Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (73 page)

Other women managed to find near-military roles that gave them a place in uniform without necessarily putting a rifle in their hands. Zouave regiments, for instance, followed the French model by enlisting
vivandières
, uniformed women auxiliaries such as Mary Tebe of the 114th Pennsylvania, who followed her husband into the Army of the Potomac and kept store, collected the regimental wash, and ventured out under fire to bring water to the wounded. Kady Brownell of the 1st
Rhode Island, Bridget Divers of the 1st Michigan Cavalry, and Annie Etheridge of the 3rd Michigan served in similar roles.

Women who could not manage a way into uniform could still find a direct military role as a spy. Precisely because social convention disconnected white women from the waging of war, it was easier for women to obtain and pass along military information without being suspected. Actress Pauline Cushman parlayed her acting talents into a series of elaborate ruses that allowed her to pry information out of admiring and complaisant Confederate officers; Belle Boyd used an equal measure of talent as a northern Virginia coquette to elide the same kinds of information out of Federal officers. At the other social extreme, African American women were also generally dismissed as militarily harmless, a miscalculation that Harriet Tubman and Sara Edmonds used to immense advantage. Tubman, who had escaped from slavery in Maryland twenty years before the war and who had amassed considerable experience venturing south to guide runaways to the North, undertook spying expeditions for the Federal troops on the Carolina Sea Islands. Edmonds colored her white skin with silver nitrate to penetrate the Confederate lines on the Peninsula in 1862. Whether in uniform or not, the war permitted these women to experiment with a series of dramatic and subversive role reversals in gender—and in Edmonds’s case a reversal of both gender
and
race.
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None of these reversals was permanent, and most of them involved only the occasional acting out of a forbidden role within accepted male definitions of those roles. Despite the prediction of one Confederate commentator that “the beginning of our career as an independent nation… ought to be signalized by the beginning of a nobler, loftier career for women,” by and large Union and Confederate women stayed within the traditional circle of women’s “proper sphere” and turned their energies to the performance of war-related work defined as gender-appropriate. “As I can’t fight,” resolved Louisa May Alcott, “I will content myself with working for those who can.” Doing war work could begin with acting as recruiting cheerleaders, pushing and shaming men into volunteering. Kate Cumming, a Confederate 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.
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“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.
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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.
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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?”
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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.”
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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 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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 Morphine & take it, see if I will not be happier. … If it shortens my life, it will be an end most devoutly wished.”
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