Women and the American Civil War , livre ebook

Women and the American Civil War
Women and the American Civil War
North-South Counterpoints

EDITED BY JUDITH GIESBERG AND RANDALL M. MILLER
The Kent State University Press KENT, OHIO
© 2018 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ISBN 978-1-60635-340-0
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this title is available at the Library of Congress.
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To our students at Villanova University and Saint Joseph’s University, for all they teach us by asking and exploring new questions about the Civil War era J UDY AND R ANDALL February 2018
Contents
P REFACE AND A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
I NTRODUCTION
P ART O NE : P OLITICS
Southern Women and Politics in the Civil War Era Elizabeth R. Varon
“All Ladies Have Politics”: Women, Morality, and Politics in the North Stacey M. Robertson
P ART T WO : W ARTIME M OBILIZATION
“With Hearts Nerved by the Necessity for Prompt Action”: Southern Women, Mobilization, and the Wartime State Lisa Tendrich Frank
Northern Women, the State, and Wartime Mobilization Jessica Ziparo
P ART T HREE : E MANCIPATION
Southern Women and Emancipation during the Civil War Rebecca Capobianco
Northern Women and Emancipation Chandra Manning
P ART F OUR : W ARTIME R ELIEF
Needles as Weapons: Southern Women and Civil War Relief Libra Hilde
Real Women and Mythical Womanhood: War Relief at the Northern Home Front Jeanie Attie
P ART F IVE : W OMEN AND F AMILIES
Women and Families on the Southern Home Front Jacqueline Glass Campbell
Women and the Family at Home in the North Nicole Etcheson
P ART S IX : R ELIGION
“Hasten the Day”: Slavery’s Apocalypse among Enslaved Women and Planter Women in the Civil War South W. Scott Poole
“I Can Read His Righteous Sentence”: Female Christian Abolitionists and the Millennium Timothy Wesley
P ART S EVEN : R ECONSTRUCTION
“In Times of Change and Trouble Like These”: Commonalities among Southern Women during Reconstruction Elizabeth Parish Smith
Women and Reconstruction in the North Faye Dudden
P ART E IGHT : C IVIL W AR M EMORY
Southern Memories and Reconstructions: The Shifting Grounds and Contested Places of Women’s Civil War Memorial Work Micki McElya
Faithful Helpmates and Fervent Activists: Northern Women and Civil War Memory Wendy Hamand Venet
C ONTRIBUTORS
I NDEX
Preface and Acknowledgments
This book grew out of discussions among historians at conferences about the need to bring the Civil War into women’s history and women’s history into the Civil War. The historians recognized that the intersections of those histories were already underway, and with much profit, but they continued to ask for systematic comparative studies that looked at women across regional boundaries, rather than simply within them, and that extended the compass of inquiry across the Civil War era. From such discussions, we suggested that we all might gain new perspectives and understandings about women, and men, during the Civil War era by pairing essays on key issues affecting and reflecting women’s interests, identities, and involvement in such subjects as politics, family, wartime mobilization, relief, religion, emancipation, Reconstruction, and memory. As in all such conversations, someone challenged any among us to try this approach. We took up that challenge. This book is the result.
In bringing together the various authors and agreeing on the subjects, we sought scholars whose work spoke to the issues. In order to cut across the sectional divide in scholarship that tended to focus on one section rather than engage in an ongoing investigation of people across regional lines, we paired essays on the North and South for each subject and encouraged the authors to share their work so that they would “speak” to one another throughout the book. Simply put, the purpose and the plan was to encourage comparisons and counterpoints. By pairing essays by subject, we wanted readers to see the people and the period as dynamic and even dialectic, rather than fixed by circumstance and geography.
We see our book as exploratory more than “definitive,” and do not pretend to comprehensiveness in subject or range. The book is, rather, a series of investigations that we hope readers will take as invitations to continue the inquiry into discovering how gender and place—and race—especially informed what the Civil War era meant to its contemporaries and might mean to students of that time thereafter. Doing so will move us all closer to realizing what Walt Whitman famously said nobody would ever do—namely, get the “real war” into the books.
This book is the work of many hands. First, we thank all those historians wanting us to try such a project—and we toast you all for your confidence. We thank the authors for taking on the project with enthusiasm and intellectual rigor. We also benefited from the assistance of staff at various libraries, including most directly the Falvey Library at Villanova University, the Drexel Library at Saint Joseph’s University, the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, the Magill Library at Haverford College, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Library Company of Philadelphia. We also raise our glass to the bartenders and wait staff at Brick & Brew in Havertown, Pa., “the office,” for letting us stake out window tables to work on this book while sampling various brews or wines to insure words would flow. We thank the readers at Kent State University Press for their instructive and useful comments, which did much to improve the book. And we very much thank the staff at Kent State University Press, especially Joyce Harrison and Will Underwood, for believing in this book from the beginning, providing most helpful advice on direction and scope all along the way, and guiding the book through the review and publication process. We also thank the DBD Fund for providing a grant to support this work. And throughout the gestation period of this project, we thank the patience and support of our spouses, Edward Fierros and Linda Patterson Miller, who knew we would get the work done and still be home for dinner.
Judith Giesberg, Havertown, Pa., and Randall M. Miller, Glen Mills, Pa .
Introduction
In 2002, surveying the literature on women and the Civil War, historian Thavolia Glymph concluded that “the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the most racially gendered and regionally segregated historiographical space in U.S. history.” 1 At the time, the scholarship was still relatively young, having only begun to mature in the previous decade. Since then, those, like Glymph, who teach and write on the subject have inspired and trained others, and as a result scholarship on women in the Civil War is far less elite and white than it once was. Much has been accomplished to uncover the lives of Southern slave and freedwomen and poor white women, for instance, and studies of the urban and rural communities in the North have moved beyond an exclusive focus on middle-class women’s voluntary work. New work is underway on the great variety of wartime and postwar experiences of women in the West, including Native American, Chinese, and Mexican women. But yet much of it—except for perhaps this latter—remains “regionally segregated.” Historians writing about Southern women rarely comment on or interact with those working on the North, and vice versa; questions and research methods employed in one place do not inform and are not replicated in the other. This leaves us asking: Are there two distinct models for studying women’s Civil War? We think not, but the essays in this collection will allow us to consider that question carefully.
This volume brings historians together in a series of paired essays on critical issues relating to women and the American Civil War. Each pair assays a particular subject from the Southern and the Northern experience, thereby establishing a running comparative dynamic throughout the book. This organization will allow readers to see where the work overlaps, when questions posed of one group of women might rightfully be posed of another, and how sources discovered and methods employed in one case might, and even ought, to be used in the other.
While readers, we hope, will find the arrangement of these essays instructive, they will also be struck by how deep and richly textured is our understanding of women’s Civil War. As the field has matured, historians have reconsidered what we thought we knew about the period’s usual suspects—plantation mistresses, slave women, middle-class reformers, nurses, for instance—and added a panoply of new ones—female spies, smugglers, resisters, refugees, veterans, to name a few. This maturing is reflected in the essays that follow, which revisit with fresh eyes old favorites such as the politically savvy Jessie Frémont, contraband teacher and activist Harriet Jacobs, and Confederate nurse Kate Cumming. The essays continue the recovery work of women’s history, giving us new names to consider, women like (in Chandra Manning’s essay) Mrs. Maria Renfro, who organized a female-led church in Cairo, Illinois, that became the basis for the town’s first African Methodist Episcopal Church, and (in Wendy Venet’s essay) former slave and veteran’s wife Julia Layton, who, at the 1897 national meeting of the Woman’s Relief Corps, successfully stopped a measure that would have segregated the corps by calling instead for union. “Until we have union,” Layton insisted, “this organization will not progress.” Indeed, the same could be said about the postwar suffrage campaign that fractured and hopelessly floundered over the relationship between black civil rights and women’s rights.
There are no angels here, though, and by this we mean that none of the scholars revisit the postwar urge to naturalize women’s wartime contributions by saddling women with terms such as “angels