Women in the Civil War
- "I'm a Radical Black Girl" Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War HistoryFor members of the Southern Confederacy, meanwhile, the "old flag" they had once loved had come to stand for a federal government that did not respect their rights and threatened their way of life.10 Maggie Whitehead reminds us that black people were also "called on to defend the Union created by the founding fathers," that for them as well, "the flag became the sacred emblem of that cause, consecrated in battle by the blood of Union soldiers," and that long before "the abolition of slavery and the opening of the Union ranks to black soldiers, many African Americans saw the flag . . . as a symbol of freedom and the promise of citizenship." "12 As early as 1861, John M. Daniel and Edward A. Pollard, editors of the Richmond Examiner, had called southern unionists the "enemy at home" and their opposition to the war, "treason," bluntly spelling out the problem they created for the Confederacy.13 Richmond, of course, was home to the most prominent unionist white woman, Elizabeth Van Lew.14 The history of southern women in the American Civil War remains largely one of slaveholding women clinging to a way of life based on human bondage and farmwomen protesting the added burdens military conscription of their husbands, sons, and crops placed on already fragile household economies.15 Writing the history of black women in the war means writing against the grain of this traditional and still dominant narrative to include the missing history of their unionism and its antislavery roots. Acting on their antislavery politics, black women in South Carolina stood nighttime guard over a supply of cotton to prevent a slaveholder from burning it and thus prevent it from falling into Union hands.36 At St. Andrews Bay, Florida, enslaved women helped the Union army destroy the extensive salt works lining the bay.37 In the Mississippi Valley, they stood with husbands and fathers who, with muskets aimed "at their breasts," resisted orders by Confederate authorities to cut down trees to block creeks and rivers and thereby impede the Union effort and then left for Union lines despite death threats.38 When President Lincoln finally approved the enlistment of black soldiers, he secured in the bargain an undrafted, unwanted, army of black women and children who shored up the antislavery ground that helped transform the war for Union into a war for Union and freedom
- Black women in history--civil war and reconstructionLaVaughn et al look at the history of black women and their efforts to abolish slavery. African American women continued the fight and, indeed, coupled their struggle for Negro rights with the new fight for equality for all women. That struggle was to continue well into the next century. Even after the end of the Civil War, the nation continued to grapple with the status of the American Negro for another century; while that great conflict was ultimately fought over the institution of slavery,the fight never included the question of equality for the African American. Even the most hardened abolitionists, who, indeed ,loathed slavery, were not as eager to join in the fight for equal justice and opportunity for the former slave. It was left to future generations of African American women and men to complete the struggle and the seemingly endless fight to share in the uniquely American dream of securing the "blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
- The Diary of a Civil War NurseIn April 1863, two years after the outbreak of the Civil War, Amanda Akin (1827– 1911) journeyed from her home in Quaker Hill, New York, to serve as a nurse at Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C. She was one of several million men and women who left their families and communities behind to contribute to the war effort. Many departed to fight, while others took on civilian assignments to support the military campaigns.
- Women in the Civil WarIn many ways, the coming of the Civil War challenged the ideology of Victorian domesticity that had defined the lives of men and women in the antebellum era. In the North and in the South, the war forced women into public life in ways they could scarcely have imagined a generation before.
- Women Soldiers of the Civil WarIt is an accepted convention that the Civil War was a man's fight. Images of women during that conflict center on self-sacrificing nurses, romantic spies, or brave ladies maintaining the home front in the absence of their men. The men, of course, marched off to war, lived in germ-ridden camps, engaged in heinous battle, languished in appalling prison camps, and died horribly, yet heroically. This conventional picture of gender roles during the Civil War does not tell the entire story. Men were not the only ones to fight that war. Women bore arms and charged into battle, too. Like the men, there were women who lived in camp, suffered in prisons, and died for their respective causes.
Databases
- Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Manuscript Women's Letters and Diaries brings together 105,000 pages of the personal writings of women of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, displayed as high-quality images of the original manuscripts.
Streaming Media
- Rebel - Loreta VelazquezIn 1861, at the outbreak of the American Civil War, a teenager from New Orleans headed to the front lines. Under the alias Harry T. Buford, he fought at First Bull Run, was wounded at Shiloh, and served as a Confederate spy. But Buford harbored a secret–he was really Loreta Velazquez, a Cuban immigrant from New Orleans. By 1863, Velazquez was spying for the Union. She scandalized America when she revealed her story in her 1876 memoir, The Woman in Battle. Attacked not only for her criticism of war, but her sexuality and social rule-breaking, Velazquez was dismissed as a hoax for 150 years. But evidence confirms she existed, one of over 1,000 women soldiers who served in the Civil War. What made her so dangerous she was erased from history? Actors and historians bring Velazquez’s story to life in this documentary, weaving drama and animation with historical and archival material to unravel the mystery of this secret soldier. Rebel is a detective story about a woman, a myth, and the politics of national memory.
- Women at War, IHow did Northern women experience the war? Wartime urgencies provided increased opportunities for middle-class women to enter the public sphere as nurses, clerks, or agents of benevolent organizations. The experiences of poor white women and black women (whether as farmwives, widows, or factory workers) are less well understood.
- Women in the Civil WarJeanie Attie, professor of history at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, provides a sweeping overview of the roles and images of women during the Civil War. She discusses northern and southern women and the ways the war shifted notions of domesticity and women's public space. This talk took place on July 17, 2012, as part of The Visual Culture of the American Civil War, an NEH Summer Institute for College and University Teachers.
Perspectives
Keep the Days:Reading the Civil War Diaries of Southern Women
Americans wrote fiercely during the Civil War. War surprised, devastated, and opened up imagination, taking hold of Americans' words as well as their homes and families. The personal diary--wildly ragged yet rooted in day following day--was one place Americans wrote their war. Diaries, then, have become one of the best-known, most-used sources for exploring the life of the mind in a war-torn place and time. Delving into several familiar wartime diaries kept by women of the southern slave-owning class, Steven Stowe recaptures their motivations to keep the days close even as war tore apart the brutal system of slavery that had benefited them. Whether the diarists recorded thoughts about themselves, their opinions about men, or their observations about slavery, race, and warfare, Stowe shows how these women, by writing the immediate moment, found meaning in a changing world. In studying the inner lives of these unsympathetic characters, Stowe also explores the importance--and the limits--of historical empathy as a condition for knowing the past, demonstrating how these plain, first-draft texts can offer new ways to make sense of the world in which these Confederate women lived.
Army at Home
Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom the home front was a battlefield of its own. Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials. At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.
Women on the Civil War Battlefront
During the Civil War women did a lot more than keep the home fires burning. Expanding on his pioneering Patriots in Disguise, Richard Hall has now produced the most accurate and up-to-date survey available of women who were determined to serve their nation in that time of crisis. Drawing on a wealth of regimental histories, newspaper archives, and a host of previously unreported accounts, Hall shows that women served in more capacities and in greater number--perhaps several thousand--than has previously been known. They served in the infantry, cavalry, and artillery and as spies, scouts, saboteurs, smugglers, and frontline nurses. From all walks of life, they followed husbands and lovers into battle, often in male disguise that remained undiscovered until they were wounded (or gave birth), and endured the same hardships and dangers as did their male counterparts. Hall presents the most complete portrait yet available of these courageous women--including Sarah Bradbury, Lizzie Compton, Frances Hook, and Confederate spy Loreta Janeta Velazquez--many of whom earned the praise of the male soldiers they served with and rose through the ranks to become sergeants, even officers. Through his investigation of specific case histories, he has authenticated many previously undocumented reports while debunking myths and exposing previously published errors about the subject. The book also includes a biographical directory of nearly 400 women participants and dozens of Civil War documents attesting to women's role in the war. As a new synthesis and critical appraisal, Women on the Civil War Battlefront is a richly anecdotal work that unearths a hidden history and opens a new window on women's lives in the nineteenth century. These women were determined to serve, and Hall's research confirms that they did so in significant numbers-and with distinction.
A Very Violent Rebel
Ellen Renshaw House was only nineteen years old in 1863 when she began a detailed journal of her experiences in Knoxville, Tennessee, amid the turmoil of the Civil War. Her diary, now published for the first time, is a remarkable document of the divided loyalties that were so pronounced in that part of the state and of the daily effects the war had on civilians. A member of a middle-class family that had moved to Knoxville in 1860 from Georgia, Ellen House became, like her parents and siblings, a fervent Confederate - or, as she called herself, "a very violent Rebel". When the city fell to Federal forces in September 1863, Ellen's resentments ran deep, and she filled her diary with scornful words for the occupying Yankees. She eagerly followed the news of military actions that might mean the recapture of the city and became an eyewitness to the war's dangers when Confederate General James Longstreet launched an ill-fated attack on Knoxville late in 1863. Despite her own privations, Ellen gave much of her time to providing relief to Confederate prisoners of war in the city. Since she made no secret of where her sympathies lay, Federal military authorities eventually suspected her of spying and expelled her to Georgia, where she continued to record her impressions and observations. Only recently brought to light by the diarist's descendants, this compelling personal record has been meticulously edited and annotated by Daniel Sutherland. The resulting volume adds a spirited and articulate voice to the chorus of available firsthand testimony on America's bloodiest conflict.
Women at the Front
As many as 20,000 women worked in Union and Confederate hospitals during America's bloodiest war. Black and white, and from various social classes, these women served as nurses, administrators, matrons, seamstresses, cooks, laundresses, and custodial workers. Jane E. Schultz provides the first full history of these female relief workers, showing how the domestic and military arenas merged in Civil War America, blurring the line between homefront and battlefront. Schultz uses government records, private manuscripts, and published sources by and about women hospital workers, some of whom are familiar--such as Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, and Sojourner Truth--but most of whom are not well-known. Examining the lives and legacies of these women, Schultz considers who they were, how they became involved in wartime hospital work, how they adjusted to it, and how they challenged it. She demonstrates that class, race, and gender roles linked female workers with soldiers, both black and white, but became sites of conflict between the women and doctors and even among themselves. Schultz also explores the women's postwar lives--their professional and domestic choices, their pursuit of pensions, and their memorials to the war in published narratives. Surprisingly few parlayed their war experience into postwar medical work, and their extremely varied postwar experiences, Schultz argues, defy any simple narrative of pre-professionalism, triumphalism, or conciliation.
Podcasts
- Female spies of the Civil War eraHistorian Nadine Akkerman introduces a number of remarkable women who acted as secret agents in the 17th century
- Following HarrietFollowing Harriet is a podcast that takes a closer look at the life of one of the bravest and most extraordinary women in our country’s history. It also puts Harriet in a broader context, examining the 19th Century experience of African Americans, especially in Virginia.