The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century by Martha Hodes

From the Publisher

Award-winning historian Martha Hodes brings us into the extraordinary world of Eunice Connolly. Born white and poor in New England, Eunice moved from countryside to factory city, worked in the mills, then followed her husband to the Deep South. When the Civil War came, Eunice's brothers joined the Union army while her husband fought and died for the Confederacy. Back in New England, a widow and the mother of two, Eunice barely got by as a washerwoman, struggling with crushing depression. Four years later, she fell in love with a black sea captain, married him, and moved to his home in the West Indies. Following every lead in a collection of 500 family letters, Hodes traced Eunice's footsteps and met descendants along the way. This story of misfortune and defiance takes up grand themes of American history-opportunity and racism, war and freedom-and illuminates the lives of ordinary people in the past.

Publishers Weekly

Hodes reconstructs the intriguing and unusual life of Eunice Richardson Stone Connolly. a mill laborer in mid-19th-century New England who went South with her husband to seek their fortune; homesick, even as her husband fought for the Confederacy, she returned to New Hampshire, where she was reduced to working as a washerwoman. The only thing that brought an impoverished Eunice respectability was her white skin. But then she heard of her husband's death, and in 1869, mystifying some of her relatives, Connolly put that respectability at risk, too, marrying a well-to-do black sea captain from Grand Cayman Island and moving there with him. Hodes, a historian at NYU (White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South), relies on a rich cache of Connolly's letters, which are housed at Duke University. Unfortunately, the letters don't reveal how Connolly met her second husband or explain in depth why she decided to marry him. Hodes's prose, though sometimes a bit affected ("In place of fiction, I offer the craft of history, assisted by the art of speculation"), is lucid and her account is engaging, though for readers steeped in the subject not pathbreaking; what Hodes has to tell us about the 19th century-that race was socially constructed and complicated, for example-is nothing new. 47 b&w illus., 2 maps. (Sept.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In this gem of historical writing and research, Hodes (history, NYU) shows how a 19th-century white, working-class woman coped with the upheavals precipitated by industrialization, immigration, civil war, and racism. Eunice Connolly, born in New England in 1831, sought a marriage that would fulfill her dream of upward mobility and stability. Instead, she found a hardscrabble existence that led her to two dramatic choices. In the first, she abandoned a husband sympathetic to the South (where the couple had moved) to return to New England during the Civil War. In the second, as a war widow, she defied an increasingly racist society to marry a black sea captain and follow him to the West Indies. Ultimately, this marriage brought the status and stability that she sought. Hodes, who won the Allan Nevins Prize for her previous book, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South, has produced another outstanding work showing the complexities of 19th-century racism. Highly recommended for academic libraries; however, the compelling story and graceful writing will appeal to general readers who enjoy American history.-Linda V. Carlisle, Southern Illinois Univ., Edwardsville Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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