This chapter examines the literary afterlives of white Confederates' household possessions, especially those damaged during military invasion, or degraded by the impoverishment experienced by elite white southerners in the Civil War’s aftermath. It argues that, alongside emancipation's arrival, the military incursion into southern plantations and wealthy households altered the premises of white possession beyond recall. The damaged objects left behind became more than just traces of enemy invasion to the privileged slaveholding women left to pick up the pieces. As these women revealed in their private journals, their own belongings represented a threat to the forms of selfhood and racial pedigree that had defined their antebellum lives. In exploring how ex-Confederate women, writing during Reconstruction, used fiction to reorganize and display their sullied possessions, this chapter outlines a material history integral to the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth more recognizably reified by monuments to the Lost Cause.

The violent disunion rhetorics that swelled in anticipation of Civil War crafted sectional identities for listeners, pitting the interests of opposing sides as irreconcilable. For some, embracing such sectional identities was a rhetorical process. The war-time diary of one Virginia plantation mistress, Ida Powell Dulany, serves as a case study to explore the process of sectional identification and to illustrate the role of proximity to war’s violence in ethos formation. The Dulany plantation, Oakley, sat on a major thoroughfare that both northern and southern troops sought to control, bringing war’s violence to its inhabitants. Oakley represents a site of competing and divergent rhetorical motives and a site of conflict over the meaning of the southern home. The concept of rhetorical becoming accounts for the circumstances, contexts, and locations that shape self-perception and rhetorical action, foregrounding the interplay of public discourses such as disunion rhetorics and individual experiences in shaping a sense of war-time ethos.