The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century
The Journal of Caribbean history, 2009
Martha Hodes. The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth C... more Martha Hodes. The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century, New York: Norton, 2006, 384 pp.Eunice Conolly's story reads like a fairy tale. She grew up in a New England Yankee family whose downward mobility was confirmed by her father's abandonment of his family and death as a result of alcoholism. After enduring economic hardship in her first marriage, she was eventually courted in her widowhood by a prosperous sea captain from the Cayman Islands who took her and her children to a comfortable life on that tropical island. What set the story apart from the conventional nineteenth-century fairy tale were the racialized identities of the two romantic leads in this story: Eunice descended from an Anglo-American family with long roots in New England, while the husband who rescued her from her dreary life was born into a family tracing its roots to African and European ancestors.At seventeen, Eunice married William Stone, an ambitious young craftsman, during a period when mill production undercut independent workers and offered low-waged industrial jobs as an alternative. The couple hoped to save enough money to purchase a small farm, but, in late 1859, after years of struggle in New England's economy, they turned to migration as a solution to their financial woes. Their timing was appalling: they joined Eunice's sister in the Southern port city of Mobile, Alabama, about a year before the election of President Lincoln precipitated the US Civil War which divided the family.Martha Hodes leaves open the question about Eunice's own loyalties during the war as well as the nature of William Stone's Confederate military service. Did he join of his own volition or was he coerced? Did Eunice's New England-form of universalistic piety lead her to reject the slavery that her sister more readily embraced? In any case, Eunice's brothers joined the Union forces while her husband and brother-in-law fought with the Confederates. Once her husband had left for war, Eunice, heavily pregnant, returned to New England to live with her inlaws, waiting in agony to hear the fates of her husband and brothers who were fighting on opposite sides. She received the news of her Unionist brother's death in battle and her Confederate husband's demise in an Atlanta hospital, while she was trying to eke out a living as a seamstress, house cleaner and laundress, the lowest-paid, lowest-status occupations available to a New England woman. These were jobs usually taken by newly immigrated Irish women. She often had to live separately from her children, and her son had to go out to work when he reached the age of ten. Suicidal, she finally collapsed from exhaustion after several years and doctors despaired of her life.Suddenly, her life took a dramatic turn for the better when her knight in shining armour, the romantic "Sea Captain" of the book's title, arrived to take her away from the drudgery and despair that she had known up to that time, and provide her with a respectable life. William "Smiley" Conolly, a prosperous Caymanian sea captain, traded to North America. The moment when the couple met remains a mystery. Did she meet him in church in Mobile? Was she only introduced to him after her return to the North when he might have visited the textile-mill town near her home to purchase goods to ship back to the Caribbean? In New England, church was a logical place for these two devout single parents to meet. Hodes hypothesizes that Conolly could even have been the father of Eunice's second child, the daughter conceived shortly before her husband, William Stone, left for war. Given her long despondency after Stone's death, her intermittent residence with Stone's parents and extended kin in New England during her widowhood, ongoing warm relationship with Stone's sister even after her marriage to Conolly and lifelong piety alongside a lack of any evidence that the couple even knew each other during the Mobile period, this seems to be excessively speculative. …
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