America's Women

by Gail Collins

  But in general, women seemed to dislike slavery mainly because they found it so difficult to handle the slaves. “I sometimes think I would not care if they all did go, they are so much trouble to me,” wrote one Southern housewife in a typical outburst. Sarah Gayle, the wife of an Alabama governor, berated herself for losing her temper with the slaves and wrote in her journal, “I would be willing to spend the rest of my life at the North, where I never should see the face of another Negro.” Just as Northern women complained about the difficulty in getting good servants, the Southern women complained bitterly about their slaves. Absent the incentive of wages, slaves were motivated mainly by the fear of punishment, and although some white women did whip their servants, most did not really have the power to instill physical fear. Mistresses who actually hurt slaves generally did it in the heat of anger, grabbing whatever was available—knitting needles, kitchen knife, fork, or boiling water—and sometimes permanently maiming them.

  Southern women constantly pointed out that unlike Northern women, they were responsible for housing and clothing their servants and tending them when they were sick. They frequently described themselves as the real slaves. Caroline Merrick, who admitted that much of the comfort of her life was due to her servants, nonetheless felt the “common idea of tyranny and ill-usage of slaves was often reversed,” and claimed to have been “subject at times to exactions and dictations of the black people…which now seem almost too extraordinary to relate.” Southern women felt they had to go to a great deal of trouble to look after slaves, who did not go to a great deal of trouble for them. But their claims that they wanted to see an end to the system were mostly imaginary, as demonstrated by how miserable they were when the slaves actually left. The housewives did not want to do the work themselves—they simply wanted the people who did it for them to work harder.

  If Southern women ever really hated slavery, it was because they feared it was sexually corrupting their men. “Slavery degrades the white man more than the Negro and oh exerts a most deleterious effect upon our children,” wrote Gertrude Thomas of Georgia, who suspected that both her father and husband had black mistresses. Catherine Hammond, who remained loyal to her philandering husband during a scandal involving his conduct with his nieces—her dead sister’s children—did leave him in 1850 because he refused to give up his slave mistress. In an indication of what a Southern male who had been taught to dominate could be like, Hammond blamed the rupture on the “utter want of refinement and tone” in his wife’s family.

  “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system,” wrote Mary Chesnut. Like many of her fellow Southerners, she disliked the institution yet wanted the service. But on the subject of sex, her intense feeling was uncomplicated. The most famous remark in her diaries was that every Southern lady “tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.”

  9

  The Civil War: Nurses, Wives, Spies, and Secret Soldiers

  “MY STATE IS OUT OF THE UNION”

  For Southern women, the beginning of the Civil War offered an unusual opportunity to get involved in public life. “Politics engrosses my every thought,” wrote Amanda Sims. In this crisis, showing a deep interest in masculine concerns was not considered unfeminine. Keziah Brevard, a fifty-eight-year-old widow, said she was so emotionally involved in the political drama that if she awoke in the middle of the night “my first thought is ‘my state is out of the union.’” There were the usual wartime stories of young women who refused to allow draft dodgers to pay them court. (Girls in Texas were alleged to be handing out bonnets and hoopskirts to men who failed to enlist.) But this early-stage patriotism came easy: most Americans, North and South, believed the war would be resolved very quickly, perhaps even before any blood was actually shed. When their husbands actually saddled up and rode off to battle, a number of women began questioning whether there was any cause they’d be willing to sacrifice their loved ones for. “Charlie is dearer to me than my country,” admitted Kate Rowland of Georgia.

  The women left behind knew they would have a new role to play, although they weren’t particularly clear what it would entail. Writing to her local paper, one Confederate urged her fellow Southern females to “hurl the destructive novel in the fire and turn our poodles out of doors, and convert our pianos into spinning wheels.” Young women wrote in their diaries that they wished they were men. Feeling both useless and anxious, they embroidered razor kits, formed relief committees to sew clothing for the troops, and held benefits to raise money for the war effort. But unlike their Revolutionary era ancestors, the Southern elite refused to wear homemade clothing as a badge of patriotic fervor. According to the Southern Illustrated News, “Not five out of five hundred ladies would be caught in the street in a homespun dress.”

  “DOES SHE MEAN TO TAKE CARE OF ME—

  OR TO MURDER ME?”

  Confederate women became keenly aware that they were alone on remote farms with slaves who believed they might soon be freed. Keziah Brevard, who woke up in the middle of the night to thoughts of secession at the onset of the war, found that as the months rolled by, the thing keeping her awake was the possibility of a slave uprising. A middle-aged widow, Brevard was used to living alone on her plantation with a great many slaves, but by 1861, she was writing that “we know not what moment we may be hacked to death in the most cruel manner.” There were indeed a few spectacular murders, and everyone had heard about them. Lewis B. Norwood, a wealthy North Carolina planter, was killed by two of his slaves. A husband and wife, they held him down, shoved a funnel into his mouth, and poured scalding water down his throat. (Norwood had just sold the couple’s baby and was preparing to sell the wife.) The wealthy Mary Chesnut, who bragged in her diary about her lack of fear, may have thought twice after her elderly cousin, Betsey Witherspoon (“a saint on earth”), was smothered by one of her servants. As Chesnut discussed the tragedy with her sister Kate, a maid came in and announced that she intended to sleep in Kate’s room in order to protect her. “For the life of me, I cannot make up my mind. Does she mean to take care of me—or to murder me?” Kate asked her sister.

  Plantation mistresses had been left alone a great deal before the war. But then their slaves were not expecting to be freed any minute, and white male neighbors were normally nearby. During the war, the women were truly alone, and very few of them seem to have welcomed an opportunity to demonstrate their leadership skills. They began to flood the Confederate government with petitions asking that their men be exempted from duty in order to defend the lives and chastity of their wives and daughters from the local slaves. In fact, as civil rights leaders pointed out after the war, there were far fewer instances of rape or assault than anyone might have expected. The women’s far more realistic worry was that they might wake up one morning and find that their servants had simply taken off. “I dread our house servants going and having to do their work,” wrote Mary Lee, a Virginia woman whose male slaves ran away in 1862, with the females threatening to follow. One Georgia slave-owning family was so determined to keep their prized cook that they chained her to the kitchen—the Union Army found her with “heavy iron shackles put on her feet so she could not run off.” Women from prosperous Southern families had been raised to regard physical work as degrading, and having slaves do it for them was a very deep-rooted part of their identity as Southern ladies. Many well-to-do women had no idea how to do household chores, and when they learned, they didn’t much like it. Kate Foster of Mississippi was forced to do the laundry when the house servants ran off, and she reported she “came near ruining myself for life as I was too delicately raised for such hard work.” There were reports of women who “fainted dead away” while washing windows or who took to their beds after a bout of floor scrubbing.

  “THE WOMEN ARE AS BAD AS MEN DOWN HERE”

  The Confederate Army began to draft soldiers in the spring of 1862, during p
lanting time, and the sight of women behind plows became common. As the war dragged on, the towns became virtually all-female worlds, stripped of able-bodied men who could help with the local defense, run local businesses, or even lift heavy furniture. In New Bern, North Carolina, only 20 of the 250 white residents were male, and most of those were old or on the verge of being inducted. Inflation became a terrible problem in the South. A soldier’s pay was $11 a month, and at wartime prices in some areas that was not enough to feed a family of four on grain alone. Many men, meanwhile, still managed to maintain a mythical image of what their wives were doing at home. “I do not like the idea of your weaving. It is mortifying to me. I wish you would not do it,” wrote Will Neblett to his wife, Lizzie, who really had no other way to clothe her family and eleven slaves.

  Women got increasingly surly and started food riots, attacking merchants and army agents, raiding grain warehouses, mills, and stores. In areas where the farms were small and people had never owned many slaves to begin with, enthusiasm for the war burned out rather quickly, and wives pestered their husbands to come home and help feed their families. When the men complied, they camped out in the woods while the women supplied them with food and blankets. Some women physically attacked Confederate officers who were trying to reclaim their male relatives. “The women are as bad as men down here,” complained a militia officer in North Carolina. Militias sometimes tortured women in order to locate their sons and husbands. One deserter’s wife had her hands placed under a fence rail while a soldier sat on it. Another woman was suspended from a cord tied to her two thumbs behind her back.

  Newspapers began commenting disapprovingly about women’s lack of support for the cause. “The self-sacrifice has vanished, wives and maidens now labor only to exempt husbands and lovers from the perils of service,” mourned the Montgomery Daily Advertiser in 1864. In the larger cities, elite women consoled themselves for their troubles with a round of social activity. This was particularly true in Richmond, where during the last winter of the war Mrs. Robert Stannard was said to have spent more than $30,000 on entertainment.

  “WATCH OVER THEIR DAUGHTERS

  AS WELL AS THEIR SONS”

  When the war began, Northern women responded the same way as in the South. They held meetings—generally chaired by men—in which they pledged their patriotism and vowed to fold bandages or sew clothing for the soldiers at the front. But the Northern women’s relief efforts soon became a national organization, the United States Sanitary Commission, which performed a critical role in providing food and medical services for the soldiers. Although men still occupied the top jobs in the commission, women had a great many managerial duties, and as time went on, middle-class matrons began to praise each other for having “executive talents.” The necessary supplies “were almost universally collected, assorted, and dispatched, and re-collected, re-assorted, and re-dispatched, by women, representing with great impartiality, every grade of society in the Republic,” said Alfred Bloor of the Sanitary Commission. The women had taken over, he said, after the men were discouraged when it became clear the war was not going to be short-lived after all.

  Working-class urban women were less enthusiastic about supporting the war effort. They saw the family breadwinners being forced to fight while wealthier men were able to buy their way out of service. In 1863, when Irish New Yorkers rioted to protest losing their young men to the draft, the New York Herald blamed women for starting the trouble. “The female relatives of the conscripts mingled their wildest denunciations against the conscription law, and thus gave the people a…motive to enact the terrible scenes,” the paper thundered. The archbishop of New York warned Catholic parents to “watch over their daughters as well as their sons” during the riots “and keep them at home.”

  The Draft Riots were more brutal than any mob action that occurred in the South. The rioters, mainly poor immigrants, burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum, set fire to houses, and killed people who got in their way. A Colonel O’Brien, who had ordered his men to fire on the mob, was beaten to death. Angry women, a report stated, “committed the most atrocious violence on the body.” A small black child was thrown from a fourth-story window of the orphanage; a black woman was beaten with her newborn baby in her arms. The female rioters also assaulted members of their own sex who had married black men, and a tavern owner named Black Sue whose establishment had separated many sons and husbands from their paychecks.

  At her infirmary, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister spent three days and nights tending the sick while the city rocked with riots. They ignored demands by their white patients that sick black men and women should be expelled before the mob discovered them. When the houses next to the infirmary were set on fire, the women blocked the view from their patients. The infirmary survived, and Blackwell never even mentioned the incident in her autobiography.

  “WERE THEY THE SAME SCHOOL GIRLS OF 1861?”

  An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Many were like Amy Clarke, who enlisted so she could remain with her husband when he joined the Confederate Army. Amy continued to fight after he was killed, and she was wounded herself and taken prisoner. Women also served as spies, much to the joy of newspapers that delighted in reporting their adventures. The Confederacy seemed to attract the most colorful Mata Haris. Rose O’Neal Greenhow, “The Rebel Rose,” was a Washington society hostess who was arrested as a Southern spy in 1861 and imprisoned with her eight-year-old daughter. Released a year later, she ran the Union blockade and sailed to Europe, put her daughter in a French convent, published her prison memoirs, and became the toast of London and Paris. Returning home to confer with Confederate leaders, she attempted to evade the blockade in a small boat. When it overturned, Mrs. Greenhow drowned, weighed down by her book royalties—a purse full of heavy gold coins.

  The most famous Southern spy was Belle Boyd. Her talent for self-promotion was demonstrated early in life when, angry at being excluded from a party for adults, she rode her horse into the living room. Taking advantage of Union soldiers’ gallantry toward a beautiful teenage girl, she served as a courier for the Confederate intelligence service and delivered information on troop size and placement she had picked up from her admirers. On her final mission, Belle sailed to England carrying Confederate dispatches and was captured by a Union blockade. She later married the Union officer who had taken command of her captured steamer. She was only twenty-one years old when the war ended, already a widow with a small child, and she turned to the theater and lecture circuit, where real-life celebrities were always welcome.

  Belle was one of the very few Southern women for whom the war was a glamorous adventure. For many it was a nightmare. Their neighborhoods were shelled, their farms commandeered by the military, their cities put under siege. More than 250,000 people, most of them women and children, were forced to leave their homes. As the Union forces moved into the South and conditions became more desperate, families began living in boxcars or tents. Others fled into caves, which they attempted to furnish with rugs or stuffed chairs. Three-fourths of Columbia, South Carolina, was burned down in a single night. In Vicksburg, the citizens had been given so many warnings of imminent attack that many people failed to flee when the Yankees actually did arrive in 1862. Those who were trapped in the city during the ensuing siege wound up desperate for food, eating rats and mules. An Atlanta resident regarded her friends and asked, “were these the same people—these haggard, wrinkled women, bowed with care and trouble, sorrow and unusual toil…were they the same school girls of 1861?”

  Black women, who often fled toward the Union Army, found little welcome when they got there. At Camp Nelson, Kentucky, soldiers razed a shantytown, leaving 400 women and children homeless in the cold. While marching to Savannah, Sherman’s troops dismantled a pontoon bridge before black refugees could get across, leaving them to the oncoming Confederates. Former slaves who joined the Union forces were promised pay and rations for their families, bu
t it didn’t always arrive. Emma Steward, left behind with the children in Florida when her husband, Solomon, joined the First South Carolina Volunteers regiment of ex-slaves, wrote to him in February 1864 that an

  angel Has Come and borne My Dear Little babe to Join with Them. My babe only Live one day. It was a Little Girl. Her name Is alice Gurtrude steward. I am now sick in bed and have Got nothing To Live on. The Rashion That They Give for six days I Can Make It Last but 2 days. They don’t send Me any wood. I don’t Get any Light at all. You Must see To That as soon as possible for I am In want of some Thing to eat.

  All the family send thair love to you. No more at pressant Emma Steward.

  “THE BEST THING

  THAT COULD HAVE TAKEN PLACE FOR ME”

  Although many Southern women came to regard the war as a betrayal by the men who were supposed to take care of them, some saw it as an opportunity. In a gesture of liberation, they let down their hair and took off their hooped skirts. “Nothing looks funnier than a woman walking around with an immense hoop—barefooted,” one said. Amanda Worthington of Mississippi gave up the huge skirts in 1862, when her worn hoop began to fall off during church services. By 1863, she had constructed a “bloomer costume” so she could fish to help feed her hungry household. Young women also began to cut their hair short, much to their mothers’ dismay, and even the more conservative gave up elaborate hairstyles once they had no slaves to arrange them.

  Southern women began to fill government clerical jobs, particularly in the Treasury Department, where each Confederate banknote had to be signed individually. The job required good handwriting and good political connections. Most of the women came from elite families and their pay reflected their status—while privates in the army were getting $11 a month, female clerks got $65. Some of them regarded it as a great adventure. “I am rarely ill now even with a headache,” reported twenty-year-old Adelaide Stuart, who spent her days signing Treasury bills and her nights sampling the still-active Richmond social whirl. Being forced to take a job, she decided, was “the best thing that could have taken place for me—it is bringing into active service and strengthening all the best parts of my character and enabling me to root out all that was objectionable.” Other women, however, were humiliated at being forced to work for pay, no matter how cushy the job and lucrative the check. “How mean I felt,” wrote Mary Darby DeTreville, after she lined up for her wages.