“MY STATE IS OUT OF THE UNION”
For Southern women, the beginning of the Civil War offered an unusual opportunity to get involved in public life. “Politics engrosses my every thought,” wrote Amanda Sims. In this crisis, showing a deep interest in masculine concerns was not considered unfeminine. Keziah Brevard, a fifty-eight-year-old widow, said she was so emotionally involved in the political drama that if she awoke in the middle of the night “my first thought is ‘my state is out of the union.’” There were the usual wartime stories of young women who refused to allow draft dodgers to pay them court. (Girls in Texas were alleged to be handing out bonnets and hoopskirts to men who failed to enlist.) But this early-stage patriotism came easy: most Americans, North and South, believed the war would be resolved very quickly, perhaps even before any blood was actually shed. When their husbands actually saddled up and rode off to battle, a number of women began questioning whether there was any cause they’d be willing to sacrifice their loved ones for. “Charlie is dearer to me than my country,” admitted Kate Rowland of Georgia.
The women left behind knew they would have a new role to play, although they weren’t particularly clear what it would entail. Writing to her local paper, one Confederate urged her fellow Southern females to “hurl the destructive novel in the fire and turn our poodles out of doors, and convert our pianos into spinning wheels.” Young women wrote in their diaries that they wished they were men. Feeling both useless and anxious, they embroidered razor kits, formed relief committees to sew clothing for the troops, and held benefits to raise money for the war effort. But unlike their Revolutionary era ancestors, the Southern elite refused to wear homemade clothing as a badge of patriotic fervor. According to the Southern Illustrated News, “Not five out of five hundred ladies would be caught in the street in a homespun dress.”
“DOES SHE MEAN TO TAKE CARE OF ME—
OR TO MURDER ME?”
Confederate women became keenly aware that they were alone on remote farms with slaves who believed they might soon be freed. Keziah Brevard, who woke up in the middle of the night to thoughts of secession at the onset of the war, found that as the months rolled by, the thing keeping her awake was the possibility of a slave uprising. A middle-aged widow, Brevard was used to living alone on her plantation with a great many slaves, but by 1861, she was writing that “we know not what moment we may be hacked to death in the most cruel manner.” There were indeed a few spectacular murders, and everyone had heard about them. Lewis B. Norwood, a wealthy North Carolina planter, was killed by two of his slaves. A husband and wife, they held him down, shoved a funnel into his mouth, and poured scalding water down his throat. (Norwood had just sold the couple’s baby and was preparing to sell the wife.) The wealthy Mary Chesnut, who bragged in her diary about her lack of fear, may have thought twice after her elderly cousin, Betsey Witherspoon (“a saint on earth”), was smothered by one of her servants. As Chesnut discussed the tragedy with her sister Kate, a maid came in and announced that she intended to sleep in Kate’s room in order to protect her. “For the life of me, I cannot make up my mind. Does she mean to take care of me—or to murder me?” Kate asked her sister.
Plantation mistresses had been left alone a great deal before the war. But then their slaves were not expecting to be freed any minute, and white male neighbors were normally nearby. During the war, the women were truly alone, and very few of them seem to have welcomed an opportunity to demonstrate their leadership skills. They began to flood the Confederate government with petitions asking that their men be exempted from duty in order to defend the lives and chastity of their wives and daughters from the local slaves. In fact, as civil rights leaders pointed out after the war, there were far fewer instances of rape or assault than anyone might have expected. The women’s far more realistic worry was that they might wake up one morning and find that their servants had simply taken off. “I dread our house servants going and having to do their work,” wrote Mary Lee, a Virginia woman whose male slaves ran away in 1862, with the females threatening to follow. One Georgia slave-owning family was so determined to keep their prized cook that they chained her to the kitchen—the Union Army found her with “heavy iron shackles put on her feet so she could not run off.” Women from prosperous Southern families had been raised to regard physical work as degrading, and having slaves do it for them was a very deep-rooted part of their identity as Southern ladies. Many well-to-do women had no idea how to do household chores, and when they learned, they didn’t much like it. Kate Foster of Mississippi was forced to do the laundry when the house servants ran off, and she reported she “came near ruining myself for life as I was too delicately raised for such hard work.” There were reports of women who “fainted dead away” while washing windows or who took to their beds after a bout of floor scrubbing.
“THE WOMEN ARE AS BAD AS MEN DOWN HERE”
The Confederate Army began to draft soldiers in the spring of 1862, during planting time, and the sight of women behind plows became common. As the war dragged on, the towns became virtually all-female worlds, stripped of able-bodied men who could help with the local defense, run local businesses, or even lift heavy furniture. In New Bern, North Carolina, only 20 of the 250 white residents were male, and most of those were old or on the verge of being inducted. Inflation became a terrible problem in the South. A soldier’s pay was $11 a month, and at wartime prices in some areas that was not enough to feed a family of four on grain alone. Many men, meanwhile, still managed to maintain a mythical image of what their wives were doing at home. “I do not like the idea of your weaving. It is mortifying to me. I wish you would not do it,” wrote Will Neblett to his wife, Lizzie, who really had no other way to clothe her family and eleven slaves.
Women got increasingly surly and started food riots, attacking merchants and army agents, raiding grain warehouses, mills, and stores. In areas where the farms were small and people had never owned many slaves to begin with, enthusiasm for the war burned out rather quickly, and wives pestered their husbands to come home and help feed their families. When the men complied, they camped out in the woods while the women supplied them with food and blankets. Some women physically attacked Confederate officers who were trying to reclaim their male relatives. “The women are as bad as men down here,” complained a militia officer in North Carolina. Militias sometimes tortured women in order to locate their sons and husbands. One deserter’s wife had her hands placed under a fence rail while a soldier sat on it. Another woman was suspended from a cord tied to her two thumbs behind her back.
Newspapers began commenting disapprovingly about women’s lack of support for the cause. “The self-sacrifice has vanished, wives and maidens now labor only to exempt husbands and lovers from the perils of service,” mourned the Montgomery Daily Advertiser in 1864. In the larger cities, elite women consoled themselves for their troubles with a round of social activity. This was particularly true in Richmond, where during the last winter of the war Mrs. Robert Stannard was said to have spent more than $30,000 on entertainment.
“WATCH OVER THEIR DAUGHTERS
AS WELL AS THEIR SONS”
When the war began, Northern women responded the same way as in the South. They held meetings—generally chaired by men—in which they pledged their patriotism and vowed to fold bandages or sew clothing for the soldiers at the front. But the Northern women’s relief efforts soon became a national organization, the United States Sanitary Commission, which performed a critical role in providing food and medical services for the soldiers. Although men still occupied the top jobs in the commission, women had a great many managerial duties, and as time went on, middle-class matrons began to praise each other for having “executive talents.” The necessary supplies “were almost universally collected, assorted, and dispatched, and re-collected, re-assorted, and re-dispatched, by women, representing with great impartiality, every grade of society in the Republic,” said Alfred Bloor of the Sanitary Commission. The women had taken over, he said, after the men were discouraged when it became clear the war was not going to be short-lived after all.
Working-class urban women were less enthusiastic about supporting the war effort. They saw the family breadwinners being forced to fight while wealthier men were able to buy their way out of service. In 1863, when Irish New Yorkers rioted to protest losing their young men to the draft, the New York Herald blamed women for starting the trouble. “The female relatives of the conscripts mingled their wildest denunciations against the conscription law, and thus gave the people a…motive to enact the terrible scenes,” the paper thundered. The archbishop of New York warned Catholic parents to “watch over their daughters as well as their sons” during the riots “and keep them at home.”
The Draft Riots were more brutal than any mob action that occurred in the South. The rioters, mainly poor immigrants, burned down the Colored Orphan Asylum, set fire to houses, and killed people who got in their way. A Colonel O’Brien, who had ordered his men to fire on the mob, was beaten to death. Angry women, a report stated, “committed the most atrocious violence on the body.” A small black child was thrown from a fourth-story window of the orphanage; a black woman was beaten with her newborn baby in her arms. The female rioters also assaulted members of their own sex who had married black men, and a tavern owner named Black Sue whose establishment had separated many sons and husbands from their paychecks.
At her infirmary, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell and her sister spent three days and nights tending the sick while the city rocked with riots. They ignored demands by their white patients that sick black men and women should be expelled before the mob discovered them. When the houses next to the infirmary were set on fire, the women blocked the view from their patients. The infirmary survived, and Blackwell never even mentioned the incident in her autobiography.
“WERE THEY THE SAME SCHOOL GIRLS OF 1861?”
An estimated 400 women disguised themselves as men to fight in the Civil War. Many were like Amy Clarke, who enlisted so she could remain with her husband when he joined the Confederate Army. Amy continued to fight after he was killed, and she was wounded herself and taken prisoner. Women also served as spies, much to the joy of newspapers that delighted in reporting their adventures. The Confederacy seemed to attract the most colorful Mata Haris. Rose O’Neal Greenhow, “The Rebel Rose,” was a Washington society hostess who was arrested as a Southern spy in 1861 and imprisoned with her eight-year-old daughter. Released a year later, she ran the Union blockade and sailed to Europe, put her daughter in a French convent, published her prison memoirs, and became the toast of London and Paris. Returning home to confer with Confederate leaders, she attempted to evade the blockade in a small boat. When it overturned, Mrs. Greenhow drowned, weighed down by her book royalties—a purse full of heavy gold coins.
The most famous Southern spy was Belle Boyd. Her talent for self-promotion was demonstrated early in life when, angry at being excluded from a party for adults, she rode her horse into the living room. Taking advantage of Union soldiers’ gallantry toward a beautiful teenage girl, she served as a courier for the Confederate intelligence service and delivered information on troop size and placement she had picked up from her admirers. On her final mission, Belle sailed to England carrying Confederate dispatches and was captured by a Union blockade. She later married the Union officer who had taken command of her captured steamer. She was only twenty-one years old when the war ended, already a widow with a small child, and she turned to the theater and lecture circuit, where real-life celebrities were always welcome.
Belle was one of the very few Southern women for whom the war was a glamorous adventure. For many it was a nightmare. Their neighborhoods were shelled, their farms commandeered by the military, their cities put under siege. More than 250,000 people, most of them women and children, were forced to leave their homes. As the Union forces moved into the South and conditions became more desperate, families began living in boxcars or tents. Others fled into caves, which they attempted to furnish with rugs or stuffed chairs. Three-fourths of Columbia, South Carolina, was burned down in a single night. In Vicksburg, the citizens had been given so many warnings of imminent attack that many people failed to flee when the Yankees actually did arrive in 1862. Those who were trapped in the city during the ensuing siege wound up desperate for food, eating rats and mules. An Atlanta resident regarded her friends and asked, “were these the same people—these haggard, wrinkled women, bowed with care and trouble, sorrow and unusual toil…were they the same school girls of 1861?”
Black women, who often fled toward the Union Army, found little welcome when they got there. At Camp Nelson, Kentucky, soldiers razed a shantytown, leaving 400 women and children homeless in the cold. While marching to Savannah, Sherman’s troops dismantled a pontoon bridge before black refugees could get across, leaving them to the oncoming Confederates. Former slaves who joined the Union forces were promised pay and rations for their families, but it didn’t always arrive. Emma Steward, left behind with the children in Florida when her husband, Solomon, joined the First South Carolina Volunteers regiment of ex-slaves, wrote to him in February 1864 that an
angel Has Come and borne My Dear Little babe to Join with Them. My babe only Live one day. It was a Little Girl. Her name Is alice Gurtrude steward. I am now sick in bed and have Got nothing To Live on. The Rashion That They Give for six days I Can Make It Last but 2 days. They don’t send Me any wood. I don’t Get any Light at all. You Must see To That as soon as possible for I am In want of some Thing to eat.
All the family send thair love to you. No more at pressant Emma Steward.
“THE BEST THING
THAT COULD HAVE TAKEN PLACE FOR ME”
Although many Southern women came to regard the war as a betrayal by the men who were supposed to take care of them, some saw it as an opportunity. In a gesture of liberation, they let down their hair and took off their hooped skirts. “Nothing looks funnier than a woman walking around with an immense hoop—barefooted,” one said. Amanda Worthington of Mississippi gave up the huge skirts in 1862, when her worn hoop began to fall off during church services. By 1863, she had constructed a “bloomer costume” so she could fish to help feed her hungry household. Young women also began to cut their hair short, much to their mothers’ dismay, and even the more conservative gave up elaborate hairstyles once they had no slaves to arrange them.
Southern women began to fill government clerical jobs, particularly in the Treasury Department, where each Confederate banknote had to be signed individually. The job required good handwriting and good political connections. Most of the women came from elite families and their pay reflected their status—while privates in the army were getting $11 a month, female clerks got $65. Some of them regarded it as a great adventure. “I am rarely ill now even with a headache,” reported twenty-year-old Adelaide Stuart, who spent her days signing Treasury bills and her nights sampling the still-active Richmond social whirl. Being forced to take a job, she decided, was “the best thing that could have taken place for me—it is bringing into active service and strengthening all the best parts of my character and enabling me to root out all that was objectionable.” Other women, however, were humiliated at being forced to work for pay, no matter how cushy the job and lucrative the check. “How mean I felt,” wrote Mary Darby DeTreville, after she lined up for her wages.
Women from less influential backgrounds got jobs as well. Thousands took in piecework for the Confederate Clothing Bureau, sewing shirts for $1 apiece and coats for $4. Others packed cartridges at the arsenal for $1 a day. It was dangerous work—in 1863, fifty of the ordnance workers were killed in an explosion in Richmond. Their supporters bitterly asked why poor women working at such hazardous jobs got paid so little “when so many of the departments are filled with young ladies (not dependent on their pay) with nothing to do, at salaries equal to and in some cases better than the best male clerks?” The split consciousness that worshiped the image of a lady with soft hands and no occupation, while expecting most of Southern womanhood to spend their lives in hard labor, was still at work. In 1864, when the note signers were ordered to move from Richmond to Columbia if they wanted to keep their jobs, the women were treated like martyrs. But there was a limit to public sympathy. Late in the war, one Confederate congressman proposed that government vehicles be used to take the women to their offices when “their lives and health are jeopardized by the weather.” The ensuing hilarity indicated that the women’s pedestal had been trimmed to a more manageable height.
In the North, Francis Spinner, Abraham Lincoln’s U.S. treasurer, was a fan of female clerical workers. He liked their efficiency and, not incidentally, the fact that they were much cheaper than men. Eventually, 447 women worked in the Treasury Department. They made $720 a year—a generous salary for female workers but barely a living wage in a time of high inflation. In 1865, women Treasury workers petitioned for a raise and got $900 a year. It was half the salary paid to men, and it was the last raise they’d get for twenty years.
If the female workers in the South were treated like fragile flowers, the Northern Patent Office women were viewed as a potential source of sin in the workplace. In 1864, Congressman James Brooks of New York, who was at odds with a Treasury official named Spencer Clark, claimed that Clark and the Treasury women were participating in “orgies and bacchanals.” Brooks’s target might have been Clark, but his victims were the girls accused of having relations with him. When one, Laura Duvall, died, Baker claimed she had succumbed from the aftereffects of an abortion. But an autopsy on her body—removed from the hearse on the way to the cemetery—found she was a virgin who had died of pneumonia. In the end, the investigations committee declared that Brooks had unjustly “compromised the reputation of three hundred females…wives or sisters of soldiers fallen in the field.” But the Patent Office women had gotten a reputation that stuck long after Brooks and Clark had vanished from the scene.
“ALMOST WILD ON THE SUBJECT
OF HOSPITAL NURSING”
Until midcentury, nursing had been a job for men and lower-class women. Florence Nightingale made it respectable for ladies. She was a well-born Englishwoman who became an international heroine in 1855 when she reorganized the nursing care in the Crimean War, reducing the death rate in British field hospitals from 45 to 2 percent. When the Civil War began, one observer noted, there was “a perfect mania to act Florence Nightingale.” At least 3,000 women held paid nursing positions in the North and South, and thousands of others worked as volunteers. “The war is certainly ours as well as men’s,” said Kate Cummings of Mobile, Alabama, who became the matron of a large Confederate hospital.
The Nightingale mania struck particularly hard in the North. “Our women appear to have become almost wild on the subject of hospital nursing,” said a wartime correspondent for the American Medical Times. When Elizabeth Blackwell called an emergency meeting at her infirmary to organize nursing aid for the war effort, 4,000 volunteers showed up. Not everyone was pleased. A wartime correspondent for the American Medical Times was disturbed by the image of “a delicate refined woman assisting a rough soldier to the close-stool or supplying him with a bedpan.” He urged that women restrict themselves to “delicate soothing attentions, which are always so grateful to the sick.” But public opinion once again chose necessity over proper standards of ladylike behavior. A Confederate congressional investigation discovered that the mortality rate among soldiers cared for by female nurses was only half that of those tended by men. “I will not agree to limit the class of persons who can affect such a savings of life as this,” said a senator from Louisiana. Suddenly, people on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line switched from regarding nursing as an inappropriate job for well-bred women to seeing it as one for which they were uniquely qualified.
Still, authorities were wary of putting young girls in intimate contact with bedridden soldiers. Dorothea Dix, when she was appointed superintendent of Union nurses, set a minimum age of thirty for her volunteers and demanded they be “plain looking women.” As the war went on and the need for medical assistance became more desperate, Dix ignored her own regulations. But she was firm in the beginning. One young woman from Auburn, New York, was told that she could volunteer only if the elderly family physician agreed to accompany her. She wrote a friend that if she ever became a nurse, it would be in an “Old Maid’s Hospital.” Elida Rumsey Fowle was rejected because she was only nineteen years old and instead became a sort of early era USO. She entertained the patients with songs and stories, giving more than 200 performances in a year, and established a soldier’s library in Washington. Later she and her husband also collected medical supplies and delivered them to the front.
Fowle and the other volunteers who took care of the wounded during the early parts of the Civil War were basically on their own. They determined where the fighting was, wheedled their way through to the front, and did what they could to help. Neither the Union nor Confederate Army was in any way prepared to feed and clothe its soldiers, let alone care for them when they were injured. In the first terrible years of the war, wounded men died on the battlefield after lying there for days, untended, in the hot sun. There was no organized system of getting them to a field hospital. It took an enormous leap for well-bred women to enter the gory army hospitals to tend the wounded men, and it’s hard to imagine the kind of daring they must have needed to get to the battlefield unescorted. Yet a number of them managed to do it, on their own.
“I AM A U.S. SOLDIER…AND THEREFORE
NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SUSCEPTIBLE TO FEAR”
Clara Barton was one of those restless New England spinsters of the nineteenth century who spent their lives going from place to place, living with friends and relatives, never finding a spot to settle in. She was intellectual, athletic, and afflicted with periodic bouts of depression. (She was also an advocate of free love, but if she ever acted on her beliefs, she was extremely discreet.) A talented teacher, she quit a good position in New Jersey when a man was appointed head of a public school system she had founded. She became one of the first Patent Office women in Washington and was, remarkably, paid the same salary as the male workers, although the Commissioner of Patents never dared include her on the official roll of employees he sent to Congress.
When the war began, one of the first New England volunteer regiments that traveled through Washington on its way to the South was the Sixth Massachusetts. Nearly forty of the men in the unit had been Barton’s pupils, and the mothers of Clara’s “boys” targeted her as a useful go-between in sending food and clothing to their sons. Soon her house was so crammed with boxes that she had to move. The turning point in Barton’s life came when she realized that the lovingly packed gifts that piled up in her living quarters were not just special treats. The soap, fruits, and other presents were dire necessities for men serving in an army bereft of supplies. The medical situation was worst of all. There were not enough field hospitals, and those that existed sometimes lacked even bandages. There was not enough medicine and certainly not enough medical staff. Doctors operated with instruments that had not been disinfected, and they dosed the men with quinine and morphine, when they were lucky enough to have even that. Most of the wounded died—nine out of ten men with abdominal injuries failed to survive their treatment. When trains bearing the wounded arrived back from the front, they brought fallen soldiers who had not been given anything to eat or drink for days. Katherine Wormeley, a Union nurse, described the cargo of the trains as “a festering mass of dead and living together.” Although the official recruitment of nurses went slowly, anyone who wanted to help out could find an open field of opportunity.
Barton began actively soliciting donations and supplies. The women she contacted responded with a flood of fruit preserves and soap and lemons to combat scurvy. Within six months Barton had filled three warehouses. She bought perishables like bread with her own scanty funds and distributed her wares at military hospitals. Once the hospitals were better organized and flooded with female volunteers eager to hand out food or wipe fevered brows, Barton began to meet the ships and trains carrying back wounded men from the front. The next obvious step was to get to the battlefield itself, and after months of bureaucratic wrangling, she got permission to pass through the lines with her wagons of supplies. It would be the last time she would bother to ask. The army became so grateful for her efforts that soon she began to get unofficial leaks directing her to the next site of the fighting.
After the war, Barton became famous as the organizer of the American Red Cross, but her finest hours came in those hectic, disorganized trauma centers of the Civil War’s early years. Her face turned blue from the gunpowder, and her skirts were so heavy with blood that she had to wring them out before she could walk under their weight. Her courage under fire was legendary. Walking across a rickety bridge under heavy battery, she barely missed being killed by a shell that tore away a portion of her skirt. At Antietam, when doctors were not available, she removed a bullet from a soldier’s face while another wounded man held his head still. Later, when the operating room came under fire and the male assistants fled, Barton stayed to hold down the table where a surgeon was operating. “I am a U.S. soldier you know and therefore not supposed to be susceptible to fear,” she said. (Barton’s critics noted later that she was definitely susceptible to the urge for self-promotion.)
Barton was not the only woman who assigned herself to organize health care on the battlefield. Mary Ann (“Mother”) Bickerdyke first arrived at an army camp in Cairo, Illinois, to deliver a relief fund. Seeing the filthy, overcrowded hospital tents, she simply got to work cleaning and nursing, without asking anyone’s permission. In her Quaker bonnet, she trotted across nineteen battlefields in four years, lantern in hand, searching for the wounded. She was famous for ordering everyone around, and her reputation gave her the clout to get away with it. An army surgeon who challenged one of her orders was told: “Mother Bickerdyke outranks everybody, even Lincoln.” When a brigade marched past her, exhausted after a long day of rushing toward the front but forbidden by the officer in command to rest, Bickerdyke simply yelled “Halt!” and was able to distribute soup and coffee before the officer could get his men moving again.
“A HOSPITAL HAS NONE
OF THE COMFORTS OF HOME”
In the South, nurses had to deal with the irregularities created by a conflict carried out on home territory, where families were often close enough to help care for their wounded, or to get in the way of those who were trying to do so. Phoebe Yates Pember, a thirty-nine-year-old widow who became matron of Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, had a patient whose wife came for a visit and stayed for weeks, giving birth to their daughter on his cot. Pember cared for the new baby, who was named Phoebe in her honor, and got the mother a ticket home. She then learned that the woman had abandoned her child at the station. Rousing the father, she discharged him and sent him home with little Phoebe. As in the North, the first female Confederate nurses were mainly women who simply started helping out. Mary Rutledge Fogg of Nashville was so appalled at watching wounded soldiers die in her own city that she raised money to recruit nurses. She then informed the government that her volunteers were on the way to the front lines in Virginia, whether anyone was ready to receive them or not. Women’s organizations created wayside hospitals around the country that could aid wounded soldiers making their way home.
Some found a strange sense of liberation in their duties. “Nobody chided me then as unwomanly, when I went into a crowd and waited on suffering men,” said Rebecca Latimer Felton. “No one said I was unladylike to climb into cattle cars and box cars to feed those who could not feed themselves.” Still, Southern women did not flock to serve. “Are the women of the South going into the hospitals? I am afraid candor will compel me to say they are not! It is not respectable, and requires too much constant attention, and a hospital has none of the comforts of home,” wrote Kate Cummings, who said she was very tired of hearing her female friends tell her what they would do if only they were men.
As the war went on, women on both sides volunteered to nurse in order to stay with their husbands. Others signed up after they learned their loved ones had died in battle. Whatever the impulse, they frequently wound up working under conditions that were not much less dangerous than those on the battle lines. They nursed under artillery fire or served in hospitals for soldiers with communicable diseases like smallpox. They worked themselves into a state of exhaustion that left them susceptible to typhoid or pneumonia. “I have had men die clutching my dress till it was almost impossible to loose their hold,” said Lois Dunbar. During the battle of Pea Ridge, Mary Ellis remembered standing at the operating table for hours “with the hot blood steaming into my face, until nature rebelled against such horrible sights and I fainted, but as soon as possible I returned.” Annie Etheridge was dressing the wound of a soldier when he was hit by a shell and torn to pieces. Delia Fay marched with her husband’s regiment, carrying her own supplies as well as the load of any sick soldier she came upon. Anna McMahon, who came down with a fatal case of measles, looked up at the doctor and asked: “Have I done my duty?” On being assured that she had, she sighed, “Good-bye, I will go to sleep,” and died. Rebecca Wiswell volunteered to dress the wounds of men who had been shot through the bowels. “The worst case no doctor ever dressed but three times; then he was left in my care and I did it five months,” she said later. And for some of them, it was the best part of their lives. “We all know in our hearts that this is thorough enjoyment to be here,” wrote Katharine Wormeley from a Northern hospital ship.
But the number of women who wanted to give soldiers inspirational tracts or home-baked treats outstripped those who sought to be nurses. Southern hospital personnel passed around the stories of volunteers who killed dysentery patients by feeding them sweet delicacies. Francis Bacon, a Northern surgeon, complained of being “subjugated and crushed by a woman who sings the Star Spangled Banner copiously through all the wards of my hospital.” Doctors on both sides of the conflict often preferred Catholic nuns as nurses because they were used to hard work and discipline and inclined to be deferential. Eventually 617 sisters from twenty-one different religious communities served in either Union or Confederate medical facilities. Nuns were not exempt from the anti-Catholic hysteria that was rampant in America at the time, and Dorothea Dix refused to appoint them as government nurses. But the army physicians, and the nuns, managed to work around her.
“GIRLS HAVE MARRIED MEN THEY WOULD NEVER
HAVE GIVEN A THOUGHT OF”
For all the reports of ladies living high in Richmond or shirking their nursing duties, the vast majority of Southern women suffered during the war, and they began to realize that they were going to suffer a great deal more when it was over. There was a sense of universal loss, which the postwar Southerners would soothe by creating a mythology of the glorious prewar South, like Scarlet O’Hara’s Tara. “My happy life! I love to think of it now,” wrote Sarah Morgan, a Louisiana girl, in her diary. “Until that dreary 1861, I had no idea of sorrow or grief.” Some mothers had lost four, five, even seven sons in the war. Brides of less than a year were left widows. In what the whole South came to regard as an emblematic tragedy, the beautiful Hetty Cary of Richmond married a handsome Confederate general in one of the social highlights of the season, only to return to the church three weeks later to bury him. General Robert E. Lee wrote to his wife that he found the change in the young socialite’s appearance shocking. There were 80,000 widows just in Alabama—three-quarters of them in dire distress.
Nearly a quarter of the men of military age in the South were killed, and perhaps another quarter returned home wounded. To make up to the men for what they had lost, Southern girls were urged to do their part by marrying handicapped veterans. “Girls have married men they would never have given a thought of had it not been thought a sacred duty,” wrote a North Carolina woman whose daughter had just taken the plunge. “You would never believe how our public speakers…excite the crowd to this thing.” While many men returned with an empty sleeve or ruined leg, ready to begin a new life, a good many others suffered from more complicated and destructive wounds. They were alcoholics, or depressives, or simply lost souls from the prewar era, unable to make a postwar life for themselves. It was a crisis that the narrow prewar life of wealthy Southern manhood had paved the way for. Sarah Morgan wrote that she intended to marry a man who had a profession because a rich man could lose his money “and Master is turned adrift on the tender mercies of the world, without the means to turn an honest penny, even if he had the inclination or energy, which most rich men do not…so he quietly settles down, and goes to the dogs, not forgetting you, but insisting on your company for the first time in your married life.”
If Southern women felt a sense of betrayal when their men left them alone and went off to lose the war, their slaves, and their property, they must have felt even more aggrieved when those men failed to get hold of themselves once they returned. One newspaper concluded that Southern manhood, “the mighty oak,” had been “hit by lightning” and depended on the “clinging vine” to hold it up. Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, might have represented his entire generation when he emerged from a Union prison ill, depressed, and never again able to find a career that could support his family. His wife, Varina, not only struggled to keep the family together and educate their children but also had to cope with the humiliation when Davis moved onto the estate of a wealthy and worshipful widow while Varina was in England recovering from a heart ailment. After they reconciled, she was still required to care for and support an ailing ex-hero who obsessively relived his wartime experiences.
Many single Southern women had to face the fact that the war had probably deprived them of any chance of getting married. Families who had allowed their daughters to work during the war expected to reel them in afterward. But some of the daughters had other ideas. “I will not be a dependent old maid at home with any allowance doled out to me while I could be made comfortable by my own exertions,” replied Elizabeth Grimball when her family tried to make her give up her job at a private girls’ school. By 1883, an Alabama official reported: “members of the most elegant and cultivated families in the State are engaged in teaching.”
“IF I STAY HERE I’LL NEVER KNOW I’M FREE”
After the war, the first thing freed slaves wanted to do was move around—from job to job, and from plantation to city. Patience, an ex-slave in South Carolina, passed up a profitable job cooking for her former owner. “I must go,” she said. “If I stay here I’ll never know I’m free.” The black population of Atlanta, about 20 percent before the war, reached 46 percent by 1870. Most were women who got jobs as laundresses, frequently working in their own homes where they could watch their children while making some money. By the 1880s, nearly 98 percent of black women in the workforce were domestics. But they and their employers had different expectations about how hard their newly freed workers should have to labor, and at what tasks. Black household workers quit their jobs frequently—in what must have been a heady experience after slavery. In response to white complaints, Southern state legislatures began passing laws that turned any worker who had quit her job into an automatic “vagrant.” The Ku Klux Klan took a more direct route. “Many times, you know, a white lady has a colored lady for cook…” explained a state legislator in Georgia, Alfred Richardson. “They have a quarrel, and sometimes probably the colored woman gives the lady a little jaw. In a night or two a crowd will come in and take her out and whip her.”
Part of the Klan’s strategy for terrorizing the black population was sexual assault. In Georgia, Rhoda Ann Childs was taken from her home and beaten by eight white men. “(T)wo men stood upon my breast, while two others took hold of my feet and stretched my limbs as far apart as they could, while the man standing upon my breast applied the strap to my private parts until fatigued into stopping, and I was more dead than alive,” she said. An ex-soldier then raped her. Although the South was obsessed with the idea of black men molesting white women, the real peril was for black women at the mercy of white men. “It is all on the other foot…colored women have a great deal more to fear from white men,” acknowledged Z. B. Hargrave, a white attorney.
The Georgia legislature passed the Apprentice Act, allowing employers to get custody of black orphans, allegedly so they could teach them a trade. But it was actually a way for whites to get free labor. The American Missionary Association, which sent orphans to white households looking for domestic help, shipped off not only all the homeless black children that could be found but also a number who had families eager to take care of them. “Somehow these black people have the faculty of finding out where their children are,” complained the matron of an orphanage from which children were recruited, after a few relatives had managed to retrieve nephews and nieces from the Association’s clutches. (They did so at some risk. In South Carolina an ex-slave named Sue was beaten and then shot to death when she opposed her former owner’s attempt to apprentice her nephew.)
White people—even those who did not go so far as to kidnap the children of ex-slaves—were irritated by the behavior of freed blacks, who wanted the things they had been deprived of, including pretty clothes. “Slavery to our Islanders meant field work, with no opportunity for the women and girls to dress as they chose and when they chose,” said a teacher of ex-slaves in Georgia. Women who had spent their lives alternating between the two smocks they were given each Christmas by the master felt proud and independent walking down the street in colorful dresses and hats. Their husbands felt proud, too, because their wives’ clothing showed the world that they were good providers. The whites concocted endless explanations for why that was inappropriate. “The airs which the Negroes assume often interfere with their efficiency as laborers,” complained a South Carolinian.
Newly freed black families also wanted to keep the women at home. Mothers who had been forced to leave their children behind when they went out to the fields wanted to stay with them. Husbands reveled in the idea of having their wives devote all their time to cooking and keeping house. (“When I married my wife I married her to wait on me and she has got all she can do right here for me and the children,” said an ex-slave who refused to send his spouse back into the fields.) Everyone wanted to protect their daughters from the clutches of rapacious employers. The white community, however, was horrified at the idea of black women becoming full-time housewives. They called it “acting the lady” and “the evil of female loaferism.” Southern plantation owners were desperate for farm labor, and they regarded any woman who wanted her husband to “support her in idleness” as a threat to the agricultural economy. Northerners tended to side with the Southern elite on this issue. To be self-sustaining, they felt, black families needed income from all members. But the bottom line was that the sight of blacks behaving like whites in any way—by dress or manner or by keeping their wives at home—threatened the white sense of racial superiority. An agent for the Freedmen’s Bureau in South Carolina, which existed to look after the interests of ex-slaves, complained that “myriads of women who once earned their own living now have aspirations to be like white ladies and, instead of using the hoe, pass the days in dawdling over their trivial housework or gossiping among their neighbors.”