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Jeffrey W. McClurken.  Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing
Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia.  A Nation Divided: Studies in
the Civil War Series. Charlottesville  University of Virginia Press,
2009.  256 pp.  $39.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8139-2813-5.

Reviewed by Amy F. Morsman
Published on H-SAWH (September, 2010)
Commissioned by Antoinette G. van Zelm

Making Confederate Veterans Count

For all the scholarship that historians have generated about the
American Civil War and its soldiers, Jeffrey W. McClurken thinks that
there is more work to be done, especially on the lives of the white men
who fought for the Confederacy, survived military service, and returned
home to families facing an uncertain future. _Take Care of the Living_
explores the difficult postwar conditions that Southern soldiers faced
and the strategies that they and their kin used to endure. McClurken's
main interest lies in the human impact of the war and its aftermath, but
whereas many other scholars with the same interest have focused on
veterans in the North or on the consequences of emancipation in the
South, he seeks to remind us of the long-lasting physical and
psychological ramifications for those who fought but were not victorious
and did not have a triumphant national government to support them. 

This is, therefore, a study about loss--soldiers losing arms and legs,
battlefield survivors losing their minds, and once-independent,
able-bodied men losing the ability to labor for the support of their
dependents. This is also, however, a study of survival, of how families
of dead, injured, or sick soldiers scrambled to make ends meet by
altering the composition of their households; changing jobs; calling on
local networks of support; and, ultimately, taking advantage of an
expanding state welfare system. 

In six chapters, McClurken aims to measure the short- and long-term
effects of military service and defeat on military families of all
classes living in Pittsylvania County, Virginia. In his study, the poor
financial condition of many of these families did not readily improve
over the course of the postwar period, largely because of chronic
physical problems that the war had created for veterans. Here we see men
from all walks of life--middle-class merchants, sizeable landowners,
mechanics, and farm laborers--weakened by disease, hobbling on wooden
legs, or struggling with deformed hands to make a living, to do the work
that they had once performed as whole and healthy men. We also see
glimpses of their female kin trying to make ends meet and often taking
on greater responsibility for the economic welfare of their households.
For a sizeable number of the women in McClurken's study, this meant
entering domestic service. 

McClurken uses personal letters and memoirs to capture some of the
voices of veterans and illustrate their reactions to their new and
trying circumstances, but it is in his analysis of a variety of
government documents that he makes his unique contribution to the field.
Using veterans' applications for state aid, which came in the form of
artificial limbs, commutations, military pensions, and medical care in
state-run mental hospitals and retirement homes, McClurken sees a shift
in the strategies that many veteran families used to survive. Instead of
depending solely on more established, private avenues of support--such
as extended family, friends, community leaders, and neighborhood
institutions, all of whom could place conditions on the assistance
provided and the behavior of those they helped--veterans and their
family members began tapping into new public funds and services that
were designated for people like them, those considered _worthy_ of need.


McClurken argues that while such aid from the Virginia state government
was modest and certainly not enough to serve as a family's sole support,
it helped struggling veteran families survive and recognized their
sacrifice for the Confederate cause. It is important to note that the
legislature limited its assistance, especially its Confederate pensions
and space in retirement homes, to the most needy of its former soldiers.
So while McClurken writes broadly about veterans' postwar experiences,
his conclusions may be most accurate for only a subset of veterans or
their widows, those who remained in or fell into the working class or
were downright destitute after the war. Given the fact that most
historical scholarship draws disproportionately from sources by and
about elites or the literate middle class, McClurken's attention to the
poor and the laboring class is welcome. Nevertheless, he should have
acknowledged the class constraints of this part of his argument early
on.  

Although important, the personal comments and stories of individual
veterans do not form the core of_ Take Care of the Living_. Instead,
McClurken's most distinctive contribution is in the use of quantitative
analysis. He obviously spent countless hours reading military service
records and census records on microfilm, tracking veterans and their
families through these and numerous other document sets, and then
logging the personal details into two massive databases that he created.
Out of all of this incredibly tedious work, McClurken has compiled lots
of figures about soldiers' military service and the families living in
all Pittsylvania households as reflected through the 1860 and 1870
censuses. This data allows him to draw some interesting conclusions
about how Virginia veterans fared collectively after the war; how they
compared to nonmilitary families; and how isolated elements of their
military experience, such as incurring injuries, made the challenges of
holding a job and retaining property greater for them in the postwar
years. I am not convinced, though, that the benefits of this massive
quantitative undertaking outweigh the costs, especially since the burden
of the work necessitated that McClurken contain his number crunching to
one decade's worth of data (1860-70) from one Virginia county.  

In selecting that one county, McClurken had some good reasons for
choosing Pittsylvania. It was Virginia's largest county by area and had
the third largest population in 1860. Situated on the state's southern
border, Pittsylvania was distant from the battles that raged in the
valley and in Virginia's central corridor; it did, however, send an
extraordinary number of its men (4/5 of those of military
age) to fight in the war. Its small amount of war-related property
damage and high number of veterans suit McClurken's interest in
measuring the human, physical cost of the conflict. Newspapers from this
county, however, are not available for this time period, which
dramatically limits McClurken's ability to gain a full sense of the
community and veterans' place in it. This is especially regrettable
given that the county also included the bustling city of Danville, which
undoubtedly was home to numerous voluntary organizations that might have
served veterans well and whose records or coverage in newspapers might
have illuminated a greater sense of connection between veterans, their
civilian neighbors, Danville businesses, and other civic institutions. 

To be fair, McClurken does examine closely the records of churches in
Danville and throughout the county, but those are limited only to the
Baptist congregations, and he does not appear to make much use of the
records of nonreligious organizations. Danville had an active ladies' 
aid society during the war. How might this and similar associations in
other parts of the county have related to veterans and their families
after the war? Similarly, how many of the veterans in this study joined
local veterans' organizations when these groups formed later in the
postwar period? McClurken does not address these questions. I understand
his decision not to incorporate Civil War memory into his study, because
his concern is the living, not the dead, but veterans' organizations did
more than just memorialize their fallen comrades and celebrate the Lost
Cause. They actively called on the state legislature to fund veterans'
pensions and appropriate large sums of money for other veteran services.
It seems plausible, then, that they would have provided a strong
community network for veteran families and may have also influenced the
economic strategies veterans adopted as they grew older and weaker. 
If, like newspapers, the records of these and other important
organizations have not survived in Pittsylvania, then perhaps another
Virginia county would have been a better choice for this study. A fuller
explanation of available local sources would also have been helpful in
the book's introduction.  

To some extent McClurken's quantitative research does accomplish what he
set out to do: gain a broader understanding of the veterans as a group
and identify larger trends in their postwar experiences. 
Numbers, however, cannot easily provide a sense of the human shape,
attitudes, or personalities of these historical subjects. Perhaps
combining the quantitative data with richer qualitative sources and a
deeper examination of the lives of just a few veteran families from the
larger group would have filled in more gaps and put flesh and blood on
the silhouettes of these suffering survivors. In addition, though
McClurken's focus justifiably falls on whites in the postwar period,
taking into account the larger context of race and the postwar labor
situation in the county would have strengthened the book. Before and
during the war, almost half the residents of Pittsylvania County were
slaves, and unlike most other Virginia counties, slaveholding in
Pittsylvania was pretty evenly distributed, with a high number of
smaller farmers owning a few slaves. A more complete examination of how
veteran households handled the loss of slaves and the transition to free
labor, as well as consideration of how those challenges combined with
veterans' other war-related problems, would have created a fuller
picture of the realities that these families faced everyday. 

I doubt that the aforementioned criticisms of _Take Care of the Living_
come as a surprise to its author. I raise them, though, for those who
will continue the important work that McClurken has begun. 
The questions he raises are good ones, and his book will serve as a
valuable base for future research on the impact of the war and the
development of social welfare in the South. 

Citation: Amy F. Morsman. Review of McClurken, Jeffrey W., _Take Care of
the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia_.
H-SAWH, H-Net Reviews. September, 2010.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29906

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

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