The World of Juliette Kinzie by Ann Durkin Keating

Author:Ann Durkin Keating [Keating, Ann Durkin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO000000 Biography & Autobiography / General
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Published: 2019-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

The War Begins

At the beginning of the Civil War, John and Juliette were dismayed to find men they knew well taking opposing sides. Their old friend from Wisconsin General David Twiggs left the Union army and enlisted in the Confederacy, while their brother-in-law soon-to-be General David Hunter worked closely with President Lincoln. When Jefferson Davis was elected the Confederate president in February 1861, Juliette recalled her acquaintance with him in the early days of her marriage when he had served in the US Army across Wisconsin and Illinois. Juliette was critical of the secessionist Davis, sniping that “he meant to be president of the United States and seeing no prospect of that, he rushed that portion of it that he could control into ruin, to gratify, to satisfy his insatiable ambition.”8 Even in Chicago, where Stephen A. Douglas championed the Union and supported President Lincoln, other Democrats were openly sympathetic to the South.

Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, marked a moment of relief after months of uncertainty. In the days afterward, Juliette wrote to her daughter that they were “enjoying the satisfactory knowledge that Mr. Lincoln is inaugurated . . . despite conspiracies to stop his inauguration.” She reassured Nellie that “there is no danger of Mr. Lincoln resorting to coercion—if there is to be bloodshed, it will be the south who invokes it.” Juliette’s college-age son, Arthur, even sent his sister a playful letter suggesting among other preposterous events the arrival of Confederate emissaries trying to buy canal boats at Chicago, Jeff Davis’s plan to address the residents of Bridgeport, and the Republican candidacy for mayor of a “younger brother of Fred Douglass.”9

But just a few weeks changed the tone dramatically. In late March Juliette received the news she had feared: fighting had begun. Her thoughts flew to her daughter, whose home had become “a foreign and hostile one!” Juliette regretted having “yielded a reluctant consent to give up my daughter to a distant home.”10 While Juliette understood her daughter’s decision to stay in the South and support her husband, Nellie’s younger brothers were heartbroken. Arthur was dumbfounded by her decision to side against her family, her home city, and her home region: “I should never have thought it of Nellie!!”11 Juliette tried to explain that Nellie was no longer just their sister, and that wives were expected to adhere to their husbands’ public positions. But Arthur could not imagine his sister not taking the Northern side in the war.

Arthur was not entirely wrong; it would be difficult to describe Nellie as simply loyal to the Confederacy. Her allegiance was to her husband, not to the South. Juliette worried that her daughter would do something reckless, as she had on Georgia’s secession. She implored Nellie to “add no word to encourage this wrong feeling of one part of our country against another. Women have alas, had much to do in rousing up and aggravating feelings of animosity and hatred in those who should have been brethren.”12

Still, Juliette never stopped encouraging her daughter to come to Chicago with her children.

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