Calico In Bushes And Balls Without Belles; War Parts Us

JPK Huson 1863

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
Joined
Feb 14, 2012
Location
Central Pennsylvania
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As funny as these ungainly, awkward scenes were- and am guessing some were fall-down funny, the artist depicts no derision on the part of onlookers. " Stag Dances " gave them Emeline, for a moment, in size 12 boot, smelling like a bear just out of hibernation but Emeline.

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Harper's


No heart strings yanked here. Well, perhaps one, long pull, painful stretch, War's bandaid pull, an agonizingly slow wrench.

You continually bump into these; the abnormal conditions imposed on men and women separated by this whole shambles resulted in papers peppered with well, abnormal stories. War is an abnormal condition all by itself. Disease in the human body is generally the result of a disruption somewhere- and the whole system being confused or outraged on what in blazes to do.

One features ' Northern ' snark, a little, please ignore. Two stories on coping, in my opinion, with this;
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LoC

Inclusive of another element, frequent victims of war- prostitute, camp followers, these were very frequently displaced girls and women. Make no mistake, they did it to eat. Choice? Ok. They chose to eat. In doing so, each became someone's Emeline.

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New? Hardly. Snark towards Southern chivalry aside, displaced women had been substituting themselves for arms at home since War was invented. You just know by men with no wives.
 
Thank you, Annie, for sharing these poignant reminders of the tearing asunder of hearts during the War, and humanity's desperate attempts to survive the pangs of love lost and hunger. The pictured departure scene, the child gripping both parents, touched my heart.

Tender children's hearts were the first to be broken by War, and forever altered. That is why I wrote my novel partly in the voice of a young lad, Milton, who "demanded" to be allowed to speak, tugging at my heart strings until I would let him. His story was the first chapter I wrote, back in 2009, of the entire novel coming out this Fall. I was honored to meet one of Milton's living descendants recently, thanks to DNA labs linking families.
 
More partings. This will not be popular but one of the points here in Ladies Tea would be how much we had ( and have ) in common than anyone thinks. Women set adrift by war- this trip sounds ghastly. Written with much patriotic flair, it's still the story of women, alone in a war- I do not much care what uniform anyone is wearing.

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Yes, wives and women out of Missouri- for some reason the violence there a contentious point 150 years later. It's not the point here, whose husband did what. And of course this paper writes of what beasts the Yankees are, too. At the core, women parted by war from their husbands.

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Quite a list. A lot of children, no men, a long way to go.

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" .... leaving their wagons standing in the road, not a friend near.... "

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" Not seen their husband in over two years.. " The author speaks of sacrifice- did these women say so? Or that they'd been asked?

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We hear of soldiers buried along many a long march, not children.

Article ends annoyingly with a call for ladies of Texas to somehow give more ( am not posting it ) - display more fervor, be more like this group. I say annoyingly because from what we read, many couples were parted for years at a time, some forever- sacrifices too numerous to count were endured already. It's impossible to imagine ' more '- or why anyone would ask it of them or use this story to do so.
 
Ran into a wonderfully cheerful account of ' life in camp '. For all the bugs and mud we hear of, Camp Lyon in 1862 had some cheerful men. Bumping this because another stag dance broke out. Honest, if ' fun ' could be had inside a war, men knew how to dig it up.
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