Oh! Such cannonading on all sides, such shrieks and groans, such
commotion of all kinds! wrote the teenaged Sue Chancellor, a Virginia
planter's daughter, in May 1863. We thought that we were frightened
before, but this was far beyond everything. . . . Oh, the horror of that
day! Sue's reactions to the Civil War around her was only one of myriad
responses to the conflict from children--boys or girls, black or white,
slave or free, rich or poor. They experienced the war differently from
adults, and their experiences were by no means uniform. In Topsy-Turvy,
Anya Jabour brings into sharp relief the way in which gender, race,
slavery, and status shaped the lives of children in the American South
before, during, and after the Civil War. She argues persuasively that
the identities children developed in the antebellum era shaped their
responses to the upheavals of the war years and their lives after the
war's conclusion. Even as Topsy-Turvy presents the Civil War as a major
turning point in Southern children's lives, it also illuminates the
interplay between continuity and change in the history of the American
South. Because the war was fought largely on Southern soil, parts of the
region became a permanent landscape of war, and children in the
Confederacy thus experienced the struggle in an especially profound and
personal way. Deeply researched, abundantly illustrated, and engagingly
written, the book is a major contribution to Southern history. With
twenty-eight black-and-white illustrations.
