The Women's War In the South

Description

The Women's War in the South: Recollections and Reflections of the American Civil War, edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, recounts the manner in which Southern women experienced the war and the changes it brought about in their lives. Filled with excerpts from the letters, books, diaries, and postwar writings the women left behind, it reveals the other side of the war—the women's war—through first-person accounts of women running farms, buying and selling goods, working outside the home, serving as spies, and even participating in combat in disguise.

Sujets

• Civil War Period
• Histoire
• Catherine Clinton
• Martin H. Greenberg
• American Civil War
• United States
• History
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 février 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620453681
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 1999 by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Cumberland House Publishing, Inc., 431 Harding Industrial Drive, Nashville, Tennessee 37211-3160.
 
The acknowledgments on pages xi-xii constitute an extension of this page. Cumberland House Publishing has made every effort to contact and acquire the appropriate permissions for materials not deemed within the public domain.
 
Cover design by Bateman Design, Nashville, Tennessee.
 
Library of Congress Cataloing-in-Publication Data
 
The women’s war in the South : recollections and reflections of the American Civil War / edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg.

p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
9781620453681
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Women. 2. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Personal narratives, Confederate. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Social aspects. 4. Women—Southern States—Biography. 5. Confederate States of America—History—Sources. 6. Women—Confederate States of America—History—Sources. I. Waugh, Charles. II. Greenberg, Martin Harry.
E628.W93 1999
973.7’082—dc21 98-56396 CIP
 
Printed in the United States of America
 
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9—04 03 02 01 00 99
To Frank D. McSherry Jr.
Table of Contents
Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Preface Introduction: Southern Women and the Civil War Recollections
1 What a School–Girl, Saw of John Brown’s Raid 2 When the States Seceded 3 A Contemporary Account of the Inauguration of Jefferson, Davis 4 Mrs. Greenhow Confederate Spy 5 A Virginia Girl in the First Year of the War 6 Personal Recollections of the Battle of Chancellorsville 7 Stonewall’s Window 8 A Woman’s Experiences During the Siege of Vicksburg 9 A Confederate Girl Visits Pennsylvania, July—September 1863 10 Emma Sansom, Heroine of Immortal Courage 11 Woman Saved Richmond City 12 Letters of a Confederate Mother: Charleston in the Sixties 13 A Northern Woman in the Confederacy 14 “Lieutenant Harry T. Buford,” C.S.A. 15 Memories of a Hospital Matron 10 For Better or for Worse 17 Letters from the Heart
Reflections
18 The Siren of Bull Run 19 The Rose of Mississippi 20 Queen of the Confederacy 21 The Battling Belles 22 Sally Tompkins, Captain, Confederate Army 23 The Bread Riot in Richmond, 1863 24 Coping in Confederate Appalachia: Portrait of a Mountain Woman and Her Community at War 25 Emily Lyles Harris: A Piedmont Farmer During the Civil War 26 A Civil War Experience of Some Arkansas Women in Indian Territory 27 The Impact of the Civil War on a Southern Marriage: Clement and Virginia Tunstall Clay of Alabama 28 The Trial of Mrs. Surratt and the, Lincoln Assassination Plot
Notes For Further Reading Index
Preface
P RIOR, TO the Civil War, society dictated that women were to stay at home, prepare the meals for their household, bear children, and be seen and not heard. This ideal was called the “cult of domesticity,” which maintained that women’s natural abilities were limited to the home and that they certainly lacked an aptitude for political issues. The war, however, changed that by forcing women into several roles vacated by the men who had taken up arms. The manner in which women met this challenge was the first step toward equality. The letters, books, diaries, and postwar writings these women left behind reveal this other side of the war—the women’s war—excerpts from which make up most of this volume, including first-person accounts taken from late-eighteenth- and early twentieth-century sources.
The greatest contribution of the women in the South, however, was probably the most difficult to see: They kept things going at home. They did what their husbands had done before the war. As the war progressed, women ran the family farms and those with slaves worked with their overseers to keep the crops growing. When their livestock was confiscated, women hitched themselves to the plows. They bought and sold goods. Hands that had known only cooking and needlework became blistered and calloused. Many women in the cities came to be employed by the government and the factories trying to keep the armies supplied in the field.
As the war intensified and casualties mounted, women found themselves entering the nursing profession. In 1862 Confederate nurse Kate Cumming noted: “The foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick. We have to walk in blood and water, but we think nothing of it.” Another nurse described finding maggots in the wounds of the soldiers under her care. In one instance she claimed to have pulled a pint of them from a single wound.
Some of the more adventuresome served as spies because the prejudices of the times placed them above suspicion; men did not expect women to take up this dangerous work. Among the most notable and successful Southern spies was Rose Greenhow, a Washington socialite who coaxed incredible information from the politicians and officers who enjoyed her company and conveyed it to Richmond. Details of her story appear in the pages that follow.
A few hundred women surreptitiously joined the ranks of the armies and endured combat. Malinda Blalock from Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, followed her husband, Keith, into uniform. She cut her hair and enlisted in the Twenty-sixth North Carolina as his sixteen-year-old brother, Sam. When her husband was discharged from the army for disease, Malinda revealed herself and was discharged at the same time. A more sweeping epic concerned Loreta Janeta Velazquez, whose “adventures” span the whole war according to the memoirs excerpted in this book and whose truthfulness has been doubted often.
Southern women had strong feelings about this war and often confronted invading Yankees face-to-face without weapons. Their frustrations were furiously recorded in their diaries, such as Sarah Morgan wrote in 1864: “If I was a man. Oh, if I was only a man! For two years, that has been my only cry. Blood, fire, desolation—rather than submit we should light our own funeral pyre as a memorial to our sorrow and suffering.”
The war was something that Southern women supported patriotically, but the war meant shortages and sacrifice. The women of the Confederacy quickly focused on survival, notwithstanding the legend of their willingness to do anything for the cause. When William Tecumseh Sherman’s soldiers marched across Georgia, the desperate situation took a turn for the worse as a quarter of a million Southern women became refugees and fled from the invading Yankee army.
As Sherman’s army foraged liberally across the countryside from Atlanta to Savannah, it laid waste to the land itself, burning barns, killing livestock, and destroying crops. The only opposition was the Southern women intent on maintaining their property as their husbands had left it. For these women, the war was on their doorstep.
In addition to the hundreds of thousands of men who died in the war, untold numbers of women lost their lives to disease, starvation, and battle. For the survivors, the grieving would not end quickly, but amid their sorrow emerged a legacy of independence and freedom. Women emerged from the wreckage and carnage of the war into a new society, where a woman’s place was not always confined to the home.
Women were engulfed by the war, and they were eyewitnesses to the events of 1861-65, recording those memories in letters and diaries. During the decades after the war and into the next century, many recounted these recollections in popular magazines like Harper’s and Century. Many of the articles reproduced in this book come from these sources, recalling their experiences for a new audience.

Acknowledgments
T HE SOURCES for the selections in this volume are listed below. The original spelling and punctuation have been followed throughout with only minor typographical variations for the sake of consistency. Reference notes have been combined in a separate section following the text.
 
Beymer, William G. “Mrs. Greenhow, Confederate Spy.” Harper’s 124 (March 1912): 563–76.
Bleser, Carol K., and Frederick M. Heath. “The Impact of the Civil War on a Southern Marriage: Clement and Virginia Tunstall Clay of Alabama.” Civil War History 30 (1984): 197–220.
Cabell, William Preston. “Woman Saved Richmond City.” Southern Historical Papers 38 (1910): 350–58.
Chambers, Jenny. “What a School-Girl Saw of John Brown’s Raid.” Harper’s 104 (January 1902): 311–18.
Chancellor, Sue M. “Personal Recollections of the Battle of Chancellorsville.” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 66 (1968): 137-46.
Clinton, Catherine. “Southern Women and the Civil War.” Journal of Women’s History 8 (1996): 163-68.
Clune, Michael. “The Siren of Bull Run.” Harper’s Weekly 54, July 23, 1910, p. 20.
Davis, Varina. “Stonewall’s Widow.” Southern Historical Papers (1893): 340–43.
Fischer, Leroy H., ed. “A Civil War Experience of Some Arkansas Women in Indian Territory.” Chronicles of Oklahoma (Summer 1979): 137–63.
Fordney, Chris, ed. “Letters from the Heart.” Civil War Times Illustrated 34 (September-October 1995): 28, 73–82.
Gilman, Caroline H. “Letters of a Confederate Mother: Charleston in the Sixties.” Atlantic 137 (April 1926): 503–15.
Hall, Richard. “‘Lieutenant Harry T. Buford,’ C.S.A.” From Patriots in Disguise (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 107–153.
Harrison, Constance Cary. “A Virginia Girl in the First Year of the War.” Century 30 (1885): 606–14.
Hergesheimer, Joseph. “The Rose of Mississippi.” From Hergesheimer, Swords and Roses (New York: Knopf, 1919), 67–97.
Holzman, Robert S. “Sally Tompkins, Captain, Confederate Army.” Am