Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (72 page)

Much to the surprise of those who thought that the Civil War would be “a white man’s war,” the conflict quickly broadened, by policy and by accident, to include a kaleidoscope of races and ethnic minorities, from Battery Wagner to Glorieta Pass. Each of these groups saw the confusion of civil war as a moment of opportunity, whether they had rights and respect to win or political agendas to build or merely scores to settle. None of them saw their hopes fully realized. What is remarkable is how the issues and battles of the Civil War made those hopes soar. “This is essentially a people’s contest,” Lincoln told Congress in 1861, a war that would justify confidence in what Lincoln’s Whig forerunner Daniel Webster had called “a popular government, erected by the people… responsible to the people” and “just as truly emanating from the people, as from the State governments.” In 1861, neither Lincoln nor his Congress could have dreamed of the ways in which many different kinds of American people were eager to claim a seat at that democracy’s table.

For Virginia governor Henry Wise, the Union was like a marriage of man and woman. “It is with the Union of the States as it is with the union of matrimony,” Wise explained in 1860—in it, the husband must be “a good man, a good citizen, a good moralist,” and so long as his honor is not questioned by his wife, all within that marriage would be peace. The moment the wife challenged that authority, however, then “he will burst the bonds of union, as the burning Wythes were bursted by the vigorous limbs of the yet unshorn Nazarite.” Abraham Lincoln took precisely the opposite view. It was actually easier for a husband and wife to be divorced, because they could go out of each other’s sight, but the North and the South were bound together geographically in ways which made anything less than conjugal union impossible. To secessionists, “the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement.”
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If secession was equivalent to the disruption of a marriage, then civil war could hardly be less than the overthrow of gender itself. On Wise’s logic, divided Americans could not avoid some uncomfortable reflection on gender roles in American society, not just as symbol but as reality. A house divided was literally a house whose meanings and roles were now being contested, and each individual within this divided American household would feel the impact of that challenge in a different way. For Southern slaveholders such as Wise, authority and fatherhood were the prerogatives of men, and the threat posed first by John Brown, then by Lincoln, and then by the invading Yankee armies was really a threat to strip slaveholders of their “fatherhood” over their slaves and their families. For the black males whom Wise enslaved, it offered the opportunity to assert a manhood and fatherhood that slavery had denied them. And as American men struggled to define themselves in the midst of civil war, American women likewise found a fresh series of opportunities to question what gender roles meant in the ambiguous context of a liberal democracy.
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From time out of mind in European societies, adult males had been assigned the primary role of providers and leaders. The combined risks and necessities of biological reproduction limited the mobility of women and restricted them, with few exceptions, to the subordinate role of caring for children, performing gender-based “women’s work” (spinning, carding, butter making, sewing, making and mending clothes, storing and preparing food, making soap and candles, household cleaning), and yielding to the direction and authority of men. The twin dictatorship of tradition and biology gave husbands the role of command and women the role of support, and these were taken as verities from which no more appeal could be made than an appeal against the weather. In America, however, re-creating these ancient patterns of subordination, like the re-creation of other patterns of European social organization, had been neither easy nor straightforward. The disorientation and disorganization of migration frequently jumbled the boundaries of gender; on top of this, the turmoil of the Revolution and the Revolution’s appeal to an equality of natural rights over traditional hierarchy rendered unquestioned male control over women much less easy to assume and much less legitimate in America.
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Yet it would be a grave mistake to overestimate the independence of women in the new republic. “It is needful,” warned Catharine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “that certain relations be sustained, which involve the duties of
subordination.” That included “the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, employer and employed, each involving the relative duties of subordination.” Otherwise, “Society could never go forward, harmoniously, nor could any craft or profession be successfully pursued, unless these superior and subordinate relations be instituted and sustained.” American law continued to be guided by English common law until well into the nineteenth century, and under English common law, marriage very nearly meant the legal annihilation of a woman. Up to the point that an adult woman married, she suffered no special restrictions and could own property in the same way as men; once a woman was married, however, her property and property rights were automatically transferred to her husband, and she was permitted to own nothing in her own name. Married women could not make contracts, could not sue, could not write a will, and could not buy or sell, except over their husbands’ signatures. The United States might be a liberal democracy, but it was a democracy of patriarchs, where adult males controlled public institutions and the organization of their families and spoke as their families’ voices in their communities. The vast majority of black women in the republic were chattel slaves for whom the word
patriarch
had a much more ominous meaning. The small number of free black women occupied only the poorest rungs of the economic ladder, and many deliberately stayed unmarried in order to retain what few property rights they were entitled to.
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Still, the logic of democracy always agitated restlessly for more and greater liberty, independence, and property, and the intrusion of market capitalism joined hands with that logic. Attaching artificial power, especially in the form of the steam engine, to the manufacture of goods transformed laborers, who lived by raw physical strength, into operatives, who lived by tending machines, and machines could be tended by women as readily as by men. “The whirl and whiz of belts and clogs, all seemed like the greetings of cherished friends,” declared the heroine of Charlotte Hillbourne’s “factory girl” novel. “I wrote and sang and chatted, fearless of listening critics, and my daily invocations to Heaven’s throne were heard only by the great Father, as they arose from my lips, while bending busily over my daily task.”
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At the same time, men’s work was increasingly transferred out of the home-based shop or farm and into commerce; the home ceased to be a productive unit over
which they presided, and instead became a refuge from the cares and weariness of market competition—a refuge that wives erected as a solace for their battered husbands “to smoothe, to comfort and to heal.” Men “go forth into the world, amidst the scenes of business” only to “behold every principle of justice and of honor, and even the dictates of common honesty disregarded, and the delicacy of our moral sense is wounded,” wrote Sara Josepha Hale, the editor of the
Ladies’ Magazine
, in 1830. In “the sanctuary of home,” by contrast, women bestow “sympathy, honor, virtue,” and “there disinterested love is ready to sacrifice every thing at the altar of affection. To render home happy, is woman’s peculiar province.”
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Two paths, then, opened up for American women in the decades before the Civil War: retreating more deeply into domestic life or demanding competitive personal rights for themselves in a market-oriented society where women’s exclusion no longer made any workaday sense. In July 1848, a group of 200 women, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, organized a women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York. The Declaration of Sentiments that the Seneca Falls convention adopted announced that “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” and they concluded by demanding what women in America had possessed in only one place since the Revolution (in New Jersey) and which they had not had at all since 1807—the right to vote. Two years later, they organized a National Women’s Rights Convention, at which was denied

the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or of any individual to decide for another Individual what is and what is not their “proper sphere”; that the proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest to which they are able to attain; what this is, can not be ascertained without complete liberty of choice; woman, therefore, ought to choose for herself what sphere she will fill, what education she will seek, and what employment she will follow, and not be held bound to accept, in submission, the rights, the education, and the sphere which man thinks proper to allow her.
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Did this include marching to war? The most immediate test of any claim to civil equality would be the equality of the bayonet, since the most ancient and durable “proper sphere” was the one that shielded women from involvement in war and assigned to men the role of combatants. For that reason, the Civil War opened the
risky question of what women—if they wanted that vote and the other civil rights which went with it—could or would do once the unsettled atmosphere of war settled over them. At the most basic level, the outbreak of the Civil War rallied the sectional patriotism of women fully as much as that of men. “The secession of Virginia is the work of her women,” George Fitzhugh proclaimed in 1861. “With a prescience and a zeal surpassing that of men” and reminiscent of the “annals of Sparta,” Southern women “urged on the present revolution, and… are now devoting all their energies and industry to clothe the soldier, to heal his wounds, to tend on him in sickness, and to relieve the wants of his family.” Sarah Morgan of Baton Rouge, who kept one of the war’s most interesting diaries, did not believe in secession, “but I do in Liberty. … The North cannot subdue us. We are too determined to be free.”
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Some of that patriotism was mixed with the half-formed expectation that crossing over into the state of war meant entrance to a new social territory. “I’ve often longed to see a war,” wrote Louisa May Alcott in April 1861, “and now I have my wish.” For Alcott, war made her “long to be a man” and thus upset the entire hierarchy of gender values. “Felt very martial and Joan-of-Arc-y,” Alcott wrote after a visit to Fort Warren in Boston harbor, “as I stood on the walls with the flag flying over me and cannon all about.” The nineteen-year-old Morgan loathed “women who lounge through life, between the sofa and rocking chair with dear little dimpled hands that are never raised except to brush away a fly.” The war excited Morgan to the point of anger at her confinement, and she wrote angrily, “If I was only a man! I don’t know a woman here who does not groan over her misfortune in being clothed in petticoats; why can’t we fight as well as the men?” Julia LeGrand, another prolific Confederate diary keeper, also chafed at the bonds of womanhood, and sighed against leading “the lives which women have led since Troy fell… while men, more privileged, are abroad and astir, making name and fortune and helping make a nation.”
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Almost as an answer to that complaint, a number of American women managed to slip into direct roles in combat by donning men’s clothing and volunteering for the armies as men (and given the lax medical examination processes, this turned out to be easier than it might seem). Some of these women, such as Lucy Matilda Thompson, were simply following lovers, husbands, or brothers who cooperated in the disguise: Thompson saw her husband enlist in the 18th North Carolina in 1861, and then “cut her thick hair close to her head, took up a few seams in one of her husband’s suits, oiled her squirrel musket, and boarded a troop train for Virginia, under the name of ‘Private Bill Thompson.’” Not until her husband was killed and she herself wounded in 1862 was Thompson discovered to be a woman and summarily
discharged. For other women, the war offered an opportunity not to follow men but to evade them and to escape the restraints of custom imposed by a “proper sphere.” Sara Emma Edmonds “was born into this world with some dormant antagonism toward man” and “longed to go forth and do” by killing “one rebel after another.” Edmonds managed to serve, with or without male connivance, as a Union nurse, spy, and soldier, and the frontispiece illustration to her 1865 memoirs shows her booted and spurred (and skirted), with a hard-set jaw and a savage grip on her riding crop, ready to ride down any opposition—even from her readers.
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All told, between 250 and 400 women disguised as men found their way into either the Federal or Confederate armies. A variety of complications made their enlistments short ones. “There was a corporal taken sick on the picket line close by us the other night,” wrote Henry Hunt of the 64th New York.

… the corporal was taken to a house close by and before morning there was a little corporal in bed with her. It appears that she enlisted with her lover last fall and dressed in men[’]s clothes and by some means deceived the doctor when examined and has been with the Army all winter and tented with her sweetheart.
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Others managed to elude detection and dismissal for considerable periods of time, some until the close of the war and beyond. Elizabeth Compton, a Canadian, enlisted seven different times under different names and with different male disguises, serving in the 125th Michigan for eighteen months in one instance before being detected. Jennie Hodgers was mustered into the 95th Illinois in 1862 as “Albert Cashier,” survived forty battles and skirmishes, and continued to live as an honored male Civil War veteran until 1911, when an automobile accident disclosed his/her identity. Some women kept their secrets far longer than anyone expected. In 1934, a farmer near the old Shiloh battlefield unearthed nine human skeletons with bits of uniforms and buttons that identified them as soldiers; one of the skeletons was that of a woman.
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