Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  It also made little sense to talk about choosing one’s “proper sphere” when subsistence itself was becoming the necessity. The simple absence of men from farms and shops forced the wives they had left behind to shift for themselves, whether that was the “sphere” they wanted or not. Although local and state governments made generous promises of support for soldiers’ families, little of that support was ever forthcoming in meaningful quantities. Bereft of the men who formed the traditional center of patriarchal authority, women had to improvise new ways of organizing their lives. Women who had defined their lives by domestic work inside the house now found themselves behind the plow in the fields. “Most of the women around here who live on farms have to do all their work alone, their husbands being in the army,” wrote a curious soldier in Tennessee. “I got some butter the other day of a woman who has six little children and a place of fifty acres which she has cultivated alone and supported herself and children besides. Don’t you think this is doing pretty well for one woman?”50

  Perhaps it was, but the satisfaction these women derived from “doing pretty well” had to be balanced against the incessant grind of dread and anxiety over the fate of their husbands, brothers, and sons. When those fears culminated at last in the news of death in battle, the results could range from raw stoicism to outright derangement. Mary Chesnut’s friend Colonel John Hugh Means was killed at Antietam; Means’s wife lay down, covered her face, and a little while after, when “she remained quiet so long, someone removed the light shawl which she had drawn over her head. She was dead.” Is it any wonder, Chesnut asked, that “so many women die? Grief and constant anxiety kill nearly as many women as men die on the battlefield.”51

  The toll that privation, dislocation, and death took on the loyalty of women was especially severe in the South. Unlike Northerners, women in the Confederacy had to deal with invasion and occupation, including everything from vandalism by unruly Federal soldiers to conflicts with restless slaves. As early as the summer of 1861, Kate Stone noticed that “the house servants have been giving a lot of trouble lately—lazy and disobedient.” Ada Bacot tried to run her South Carolina plantation after the death of her husband, but she found her slaves “disregarded” her “orders… more & more every day”; one teenaged slave was “so impertinent” that Bacot lost all self-control and “slaped him in the mouth before I knew what I did.” But the relationships were not always ones of white dominance. In the absence of their menfolk, some Southern white women found comfort in sexual “connection” with their slaves. “I will tell you a fact that I have never seen alluded to publicly,” reported Richard J. Hinton, a British-born officer in a Kansas “colored” regiment, “that there is a large amount of intercourse between white women and colored men.” Wartime testimony before the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission about amours between male slaves and mistresses was so shocking that the commission eliminated thirty-two pages of it from its printed proceedings.52

  In some instances, Confederate women put up spirited resistance to the Union occupation forces. Peter Osterhaus, a Prussian-born Federal general in the Army of the Tennessee, was asked by a Mississippi woman if he wouldn’t make war on women and children; he replied that as far as he could see, “the women carried on this war. He had intercepted many a letter from the young ladies in which they urged their lovers to fight well and never give up.” After Baton Rouge fell to Federal forces in 1862, Sarah Morgan and her sister Antoinette made small Confederate flags for themselves; Morgan “put the stem in my belt, pinned the flag to my shoulder, and walked down town, creating great excitement among women & children” and among the Federal occupation troops. When Confederate cavalry stampeded in panic through Winchester, Virginia, in 1864, “a large number of the most respected ladies joined hands & formed a line across the principal street, telling the cowardly Cavalrymen that they should not go any further unless they ran their horses over their bodies.” Beholding the Winchester women from the Union perspective, one Union general sneered that “Hell is not full enough, there must be more of these Secession women of Winchester to full it up.”53

  In New Orleans, Confederate women grew so hostile and malevolent in their behavior that the occupation commander, Benjamin Butler, issued a general order that threatened that “when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”—in other words, a prostitute. Butler’s proclamation was ill-timed and even more ill-worded—it even aroused unfavorable comment in the British Parliament—but it did underscore Butler’s frustration with women who refused to behave passively in the face of male conquest. What Butler failed to see behind the contempt the New Orleans women had for Yankee soldiers was the corresponding contempt they nurtured for the Confederate men who had abandoned them to Butler’s unkind embrace, and what Butler’s proclamation unwittingly underscored for Confederate women was how exposed and undefended the Confederacy had left them in their hour of peril. Poorer women who were not quite on the same social level as the “respected ladies” of Winchester stated their disgust more frankly. “The men of Atlanta have brought an everlasting stain on their name,” wrote Julia Davidson, an angry Georgia farm wife. “Instead of remaining to defend their homes, they have run off and left Atlanta to be defended by an army of women and children. … God help us for there is no help in man.”54

  For that reason, by 1862, fewer Confederate women were lending their aid to recruitment duties, or sending their men off willingly. Some were refusing to keep up farms, and others were demanding that the Confederate government return their men. In many cases, Southern farm women and planters’ wives were forced to rely on male slaves to run their farms and plantations for them, which in most cases dangerously loosened the bonds of slave discipline. The Confederate Congress responded sluggishly with a series of conscription exemptions designed to keep the most critically needed men at the most critical jobs. But many of the exemptions, especially the infamous “twenty-nigger law,” only fanned the resentment of the yeoman classes without doing much to improve the South’s chances.

  As the blockade further pinched Southern resources, even the wealthiest Southern women were besieged with the need to economize, while the yeoman farmers slipped into outright poverty. “We are all in a sadly molting condition,” wrote Mary Chesnut in the fall of 1863. “We had come to the end of our good clothes in three years, and now our only resource was to turn them upside down or inside out—mending, darning, patching.” George Washington Whitman was amazed at the wretched conditions he found among the once prosperous farms of northern Virginia in 1862: “The villages we have passed through are the most God forsaken places I ever saw, the people seem to have next to nothing to eat as the men have all gone in the Secesh army, and how they are going to get through the winter I dont know.”55

  Southern women were being forced to assume roles of independence for which they had little preparation, and the independence that events foisted on them was not always with the kind of independence they might have welcomed. At the same time, however, Southern men were becoming ever more critically dependent on the women for supplies of food from the fields and clothing from the home. The bargain of “proper” spheres was turning upside down as the Confederacy weakened, and Southern women, far from rallying round the flag, now turned on Confederate men in rage. “I am so sick of trying to do a man’s business,” complained Elizabeth Neblett to her soldier-husband in 1863. “I have a great mind to get Morphine & take it, see if I will not be happier. … If it shortens my life, it will be an end most devoutly wished.”56

  These mutterings of disloyalty came mostly from Confederate women who stayed put; a far darker kind of misery awaited those who tried to turn refugee. As early as 1862, Federal invasions of northern Virginia and Tennessee were dislodging large numbers of Southerners, mostly women whose men had left for the army and who feared the unlov
ely rule of Yankee occupiers, and mostly those with slaves who feared that their slaves could not be relied upon anywhere near the Northern armies. Over the course of the war, nearly 250,000 Southerners fled from the battle zones to areas deeper within the Confederacy. Taken together with the flight of blacks in the other direction and with the three million men sucked up into the whirlwind of the armies as they crossed state after state and river after river, the Civil War produced a demographic disruption all across the eastern half of North America that had no equal in the American memory.57

  Nor did the problems stop once Southerners had gotten away to a reasonable distance from the Yankee invaders. Once removed, refugee planters who had dragged their slaves along with them had no work for the slaves to do and no income from cotton planting to feed them. In order to earn money from their slaves, refugee planters hired them out in record numbers to public and private war industries, as teamsters, ironworkers, and even “nitre diggers.” This, in turn, only further destabilized the slave work regimen. As slaves moved out of the plantation environment and into the wider boundaries of urban employment for cash, the old systems of supervision broke down, while wartime conditions made it impossible to develop a new work system to absorb the sudden influx of industrial slaves.58

  Even without the excess baggage of slaves, Southern women refugees found the incessant string of moves from one unfamiliar place to another, or from one increasingly reluctant brace of relatives to another, to be a counsel of despair. The longer the war rolled on, the more all trace of Southern civic life disappeared, as individual survival became the paramount concern. Sarah Morgan and her family fled Baton Rouge under a barrage of Union shells to seek refuge on a plantation near Port Hudson; when the war came up to Port Hudson, they fled again to Lake Pontchartrain, and then finally into occupied New Orleans, where Sarah was sheltered under the roof of her Unionist half-brother. “Give me my home, my old home once more,” she lamented, in what could have been the words of every Confederate woman tossed in the tornado of destruction and disappointed expectations for their own womanhood. “O my home, my home! I could learn to be a woman there, and a true one, too. Who will teach me now?”59

  As the war forced women into new and unaccustomed roles, it simultaneously undermined women’s notions of their reliance on men, and introduced them to new views of their own capacities. This was particularly true for women who stepped into the void created by the army medical services’ miserable unpreparedness for handling the frightful casualties of Civil War battlefields. Women had been assigned to so many domestic roles related to caregiving that it required only the shortfall in male medical personnel before women began to volunteer themselves as nurses, and in a few cases, such as that of Union army surgeon Mary Walker, as doctors. Before the 1850s, army medicine, like the army itself, had been the preserve of male doctors and male nurses, and women could scarcely find opportunity for medical education in the United States, much less an opening for medical practice.60

  The work of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War had cracked that particular wall of gender separation down to its foundations, and Nightingale became the stepping-stone for a small number of American women to open up military nursing to women volunteers. Not surprisingly, female nurses were at first not welcomed by the doddering army medical establishments. “There is scarcely a day passes that I do not hear some derogatory remarks about the ladies who are in hospitals, until I think, if there is any credit due them at all, it is for the moral courage they have in braving public opinion,” wrote Kate Cumming in 1863. But the administrative record soon carved out by Dorothea Dix as the superintendent of army nurses in the North, by Captain Sally Tomkins and her Richmond hospital, and by U.S. Sanitary Commission nurses on the Federal hospital ships on the western rivers soon dampened the carping. Tompkins, the sister of a Confederate colonel, opened her own private hospital for 1,330 Confederate soldiers in Richmond and managed to evade bureaucratic efforts to incorporate her hospital into the army hospital system by obtaining a captain’s commission from Jefferson Davis. She was “original, old fashioned and tireless in well doing,” recalled Thomas De Leon, “… as simple as a child and as resolute as a veteran.”61

  What was far more discouraging to women nurses was the appalling slaughter churned up by battle, and the dirt and incompetence that pervaded the army medical services. When Cornelia Hancock and a group of army nurses caught up with the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg in 1864, they walked into an abandoned church that the army had converted into a hospital. There “the scene beggared all description.” The two male surgeons with them “were paralyzed by what they saw,” Hancock wrote home, for “rain had poured in through the bullet-riddled roofs of the churches until our wounded lay in pools of water made bloody by their seriously wounded condition.” Louisa May Alcott, who nursed briefly in a military hospital in Georgetown before falling dangerously ill, described her hospital as a “perfect pestilence-box… cold, damp, dirty, full of vile odors from wounds, kitchens, wash rooms, & stables.” By the end of the war, only 3,200 women had actually served as nurses in the armies, not more than a fifth of the overall number of military nurses.

  Rather than take the risks posed by nursing, far more women found their ways to new jobs in Northern and Southern textile mills, hurriedly manufacturing cartridges, clothing, and military equipment under the wide umbrella of government war contracts. The absence of men also created a gap in teaching, another previously all-male profession that now began to admit women, and the explosive growth in government paperwork opened up employment for women in government and Treasury offices. By the end of the war, the U.S. Treasury was employing 447 “treasury girls” as copyists and currency counters.62

  What is not clear is whether these new opportunities, however much satisfaction they gave, opened any new windows for redefining political or social power for women. Many of the wartime positions available to women were as replacements for men, and those positions often disappeared as soon as the war was over and the men returned. It was only at incidental moments that a real departure for women and genuine movement toward gender equality took shape. In 1863, a core group of women veterans of the Seneca Falls convention organized a Women’s National Loyal League, which took as its primary object the creation of a massive petition drive in support of an amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery as a legal institution. That, in turn, became the organizational platform from which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony launched a parallel movement in 1866, the American Equal Rights Association, to ensure a similar constitutional amendment which would grant voting rights to women.

  The only real weapons Stanton and Anthony had at their disposal were petitions and persuasion, and they gained little ground against the entrenched legal restraints that deprived women in many states not only of the vote but also of the most basic republican privilege, property ownership. Mary Ashton Livermore, who had already carved out a prominent career as a reformer and editor of a religious magazine in the 1850s, turned her organizing talents to private fund-raising for the United States Sanitary Commission during the war. When she attempted to sign a contract for constructing the fairgrounds for the 1863 Northwestern Sanitary Fair in Chicago, however, she was politely informed that no contract with her signature on it had any legal standing, even if she paid the contractors in cash. Only her husband’s signature carried any standing in Illinois law. “By the laws of the state in which we lived, our individual names were not worth the paper on which they were written.” In the face of this legal stonewalling and the demand to combine gender and racial civil rights, Stanton and Anthony were unable to hold their equal-rights movement together, and the drive fractured into a radical wing led by Stanton and Anthony (which continued to press for a national constitutional amendment) and a moderate wing led by Mary Livermore and Henry Ward Beecher (which wanted to limit the campaign to what could be accomplished in state legislatures). None of them lived to see American women gai
n the right to vote in 1920.63

  The war brought changes to American women, but only some changes and only to some women. In the confusion caused by the war, both the number of women who left the domestic sphere to find work in the field, the government office, or the hospital and the number of jobs that women were admitted to be capable of doing increased. But the war that had made this movement possible also doomed its further growth, since so much of this work was the creature of the war itself. The legal structure of restraints on women remained unchanged, and once the war was over, the tide of women’s advance into new realms of work and life receded to its prewar boundaries. This retreat was reinforced by a certain measure of class as well as gender expectations. Black women and lower-class white women had never been part of the domestic expectation, and both had always worked outside the domestic boundary; only the national emergency of the war sanctioned the movement of upper- and middle-class white women in the same outward direction. Once that emergency was over, the class bias of women’s work reasserted itself, and women’s work outside the family circle reclaimed its stigma of being “poor folks’ work.”

  The Civil War represented neither advance nor retreat for American women, but only a moment of unspeakable turbulence when all the customary handholds disappeared and men and women were forced to find new ways through the storm of conflict. For Clara Barton, who made her Civil War nursing career the foundation for organizing the International Red Cross, the war meant a gain of what Barton estimated to be “fifty years in advance of the normal position which continued peace… would have assigned her.” For Susan B. Anthony, the postwar crusader for women’s rights, the war actually stifled most of the progress women had made toward winning the right to vote. It was “the crime of the ages” for the United States to fight “for national supremacy over the states to enslave & disenfranchise—and then refuse to exercise that power on behalf of half the people.” Barton and Anthony looked at the war from two very different angles, and perhaps neither were entirely right or, as another generation would demonstrate, entirely wrong.64