The Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) organized in 1896 primarily to care for aging veterans and their families. In addition to this original goal, members attempted to reform Texas society by replacing the practices and values of their male peers with morals and behavior that UDC members considered characteristic of the antebellum South, such as self-sacrifice and obedience. Over time, the organization also came to function as a transition vehicle in enlarging and empowering white Texas women's lives. As time passed and more veterans died, the organization turned to constructing monuments to recognize and promote the values they associated with the Old South. In addition to celebrating the veteran, the Daughters created a constant source of charity for wives and widows through a Confederate Woman's Home. As the years went by, the organization turned to educating white children in the “truth of southern history,” a duty they eagerly embraced. The Texas UDC proved effective in meeting its primary goal, caring for aging veterans and their wives. The members' secondary goal, being cultural shapers, ultimately proved elusivenot because the Daughters failed to stress the morals they associated with the Old South but because Texans never embraced them to the exclusion of values more characteristic of the New South. The organization proved, however, a tremendous success in fostering and speeding along the emergence of Texas women as effective leaders in their communities. The UDC was an important middle ground for women moving from an existence that revolved around home and family to one that might include the whole world.

In 1824 a young Virginia aristocrat named Richard Thompson Archer migrated to Mississippi. Joining in the boom years of expansion in the Magnolia State in the 1830s, Archer built a vast cotton empire. He and his wife, Ann Barnes, raised a large family at Anchuca, their home plantation in Claiborne County, Mississippi. From there Richard Archer ruled a domain that included more than 500 slaves and 13,000 acres of land. On the eve of the Civil War he was one of the wealthiest men in the South. This work examines the life of Richard Archer from his origins in Amelia County, Virginia, to his death in Mississippi in 1867. It takes as its thesis the theme of Archer's life: his burdens as proprietor of a vast cotton empire and as father figure and provider for a large extended family. This theme weaves together the strands of Archer's life, including his rise to the position of great planter, his duties as husband and father, and his political beliefs and activities. Archer's story is told against the background of the history of Mississippi and of the South, from their antebellum heyday, through the Civil War, and into the early years of Reconstruction. Archer was an aristocrat but also a businessman, a paternalist but also a capitalist. He enjoyed his immense wealth and the power of his position, but he maintained a heavy sense of the responsibilities that accompanied that wealth and power. Archer pursued his business and his family interests with unyielding tenacity. To provide for the well- being and security of his large extended family and of his slaves was his life's mission. Although the Civil War destroyed much of Archer's empire and left him in a much reduced financial state, his family survived the war and Reconstruction with several of their plantations intact and with their social position preserved.

<p>  </p> <p>This dissertation explores how Black and white, men and women in ex-Confederate states physically recreated or created their environment after four long years of war. Through rebuilding and building homes, businesses, churches, jails, and infrastructure, southerners remade their landscape in a way that reflected their aspirations and fears for life in the postwar South, and in ways that reflected expectations about new alliances and relationships. For instance, white southerners used their kinship networks as well as state governments to rebuild jails, courthouses, and grand churches to reconsolidate their elite, Old South status. This process of rebuilding has received little attention from historians, and the existing literature has instead emphasized the social, political, and economic narratives of the Reconstruction Era. While that scholarship is essential to understand the contentious and fraught nature of the period, the unexplored story of rebuilding adds to these histories by recovering the motivations of the laborers and financiers who rebuilt the South after the Civil War. In addition, this project illuminates how Black and white southerners tried to exert control and influence over their space and place in the postwar world, and in doing so, reveals that the work of rebuilding mattered just as much to southerners as did the political reunification and Reconstruction of the Union. More broadly, it posits the process of rebuilding as a moment of transition for both the South and the nation, as it bridged the gap between the Old and New South, wartime and peacetime, and the Civil War and Reconstruction Eras.  </p>

The Walling Family of Nineteenth-Century Texas recounts the actions of the first four generations of the John Walling family. Through a heavily quantitative study, the study focuses on the patterns of movement, service, and seizing opportunity demonstrated by the family as they took full advantage of the benefits of frontier expansion in the Old South and particularly Texas. In doing so, it chronicles the role of a relatively unknown family in many of the most defining events of the nineteenth-century Texas experience such as the Texas Revolution, Mexican War, Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Close of the Frontier. Based on extensive research in census, tax, election, land, military, family paper, newspaper, and existing genealogical records; the study documents the contributions of family members to the settlement of more than forty counties while, at the same time, noting its less positive behaviors such as its open hostility to American Indians, and significant slave ownership. This study seeks to extend the work of other quantitative studies that looked at movement and political influence in the Old South, Texas, and specific communities to the microcosm of a single extended family. As a result, it should be of use to those wanting a greater understanding of how events in nineteenth-century Texas shaped, and were shaped by, families outside the political and social elite.

Place, as it transcends the immediate setting of a work, is an essential element of Caroline Gordon’s early novels. She looks to the past and to the region of her birth to focus on the traditional South. She shows her characters’ changing attitudes toward the Cavalier Myth, a view that promotes the value of the land, the patriarchal family, and an anachronistic code of honor. To them, the South is unique, and they resist all efforts to change this “given social order.” However, Gordon begins to recognize that change is inevitable. Thus, she reveals her characters’ succumbing to the rising merchant class which provides a more practical way of life for the New South. In her seminal novel, Penhally, Gordon describes three generations of traditional Southerners struggling to protect the family homeplace and the South itself. They, however, are unable to resist the ravages of the Civil War or the allure of the merchant class. The consequences are a splintering of the family and the demise of the traditional Southern way of life. Gordon also gives attention to place in her novel None Shall Look Back. She continues to describe her characters in their futile efforts to preserve the family homeplace and the Old South. The male characters fight heroically the invading “Yankee” army and the females try to maintain a semblance of unity on the domestic front; the results of war, however, take their toll on the area. After the war, the characters are unable to withstand the insidious rise of the merchant class with its promise of riches. The consequences are again tragic for the individual and the family. In The Garden of Adonis, set in the modern period, Gordon reiterates her theme: the unsuccessful struggle of her characters to sustain a satisfying life in the agricultural milieu. Drought, depression, inadequate financial resources and a changing labor force follow the ravages of war and reconstruction. In addition, the allure of the industrialists draws the traditional family apart, and many of the members desert the rural area for the city. In this work, Gordon begins to question the agrarian tradition as a viable way of life in the New South. The decline of the family and the traditional South is complete in Gordon’s work The Women on the Porch. The land no longer holds the relevance it does for the characters in the earlier novels. In this place of decay, Gordon’s heroine finds it difficult to restore human relationships and establish new ones. Gordon demonstrates that in such an environment, the men are ineffectual and the women live unproductive, frustrated or shallow, pretentious lives. Although Gordon emphasizes her characters’ quest for a new truth to replace the loss of the agrarian tradition, she continues to utilize the South as a setting for her later novels The Strange Children and The Malefactors. Place, therefore, remains central to Gordon’s art, as she reveals her deep knowledge of the agrarian South yielding to the modern industrial South.

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