Georgia Beauty or Elite White Slave

Georgia Beauty, Samantha Beavers, was a victim of a peculiar institution, as well as an Elite White Slave, an additional casualty of the southern male mindset of the era and the Civil War. Georgia was just one state where Elite Southern white women were the combatants and their battlefields were too often their own backyards. They faced conflicts during the Civil War, but the significance of their clashes has been seriously neglected. Their personal recorded history not only documented their trials and efforts in support of the Confederacy, but also the burden they carried due to their status and placement inside a “female world” of the antebellum South.

Most of these Georgia Beauties lived in a patriarchal society that held them captive to a way of life. As victims of gender and Southern tradition, they might have remained that way if there had been no influential force to prompt them into action. The Civil War presented elite Southern white women of Georgia and most Confederate states with a twofold cause: to fight the enemy in blue over the emancipation of slaves, and to face the enemy in gray over their own personal freedom. The Civil War served elite Southern white women as an impetus to their transformation from invisible victims behind the shield of traditionalism to their emergence as women of identity; it altered them from a gender which was once held in bondage, to one which became more independent.

At birth, girls became the property of their fathers, when they married, they became the property of their husbands, as did any land or valuables they may have owned. Their position placed them in charge of their household that catered to the needs of their “white family and their husband’s slaves.” These Georgia Beauties were allowed to carry the keys to the plantation, but those keys only served to keep them locked within their own unique sphere of white slavery.

Although some elite white women may have been unaware of their status, or denied it, the fact remained that most of them had no personal identity, as long as the white women and the slaves remained in their proper places, they were treated well. This does not mean that all Southern men were abusive of their patriarchal position or of the women of their households; it merely points out that it was within their rights and prerogatives to have done so.

Education was given to young women, but no Southern woman had schooling equal to that of a man of her class. Women were not expected to need more of an education because most married at a young age and spent the rest of their lives engaged in domestic work.  After marriage, the fear of continued pregnancy gave them cause for worry as many of them died in childbirth. One upper-class Georgian woman wrote,

“Family on the increase continually, and every one added labor and responsibility. My heart almost sinks within me.”

Georgia Beauties  were expected to be weak and dependent. They were not weak, but they remained dependent, and they resented it. One such woman wrote,

“The negroes are a weight continually pulling us down! Will the time ever come for us to be free of them?” 

That time arrived with the first shot of the Civil War; when the time for emancipation had begun. The irony of that Georgia Beauty’s plea was that the patriarchs of her society expected women to help defend their right to keep slaves in bondage, and by so doing, women remained enslaved as well.

Georgia Beauty, Samantha Beavers, was just one of thousands of female victims of a peculiar institution that resulted in the American Civil War and her battle for independence and freedom continues to this day.

Bummer