Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (74 page)

These mutterings of disloyalty came mostly from Confederate women who stayed put; a far darker kind of misery awaited those who tried to turn refugee. As early as 1862, Federal invasions of northern Virginia and Tennessee were dislodging large numbers of Southerners, mostly women whose men had left for the army and who feared the unlovely rule of Yankee occupiers, and mostly those with slaves who feared that their slaves could not be relied upon anywhere near the Northern armies. Over the course of the war, nearly 250,000 Southerners fled from the battle zones to areas deeper within the Confederacy. Taken together with the flight of blacks in the other direction and with the three million men sucked up into the whirlwind of the armies as they crossed state after state and river after river, the Civil War produced a demographic disruption all across the eastern half of North America that had no equal in the American memory.
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Nor did the problems stop once Southerners had gotten away to a reasonable distance from the Yankee invaders. Once removed, refugee planters who had dragged
their slaves along with them had no work for the slaves to do and no income from cotton planting to feed them. In order to earn money from their slaves, refugee planters hired them out in record numbers to public and private war industries, as teamsters, ironworkers, and even “nitre diggers.” This, in turn, only further destabilized the slave work regimen. As slaves moved out of the plantation environment and into the wider boundaries of urban employment for cash, the old systems of supervision broke down, while wartime conditions made it impossible to develop a new work system to absorb the sudden influx of industrial slaves.
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Even without the excess baggage of slaves, Southern women refugees found the incessant string of moves from one unfamiliar place to another, or from one increasingly reluctant brace of relatives to another, to be a counsel of despair. The longer the war rolled on, the more all trace of Southern civic life disappeared, as individual survival became the paramount concern. Sarah Morgan and her family fled Baton Rouge under a barrage of Union shells to seek refuge on a plantation near Port Hudson; when the war came up to Port Hudson, they fled again to Lake Pontchartrain, and then finally into occupied New Orleans, where Sarah was sheltered under the roof of her Unionist half-brother. “Give me my home, my old home once more,” she lamented, in what could have been the words of every Confederate woman tossed in the tornado of destruction and disappointed expectations for their own womanhood. “O my home, my home! I could learn to be a woman there, and a true one, too. Who will teach me now?”
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As the war forced women into new and unaccustomed roles, it simultaneously undermined women’s notions of their reliance on men, and introduced them to new views of their own capacities. This was particularly true for women who stepped into the void created by the army medical services’ miserable unpreparedness for handling the frightful casualties of Civil War battlefields. Women had been assigned to so many domestic roles related to caregiving that it required only the shortfall in male medical personnel before women began to volunteer themselves as nurses, and in a few cases, such as that of Union army surgeon Mary Walker, as doctors. Before the 1850s, army medicine, like the army itself, had been the preserve of male doctors and male nurses, and women could scarcely find opportunity for medical education in the United States, much less an opening for medical practice.
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The work of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War had cracked that particular wall of gender separation down to its foundations, and Nightingale
became the stepping-stone for a small number of American women to open up military nursing to women volunteers. Not surprisingly, female nurses were at first not welcomed by the doddering army medical establishments. “There is scarcely a day passes that I do not hear some derogatory remarks about the ladies who are in hospitals, until I think, if there is any credit due them at all, it is for the moral courage they have in braving public opinion,” wrote Kate Cumming in 1863. But the administrative record soon carved out by Dorothea Dix as the superintendent of army nurses in the North, by Captain Sally Tomkins and her Richmond hospital, and by U.S. Sanitary Commission nurses on the Federal hospital ships on the western rivers soon dampened the carping. Tompkins, the sister of a Confederate colonel, opened her own private hospital for 1,330 Confederate soldiers in Richmond and managed to evade bureaucratic efforts to incorporate her hospital into the army hospital system by obtaining a captain’s commission from Jefferson Davis. She was “original, old fashioned and tireless in well doing,” recalled Thomas De Leon, “… as simple as a child and as resolute as a veteran.”
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What was far more discouraging to women nurses was the appalling slaughter churned up by battle, and the dirt and incompetence that pervaded the army medical services. When Cornelia Hancock and a group of army nurses caught up with the Army of the Potomac at Fredericksburg in 1864, they walked into an abandoned church that the army had converted into a hospital. There “the scene beggared all description.” The two male surgeons with them “were paralyzed by what they saw,” Hancock wrote home, for “rain had poured in through the bullet-riddled roofs of the churches until our wounded lay in pools of water made bloody by their seriously wounded condition.” Louisa May Alcott, who nursed briefly in a military hospital in Georgetown before falling dangerously ill, described her hospital as a “perfect pestilence-box… cold, damp, dirty, full of vile odors from wounds, kitchens, wash rooms, & stables.” By the end of the war, only 3,200 women had actually served as nurses in the armies, not more than a fifth of the overall number of military nurses.

Rather than take the risks posed by nursing, far more women found their ways to new jobs in Northern and Southern textile mills, hurriedly manufacturing cartridges, clothing, and military equipment under the wide umbrella of government war contracts. The absence of men also created a gap in teaching, another previously all-male profession that now began to admit women, and the explosive growth in government paperwork opened up employment for women in government and Treasury offices. By the end of the war, the U.S. Treasury was employing 447 “treasury girls” as copyists and currency counters.
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What is not clear is whether these new opportunities, however much satisfaction they gave, opened any new windows for redefining political or social power for women. Many of the wartime positions available to women were as replacements for men, and those positions often disappeared as soon as the war was over and the men returned. It was only at incidental moments that a real departure for women and genuine movement toward gender equality took shape. In 1863, a core group of women veterans of the Seneca Falls convention organized a Women’s National Loyal League, which took as its primary object the creation of a massive petition drive in support of an amendment to the Constitution that would abolish slavery as a legal institution. That, in turn, became the organizational platform from which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony launched a parallel movement in 1866, the American Equal Rights Association, to ensure a similar constitutional amendment which would grant voting rights to women.

The only real weapons Stanton and Anthony had at their disposal were petitions and persuasion, and they gained little ground against the entrenched legal restraints that deprived women in many states not only of the vote but also of the most basic republican privilege, property ownership. Mary Ashton Livermore, who had already carved out a prominent career as a reformer and editor of a religious magazine in the 1850s, turned her organizing talents to private fund-raising for the United States Sanitary Commission during the war. When she attempted to sign a contract for constructing the fairgrounds for the 1863 Northwestern Sanitary Fair in Chicago, however, she was politely informed that no contract with her signature on it had any legal standing, even if she paid the contractors in cash. Only her husband’s signature carried any standing in Illinois law. “By the laws of the state in which we lived, our individual names were not worth the paper on which they were written.” In the face of this legal stonewalling and the demand to combine gender and racial civil rights, Stanton and Anthony were unable to hold their equal-rights movement together, and the drive fractured into a radical wing led by Stanton and Anthony (which continued to press for a national constitutional amendment) and a moderate wing led by Mary Livermore and Henry Ward Beecher (which wanted to limit the campaign to what could be accomplished in state legislatures). None of them lived to see American women gain the right to vote in 1920.
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The war brought changes to American women, but only some changes and only to some women. In the confusion caused by the war, both the number of women
who left the domestic sphere to find work in the field, the government office, or the hospital and the number of jobs that women were admitted to be capable of doing increased. But the war that had made this movement possible also doomed its further growth, since so much of this work was the creature of the war itself. The legal structure of restraints on women remained unchanged, and once the war was over, the tide of women’s advance into new realms of work and life receded to its prewar boundaries. This retreat was reinforced by a certain measure of class as well as gender expectations. Black women and lower-class white women had never been part of the domestic expectation, and both had always worked outside the domestic boundary; only the national emergency of the war sanctioned the movement of upper- and middle-class white women in the same outward direction. Once that emergency was over, the class bias of women’s work reasserted itself, and women’s work outside the family circle reclaimed its stigma of being “poor folks’ work.”

The Civil War represented neither advance nor retreat for American women, but only a moment of unspeakable turbulence when all the customary handholds disappeared and men and women were forced to find new ways through the storm of conflict. For Clara Barton, who made her Civil War nursing career the foundation for organizing the International Red Cross, the war meant a gain of what Barton estimated to be “fifty years in advance of the normal position which continued peace… would have assigned her.” For Susan B. Anthony, the postwar crusader for women’s rights, the war actually stifled most of the progress women had made toward winning the right to vote. It was “the crime of the ages” for the United States to fight “for national supremacy over the states to enslave & disenfranchise—and then refuse to exercise that power on behalf of half the people.” Barton and Anthony looked at the war from two very different angles, and perhaps neither were entirely right or, as another generation would demonstrate, entirely wrong.
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By the fall of 1863, the Civil War had taken on new and unexpected shapes for all Americans. The political goals of the war had expanded for both Northerners and Southerners, from simple reunion to emancipation in the Northern case, and from simple secession to the forging of a new Confederate nation in the South. The added turmoil of moving millions of people out of their homes and out of the accustomed tracks of their lives, and the relentlessly-lengthening casualty lists threatened to break up and disorganize an entire generation of American lives. After two years of dislocation, shock, and carnage, Americans were groping in exhaustion for the
meaning and purpose of the war that would give them some idea of why the war was being fought. For those answers they turned to the philosophers, moralists, and clergymen who constituted the intellectual elite of the American republic and made it what Walt Whitman cheerfully described as a “Union always swarming with blatherers.”
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America was the off spring of movements of the mind, and the South was not the only place in American life where the Enlightenment was enmeshed in the challenge of the Romantics. The most formidable reply to the burden of Enlightenment reason came from Immanuel Kant, and it is from Kant’s formulations of a “transcendent” realm of knowledge that Northern Romantics formulated a critique of Enlightenment politics. Kant’s foremost American admirer was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a former Unitarian clergyman who had abandoned the ministry to take up a life of writing and lecturing across the country. Around Emerson clustered the crown jewels of Boston’s Romantic intellect—Henry Hedge, George Putnam, Margaret Fuller, George Ripley, Orestes Brownson, and Bronson Alcott—whom Emerson styled as Transcendentalists, “from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant, of Konigsberg, who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke.” The Transcendentalists found the “buzz and din” of democratic politics distasteful. They withdrew from an engagement with democratic political culture and celebrated a radical individualism built upon “self-reliance” and “self-culture.” That, in turn, gave them little to admire and still less to understand about a civil war in a democracy. Emerson wanted “to insulate the individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world as his, and man shall treat man with as a sovereign state with a sovereign state,” and he held himself aloof from even the most pressing reform movements.
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Few of the Transcendentalists bothered their heads with abolition; Emerson, in particular, had been notoriously slow to embrace the anti-slavery cause, not so much from indifference to the moral question at stake as from his reluctance to imbrue his hands in politics. “Society gains nothing whilst a man, not himself renovated, attempts to renovate things around him.” Slavery he opposed, but largely out of the Kantian conviction that slavery was a denial of human authenticity (or free will). With the firing on Fort Sumter, Emerson was surprised almost in spite of himself with how “a sentiment mightier than logic, wide as light, strong as gravity, reaches into the college, the bank, the farm-house, and the church” and was sweeping up even the most detached and self-reliant minds up in a “whirlwind of patriotism.” Still, few New England intellectuals stayed for long within that whirlwind. Rather than seeing the war as the test of liberalism’s virtues, the Romantic historian Francis
Parkman thought that the war had exposed “the fallacies of ultra democracy,” and though he supported the war, it was more for the opportunities it gave young New England blue bloods to demonstrate the individual virtues of heroism, fortitude, and manliness.
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The death of Robert Gould Shaw at Battery Wagner, for instance, was seen less as a blow for racial justice and more as proof that Boston’s wealthy mercantile elite had not grown stagnant and effeminate.