Thanks to the discovery of a rich correspondence, Martha Hodes tells the story of an ordinary American woman, a white worker at the time of the Civil War. Except that this woman married a black naval captain. The genre of historical biography is considerably renewed.
Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly, the subject of this book, was a white woman born in 1831 on a farm in Massachusetts. She experienced years of poverty as a textile factory worker, then as a seamstress, washerwoman and domestic, before following her husband, William Stone, to the South at the dawn of the Civil War (1861-65). Widowed, she then married William Smiley Connolly, a black navigator from the Cayman Islands, before dying with her husband and children in a hurricane that struck that region in 1877. A specialist in XIXe century, American historian Martha Hodes tells the story of this woman in this book published in the United States in 2006 and recently translated into French. By focusing on Eunice’s life, similar to that of many poor white women in the XIXe century but remarkable because of her marriage to a black man, Martha Hodes offers particularly successful pages on the history of women workers and their struggle for survival, on family solidarity and on race relations in the United States and on the island of Grand Cayman. This particularly well-conducted story happily brings to the biographical approach in history, including through regular reflections by the author on her approach to contextualizing sometimes incomplete primary sources.
A story “seen from below”
Throughout the book, we discover the lives of farmers and small artisans in New England, forced to leave for the city or the South to improve their conditions. They move according to job opportunities, various problems (the crisis of 1857 destroys Eunice and William’s plans to build a house) and driven by the hope of a better life. The women of modest means, and this is one of the most successful aspects of the book, dream of an advantageous marriage that would allow them to escape a difficult and sometimes miserable life. However, they are confronted with the alcoholism of men (case of Eunice’s father) or insufficient male income and must work from home or in factories, without guarantee of sufficient income. This work is hard, whether it is braiding hats at home for pittance, the arduous and humiliating domestic work, or the work in factories which leads to the necessary placement of children and to life in dormitories, where paternalism dominates. The American women find themselves in competition with the Irish immigrants, who are as poorly regarded as the blacks.
From North to south
William Stone moved to the South in 1859, to Mobile, Alabama, following Eunice’s sister Ellen and her husband Dudley Merril, unaware of the growing divergence between the industrialized North and the slave-owning South, or of the stark social and economic inequalities suffered by southern blacks, at a time when the North was rallying to abolitionist ideas, even though fear of miscegenation and of relations between black men and white women prevailed (pp. 87-88). Eunice joined her husband in 1860, at the dawn of the Civil War. The conflict tore the family apart as Eunice’s sister, brother-in-law, and husband sided with the secessionists and both men joined the fratricidal war on the Confederate side, while two of Eunice’s other brothers, Luther and Henry, fought with the North.
In her letters, Eunice affirmed her support for the Union, against her husband’s choices, thereby demonstrating an unusual desire for independence for an American woman of her class. Martha Hodes explains this choice by the young woman’s religious affiliation, having moved from Congregationalism to the Universalist Church, which, along with other denominations, advocated abolitionism and, above all, addressed its “egalitarian appeals to ordinary people, including the working class of the North” (p. 108). Eunice and her sister also grew apart because of different views of blacks: Ellen’s husband was more successful socially than William, and she herself appreciated her status as a white woman in a South that considered slaves as inferior beings. The social differences between the sisters increased their divergences on the war, with Eunice writing to her mother, “I am with the North (…) but I must keep it to myself” (p. 122). The brothers who remained in the North, for their part, signed up to “defend the Union and free labor, and not to fight against slavery” (p. 152), like many Northerners.
This desire to make her own choices, “outside of convention” (p. 142), even against the gender norms of her time, manifests itself again when Eunice, alone with her son and seven months pregnant, decides to return to the North in December 1861. She then finds herself dependent on family support and in a situation of increasing impoverishment, aggravated by the death of her husband at the front. Her economic dependence keeps her “on the fringes of respectability.” Eunice’s letters express her dismay and even deep depression (p. 201).
A marriage between a white American woman and a black Caribbean man
Eunice’s recovery was due to an extraordinary event for the time: the courtship of her by Smiley Connoly, an upper-class black Caribbean man, which ended in their marriage in 1869. Smiley and Eunice’s letters to her family denote a deep love. Thus, regarding the color of her husband’s skin, Eunice writes: “it is not what I see when I look at him, I seek a loving gaze that I always meet” (p. 242).
Her highly unusual choice to marry a black man is largely due to her love for him, although it is probably also due to economic considerations. Smiley, a captain and owner of a fleet and land in Grand Cayman, is a man with a substantial income. Marrying him allows Eunice to realize her dream, shared with her fellow working-class women: to have a husband with a sufficient income to be able to stay at home and run a household. By marrying a black man, Eunice challenges the “color line” that governs relations between blacks and whites in the United States. Since the colonial era, laws have prohibited interracial unions and, while some states have abolished them in the XIXethey were perpetuated in the South, at the same time as white supremacy took hold there, a few years after the end of the Civil War. During the war, a pseudoscientific discourse establishing the superiority of the “white race” and the need to safeguard its purity spread in the United States and was taken up from the 1880s in political discourse – it was then a question of preserving the union of the country more than of worrying about the fate of former slaves -, by historians and in advertising. In New England, whites “clearly displayed their role in the eradication of slavery without, however, admitting the principles of racial equality” (p. 222). In this context, Eunice’s marriage can only lead to “her social downgrading” (226).
Eunice and Smiley’s marriage can only last thanks to the couple’s settlement in the Cayman Islands, placed under the British crown, where the hierarchy between blacks, Creoles and whites is defined, in a much more fluid and complex way than in the United States, according to skin color, but also the degree of mixed race and social status. Eunice finds herself estranged from her family: if her union with Smiley has received the approval of her mother and some of her sisters, she is deeply hurt by the rejection of those in her family who have been the most successful socially: this very disrespectful marriage puts their social advancement in jeopardy. Eunice’s last letters, however, establish her marital happiness, despite the death of her son Clarence from an illness. Smiley corresponds more than William Stone to the qualities required of a husband according to the Victorian code: by his attentions, the care given to Eunice’s children and their two daughters and by his capacity to provide them with an enviable income and to allow his wife to be a housewife, he corresponds to the ideal husband.
Complicating a fragmentary story
This biographical account was reconstructed from 500 letters, most of which were written by Eunice to her family. Correspondence was a widespread practice in New England, where literacy rates were high and not the sole preserve of the wealthy. Martha Hodes did an admirable job of filling in the gaps caused by letters that had disappeared and by information that was often imprecise or incomplete. To do this, she consulted various archival documents (land registers, municipal and religious records, company documents), letters and local newspapers, in the United States and on the island of Grand Cayman. She compared the facts mentioned in the letters with information given in publications of the time (travel stories, novels, essays, etc.) and met descendants of the families at the center of the story. The last chapter explains the historian’s approach to finding the places (houses, cemeteries, churches) and witnesses associated with the Richardson and Connolly families, in a memorial quest that brings an emotional dimension to her work.
Martha Hodes admits that she regularly had to “extrapolate from the literal meaning that[she]could find in the letters” and regularly used “expressions like ‘perhaps,’ ‘possibly,’ and ‘probably.'” She specifies, however, that she “offers the craft of historical practice, seconded by the art of supposition” (pp. 38-39). The Captain’s Wife resembles in some ways a historical fiction, an adventure novel even; it can also be read as such by readers less interested in the historian’s analyses. However, the large-scale work to fill in the gaps and omissions is indeed a meticulous historical work.
Conclusion
Martha Hodes’s book, very well written and judiciously illustrated with iconographic documents, reconstructs a complex family history from incomplete documents. The historian therefore resorts to speculation to some extent, but after all, this is also the nature of a biographical narrative. Paraphrasing Ivan Jablonka, we can say that reconciling social sciences and literary creation here reinforces the scientific nature of the research (History is a contemporary literatureSeuil, 2014). We can sometimes doubt some interpretations: Martha Hodes thinks for example that Eunice’s daughter, born, according to the civil registry, from her marriage to her first husband, would perhaps be the fruit of an affair with Smiley Connolly, possibly met in the South, at a time when interracial relations were nevertheless strictly controlled and strongly criticized, particularly in the slave-owning South and even more so for a married woman. Despite this reservation, The Captain’s Wife is a largely successful work. It successfully places Eunice’s story in a rich context marked by the progressive industrialization of the North, the question of slavery and the Civil War, as well as the debates engendered by the reunion of the South and the North during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877), and in particular the progressive minimization of the emancipation of slaves in favor of a dominant white discourse.