Thy Will Lord, Not Mine: Parents, Grief, and Child Death in the Antebellum South Público
Armstrong, Katherine McVane (2011)
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Thy Will Lord, Not Mine: Parents, Grief, and Child Death in the
Antebellum South
By Katherine McVane Armstrong
This dissertation investigates the emotions and experiences of
planter-class
parents in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia as
they grieved the
death of a child. Through analysis of prescriptive and consolation
literature, sermons,
periodicals, and especially the letters and diaries of bereft
parents and the friends and
family they turned to for support, I argue southern parents'
profound difficulty aligning
their feelings of loss with the expectations of their society
defined their grief. Of these
expectations, the idea that mothers and fathers must resign
themselves to God's will-
that they must say, "Thy will be done"- was the most pervasive, the
most crucial, and
the most difficult for grieving parents to meet.
Though all too common, the death of a child was a crushing event in
the lives of
antebellum southern parents that left mothers and fathers deeply
saddened, often guilt-
ridden or angry, and bewildered with the meaning of their lives in
the midst of loss. The
need to grieve in accordance with southern cultural dictates only
exacerbated these
emotions. Still, antebellum southerners' fought to do so, concerned
with their honor and
determined to demonstrate their piety and their adherence to gender
ideals.
A child's death, her parents' grief, and the tension both catalyzed
between
southerners and their culture changed the tenor of plantation life,
altering dynamics
between husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and
sisters, and masters and
slaves.
Thy Will Lord, Not Mine: Parents, Grief, and Child Death in the
Antebellum South
By
Katherine McVane Armstrong
B.A., Davidson College, 2005
M.A., Emory University 2009
Advisor: James L. Roark, Ph.D.
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the
James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in History
2011
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Introduction: "A Mortal cannot live without loving and cannot love without
suffering" . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter One: "To love children is the dictate of our nature": Motherhood and
Fatherhood in the Old South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chapter Two: "The Lord Gave and the Lord Hath Taken Away": The Elements of
Consolation and Southern Mourning Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Chapter Three: "How full the world is of sad Mothers!": Maternal Grief . . . . . . . . . 105
Chapter Four: "I have been bowed down to the earth": Paternal Grief . . . . . . . . . . 149
Chapter Five: "Our little circle is broken": The Plantation Household and Grief . . 183
Epilogue: The Civil War and Parental Grief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
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