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

as the summer of 1861, Kate Stone noticed that “the house servants have been giving a lot of trouble lately—lazy and disobedient.” Ada Bacot tried to run her South Carolina plantation after the death of her husband, but she found her slaves “disregarded” her “orders… more & more every day”; one teenaged slave was “so impertinent” that Bacot lost all self-control and “slaped him in the mouth before I knew what I did.” But the relationships were not always ones of white dominance. In the absence of their menfolk, some Southern white women found comfort in sexual “connection” with their slaves. “I will tell you a fact that I have never seen alluded to publicly,” reported Richard J. Hinton, a British-born officer in a Kansas “colored” regiment, “that there is a large amount of intercourse between white women and colored men.” Wartime testimony before the American Freedman’s Inquiry Commission about amours between male slaves and mistresses was so shocking that the commission eliminated thirty-two pages of it from its printed proceedings.52

In some instances, Confederate women put up spirited resistance to the Union occupation forces. Peter Osterhaus, a Prussian-born Federal general in the Army of the Tennessee, was asked by a Mississippi woman if he wouldn’t make war on women and children; he replied that as far as he could see, “the women carried on this war. He had intercepted many a letter from the young ladies in which they urged their lovers to fight well and never give up.” After Baton Rouge fell to Federal forces in 1862, Sarah Morgan and her sister Antoinette made small Confederate flags for themselves; Morgan “put the stem in my belt, pinned the flag to my shoulder, and walked down town, creating great excitement among women & children” and among the Federal occupation troops. When Confederate cavalry stampeded in panic through Winchester, Virginia, in 1864, “a large number of the most respected ladies joined hands & formed a line across the principal street, telling the cowardly Cavalrymen that they should not go any further unless they ran their horses over their bodies.” Beholding the Winchester women from the Union perspective, one Union general sneered that “Hell is not full enough, there must be more of these Secession women of Winchester to full it up.”53

In New Orleans, Confederate women grew so hostile and malevolent in their behavior that the occupation commander, Benjamin Butler, issued a general order that threatened that “when any female shall by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”—in other words, a prostitute. Butler’s proclamation was ill-timed and even more ill-worded—it even aroused unfavorable comment in the British Parliament—but it did underscore Butler’s frustration with women who refused to behave passively in the face of male conquest. What Butler failed to see behind the contempt the New Orleans women had for Yankee soldiers was the corresponding contempt they nurtured for the Confederate men who had abandoned them to Butler’s unkind embrace, and what Butler’s proclamation unwittingly underscored for Confederate women was how exposed and undefended the Confederacy had left them in their hour of peril. Poorer women who were not quite on the same social level as the “respected ladies” of Winchester stated their disgust more frankly. “The men of Atlanta have brought an everlasting stain on their name,” wrote Julia Davidson, an angry Georgia farm wife. “Instead of remaining to defend their homes, they have run off and left Atlanta to be defended by an army of women and children. … God help us for there is no help in man.”54

For that reason, by 1862, fewer Confederate women were lending their aid to recruitment duties, or sending their men off willingly. Some were refusing to keep up farms, and others were demanding that the Confederate government return their men. In many cases, Southern farm women and planters’ wives were forced to rely on male slaves to run their farms and plantations for them, which in most cases dangerously loosened the bonds of slave discipline. The Confederate Congress responded sluggishly with a series of conscription exemptions designed to keep the most critically needed men at the most critical jobs. But many of the exemptions, especially the infamous “twenty-nigger law,” only fanned the resentment of the yeoman classes without doing much to improve the South’s chances.

As the blockade further pinched Southern resources, even the wealthiest Southern women were besieged with the need to economize, while the yeoman farmers slipped into outright poverty. “We are all in a sadly molting condition,” wrote Mary Chesnut in the fall of 1863. “We had come to the end of our good clothes in three years, and now our only resource was to turn them upside down or inside out—mending, darning, patching.” George Washington Whitman was amazed at the wretched conditions he found among the once prosperous farms of northern Virginia in 1862: “The villages we have passed through are the most God forsaken places I ever saw, the people seem to have next to nothing to eat as the men have all gone in the Secesh army, and how they are going to get through the winter I dont know.”55

Southern women were being forced to assume roles of independence for which they had little preparation, and the independence that events foisted on them was not always with the kind of independence they might have welcomed. At the same time, however, Southern men were becoming ever more critically dependent on the women for supplies of food from the fields and clothing from the home. The bargain of “proper” spheres was turning upside down as the Confederacy weakened, and Southern women, far from rallying round the flag, now turned on Confederate men in rage. “I am so sick of trying to do a man’s business,” complained Elizabeth Neblett to her soldier-husband in 1863. “I have a great mind to get