African American Women During the Civil War

Ella Forbes

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136712814
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire du monde

This study uses an abundance of primary sources to restore African American female participants in the Civil War to history by documenting their presence, contributions and experience. Free and enslaved African American women took part in this process in a variety of ways, including black female charity and benevolence. These women were spies, soldiers, scouts, nurses, cooks, seamstresses, laundresses, recruiters, relief workers, organizers, teachers, activists and survivors. They carried the honor of the race on their shoulders, insisting on their right to be treated as "ladies" and knowing that their conduct was a direct reflection on the African American community as a whole.
For too long, black women have been rendered invisible in traditional Civil War history and marginal in African American chronicles. This book addresses this lack by reclaiming and resurrecting the role of African American females, individually and collectively, during the Civil War. It brings their contributions, in the words of a Civil War participant, Susie King Taylor, "in history before the people."

CHAPTER 1

In History Before the People: Introduction

“There are many people who do not know what some of the colored women did during the war … These things should be kept in history before the people. There has never been a greater war in the United States than the one of 186 1, where so many lives were lost, —not men alone but noble women as well.”’ Susie King Taylor wrote these words in her 1902 narrative, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, to show “that there were ‘loyal women,’ as well as men, in those days, who did not fear shell or shot, who cared for the sick and dying; women who camped and fared as the boys did …”² She could speak authoritatively because she experienced “the terrors of that war” as an active participant.³ One of the few firsthand African American female accounts, King's memoir documented her own ordeal during the Civil War but her experience represents the determined, noble spirit that innumerable black women displayed during a period of great importance to the African American community. And it is still true that many people do not know that African American women played an important role in the Civil War —they have been largely lost to history.

186,000 African American men served the Union as soldiers and an additional 30,000 as sailors. They represented approximately 10% of all Union troops. African Americans, though, suffered disproportionate casualties when compared to white soldiers. About 37,000 of them died during the Civil War: 2,870 died in combat; 4,000 from unknown causes; and 29,756 from illness due to inferior food, clothing, equipment and medical care.⁴ Many of the nearly one quarter million African Americans who performed other service as laborers, cooks, laundresses, and servants were women. A far greater number of black women simply subsisted, resisted and survived this terrible conflict.

Most African Americans saw the Civil War as an opportunity to end the enslavement of Africans in the United States and to make real the ultimate truism: that the liberation of African Americans was only going to come about through the efforts of African Americans. Although the war itself was relatively short, it was a pivotal and defining period in African American history because it was the culmination of many years of one type of struggle and its end signaled a new and different battle. African American history is still referred to in terms of antebellum and post-bellum activities, in terms of what African Americans were doing before the Civil War and what has happened to us since the war.

Therefore, black women had as much a stake in the outcome of the conflict as African American men. To show their commitment to the cause, they participated in a variety of ways, offering whatever skills they possessed: directly as spies, scouts, camp workers, nurses, cooks, seamstresses, recruiting agents, teachers, activists, fundraisers, organizers, and relief workers; less directly and more covertly by engaging in resistance activities such as work slowdowns, strikes, sabotage, insubordination and fleeing if they were enslaved; and indirectly, by entrepreneurial activities and by keeping families and homes together for returning soldiers and sailors. In the process they elaborated on and further developed an existing paradigm of black female charity, activism and resistance.

Coming from all backgrounds and walks of life, the women's service was fueled by incalculable and varied experiences. Nevertheless, they all tapped into the existing tradition of black female benevolence. Categorization of the women's contributions, consequently, is a bit difficult because they did not confine themselves to one sphere or activity. Sallie Daffin may have been an educator but she was also a relief worker and a journalist. Harriet Tubman was a spy, scout and soldier as well as a nurse. Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a recruiter, journalist and a paid agent for a relief organization. Most women who did aid work among refugees were involved in other benevolent activities such as succoring African American soldiers.

A large number of free women were already activists in a multiplicity of causes, usually racial, before the Civil War and they were well-known in their own right. Some were participants in numerous organizations and they used their networking skills to further their Civil War activities. Often the women came from families which had long histories of anti-slavery activism. Some women, on the other hand, were forced to act because they or loved ones may have been enslaved and they needed to relieve aspects of that particular burden. Occasionally, women, such as Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, are memorable became they are considered nontypical, larger-than-life figures. However, most of the women were ordinary people who seized the opportunity to work for African American liberation by striving for their own freedom.

Like any other community, ideological, religious, social and class differences existed within African American society. But despite these differences, any debate about race always centered on how best to relieve the racist oppression everyone suffered. Black women were involved in the debate, not as women, but as African Americans and they were well aware that they were not oppressed because they were women, but because they were African women, African being the operative word.

Class differences were often imposed on, and sometimes assimilated by, the African American community. One area of class determination was seen in the treatment of “free” African Americans versus the treatment of newly-freed people, or refugees. Generally, free African Americans were seen, by whites, as more civilized and deserving of some rights, however limited, while the formerly enslaved were seen as so degraded by the experience of enslavement that they were incapable of exercising citizenship. Some middle and upper class African Americans held opinions about freedpeople which were similar. However, free blacks, most often, felt that the formerly enslaved could be elevated to citizenship with a little education and training. After all, most of them had come out of the enslavement experience in one way or another and class distinctions within the African American community did not blur the racial discrimination that all African Americans experienced.

Therefore, they were thoroughly familiar with racism because they experienced discrimination in most social and civil areas. The same racism that prevented their fathers, husbands, brothers and sons from exercising the rights of citizenship affected African American women in very concrete and material ways. It was a constant — always there to be dealt with, regardless of gender, status or class. Consequently, whatever happened to African American men, impacted upon African American women. The Delaware, Ohio Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society issued a written address to the Convention of Disfranchised Citizens of Ohio in 1856 which spoke to this point. The discourse urged the black men of the state to continue fighting for the rights the state legislature had deprived them of, saying, “we offer this testimonial of our sympathy and interest in the cause in which you are engaged …” The deposition, written by Sara G. Stanley, later to be an important and dedicated teacher of freedpeople, went on to assert, “press on! Manhood's prerogatives are yours by Almighty fiat.” In a collective crusade with the black men of Ohio, the “Christian wives, mothers and daughters” of the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society “pledge ourselves to exert our influence unceasingly in the cause of Liberty and Humanity.”’ This sentiment was translated into action during the Civil War when liberation became the black community's common cause, no matter what gender, rank, class or ideology.

The infamous Dred Scott Decision, rendered in 1857, had left no doubt about the status of Africans in this country: they were not considered citizens. Roger B. Taney, the Chief Supreme Court Justice, said about African Americans in the course of stating the Court's decision: “They had more than a century before [the signing of the Declaration of Independence] been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to be associated with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and the Negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold, and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever a profit could be made by it. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. It was regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in politics.”

White public opinion, therefore, determined public policy and public policy mandated the disfranchisement of African Americans. In most northern states African American men did not have the right to vote. African Americans were denied passports because they were not considered citizens. Discrimination in public accommodations was rampant. The judicial system was racially unfair. Whites engaged in physical intimidation and violent actions against African Americans. Nonetheless, African Americans expected that black participation in the Civil War would finally establish their place as viable citizens in American society once and for all by reversing white public opinion. Women were to play a major, if sometimes supporting, role in that process.

In that context, Anne Demby asked the question,

What should the colored race do in the present crisis? is a question that forces itself upon the mind of every thinking man and woman. Should we meekly submit to the threats, insults, and bruises that have been heaped upon our ancestors, and upon ourselves for so long a period, or should we go forth and cry our wrongs from the hill-sides or from the mountain tops? No. Then what should we do?

She began with “we” because white supremacy was not gender-biased; African American men and women both suffered the same racism. However, she placed the role of African American women in the traditional realm of nurturer and educator:

Mothers should inculcate it into the minds of their children that, although many of them may have been born slaves, and held in that brutal condition and forced to drink to the dregs that most bitter cup of human degradation — and although they have, for many years been subjected to the most demoralizing influences that slavery, in its hideous form, and subtle nature could impar — while the design of this creation was not that they should stand with folded hands and cry for help, but that they should, with uplifted hands, and willing hearts, rush forward to conquer and to the conquest, never fearing while they have truth and justice on their side …

According to Demby, men had a more direct and active part to play in the conflict,

The fathers should also teach their sons that although the colored man is denied the right of political franchise, the right is not denied him of shouldering his musket, and marching to the field of battle shouting, for their watch-word, ‘Liberty or Death.’ … names that are borne by sable sons, shall shine with a lustre that the darkness and shame of slavery can never extinguish …

Apparently no believer in passive resistance, Demby, like several of her contemporary African American male activists, recognized the necessity of armed action.

It is to be considered a menial act for any one of the colored race to shrink from the duties that are now devolved upon them, but they should aspire, and, by having God on the one hand, and the sword in the other, they should, by the might of God, and by their own might and patriotism, slay the grim monster slavery, and trample his mangled corpse beneath their feet, crying Truth and Justice, Liberty or Death …⁶

While placing her words in the context of the Civil War, she echoed activists like David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass who had previously loudly proclaimed the right of African Americans to violently resist enslavement and oppression.

Demby and other African American women, free or freed, consciously resolved not to shrink from the new duties that the Civil War visited upon them. They operated on whatever level they could to make a contribution to their community during the Civil War. Acting with an agency they had always possessed, they went forward, “crying Truth and Justice, Liberty or Death.” Their actions secure their place in history.

NOTES

1. Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp With the 33rd United States Colored Troops (New York: Arno Press, 1968, 1902), 67–68.

2. Ibid., preface.

3. Ibid., 51.

4. Otto Friedrich, “We Will Not Do Duty Any Longer For Seven Dollars Per Month,” American Heritage (February 1988): 68.

5. Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States: From the Colonial Times Through the Civil War (New York: Citadel Press, 1979, 1951), 381, 383.

6. Christian Recorder, 8 October 1864.

CHAPTER 2

Full of the Spirit of Freedom: Freedwomen and the System

The experience and contributions of newly-freedwomen were understandably different from the “civilized” contributions made by free African American women. That was mainly because of the imposition of an inferior status which determined, right from the beginning of their freedom, that they would have to contend with more obstacles than just gender. A major hindrance was the assumption on the part of whites that freedpeople required control disguised as guardianship. Greed, racism and classism were also added to the mix.

Most of the fugitives who fled to Union lines were considered “contraband” or confiscated property. The term was used, initially, to indicate that...