American Civil War

The American Civil War is a remembered historical rupture whose consequences pass through the Cropper family across generations. It destroys the family’s Mississippi home, helps set Sharman M. Cropper on the road to New Mexico and a communal experiment, and ultimately becomes part of the family story behind Everblest House: a new version of the lost mansion, financed by Priscilla Penn Cropper’s fortune and founded on a more conventional ideal of domestic happiness.

Loss and Migration

Mortimer D. Cropper, the narrator’s paternal great-great-grandfather, lost a Palladian mansion in Mississippi during the American Civil War. His son, Sharman M. Cropper, rode north in search of a living in the troubled postwar years. The family’s account of this migration begins with material dispossession, but it also records an encounter with new social ideals: family legend says Sharman was transfixed by Priscilla Penn Cropper speaking at an open-air meeting about Fourierist Harmony and the pursuit of free passion and pleasure. Whether he joined her following from conviction or opportunism remains uncertain.

The Postwar Communal Experiment

In 1868, Sharman accompanied a group to New Mexico to attempt the founding of a phalanstery. Some participants had previously belonged to offshoots of communities associated with Robert Owen and Robert Dale Owen. The project’s ambitions were concrete: it required 1,620 inhabitants, representing every possible combination of the passions of both sexes. That number was never reached, and the group also lacked anyone skilled in agriculture or knowledgeable about desert conditions. The venture failed through the collision of an ambitious social design with inadequate numbers and practical expertise.

From Ruined Mansion to Everblest House

After the phalanstery failed, Sharman proposed that he and Priscilla rebuild the Paradise of his lost youth according to what he described as her rational and harmonious principles. Their alternative was attainable family happiness, including servants but excluding slavery, rather than the group-love that had proved divisive and unmanageable. Priscilla’s fortune came from her Regenerating Powders, a patent medicine she marketed imaginatively; the proceeds paid for Everblest House, which the narrator describes as an exact replica of the Mississippi mansion lost during the war. The replacement preserves the shape of the lost home while changing the social arrangement imagined within it.

Inherited Memory and Social Consequences

The war’s afterlife is not confined to the family’s account of its lost property. Priscilla’s fortune and the house it financed become part of a lineage whose history also includes reform movements, spiritualist experiments, and competing ideas of how people might live together. Later generations inherit both the material result of the loss and its explanation: a failed communal project followed by a household founded on family life and servants rather than slavery. The Civil War thus functions as a turning point in the family’s history, linking dispossession to migration, experiment, and reconstruction.