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Fabricating the “Southern Belle”: Assessing the Role of Imported Material Culture in the Confederacy

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Abstract

Confederate society was dependent on a rigidly defined hierarchy that assigned roles and appropriate behavior based on race, gender, and wealth. White, wealthy, southern women were dependent on material culture as a socially acceptable means of self-fashioning and making their status public. The Union naval blockade threatened this practice by preventing Confederate markets from accessing imported, status-affirming goods. The industry of blockade running rose to fill this need, often controversially prioritizing cargo space for civilian, luxury products over necessities for the military. This article examines the artifact assemblages of blockade runner sites off the coasts of Wilmington, North Carolina and Charleston, South Carolina through a theoretical framework of agency and costly signaling to make assessments about Confederate identity during the Civil War.

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Notes

  1. Faust (1996, p. 7) notes that, “Lady, a term central to these women’s self-conception, denoted both whiteness and privilege at the same time it specified gender; a lady’s elite status had been founded in the oppressions of slavery, her notions of genteel womanhood intimately bound up with the prisms of class and race through which they were reflected”. The term Southern Belle is used in this article to represent the “lady” archetype and its idealized values that, this article argues, were reinforced through material culture when they could not be upheld behaviorally.

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Acknowledgements

The author would first like to thank Dr. Lynn Harris of East Carolina University who served as committee chair for the thesis from which this article originated. Martha Zierden of the Charleston Museum was a wonderful resource for all questions regarding material culture of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The archaeologists of the NCUAB and SCIAA provided open access to their blockade runner collections and files, which was greatly appreciated. Finally, many thanks to my family, friends, and colleagues, as well as the three anonymous peer reviewers, for their editorial assistance and feedback.

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  1. Warren Lasch Conservation Center, Clemson University, 1250 Supply Street, North Charleston, SC, 29405, USA

    Emily A. Schwalbe

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Correspondence to Emily A. Schwalbe.

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Schwalbe, E.A. Fabricating the “Southern Belle”: Assessing the Role of Imported Material Culture in the Confederacy. J Mari Arch 13, 37–53 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-017-9178-7

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