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

nurse, frankly told a lieutenant from the 24th Alabama that “a man did not deserve the name of a man, if he did not fight for his country; nor a woman, the name of woman, if she did not do all in her power to aid the men. … He had the candor to acquiescence in all I said.” Sara Edmonds agreed that “the women down South are the best recruiting officers—for they absolutely refuse to tolerate, or admit to their society, any young man who refuses to enlist; and very often send their lovers, who have not enlisted, skirts and crinoline, with a note attached, suggesting the appropriateness of such a costume unless they donned the Confederate uniform at once.” A soldier in the 23rd North Carolina wrote home in August, 1861, to describe how “the Ladies” in a fellow-soldier’s “naborhood had formed themselves in to Companyes and were drilling and said they would guard the young men that would not volunteer.” Sometimes the encouragements to enlistment overlapped the boundaries of sexual innuendo: “None but the brave deserve the fair,” a Charleston newspaper warned in 1861, and even Jefferson Davis urged Confederate women to prefer the “empty sleeve” of the wounded soldier to the “muscular arm” of the stay-at-home coward.47

“War work” also converted women’s domestic skills to the national cause, particularly for making clothes. In 1861, neither the North nor the South possessed the kind of large-scale clothing manufacturing that the immense numbers of enlistees required for uniforms, and the slack in uniform production had to be taken up by women at home. The Ladies Springfield Aid Society proudly reported in 1862 that it had sewn cotton shirts, drawers, socks, slippers, handkerchiefs, towels, pillow cases, and bandages, and still found time to pack off “large quantities of cornstarch, barley, tea, crackers, soap, jars, jellies, pickles, fruits. …” The Ladies Gunboat Fair in Charleston in 1862 was specifically designed to raise money to fund a building program for Confederate ironclads. Other aid organizations began demanding new and unprecedented levels of organization skill from women. In 1861, 3,000 New Yorkers organized the Women’s Central Relief Association, and in a rare but grudging concession, twelve women were elected to serve on the governing board of the association. Overall, as many as 20,000 aid societies, great and small, were set up and operating by the end of 1861; South Carolina and Alabama had a hundred each.48

As the war and the casualty lists lengthened, women received little in the way of reward for these sacrifices. Over time, the “war work” of recruitment and support required more and more sacrifice, especially in the South, where the sheer lack of resources drove most of the Southern aid societies out of business before the end of 1862. It made little sense to praise the moral influence of women when it became increasingly clear that the immense distances covered by Civil War armies unstrung any effective notion of moral control over the men in uniform. Much as Union and Confederate women might try to transport the moral values of home to camp through letters (and the volume of letters to and from the Union army reached the astonishing level of 180,000 a day in 1862) or even to keep their influence more direct by visiting husbands in camp, it was soon apparent that they had little real power to deal with the camp visits of other kinds of women. The Richmond Examiner howled in dismay that “shame-faced prostitutes” were “disporting themselves extensively on the sidewalks, and in hacks, open carriages, etc.” in the Confederate capital. Around the Army of the Potomac’s camps near Washington, the number of prostitutes and camp followers mushroomed from 500 to 5,000 in 450 known brothels by 1862. The domestic “sanctuary” was all well and good, but not when the war transported men to more dubious localities.49

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