Parthenia Antoinette Hague

Born in 1838, Parthenia Antoinette Vardaman Hague is best known for A Blockaded Family, a memoir drawn from her experiences during the Civil War. Sources describe her as a schoolteacher on a plantation near Eufaula, Alabama, where she witnessed the strain that war placed on households far from the battlefield.

Her book follows one family coping with shortages, isolation, and uncertainty as the South came under increasing pressure. Rather than focusing on generals or campaigns, she wrote about domestic survival: food, supplies, morale, and the improvisations that kept people going.

That close-up perspective is what makes her work memorable today. Hague’s memoir offers readers a personal window into nineteenth-century Southern life and into how ordinary people endured extraordinary disruption.