Interview with Melissa DeVelvis on Gendering Secession

In today’s Muster, JCWE associate editor Robert Bland interviews Melissa DeVelvis, author of Gendering Secession: White Women in the Politics of South Carolina, 1859 to 1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2025).

Gender Secession explores the lives and politics of South Carolina’s elite white women during the end of the antebellum period and the months leading up to the sectional crisis. The political drama that unfolded during the secession crisis of 1860 has long captured our attention, but scant regard has been paid to the secessionist women themselves. These women were astute political observers and analysts who filtered their “improper” political ideas through avenues gendered as feminine and therefore socially acceptable. In recreating the rhythms of the year 1860, Melissa DeVelvis spotlights the moments when women realized that national events were too overwhelming to dismiss.

Dr. DeVelvis is an assistant professor of history at Augusta University and specializes in nineteenth-century US history, history of the American South, and the history of gender in the United States.

Portions of this interview have been edited for clarity.

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Robert D. Bland: Dr. DeVelvis, I appreciate you making time for us to talk today. And I’d like to begin maybe talking a little bit about the origins of your project. How did you arrive at this particular topic? What are some of the questions that led to this topic? How did you arrive at your book?

Melissa DeVelvis: Thank you for having me. This project originated from the dissertation as a quite a few early career scholars’ projects did, but it actually started before that when I was a very precocious undergrad who wanted to do an honors thesis. And I was given these letters by my professor at the time who had already transcribed everything, which was super convenient for me, who I don’t know what my cursive reading skills were when I was all of twenty years old.

But either way, there are these two sisters in St. Simon’s Island. And their reactions to secession were completely different. And so, I was immediately kind of wondering, how did women’s personalities shape this new event. That project was the paper that got me into grad school and then just being at University of South Carolina in Columbia and having access to the Caroliniana Library, which South Carolina, I just had the best gig where I’m living and where I’m researching.

It always started with emotions. It started as an emotions’ historian and then slowly it became at story of women’s politics. It is kind of hard-to-find documents about secession by women because so many women in other states write they write after it happens. They’re like, oh, something happened, and we need to write about it. Well, what about before?

I think that is the traditional origin story, but also, they’re all a little bit different in different ways and I think the I think historians who are working through projects, especially graduate students and early-stage faculty, are always interested to hear about

RDB: How has the project changed as it moved from being dissertation to book. A lot of those questions. I’d like to talk a little bit about the central theme of your project. And how does the story of South Carolina’s road to secession change when we center gender? And what ways does gender change the story about the road to secession.

MD: in some ways, it really shapes when the public who are not these secessionist politicians, who some of them have been pushing since in 1850, they try to secede, you’ve got some that vaguely remember nullification.

It’s one thing to just hear it from the politicians and it’s another to hear it women who don’t necessarily need to be pushing a certain secessionist agenda on someone. And I’m not saying that these women aren’t politically informed because they certainly are. And that’s one of the things that I argue. But you get more of an authenticity to what are the people who are not just the leading politicians of the period um saying about secession. Is it going to happen? You can tell from the frequency of the correspondence that women are writing when do they realize that this is something big and something different: is secession going to actually happen? Is a war going to actually happen? You can see the moment where people who are not supposed to, quotation marks, talk about politics or at least electoral politics and national politics in this way, in a way that it’s still improper for Southern women.

It’s a really interesting examination of timing. When you look at people who are trying to not bring this into their everyday life. And at what point they can’t stop and can’t help themselves. But at the same time a lot of the sentiments These women are very secessionist. Sometimes we like to think that, oh, well. Well, at least I get this for my students who think that everyone was in favor of women’s individuality, but you think like, oh, well, they just kind of they had to go along with what the man said. And I’m like, well when you read this, they are part and parcel of this enslaving master class. And they very much liked their lives. And they were, a lot of them, gung-ho secessionists.

In some ways, it’s an echoing of the same elite enslaver ideology that you get from their menfolk, I suppose but in other ways Even if they share the sentiments to what extent can these sentiments permeate their diaries and their letters because even when they are writing about this, these women are still, even if it’s just a formality, they’re still apologizing or making an excuse for why they’re talking politics. So yeah, it’s similar political beliefs you can trace when things are happening and what really worries them because this is a population that is trying not to talk about it constantly in a way that men are politicking and have been making speeches about it for a couple of years, depending on who you’re talking to or about.

RDB: I want to know who these women were. What are the institutions that they lead? What type of ideas and ideologies did they hold? You talk about “improper ideas.” What are some of those improper ideas that they’re wrestling with? What sort of world are they trying to preserve? What are their relationships to other women in South Carolina? How do you see these elite white women in relationship to other women in South Carolina?

MD: When I was looking at letters and diaries, it did end up kind of bringing me to the elites. And you do see them, it’s really interesting, even in people like authors like William Freeling, who has written those giant books about session and the road to succession. These women and their diaries are used in earlier works but just kind of as like commentators. There’s no attention page that says “hey, women are saying these things.”

A lot of these names might be familiar to people, especially to scholars of South Carolina, these are the big names. I have so much by the Alston family. And then, of course, Pickens comes in. And he’s one of the wealthiest enslavers in the state. His wife, Adele writes all of the time his daughter, also named Adele, who writes all of the time. Or, sometimes some people don’t even write until Sumter. And then they realize “oh, this might be worth recording.” I’m more interested in how people’s lives changed on the road to it and when they realized their lives were going to change.

And so it’s these elite white women who are covered. And they have been covered before. Whether they’re covered by Elizabeth Fox Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household or they get the remix version of these same women with Stephanie Jones Rogers’ book, They Were Their Property. Or, you’re looking at these same women for Drew Faust’s Mothers of Invention, but the secession period is either just kind of a close to the antebellum book or it’s a prologue to the Civil War book. And Faust has a couple of pages about secession, which is pretty good, but I’m more interested in bridging that gap. These women are familiar to a lot of people and they’re very much at the top of this cultural hegemony.

RDB: Along those lines. I’d be interested to hear you talk a little bit about periodization, how you understand kind of change and continuity. In what ways does the emotional language of these white women either change or stay the same between the antebellum and the postbellum period, right? And in many ways, you are examining a short time period, but obviously like this is a kind of moment where a lot changes in a short time period. In this view, your provocative chapter titles, like “The Last Antebellum Year” capture something poignant. I wonder if you can say a little about kind of how those women experience change and how you thought about kind of framing that change over time.

MD: This is a time period where, as a quick rundown for my non-women and gender historians, what we understand to be political, these women were absolutely being political. But if we define politics as they define politics, which is giving speeches, they did attend a lot of these meetings.

But talking about electoral politics is really not something that happens To the extent that in their letters they have to say, “well, one should wonder why I’m so warm a secessionist, but South Carolina is like a mother to me and I am its daughter.” And so, they’re using this language of motherhood so they’re using these ways to justify themselves. But before secession, I looked at a couple other elections. You don’t see this extent of political talk from these women.

And what I wanted to see was when do they discuss it? When do they find that they can no longer stop writing about it. And so, I looked at people who had long-term diaries and I looked at people who had a lot of collected letters. Of course, methodology wise, you have to make sure that Is this just a spotty collection? Like, did they just lose all of the letters from March? You do have to keep that in mind.

In one example, Ella Gertrude Clinton Thomas is from Augusta, so she’s in Georgia, but barely. And she has this like multi-volume collection The only one missing covers the session. Like, of course that would happen to me. There are a lot of gaps, surprisingly. But if you can find enough of these sources, you can kind of make these generalizations and see kind of what the rhythms of their lives were based on the letters these elites Over the summer they kind of leave the plantations and either go to the city or they’ll go up to the hot springs or they’ll even go up to New York to shop because there’s quite the southern stronghold in New York City even, if you know where to look. And they do this every summer for the planting season. Their lives really follow a rhythm if you get down and dirty into what they’re writing about.

I was also curious, like what events that we mark as like the road to disunion are they writing about in their diaries or their letters and so when I went trying to look as far back, I’d start in like 1855, you really don’t see a lot until John Brown. And then they feel fully justified in talking about John Brown. But then you get to the Democratic National Convention that’s in Charleston. And you’d think, okay, now is when women are going to start worrying, but really mostly that they just worry about housing in Charleston. And they do mention what went on. They mention the walkout. They were part of the booing and the hissing of the people who refused to walk out of the Democratic National Convention. But then it quiets down. And they just go off for the summer. Some of them go north for the summer, so clearly, they weren’t thinking that like the country is going to divorce in a couple of months.

And so I’m really just finding the daily pattern of their lives, finding when it changed, tracing the frequency of these political mentionings. This is something Stephen Stowe looks at as well in his book of Civil War diarists, which is how do they try and then fold the war into the everyday lives and like make it as normal as they can? So, someone will start a diary like ranting about John Brown and then visited Mrs. Smith yesterday and it just like becomes part of the laundry list of things so I let their letters and their rhythms kind of inform when I should start this thing.

RDB: Thank you. I mean, this has been an incredibly rich discussion. Again, the book is Gendering Secession, Women in the Politics of South Carolina, 1859 to 1861. Dr. DeVelvis, thank you for making time for us today. Look forward to engaging with your work in the future.

MD: Thank you so much. This is so great to talk about. It’s been a long time coming, the book, not the interview.