Soldiers happily made a trade. Mrs. Edward Jett, a rural Georgia woman, wrote her soldier husband on September 20, 1864, that Federals told her, “if I wod comedate them I never shold suffe for … the wod fetch me anything to eat I wanted.” As an “onis woman,” she refused, but several married neighbors were “horin” for food. A blue-coat reported from Sewanee, Tennessee, that for four grams of coffee “you could get a good diddle.” Charles B. Haydon, 2nd Michigan, said in January 1863 that women in Tennessee would have sex for 5 cents to buy provisions. Further, “Capt. Poe told me he could seduce every woman in Tenn. with one haversack full of coffee.” Most remarkable for candid cynicism, Lieutenant James Graham of the 80th Ohio, when Provost Marshal of any occupied town, demanded women have sex in his back office in exchange for permits and passes: “Before she left could well and truly say I knew her.”25
It was easy for soldiers to rationalize the exploitation of women by labeling the victims morally loose. Yankees justified taking advantage of poor Southern rural women by falling back on the stereotype of “crackers,” calling them backward creatures without sense or morals. Yet evidence from other wars supports the argument that women bartered sex primarily as an act of sacrifice to succor families, not wanton opportunism. During the German siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, five years after Appomattox, the city endured famine. Milk shortages caused soaring infant mortality, especially among the poor. Cats, dogs, even rats, became luxury dishes. In desperation, Parisian women bartered their bodies to feed their dependents.26
These facts help explain a startling statistic about Civil War prison populations. We have the most intact records for the North, since many Southern files got destroyed during invasions and governmental disintegration. One modern study contends that, despite the North’s overall prosperity and a decline in male prison inmates, the number of poor women and children in jails and workhouses increased significantly. In 1860, women represented 20 percent of Massachusetts inmates; by 1864, 60 percent. During the war, the children in New York City’s almshouses jumped 300 percent. Can we profile these unfortunates? In the mid-1920s, Edith Abbott undertook pioneering sociological analysis of this question, utilizing prison reports from the 1860s. Abbott found that homeless soldiers’ widows and orphans comprised many of the incarcerated. A Massachusetts Special Report on Prisons and Prison Discipline (1865) noted that most female inmates fell into the categories of mothers, wives, or daughters of soldiers. Destitute, they had been taken into custody as vagrants.27
Prison officials reported a sharp wartime increase in juvenile delinquencies leading to incarcerations, the result of fathers at war and mothers at work, leaving adolescents unattended. One investigator noted in the Massachusetts special report, “I have talked with many boys in Jails and Houses of Correction who were either the sons or brothers of soldiers or sailors in the service. It may not be extravagant to say that one out of four of the many children in our prisons have near relatives in the army.” The New York Prison Association reported that the increase in female internments partly reflected prosecutions for abortions, called the “female crime.” “Wives, whose husbands had gone to the army, were left unprotected and exposed to the arts of the designing and the vicious of the other sex. Some of them—we are glad to believe they are the exception—have lapsed from virtue, and naturally desire to obliterate the evidence of their guilt.” A more charitable explanation would have emphasized necessity over vice.28
Some of the small children in workhouses had committed no crime other than to be born out of wedlock, the offspring of girls servicing soldiers for remuneration, or the fruit of boys’ desire to plant a seed of immortality before going off to be killed. Jeremiah Willits, a Quaker who represented the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, concluded from his enquiries that there were in every public poor house “a number of little children, some the offspring of girls following the army.” Embroidering the theme of fallen women, prison officials often averred that females had been justifiably detained for general delinquency, spending their dependents’ pay and aid money on drink, this alcoholism then inducing them to commit graver offenses. Just as those in authority could not understand the behavior of psychologically damaged soldiers, they continued blind to the fact, as Abbott noted perceptively, “that some part of the delinquency of these women must also have been caused by the emotional disturbance, the anxiety, and the grief from which they suffered.”29
It was evident from the start that hostilities would alter the dynamics of race relations, and no sector of the population experienced more turmoil than African Americans. In the free states, members of the black middle class saw opportunities to enhance their status as citizens. Northern women left home to nurse and teach with the Union forces. For example, Charlotte L. Forten, the educated daughter of a prominent black Philadelphia family, served in the South Carolina Sea Islands. African American male workers hoped to fill some of the slots vacated by white men recruited into the armed services. Their competition with whites made them bitterly resented. As discussed in chapter one, this factor helped to provoke the summer 1863 draft riots. Racist push-back went beyond the white working class. In New York, Marcia L. Daly, wife of a Democratic judge, said lynching blacks might be regrettable, but “it will give the Negroes a lesson, for since the war commenced, they have been so insolent as to be unbearable.”30
The inferior compensation of black Union soldiers meant hardship for their families. One wife wrote her soldier husband, begging him to send home just fifty cents. But unfree African Americans in the Confederate states faced the hardest situation. At first, they remained property even in Federal eyes. However, the approach of Union armies sooner or later provided opportunities to escape from plantations, as the bonds holding Southern society together dislocated and fractured. Ironically, the option to flee put slaves on the horns of a dilemma. If they bolted, they might be intercepted and punished. Madison Kilpatrick, a slaveholding soldier, wrote from camp to his wife, August 12, 1864,” saying “Tell the Negroes to stay at home and not be led into any difficulty, for there will apt to be hanging done.” Mounted slave patrols hunted for runaways in Confederate-held territory. Colonel William Camm, 14th Illinois, on September 3, 1862, recorded an eighteen-year-old female slave making his lines, clutching her baby. She had outrun the hounds, despite struggling through tangling brush that lacerated her legs and feet. But reaching Union forces did not always guarantee sanctuary. As late as July 1862, the U.S. Navy’s gunboat flotilla on the Mississippi received orders not to “promiscuously” harbor runaways.31
War’s dislocation subtly changed and eroded the plantation power structure, freighting the lives of both races with instability and peril. Slaves who gave valuable military intelligence to Union forces entering their locales ran grave risks. Captain Charles Wright Wills, 103rd Illinois, campaigning in the western theater, recorded a black girl chasing down his unit to find safety. She had told a bluecoat patrol where to locate hidden livestock, for which her mistress “took half a rail and like to wore the wench out. Broke her arm and bruised her shamefully.” Margaret Hughes, a young South Carolina slave, had to watch while her master hanged another girl who had revealed his hiding place to Union troops. On the other side, in limited instances, slaves killed masters in retribution for past wrongs, before running away. In June 1865, after Confederate policing had collapsed, former slaves chopped South Carolina planter William Allen to pieces in his barn. Some house servants, close to the white family, remained loyal throughout the conflict, but many workers without such ties chose to leave.32
Thousands of runaways pouring into Union lines ensured the eventual legal end of slavery. Their presence forced the government’s hand, because such a multitude could not be returned to bondage. As historian Vincent Harding wrote: “The relentless movement of the self-liberated fugitives into the Union lines” became “an unavoidable military and political issue.” This did not mean that “freedmen” received dece
nt treatment, for the many racists in the Union army abused them. In Alexandria, Virginia, occupying Union soldiers shot blacks for amusement. Members of the 99th New York kidnapped persons of color to sell into slavery. Cornelia Hancock, a Union medical assistant, wrote that many contrabands came into hospital sick and injured. “It is not uncommon for a colored driver to be pounded nearly to death by some of the white soldiers.”33
Some slaves, having already sampled Northern racism when Union soldiers ransacked their cabins, along with the big house, decided to stay put. Charlotte Forten, a middle-class black Northern volunteer in the Sea Islands, wrote disgustedly in February 1863 that white soldiers indiscriminately stole all plantation food stocks, “cheated the Negroes, and in some instances even burned their houses.” Union generals could act disturbingly like slave oligarchs. General David Hunter tried to arbitrarily conscript all black males 18 to 45 into the army. Susan Walker, a Northern teacher, wept bitter tears as white officers ordered their men to shoot resisters. Also reminding her of slavery days, white Union soldiers made an “arrest if any negro is found away from home during working hours.” Such treatment left the ex-slaves in a quandary as to whom they could trust. “One bright intelligent woman” told Walker “they had all been so ‘confuse’; they did not know what to do; did not know where they belonged or anything about we!”34
Union armies that failed to feed and clothe their troops properly did not adequately provide for contraband families. Runaway camps became overcrowded and unhygienic. An unnamed visitor to the D.C. camp described some naked babies, together with another six children, all sleeping in a small cabin amid a sea of mud, in rags and without fuel. Another hut housed twelve, including a consumptive girl, an orphan with pneumonia, and an infant dying of malnutrition. Children often suffered most, as they rarely tasted any milk. G. N. Coan, a Northern teacher working in the occupied South in 1864, wrote that contraband “children have suffered a great deal from cold and hunger,” often having as “their only garment an old brown tow-cloth frock, all rags and patches of different colors,” sleeping in “wretched hovels, the cold wind piercing through every crevice, their beds the floor.” After visiting the Washington camp in November 1862, Mary Todd Lincoln told her husband that contrabands suffered terribly, with only a bit of carpet for cover in November cold. Malnutrition and filth encouraged disease, such as a yellow fever outbreak in the Memphis camp. Overall, the camp death rate reached a steep 25 percent.35
Male freedmen found work as mule drivers, trench and gravediggers, some of the worst tasks the army had to offer, grinding them down and making them sick. Even then, that they actually earned some pay from the public purse made them the target of white hostility, violently expressed. Females might find work as nurses, laundresses, or, finally, as camp followers. Union officers took them as flagrantly flaunted private concubines, traveling along with their commands. Esther Hawk, a physician from New Hampshire, charged that assistant surgeon Dr. Charles Meade and his steward, 112th New York, serving in her hospital, “had a pretty colored girl to minister to their private wants.”36
Despite all these failings, the military formed a crucial initial springboard into free society. Black military service gave the slave-hut community a tangible, hitherto inconceivable, focus for pride. And, inadequate as provision for the dependents of black soldiers might be, the distribution of rudimentary food rations, clothing, medical treatment, and pay formed a lifeline (though, as Susie King Taylor, nurse and wife of a sergeant in the 1st South Carolina [U.S.], remarked, the regiment received no pay for eighteen months). The cooperation established between the military and Northern charitable groups proved to be a further important contribution toward progress, with hundreds of Northern teachers and aid workers setting up shop to help the ex-slaves prepare for citizenship.37
This endeavor dovetailed into assisting freedmen who continued tilling lands deserted by planters, with workers sharing in the profits. In the Sea Islands Port Royal Experiment alone, 10,000 slaves ran the plantations from November 1861 to March 1865. Whites mainly contributed moral support, explained Susan Walker. “All understand the planting better than we can teach them, but they need encouragement.” Lesser-known instances of fruitful cooperation included the Department of Tennessee where, in 1862, Grant made General John Eaton Supervisor of Negro Affairs. He worked with aid groups to set up freedmen with farm plots and bring them basic education. By 1864, the department boasted sixty teachers with 3,000 students.38
Such success required a situation of stability and order in a region. In those parts of the seceded states where military control remained ambivalent, fear and anxiety prevailed. Dislocation of normal societal arrangements advanced to where large areas existed as virtual noman’s-land, the races living in a state of uneasy insecurity, alternating at times with naked terror. Confederate civilians, stunned by the dissolution of their world, suffered trauma when confronted by foraging parties of their former slaves, now in Federal uniforms or operating as guerrilla bands. Sidney Lanier recorded that, after one raiding party had been driven off by white militia, former slaveholder Mrs. Parven wailed, “God help us! It is but the beginning of the raids; next time, the raiders will be more infuriated, and we may have no friends at hand.” Blacks still in the district could face savage retaliation. Amy Spain, a slave, was hanged in Darlington, South Carolina, in 1864, for reportedly shouting, “Bless the Lord, the Yankees have come!” as Sherman’s troops marched by. Kate Stone described backwater Louisiana as being, by spring 1863, in a state of constant quasi-war, with black and white groups arming against each other. “We live on a mine,” she said.39
While both black and white wondered what tomorrow might bring, praying for peace, there hung over all America a great cloud of grief that embraced all races and both genders as the casualty lists swelled. Walt Whitman “heard over the whole land, the last three years of the struggle, an unending, universal mourning—wail of woman, parents, orphans.” He envisioned the country as one huge surgery: “it seemed sometimes as if the whole interest of the land, North and South, was one vast central Hospital,” spreading out into countless graves, vast trenches serving as depositories of the slain, and creating a new national architecture of soldiers’ cemeteries. Of all the deprivations visited on Civil War people, death loomed as the greatest, with people losing loved ones in numbers unimaginable before hostilities began. Grief touched all classes; even the Northern wealthy, who never felt an economic pinch, still had to cope with the vacant chair. Houses in every neighborhood showed door handles tied with black crepe.40
As soon as the boys started down the road to war, the anxiety of waiting began, an emotional stress akin to the strain of soldiers immobilized in trenches during bombardment. Charleston belle Emma Holmes wrote in April 1861 that General Joseph B. Kershaw’s brigade had gone off: “How bravely they marched by, their bayonets glistening in the moonlight.” Yet she already felt the obliterating presence of dark shrouds: “the shadows obscured their faces so that we could not distinguish them.” Some appeared so young. “We turned away with mingled feelings of pride & sadness, the echo of the music fading in the distance, adding to the melancholy thoughts inspired by the sight.”41
Civilians then settled into the deceptive calm of ordinary life that gave no outlet for release of pent-up worry. “Oh how often have I longed to battle with life as men do,” wrote South Carolinian Grace Elmore in November 1862, “and expend in action those energies that work but to excite fretfulness because denied of the true outlet.” As she waited for news from the front, she added: “How quiet our life is, and yet so much suffering, so much horror around us, and what a terrible uncertainty.” Kate Stone cried, “Oh, this inactive life when there is such stir and excitement in the busy world outside.” She continued: “My heart leaps to my lips and I turn sick with apprehension whenever I hear a quick step, see a stranger approaching, or note a grave look on the face of any of the boys.” Her mother’s frail health imposed a further need for pretended n
ormality; Kate had to devour in secret the reports of her brother’s brigade in action.42
Captain John William DeForest, 12th Connecticut, observed in retrospect that once it became clear the war would be drawn out, “Old persons and invalids sank into the grave that season under the oppression of straining suspense and preliminary horror.” People became unbalanced by fretting, a medical condition known as “fright.” They turned for relief to opium, alcohol, laudanum, and other drugs. Midwestern teacher and social activist Frances Willard grew appalled by Union blundering in 1862: “To think of our soldiers dying of exposure—without ever striking a blow for freedom—to think of two millions a day being spent for nothing.” Though an erstwhile head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, she resorted at times to “A little ether on a handkerchief,” to escape the gloom, lifting “ ‘the real Me’ beyond the Himalayas and roseate hues gleam on me.” When “dazedness” or depression became severe, she turned to electric shock treatments.43
For civilians, long periods of inactivity alternated with frantic news gathering whenever a big battle occurred. Then, the family would designate a relative or friend to join the crowd in front of government or editorial offices, there to await the published casualty lists before hurrying home to report. Virginian Susan Blackford, wife of Captain Charles Blackford, remembered watching for her father to bring the bulletin of casualties at Manassas. She deduced from his elastic step on the porch that they had been spared any loss, and there followed a general “shout of grateful joy when he caught his breath enough to say, with choking voice, ‘All safe!’ ” Of course, some always heard the worst. Joel Chandler Harris stayed haunted by the memory of a woman finding out at his newspaper office that her husband was killed: “her screams when the editor told her of it, and the cries of her little daughter.” The young wife of a Rebel officer described the bereaved as “stunned and stupefied,” some even “died of grief.” This double tragedy entered the war’s poetry. In “After All,” William Winter wrote of Grandpa following his soldier boy to the grave:
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