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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by [log in to unmask] (January, 2005)

Shelia R. Phipps. _Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee_.
Southern Biography Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2004. xiv + 259 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8071-2885-6; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8071-2927-5.

Reviewed for H-SAWH by Giselle Roberts, Research Associate, La Trobe
University.

Mary Lee's Visitable Connexion

In recent months there has been an exciting new wave of scholarship on
women in the nineteenth-century South. Jane Turner Censer's compelling
portrait of "nondependent" postwar women, Karen Cox's examination of the
United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Sarah Gardner's analysis of
southern writers and Civil War memory are three examples of the recent
work that has shifted the focus from the household to women's
contributions to politics, benevolence, and the paid workforce.[1]
_Genteel Rebel: The Life of Mary Greenhow Lee_, by Shelia R. Phipps,
adds another dimension to this research by using biography to tell the
story of how Mary Greenhow Lee, an elite widow, used "connexion" to
frame her support for the Confederacy.

Mary Greenhow Lee was born in Richmond, Virginia, on September 9, 1819,
the daughter of Mary Lorraine Charlton Greenhow and Robert Greenhow, a
merchant and mayor of the city. Mary grew up in a wealthy southern
family that, according to Phipps, bore the hallmarks of the American
family of the early national period. Her parents had a marriage based on
companionship and affection, her mother embodied the ideal of Republican
motherhood, and the size of the family unit was smaller than the typical
family had been in the previous century.

Mary spent her childhood in the Greenhows' two-story brick, octagonal
home on Capitol Street, where she had views of the governor's mansion
and regularly associated with Richmond's elite. Phipps argues that
Mary's childhood socialized her in terms of her own _visitable
connexion_--_visitable_ meaning the "contemporary rubric symbolizing
qualities that safeguarded gentility," and _connexion_ meaning a network
of kin and social equals (p. 2).

Mary's visitable connexion provided her with a compass that guided her
through every stage of her life. When she visited her brother in
Washington in 1837-38, Mary's connexion facilitated her genteel debut
into society, where she adopted the elite traditions of visiting, going
to balls, and attending parties. When her father died in 1840, she used
her inheritance as a way of tying herself to connexion by loaning money.
Mary also nurtured connexion through her marriage to Winchester lawyer
Hugh Holmes Lee in 1843. The loss of her natal family, a sister-in-law,
her mother-in-law, and her husband in the decade before the Civil War
only reaffirmed to Mary that connexion--and with it, southern
tradition--was deeply embedded in her understanding of self.

Phipps's fascinating exploration of Mary's life in war-torn Winchester,
which changed hands numerous times, and the remarkable ways in which Lee
negotiated her sense of visitable connexion around the contingencies of
war, is a notable strength of _Genteel Rebel_. When Maj. Gen.  Nathaniel
P. Banks marched victoriously and uncontested into Winchester on March
11, 1862, Lee's outrage at seeing "the Yankee flag waving over the Court
House & Hotel" made her turn to the pages of her diary for the first
time in years (p. 99).

Drawing upon Lee's journal "of events, not of feelings," and other
civilian accounts, Phipps vividly reconstructs life in wartime
Winchester and the development of Mary's "Secesh" identity (p. 101).
Unlike Drew
Gilpin Faust's Confederate women, whose faltering sense of nationalism
led them to put self-interest before self-sacrifice, Mary Lee remained
"constant in her belief in southern independence" (p. 100).[2] As
Federal soldiers patrolled the streets and raided or occupied southern
homes, Lee expanded her framework of visitable connexion as a way to
draw a distinction between patriotic Confederates and Yankees--who
remained _un_visitable irrespective of their social status.

Like many southern women, Mary became a domestic patriot. This work
encompassed both aid to Confederate soldiers and resistance to the
enemy.  Phipps notes that Mary realized that she could use her gender
and class, and, most importantly, her understanding of connexion, to
wage war on the Union army. The ways in which Lee was able to do this
were inevitably shaped by her surroundings. In Federally controlled
Winchester, Mary refused to play the "helpless female," thereby denying
Union soldiers the opportunity of assuming the role of the protective
male, "the designation she reserved for patriotic southern men" (p.
177). She resisted all efforts made by Federal soldiers to occupy her
home, defiantly reminding them that her abode was not "a hotel, a
restaurant, or a tavern" (p.
118).

In Confederate Winchester, Lee expanded her domestic work to accommodate
the needs of "her soldiers." She took in sick and wounded men, worked in
makeshift hospitals, and assisted in running an underground mail
service.  For the most part, Lee assumed a coordinating role in relief
efforts and approached her "soldier work" as if she were an officer.
Phipps also notes that Lee used brief windows of opportunity to claim
the advantage over her captors when Winchester was under Union control.
When the Union army evacuated Winchester in September 1862, Mary stole a
cartload of supplies from abandoned Federal installations.

By refashioning her antebellum frame of reference, Lee successfully
created a Confederate framework of resistance that allowed her to push
the boundaries of elite femininity while at the same time preserving her
understanding of self. Her ability to do so in the tumultuous world of
occupied Winchester provides historians with yet another compelling
reason why elite southern women were able to resurrect the contours of
their old life in the New South.

For Mary Lee, the postwar task of rebuilding took place far away from
Winchester and her Market Street home. On February 23, 1865, Major
General Philip Sheridan banished Lee from the city on the basis that she
and her family had caused Federal troops "constant annoyance" (p. 200).
After a brief stay in Richmond, Virginia, Lee made her home in
Baltimore, Maryland, where she operated a successful boardinghouse and
became secretary of the Baltimore Chapter of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy. Her postwar life forced Mary to reassess--and
renegotiate--her visitable connexion. During the war, she had used
southern loyalty as the primary condition for association. After the
war, Lee "transformed that allegiance into conservation of the Old
South's traditions" (p. 209). Her work in this endeavor secured her a
place at the very center of her own connexion.

Shelia Phipps has compiled an outstanding biography of Lee, all the more
commendable because of the limited primary material available. She
successfully locates Lee within the historical landscape and reminds us
that within the broad historiographical brushstrokes lie the rich and
complex stories of individuals. Phipps fails, however, to connect Mary
Greenhow Lee's story to that of her famous sister-in-law, Confederate
spy Rose O'Neal Greenhow. Perhaps there was insufficient material, but I
was intrigued by the parallel between Rose's daring exploits and Mary's
risky attempts to steal supplies from retreating Federal troops. Did
Mary mention Rose in her diary? And did the familial connection with
such a celebrated Confederate alter the ways in which occupying northern
troops viewed and interacted with Mary and her family? A little more
examination of this particular connexion would have been fascinating
indeed.
Nevertheless, Shelia Phipps is to be congratulated for producing a
wonderful biography of Mary Greenhow Lee that reminds us of the
different strategies that women employed to preserve their sense of self
in war, defeat, and Reconstruction.

Notes

[1]. Jane Turner Censer, _The Reconstruction of White Southern
Womanhood, 1865-1895_ (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2003); Karen L.
Cox, _Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the
Preservation of Confederate Culture_ (Gainsville:  University Press of
Florida, 2003); and Sarah E. Gardner, _Blood and Irony:  Southern White
Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937_ (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004).

[2]. Drew Gilpin Faust, _Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding
South in the American Civil War_ (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1996).


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