SMCWINTER ENCAMPMENTS OFFERED SOLDIERS the closest thing to home that life in the army could provide. Erected in between campaigns, those semipermanent winter quarters were creative outlets and great sources of pride for soldiers weary of monotonous marches and the carnage of battle. As one Union cavalryman wrote during the construction of a winter camp: “Nearly every man has suddenly become a mason or carpenter, and the hammer, the axe and the trowel are being plied with the utmost vigor, if not with the highest skill. Many of us are astonished at the ingenuity that is displayed.… Our camp is beginning to look beautiful.”
Winter quarters could not provide soldiers with all the domestic comforts they left behind when they went to war. But as this photograph by Alexander Gardner reveals, such camps were sometimes graced with the presence of women from home, most of them officers’ wives. Letter-writing helped couples separated by war maintain some intimacy, but wives of officers often sought relief from home-front loneliness and anxiety by visiting their spouse in camp when the army allowed it. Among those who did so were Elizabeth “Libbie” Custer and Julia Grant, who frequently stayed with their husbands during lulls between campaigns. Such reunions cheered both homesick officers and dejected wives, who were happy to be “keeping house again,” as one captain’s wife remarked in her diary. Yet adjusting to camp life was hard, and wives who visited their husbands at length often ended up feeling unwanted and useless. Warfare set soldiers apart from the hallowed domestic sphere wives occupied, and many couples were not truly at home and at one with each other again until the fighting ended. SMC
VISITING WIVES Alexander Gardner took this photo at a Union winter camp in Virginia in January 1864 and commented: “Thus secluded, the wives of officers, in their brief visits to the front, find a most pleasant abiding place, from which they return with reluctance to city homes.”
