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Sallie Brock Putnam

en.wikipedia.org

Originally aired on June 28, 1996 - In part 96 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson teaches us about a Madison county woman who was part of the devoted class of southern women dedicated to the Confederate cause. 

#96 – Sallie Brock Putnam

A number of ex-Confederate soldiers confessed after the Civil War that the heaviest burden of that conflict fell not upon the men in the field but on the women behind the lines. Mothers, wives, and sweethearts lived in hope as they patiently endured countless hardships as well as fear of the unknown. A Georgia colonel declared that ‘while the men were carried away with the drunkenness of the war”, a Southern woman “dwelt in the stillness of her desolate home”.

Sallie Brock was part of that devoted class of Southern womanhood. She was a native of Madison County, Virginia and apparently from a family of medium to high social standing. Biographical information on Brock is sketchy. Though several sources suggest 1845 as her birth date, evidence is convincing that she was born in 1828. Young Sallie obtained her education from tutors and from her father, who for a time taught at the University of Virginia.

In 1858 the Brock family moved to Richmond. There, three years later, Sallie Brock saw the first Confederate flag raised above the state capitol. She wrote: “The excitement was beyond description, the satisfaction unparalleled.”

The thrill all too quickly faded as civil war bore down heavily on the Confederate capital. Miss Brock settled into a routine of sewing and knitting for soldiers, making cartridges and sandbags for Richmond’s defense, nursing the sick and wounded, and constantly attempting to cope with increasingly serious food shortages, fuel deficiencies, galloping inflation – all in a city that had swelled to four times its normal population. In every year of the war, Federal forces sought to occupy r destroy Richmond.

Exacerbating all of the drudgery for Sallie Brock was the delicate health of her mother, who died in 1865. Still, Sallie’s hopes for the Southern cause were high to the very end. As the Union army reached the outskirts of the city on April 1, 1865, Sallie noted: “Destruction hovered hover our fair city, yet happily knew it not, and dreamed on in blissful unconsciousness of impending danger”. The next day, the Confederate line snapped. Brock then experienced what she called a “stony, calm despair as the truth, stark and appalling, confronted us”. A week later, Virginians saw their struggle end in defeat.

Sometime within the next year, Miss Brock moved to New York City. Her apparent aim was to make a belated attempt at a literary career. Only two years after Appomattox, she completed a combination narrative and memoir entitled Richmond during the War. For the next two decades, the expatriate (often writing under the pseudonym “Virginia Madison”) produced a wide variety of materials: a novel, essays, editorials, reviews, historical articles, poetry, short stories, and French translations. Yet all of this output never matched her first effort.

Sallie Brock wrote Richmond during the War when her memory was fresh and vivid. The book contained an unexpectedly full history of the Civil War. At its heart, however, is an incisive eyewitness account of life in the urban center of the Confederacy. Miss Brook’s descriptions of such events as Jefferson Davis’ inauguration, the Richmond Bread Riot of 1863, and the fires that swept through the city at its fall, are deeply dramatic. So are her accounts of nameless refugees, race relations, opportunistic merchants, Confederate hospitals and prisons, plus family matters.

Brock wrote with shrewdness, maturity, and a remarkable lack of exaggeration or self-pity. On every page, too, are undertones of courage, sacrifice, and suffering.

In January, 1882, the spinster married the Reverend Richard Putnam. The couple lived in Brooklyn, New York. Sallie Brock Putnam died in 1911, but her book – occasionally available in secondhand bookstores – will always be among the best accounts of Richmond in its most chaotic years.

Dr. James I. "Bud" Robertson, Jr., is a noted scholar on the American Civil War and Alumni Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.