In September 1862, Fannie Meredith of Millwood, Ohio, complained that she had little about which to write to her soldier friend. “Every thing is so uncommonly dull her[e],” she explained, “(all on account of this detestible [sic] war).”1 About the same time, Emma Moody, another Ohioan, also apologized to her correspondent for her letter’s lack of news. “There is nothing going on,” she explained; “Everything is war.”2 Nevertheless, across the Northern states, civilians sufficiently fortunate to have some time beyond what they needed to take care of the necessities of life broke their daily routines in ways that were not all that different from their antebellum entertainments.
Throughout the war, Northerners pursued the normal cycle of social activities that could suggest to soldiers at the front to believe that war was the farthest thing from their minds. The war did not stop elites from spending their money at resorts or on yachting events, horse races, theater, opera, and other exclusive affairs, especially when the economy recovered as the war progressed.3 Nor did the war stop working men from finding their pleasure where they could, especially in the watering holes common across the land. In Newark and other New Jersey cities, dens of iniquity prospered thanks to an increase in paying customers.4 Such low entertainment discouraged German immigrant-turned-soldier Wilhelm Francksen. In an unflattering assessment, probably based on his association with the drinking activities of his Milwaukee, Wisconsin, acquaintances, Francksen reported home, “The common man, if he wants something special, goes to a saloon, drinks a lot, and pays for drinks of other people who have to drink with him but don’t have anything to do with him otherwise, and it usually leads to killing and murder.”5
In between the base and the well-heeled, there was a wide range of entertainments available to Americans who had the time to do more than simply survive the stress of war. People continued to enjoy the outdoors, visit the seashore, picnic, attend socials, ice skate, go sleighing, participate in sporting events, and attend country fairs. If the rich had their regattas, other Northerners had more modest times on the water. Many middling Northerners could also afford the time and tariff to attend minstrel shows, circuses, agricultural fairs, band concerts, and sporting activities.6
Friends and relatives continued to call on one another or dine together while young people simply walked out together to enjoy some socializing.7 Women’s reading groups and sewing circles allowed occasions for friends and acquaintances to visit.8 It cost nothing to sing at religious meetings, but it did require rehearsals beyond the time allotted to services, thus providing another avenue for socializing.9 And all sorts of Northerners, black and white, either as spectators or participants, devoted free time to the increasingly popular game of baseball, with all of its local rivalries adding even more excitement to the games. Even sport, however, was not immune to the intrusions of the war. Fans attended games that sometimes donated the proceeds to soldiers’ relief funds. They frequently noticed a team’s shifting lineup as players left the diamond to become soldiers, although there were ball players who did not volunteer, especially if they held anti-Lincoln political beliefs.10
All classes of Northerners commemorated personal milestones and the usual holidays that punctuated most family routines. In February 1865, Emma Randolph’s family celebrated the 25th anniversary of the marriage of her parents after attending church services.11 Families still celebrated Christmas, putting up trees, while some of them could still make sure children received Christmas presents.12 In 1864 Emma Randolph continued to enjoy herself singing at Christmas services in Plainfield, New Jersey, and reported a nice tree and presents around it.13 Earlier in November 1862, even with the disaster at Fredericksburg, Virginia, fresh in their minds, people such as New York doctor John V. Lauderdale celebrated Thanks giving by attending church services and eating turkey.14 In December 1862, Wisconsinite Rosa Kellner celebrated Christmas in a modest fashion, but still honored the holiday. She was pleased to buy cardboard and yarn to make bookmarks for her family.15
Public rituals also provided amusement but with serious purpose that brought communities together, accentuating the connections of the people at war. The ceremonies attending to sending off the boys stretched into the social life of those left behind as the cycle of civic holidays marched through the yearly calendar. Those Northerners who had no family members at the front could not escape the meaning of patriotic rituals on the well-established national holidays that brought together entire communities to watch parades and hear speeches in honor of the Union that their soldiers were fighting to preserve.16 Philadelphia politicians did not find the funds to support expected celebrations, but instead of allowing the time to pass unnoticed, the people did so on several occasions.17
In February 1862, the people of Belfast, Maine, raised flags, made speeches, and sang patriotic songs in honor of George Washington’s birthday.18 In 1862 Massachusetts residents celebrated Fourth of July across the state, reaffirming their commitment to the Union and the Constitution. They participated in parades, listened to music, heard speeches, and attended celebratory dinners. In Boston, the planned Fourth of July celebration the following year was especially joyous, fueled by the excitement encouraged by news of the victory at Gettysburg.19
The events of 1862 dampened the spirits of New Yorkers, but some of them still celebrated the Fourth of July, providing a “a tug load of ice cream and cake, and flowers, and flags, and a chest of tea, forty quarts of milk, and butter, and handkerchiefs, papers, and books, to set out a long table and give a treat” to convalescent soldiers remaining on Bedloe’s Island. The patriotic Good Samaritans had prepared to serve 200 men, but they found only 40 remaining. Nevertheless, they provided the men with “a glorious feast, the doctor giving his full consent that even the twelve sick ones, in bed should have as much ice cream as they wanted.” It appears that they did, for one woman estimated that each soldier had a quart of ice cream, cake, and a glass of Catawba wine.20
Unplanned, spontaneous victory celebrations also united Northerners in their communities as they enjoyed the success of their troops. Mary Livermore recollected the excitement that followed news arriving in cities in the Old Northwest after Grant’s victory at Fort Donelson on February 15, 1862. People spilled into the streets. They left their employment, decked the avenues in flags, rang bells, played music, and attended prayer meetings. The spontaneous street parties extended into the evening with bonfires and did not end “until physical exhaustion compelled an end to them.”21 After word of Vicksburg’s surrender on July 4, 1863, reached Philadelphia, the city erupted in celebration.22 And in the wake of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, people in the small community of Canton Center, Connecticut, made what noise they could.23
In February 1864, Philadelphian Sidney George Fisher commented upon the popularity of ice-skating in the larger Northeastern cities. It was an activity, he observed, that allowed ample opportunity for flirting between the sexes “besides having the advantage of healthy exercise in the open air.” It also provided the older Fisher with a chance to observe “the spectacle of youth, gayety and pleasure” that the young skaters exhibited.24 Indeed, young Northerners away from the war were happy to act as people just on the brink of adulthood, especially when the sexes had the opportunity to mix. College boys continued to act as college boys. In 1863 in Indianapolis, male students at Northwestern Christian University had “very gay times” as “They have been having a great time gallanting the girls.” Their activities were sufficiently obvious and perhaps distracting to their studies that the president of the university “has made rules prohibiting the young ladies receiving calls from the Students.” Demi Butler informed her soldier brother Scot about the restriction at the school their father had founded remarking, “I don’t know what they will do now.”25
No doubt the Indianapolis college boys were at an advantage with so many other young men off at war. Helen Aplin reported to her soldier brother that the social life of the young folk of one Vermont town progressed as it had done before the war; the war, however, had upset the antebellum sex ratio in such a way as to place young women at a disadvantage, especially when looking to socialize with patriotic men.26 Despite the empty chairs, weddings continued to take place. The beginning of the war did not distract young women from worrying about wedding presents and engagements.27 Sometimes, however, young people bent the acceptable courtship rituals as the circumstances of war altered old norms. Single women boldly initiated correspondence with soldiers when they inserted letters in boxes of supplies that they mailed to men at the front or in hospitals.28 Some young women answered ads placed in newspapers by soldiers who wished to begin corresponding with women other than family members. Eligible girls, therefore, provided soldiers with opportunities to stay in touch with the more civilized home front shaped by the presence of women, thereby raising their spirits. Single letter-writing women thus did their patriotic duty and, in turn, were able to enjoy the excitement of developing new friendships.29 Also, for some unattached Northern women who had known the recipients of their letters before the war, wartime relationships through the mails nurtured lasting relationships, moving over months and years from amusing conversations between friends to making plans for a future between fiancées.30
There were situations in which the war intensified the normal progression of these things. Some couples consummated their relationship out of wedlock, as was the case with one woman who was in December 1862 “at the point of death having had an illegal child & the father to it is in the army.”31 Many couples married before a soldier left for the front, as a Marblehead, Massachusetts, resident noticed.32 Other couples married when soldiers came home on leave. Sometimes they married under dramatic circumstances. Nettie Butler and her soldier sweetheart married while he was on leave after his escape from Libby Prison.33 A sadder nuptial involved a young woman who rushed to the side of her wounded fiancée, married him, and then nursed him until his death.34
The letter writing that cultivated romances and kept families and friends connected became the most common form of literary expression, but not the only one.35 Men, women, and young people continued their prewar habit of reviewing the events of the day in the journals they kept. Some upper-class diarists such as Sidney George Fisher, Maria Lydig Daly, and George Templeton Strong left behind more than just a schematic of their lives; they composed substantial historical records of the home-front North, including their own intelligent reflections on war, politics, and other matters.36 Still, diaries composed by common urban folk such as black Philadelphian Emilie Davis and by farmwomen such as Rachel Cormany provided an outlet for their concerns and fears as well as a record of the sacrifices they endured.37
The intellectually curious attended lectures, read books, and frequented libraries. In January 1863, the white citizens of Cleveland, Ohio, paid an admission fee and packed the lecture hall to listen to the black abolitionist, newspaper editor, and orator Frederick Douglass, while on the following evening African Americans attended another of his lectures. Douglass always had a purpose when he spoke in public, and in the latter case he called for the recruitment of a black regiment from Ohio. His efforts helped to muster the 127th Ohio Volunteer Infantry regiment, which became the 5th United States Colored Troops.38 The young, radical, and increasingly famous Philadelphian Anna Dickinson lectured audiences on the crisis of the Union, the execution of the war, abolitionism, and women’s rights.39 On April 11, 1863, on the occasion of the anniversary of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, people attended a New York City meeting at which the German-born scholarly professor Francis Lieber lectured on patriotism, political unity, and slavery promising dire consequences if Northerners did not accept his views on these matters while urging his audience to join together in loyal leagues. “Either the North conquers the South and re-establishes law, freedom, and the integrity of our country,” Lieber warned in his dense oration, “or the South conquers the North by arms, or by treason at home, and covers our portion of the country with disgrace and slavery.”40
Lectures such as those delivered by Lieber reminded Northerners of what was at stake and why they should continue to make sacrifices. Reading, a more solitary pursuit, did the same as it also entertained those who loved books. Libraries continued to attract subscribers and “reading rooms are more frequented than they were wont to be” at the Philadelphia Mercantile Library, “and the books, tables, files and other advantages of the Library, are more and more in use.”41 But even here the war made librarians aware of responsibilities of preserving the materials generated by the conflict. Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley, a Republican, believed it essential for his library to collect all manner of literature, newspapers, and ephemera, even from antiwar publications and from the South and in doing so provide “one of the greatest favors to the future historian and philosopher.”42
The newspapers Sibley collected for his library helped reshape old reading habits for some patriotic Northerners, who kept abreast of wartime events as reported in the various newspapers of the North. In New England, for example, newspapers supplanted more frivolous forms of print.43 Connecticut newspapers increased their circulation during the war, even with the increased advertising costs needed to pay for timely news reports delivered by wire, supplies, and taxes.44 Mary Vermilion, although admittedly interested in other periodical literature, refused to subscribe to “ladies magazines while the war lasts.” Indeed, Vermilion still “read a good deal” while she was away from home staying with a group of women. She frequently spent evenings with some of them reading material out loud, but even here in leisurely reading she found a political purpose. She selected literature that had a decidedly radical bent with the goal of converting other members of the reading circle to her antislavery views.45
The home folks in Connecticut eagerly consumed histories and biographies dealing with the war, making Sarah Emma Edmonds’s tales of her life as a federal nurse and spy a best seller after its Hartford publication in 1865.46 Northerners, however, did not completely abandon fiction in their patriotic effort to read for a better understanding of the crisis that enveloped their country, but fiction also catered to the desire of many readers to know more about the war. The war now provided material for writers that attracted an audience already interested in the subject, and according to industry sources a few years of the conflict did little to dampen sales. In 1863, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches brought a fictionalized version of her experiences as a nurse to the attention of the public while Henry Morford’s novels described such things as the impact of the first Battle of Bull Run and cowardly officers.47 Also, a certain class of publishers produced sensational war stories in books and periodicals that attracted a readership, but also introduced story lines that included matters of race and the role of women in the war.48 Thus, according to industry sources, “the very restlessness and the cravings of the times may lead the public to seek enjoyment in books.”49
For patriotic Northerners, reading helped them understand how they were to behave in such an unprecedented crisis, setting out clear examples of patriotic and craven behavior, encouraging the former and warning about the latter. Humor and satire as well as romanticism influenced reading material. Satire in cartoons and in print had their fun with men who failed to volunteer or avoided the draft, journalists who missed the reality around them, women who sewed havelocks but failed to grasp the nature of military service, unethical officers, greedy contractors, and just about any other topic upon which the war might cast its shadow.50
Northerners were not averse to socializing while doing good deeds. Indeed, some of the more exciting amusements enjoyed by them were the social events held for the expressed purpose of cultivating patriotism and raising money for the needs of soldiers and their families. In July 1863, Ohioan Ella Hawn reported a large Union meeting that included speeches as well as a dinner along with instrumental and vocal music.51 A vocal concert in Clarkson, New York, raised money for soldiers’ relief.52 Women in particular devoted their spare time to organizing such events as ice cream socials, lectures, and dances.53 In November 1863, Anne Butler and her associates raised money for soldiers’ families by holding a wide range of social events, including a supper, a concert, a tableaux, and a fair stretched out over an eight-day period.54
Civilians could attend fairs in towns throughout the North sponsored by soldiers’ relief organizations, but the larger cities such as Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York witnessed extravagant events that brought in crowds of people.55 Men remained happy to organize and lead such efforts, but Northern women shouldered the grinding work of raising resources. Such was the arrangement that propelled into being the nation’s dominant relief organization, the United States Sanitary Commission.
During the first year of the war, one could expect the appeal for women of forming “Soldiers’ Relief Circles” which would allow women to aid the war effort while providing them with the society of like-minded companions who would “meet once a week, from 1 to 4 p.m., the time to be spent sewing or knitting for the soldier.”56 Such relief circles became part of a much larger and more involved movement of women who aided the war effort beyond their ability to knit socks. In April 1861, some 50 to 60 New York City women came together to establish the Women’s Central Association of Relief for the Sick and Wounded of the Army, an attempt to bring order and system to the various local groups of women. Soon that female-founded and controlled organization became a subsidiary of the United States Sanitary Commission, a male-dominated organization.57
In June 1861, a group of upper-class men received the sanction of the federal government to act in the area of soldiers’ relief, which led to the formation of the commission. Its purpose was, as Mary Livermore recalled, “to do what the Government could not.”58 Prominent men such as H. W. Bellows, who became the organization’s president, George Templeton Strong, and Frederick Law Olmsted established the commission expecting to harness the enthusiasm of the local women’s groups, guiding them with a more centralized, scientific, masculine—and thus a more efficient and rational—approach to relief, one that eschewed Christian sentimentality and even resorted to using paid agents to promote its agenda. The Sanitary Commission founders also had recognized the inability of the federal government to deal with the needs of sick and wounded soldiers and set about to assist soldiers through a wide range of relief activities, including the recruiting of doctors and nurses for their hospitals. By the end of the war, the Sanitary Commission provided the war effort with relief material valued at approximately $15 million.59
The Sanitary Commission’s most prominent rival was the United States Christian Commission, founded in November 1861 by members of the U.S. Young Men’s Christian Association. That organization raised approximately $6 million for the relief of soldiers and sailors but unlike the Sanitary Commission, the Christian Commission paid particular attention to the spiritual needs of soldiers and sailors as indicated by its extensive distribution of Bibles and religious tracts to military men as well as the thousands of sermons preached and prayer meetings held by its representatives.60 But as with the Sanitary Commission, the Christian Commission relied on a network of dedicated women to do its fund-raising at the local level.61
Thus, the most common and readily accessible activity for Northern women who wished to show their commitment to the Union was the widespread efforts of various organizations to raise money to bring comfort to soldiers at the front and in hospitals or to help to provide for their families at home. From the beginning of the war, home-front women did what they could to help their soldiers and believed that their efforts were comparable in their patriotism with those of the men in the field. They formed hundreds of local organizations to raise money for soldiers and send boxes of necessary items to the front and hospitals. Women came together in the Dubuque Ladies Aid Society to tend to the needs of soldiers and eventually their families.62 Women in Bridgeport, Connecticut, went door to door to secure donations for soldiers’ relief.63 But even women in more isolated rural areas participated in this great effort to provide some comfort to military men. The organizer of the Marshalltown, Iowa, Sanitary Commission, Majorie Ann Rogers, drove herself to scattered farmhouses to solicit aid.64
A group of women living on small farms in Wisconsin some distance from a railroad line donated all sorts of goods to the war effort but decided to do even more using what Mary Livermore called “new and untried methods.” They asked farming neighbors for donations of wheat, sold what they collected, and used the profits for soldiers’ relief. Their efforts were impressive. “Sometimes on foot, sometimes with a team, amid the snows and mud of early spring, they canvassed the country for twenty and thirty miles around, everywhere eloquently pleading the needs of the blue-coated boys in the hospitals,” Livermore wrote. In the end, they gathered and sold 500 bushels of wheat for soldiers’ relief, forwarding the proceeds to the Sanitary Commission.65 Even the children of these active women could participate in what amounted to patriotic play, raising funds through various enterprises and by conducting their own small-scale sanitary fairs.66
Such heroic service by adults as well as children continued throughout the war, with some good effect. The Sanitary Commission estimated that there were over 10,000 local societies organized during the war that provided as much as $50 million in donations to various state and private entities.67 But it was difficult work. Local organizations’ efforts lagged after 1863 as women and communities tired or directed their attention to veterans in need of charity and assistance. Women in Newport, New York, curtailed their contributions to the Sanitary Commission because they felt the need to look after the needy families of their hometown soldiers, while women in Chatham, Pennsylvania, devoted themselves to caring for sick veterans who had returned home.68
The successful sanitary fairs that women such as Mary Livermore organized combined the familiar elements of the male-run early 19th-century agricultural and mechanics’ fairs and the female-dominated fund-raising fairs that began in the United States during the 1820s. The organizers, however, raised their fairs to a more spectacular level.69 Local fairs proliferated across the North, raising funds by selling goods produced by community members or donated by businesses and manufacturers. The Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio, for example, sent out circulars, one of which arrived at the late gun manufacturer Samuel Colt’s address, requesting donations of artifacts for an exhibit “of Trophies from Battle-Fields, Relics, Curiosities, Autographs, &c.” The organizers wished to secure all sorts of flags and military paraphernalia “capture[d] from the enemy or borne at the head of our own triumphant columns,” all of which might “stimulate interest in the great struggle through which we are now passing, or gratify the taste of the antiquarian.” In addition, the committee hoped to display various hand-made objects produced by soldiers, all of which would be “converted into substantial comforts for Soldiers” by the aid society.70
The larger urban sanitary fairs became the big charitable and entertainment events of the day. Chicago, for example, was home to the first major fair, running from October 27 through November 7, 1863. The event opened with a fantastic parade, cannon salvos, and throngs of attendees, many given leave by their employers to miss work. It attracted donations from across the North for sale in its various booths, including all sorts of manufactured goods, pianos, cattle, perfumes, and President Lincoln’s signed Emancipation Proclamation, which ultimately secured a bid of $3,000. The fair sponsored musical performances as well as a lecture by the well-known young patriotic orator Anna Dickinson, among other entertainments. People laughed when Mary Livermore promised that the fair would bring in $25,000.71 Livermore underestimated the draw of her enterprise; the organizers extended the fair’s duration, which when concluded had accumulated over $78,000 for soldiers’ aid. Other big city fairs exceeded Chicago’s success. The organizers of Boston’s December 1863 fair could raise admission fees because so many people wished to attend, raising $146,000 in the end. New York’s Metropolitan Fair, which opened in April 1864, raised an estimated $2 million and Philadelphia’s Great Central Fair, which opened in June 1864, raised well over $1 million.72 Even smaller cities hosted fund-raising fairs. The people of Cleveland, inspired by the Chicago fair, held one of their own, the Northern Ohio Sanitary Fair, which raised $78,000 in less than three weeks during February and March 1864.73
The money spent by the attendees of these fairs indicated that, as Sidney George Fisher judged the Philadelphia Sanitary Fair, they were “well worth seeing.” In 1864 Fisher visited his local event and observed large buildings sheltering lavishly decorated rooms, filled with “articles for sale & exhibition in infinite variety.”74 Suitably impressed, he concluded, “These fairs & Sanitary Commission are miracles of American spirit, energy, & beauty.”75
The sanitary fairs that amused thousands of Northerners and raised funds for the boys in the army were also expressions of their communities’ patriotism. They grew out of a certain amount of local boosterism, but they also were an affirmation of a united nation facing the challenge of traitors hoping to destroy the republican promise it embodied at a time when state identities still mattered. Visitors could not attend a fair and escape the fact that along with the clever contraptions and novelties on display there were sufficient flags and other military artifacts gathered in one place to provide proof of the heroism of soldiers fighting to preserve the nation. And it would be a dense individual who walked the aisles of buildings from New York City to northern Ohio and elsewhere who would not be able to witness the results of the sacrifices made by the organizers and contributors.76
African American women initially had no soldiers for whom they could raise relief funds because of the North’s reluctance at first to fight anything but a white man’s war for the Union. Nevertheless, black women did what they could to assist contrabands, the slaves who sought shelter and freedom behind the Union lines. Black communities organized relief efforts for these former slaves gathering in crowded camps. The Contraband Committee of Philadelphia’s Mother Bethel Church and other groups relied on the efforts of Northern black women and white organizations devoted to contraband relief. Wives and daughters took on the tasks with which white women had occupied themselves from the outset of the war and did what they could to make their soldiers’ lives more comfortable. Antislavery advocate, newspaper editor, and former teacher Mary Ann Shadd Cary most famously went beyond such traditional roles in the women’s war effort. Although a resident of Canada who became a British subject in 1862, she returned to the United States in 1863 and worked for contraband relief with the Colored Ladies’ Freedmen’s Aid Society of Chicago.77
Some black and white women who shared Cary’s energies required an intellectual outlet and, perhaps, more demanding settings than home-front fund-raising for their war efforts. Before the war, abolitionist women such as Cary spoke out against slavery and now during the war they publicly rallied audiences for the Union. Anna Dickinson, the young Philadelphia abolitionist and stalwart lecturer for the Union cause, earned a reputation as a Northern Joan of Arc. Other more “ordinary” women may have shared Dickinson’s patriotic sentiments, but became involved in the nation’s political discourse in ways that did not attract as much attention.78 Mary Vermilion, for example, coped with the travails of daily life, but also entered the world of wartime politics by attending Union meetings, which sometimes were all-day affairs, and reading newspapers; she did not hesitate to express fully her political opinions in letters to her husband.79
The enthusiasm of women for the male-dominated national organizations also waned as the female patriots came to believe groups controlled by a distant patriarchal board had a potentially serious flaw in that they lacked the personal knowledge of their soldiers’ needs. Women feared that the Sanitary Commission and other such large organizations might misuse or misdirect their material contributions and rightly worried that light-fingered freight handlers and surgeons might help themselves to the things that they had worked so hard to deliver to the front. Women’s groups’ desire for their independence led their members to resent the controlling hand of national organizations, creating a tension between their patriotic commitment to national loyalty and their deep ties to their local communities. This desire for autonomy often found expression in how local groups ordered their priorities, giving preference to tending the needs first and foremost of soldiers from their communities; it also prompted them to organize local fund-raising events and fairs that they could control.80
The women who dominated the organization and execution of fund-raising events walked away from their successes with lessons well learned. Their experiences sharpened their social and political skills while making them even more aware of the limitations that society placed on them. Mary Livermore learned that she and her female associates needed their husbands’ signatures to have a building constructed for the Chicago sanitary fair even though they would be using their own resources to pay in advance for the work. The law required no less, their contractor told them, because all their property legally belonged to their husbands. “We learned much of the laws made by men for women, in that conversation with an illiterate builder,” she later recalled. “I registered a vow that when the war was over I would take up a new work—the work of making law and justice synonymous for women.”81 Young women who became active during the war could second Livermore’s experiences and match her determination to do something about the paternalism they encountered in their work as they moved into the postwar nation; their wartime success in developing and coordinating such an extensive network of female-dominated organizations was testimony to their competence as well as fuel for their rising expectations.82