Payne Family, #2468

The federal government preferred to expel Confederate women suspected of disloyalty. Nannie Lomax, in vain, protests the arrest and banishment of her sister and herself from Baltimore on charges of "grave crimes against the Government; as no proof or our guilt has been shown, we believe ourselves entitled to supposition that we are innocent." Ca. 1863.

Papers of the Cumming Family, #6922

As Union forces made their way across the South, many women were forced to flee from their homes, moving from one Confederate state to another just ahead of advancing armies. Georgia Walker, discussed in this May, 1863 letter from her mother Cary Ann Gholson to Frances Booth, had a more unique refugee experience. Mrs. Walker went to Bermuda with her children and husband, a blockade runner, to live out the war.

Cooke-DuVal Papers, #8264

"What I Saw in the Spring of 1864--in Lower Virginia," by a Mrs. S. D. DuVal, pages 45-49, describing her stagecoach trip to Winchester, Virginia and apparently arriving shortly after the battle of Third Winchester (September 19, 1864). She wrote this 54-page account of wartime hardships during the 1880s.

Ada P. Bankhead Papers, #38-463

A pass signed by Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon, January 23, 1865: "Mrs. Ada Bankhead has permission to pass the Confederate lines to Memphis subject to the approval of the Commanding General through whose lines she may desire to pass." At the time, the city was under Union occupation, and Mrs. Bankhead may have wanted to visit relatives.

McGuire, Judith White Brockenbrough (Mrs. John P. McGuire), Diary of A Southern Refugee, During the War, New York: E. J. Hale & Son, 1868. 

Judith McGuire, a daughter of a Virginia Supreme Court justice and mother of two Confederate soldiers, fled Alexandria and worked in Richmond as a clerk for the Confederate Commissary Department. She also volunteered as a nurse and once described making and selling soap at home to purchase necessities. The book is based on a diary she kept between May 4, 1861 and May 4, 1865.