A Year In The South Summary

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In the year of 1865, four ordinary Southerners confronted their uncertain future. Louis Hughes, Cornelia McDonald, John Robertson, and Samuel Agnew observed, and took part in the Civil War when it was entering to final stages. Hughes, a Deep South slave, McDonald, a Virginia Con-federate army wife and mother of seven, Robertson, an East Tennessee former Confederate soldier, and Agnew, a Mississippi preacher and son of a prominent planter, each experienced the dying days of the Confederacy with varying degrees of despair, hope, restlessness and serenity. e stories of these four Southerners comprise Stephen Ash’s A Year in the South Cornelia McDonald’s life was changed radically because of the War. Cornelia McDonald was facing the same difficulties as many women in 1865 are going through because so many lost their…show more content…
She had help from people in her community to help her keep her lady-like appearance, especially people like the shoemaker Thomas Deaver. He let her take shoes for her children with the promise that she would pay him back. People in his position could have been hoping that the elite whites would rise up again and gain control of society, which in a since they did. In the book "A Year in the South 1865" the author Stephen Ash points out how early in the winter Cornelia was feeling the pressure of her situation, "Cornelia’s own situation as the winter began was undeniably grim, but she did not see it as hopeless. She had her older children to lean on she had her own considerable resources of strength and talent. Beyond that, she had a circle of friends and benefactors in Lexington who were rallying around her now in her time of need” (34). She kept pushing not for herself but for her children. She did not want to hurt her family honor. Her life style for the time being is changing but her place in the elite society will not change as long as she keeps pushing. She has more persistence than she has change. A paternalist as a husband
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