Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

could not buy or sell, except over their husbands’ signatures. The United States might be a liberal democracy, but it was a democracy of patriarchs, where adult males controlled public institutions and the organization of their families and spoke as their families’ voices in their communities. The vast majority of black women in the republic were chattel slaves for whom the word patriarch had a much more ominous meaning. The small number of free black women occupied only the poorest rungs of the economic ladder, and many deliberately stayed unmarried in order to retain what few property rights they were entitled to.37

Still, the logic of democracy always agitated restlessly for more and greater liberty, independence, and property, and the intrusion of market capitalism joined hands with that logic. Attaching artificial power, especially in the form of the steam engine, to the manufacture of goods transformed laborers, who lived by raw physical strength, into operatives, who lived by tending machines, and machines could be tended by women as readily as by men. “The whirl and whiz of belts and clogs, all seemed like the greetings of cherished friends,” declared the heroine of Charlotte Hillbourne’s “factory girl” novel. “I wrote and sang and chatted, fearless of listening critics, and my daily invocations to Heaven’s throne were heard only by the great Father, as they arose from my lips, while bending busily over my daily task.”38

At the same time, men’s work was increasingly transferred out of the home-based shop or farm and into commerce; the home ceased to be a productive unit over which they presided, and instead became a refuge from the cares and weariness of market competition—a refuge that wives erected as a solace for their battered husbands “to smoothe, to comfort and to heal.” Men “go forth into the world, amidst the scenes of business” only to “behold every principle of justice and of honor, and even the dictates of common honesty disregarded, and the delicacy of our moral sense is wounded,” wrote Sara Josepha Hale, the editor of the Ladies’ Magazine, in 1830. In “the sanctuary of home,” by contrast, women bestow “sympathy, honor, virtue,” and “there disinterested love is ready to sacrifice every thing at the altar of affection. To render home happy, is woman’s peculiar province.”39

Two paths, then, opened up for American women in the decades before the Civil War: retreating more deeply into domestic life or demanding competitive personal rights for themselves in a market-oriented society where women’s exclusion no longer made any workaday sense. In July 1848, a group of 200 women, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, organized a women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. The Declaration of Sentiments that the Seneca Falls convention adopted announced that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” and they concluded by demanding what women in America had possessed in only one place since the Revolution (in New Jersey) and which they had not had at all since 1807—the right to vote. Two years later, they organized a National Women’s Rights Convention, at which was denied

the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or of any individual to decide for another Individual what is and what is not their “proper sphere”; that the proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest to which they are able to attain; what this is, can not be ascertained without complete liberty of choice; woman, therefore, ought to choose for herself what sphere she will fill, what education she will seek, and what employment she will follow, and not be held bound to accept, in submission, the rights, the education, and the sphere which man thinks proper to allow her.40

Did this include marching to war? The most immediate test of any claim to civil equality would be the equality of the bayonet, since the most ancient and durable “proper sphere” was the one that shielded women from involvement in war and assigned to men the role of combatants. For that reason, the Civil War opened the risky question of what women—if they wanted that vote and the other civil rights which went with it—could or would do once the unsettled atmosphere of war settled over them. At the most basic level, the outbreak of the Civil War rallied the sectional patriotism of women fully as much as that of men. “The secession of Virginia is the work of her women,” George Fitzhugh proclaimed in 1861. “With a prescience and a zeal surpassing that of men” and reminiscent of the “annals of Sparta,” Southern women “urged on the present revolution, and… are now devoting all their energies and industry to clothe the soldier, to heal his wounds, to tend on him in sickness, and to relieve the wants of his family.” Sarah Morgan of Baton Rouge, who kept one of the war’s most interesting diaries, did not believe in secession, “but I do in Liberty. … The North cannot subdue us. We are too determined to be free.”41

Some of that patriotism was mixed with the half-formed expectation that crossing over into the state of war meant entrance to a new social territory. “I’ve often longed to see a war,” wrote Louisa May Alcott in April 1861, “and now I have my wish.” For Alcott, war made her “long to be a man” and thus upset the entire hierarchy of gender values. “Felt very martial and Joan-of-Arc-y,” Alcott wrote after a visit to Fort Warren in Boston harbor, “as I stood on the walls with the flag flying over me and cannon all about.” The nineteen-year-old Morgan loathed “women who lounge through life, between the sofa and rocking chair with dear little dimpled hands that are never raised except to brush away a fly.” The war excited Morgan to the point of anger at her confinement, and she