Women and the American Civil War

North-South Counterpoints

Judith Giesberg, Randall Miller

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781631013096
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Bürgerkriegsgeschichte

The scholarship on women's experiences in the U.S. Civil War is rich and deep, but much of it remains regionally specific or subsumed in more general treatments of Northern and Southern peoples during the war. In a series of eight paired essays, scholars examine women's comparable experiences across the regions, focusing particularly on women's politics, wartime mobilization, emancipation, wartime relief, women and families, religion, reconstruction, and Civil War memory. In each pairing, historians analyze women's lives, interests, and engagement in public issues and private concerns and think critically about what stories and questions still need attention. Among their questions are:

PART

Politics

Southern Women and Politics in
the Civil War Era

ELIZABETH R. VARON

“Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war; this war talk is spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream,” proclaims the iconic Southern belle, Scarlett O’Hara, in the opening scenes of the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind. This image of Southern women’s disdain for politics held sway in the public mind for much of the twentieth century. But the advent of women’s history as a serious scholarly discipline has brought to light a far more compelling and complex set of images. Scholarship of the past fifty years has established that Southern women were integral to nineteenth-century politics. They played a limited, largely symbolic role in the formal realm of “high” electoral politics, as ardent supporters of political parties; they participated in moral reform societies on behalf of causes such as temperance and in memorialization societies such as the Mount Vernon Ladies Association; they were prominent in print culture, contributing polemics to the slavery debates; and they played a robust role in the broader realm of “infrapolitics,” or the daily resistance of subordinate groups to the prevailing power structure.¹ Women’s actions—the flight of female slaves from plantations, for example, or the efforts by white female writers to defend slavery against abolitionist critiques—deepened the alienation of the North from the South.

When war broke out, white women contributed to the Confederate cause in a wide range of ways, most visibly as hospital workers. But the scope and duration of the war tested women’s patriotism, and thus a lively debate has taken shape among modern scholars over whether home front demoralization—white women’s waning commitment to Southern nationalism—was a major factor in spelling the doom of the Confederacy. Recent scholarship has also challenged us to break the habit of equating the South with the Confederacy, and to take into consideration female Unionists in the Civil War South, black and white, and also those women who resided in the war-torn slaveholding border states. Understanding the scope and variety of Southern women’s political activism is vital for understanding the war’s causes, course, and consequences.

Recent scholarship has elaborated interlocking story lines that “gender” the familiar narrative of sectional alienation. One line traces the divergence of gender conventions in the North and South, as economic modernization gave rise to new understandings of masculinity and femininity in the North even as the white South defended traditional patriarchy. Another traces the politicization of women in the antebellum era, as they were drawn into the slavery debates—implicated both in resistance to and defense of the peculiar institution. A third story line concerns how the first two developments were perceived: how the perception that the Northern and the Southern social orders had grown incompatible fed the conviction that the two sections were politically irreconcilable.²

These storylines offer us new perspectives on some familiar characters and events on the road to Civil War. For example, we all know about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s contribution, with her best-selling 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to the antislavery cause. Stowe represented the centrality of Northern women to the abolitionist movement and the use of sentimental fiction for political purposes. Stowe’s novel not only inflamed the proslavery press in the South, it also prompted a concerted response from white Southern female writers like Mary Eastman and Louisa McCord, who countered Stowe with rose-colored fantasies about the purported gentility and harmony of plantation life. Works like Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life As It Is, published the same year as Stowe’s book, were widely hailed in the proslavery press. Eastman offered readers a panoply of “contented” slaves and large doses of editorializing on slavery, in which she maintained that both the Bible and the Revolutionary forefathers had vouched for the institution. Such “anti-Tom” novels were the literary antecedents to that most enduring volley in the ongoing literary war over slavery, Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 revival of the plantation-fiction genre, Gone with the Wind.³

Eastman and McCord represent the paradox of conservative women’s political activism. They sought to defend the principle of social hierarchy: the doctrines of white supremacy and of “separate spheres” for men and women. According to the prevailing gender conventions of the era, the public sphere of politics, characterized by controversy, competition, and corruption, was the realm of men, while women were assigned to the safe and sedate private sphere of home and family. Women could exert influence, understood as gentle and noncoercive, as they did in a variety of charitable societies and church groups dedicated to aiding the unfortunate and spreading the gospel. But women should not exert power and court controversy. Southern critics of Harriet Beecher Stowe accused her of encroaching on the male terrain of politics and of representing the radical doctrine of women’s rights; but, paradoxically, women like McCord and Eastman themselves entered the public fray in order to level such accusations at Stowe.⁴

In defending slavery as a positive good, Eastman and McCord also represent the eclipse of a tenuous tradition of “gradualism” in the South. Some reform-minded women in the Upper South, such as Mary Blackford of Fredericksburg, Virginia, had supported the American Colonization Society (ACS)—which encouraged the manumission of slaves and their deportation to the African colony of Liberia—as a vehicle to promote the gradual, voluntary dismantling of slavery. Blackford, a staunch Episcopalian, trumpeted the religious benevolence of the cause, on the grounds that migrants to Africa would bring Christianity there and that she and her fellow ACS reformers were simply using familiar vehicles for benevolence, such as fundraising fairs and the distribution of tracts, to exhort their neighbors to good deeds. But these claims to benevolence did not insulate the ACS from criticism, as it came under withering attacks from abolitionists, who saw it as a front for proslavery interests, and slavery defenders, who saw it as a front for abolitionism. In the 1850s, as white Southerners closed ranks against the abolitionist threat, gradualism became politically suspect, and women like Blackford became marginalized.⁵

We all know the name of Harriet Tubman and recognize her role in leading the Underground Railroad in the 1850s. She was a remarkable, heroic individual.⁶ But she was not alone. Recent scholarship has recovered the names and stories of scores of female fugitives from slavery and of female Underground Railroad operatives, white and black, Northern and Southern, who fought their own campaign along the border of the free and slave states. Their stories may be forgotten today, but they were national news back then.⁷ When the slave Jane Johnson was rescued from her master (a prominent Southern politician) by the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia in 1855, her case became a national cause célèbre. Johnson risked recapture by testifying in public on behalf of her abolitionist allies and proclaiming the slave’s natural yearning for freedom; to the antislavery press, she represented the courage and dignity of enslaved women. To the proslavery press, however, she represented the faithlessness of Northerners, who, in defiance of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, refused to act as slave catchers. The hundreds of enslaved women who risked life and limb to seek freedom thus directly impacted the course of the sectional crisis: among the principal grievances of secessionists was their complaint that the border between North and South was too porous, and the Upper South too vulnerable to slave flight.⁸

Women who fled slavery and found refuge in the North entered the literary war over slavery by publishing narratives of their experiences. The most influential of these was Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the penname Linda Brent. Incidents offered a searing indictment of the sexual predations of slaveholding men and the callous cruelty of plantation mistresses. “No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear,” Jacobs explained. Jacobs points out that on the eve of the Civil War abolitionists were still fighting the problem of disbelief: the propensity of white Northerners to accept uncritically proslavery accounts of Southern life. “Reader, I draw no imaginary pictures of southern homes,” Jacobs declared. “I am telling you the plain truth. Yet when victims make their escape from this wild beast of Slavery, northerners consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den, ‘full of dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness.’”⁹

Slave narratives, together with WPA interviews (conducted during the New Deal by the Works Progress Administration, to chronicle the prewar experiences of former slaves) and other firsthand accounts, have made it possible for historians to recover the wide spectrum of slave resistance, including the daily acts of resistance on the part of slave women, such as feigning illness, work slowdowns, tool-breaking, and truancy (short-term flight). As the scholar Stephanie Camp has demonstrated, seemingly “small” or even covert gestures of defiance by the enslaved—the holding of illegal parties, away from the master’s gaze, or the display in the slave quarters of abolitionist images—created “rival geographies” on the plantation landscape, carving out zones of physical and psychological autonomy for slaves. Such acts must be regarded, Camp has persuasively argued, as “political,” for they sustained a culture of opposition to white domination that stoked the anxieties of slaveholders and served as a foundation for more overt forms of black politics during and after the Civil War.¹⁰

Moreover, it was not just Southern women’s actions but also gender aspersions that worked to escalate the sectional conflict. Attacks on the manhood and womanhood of one’s political opponents—the charge that they were not “true” men and women—were a staple of antebellum politics. Lashing out against the gender egalitarianism of radical antislavery societies, which featured women, including South Carolina’s anomalous Grimké sisters (elite slaveholders who repudiated slavery and the South), as orators and managers, antiabolitionists linked women’s rights to the specter of disunion. When thousands of Northern women signed petitions to Congress demanding an end to slavery and rejected the annexation of Texas, Southern politicians offered them jarring chastisements. Rep. Jesse A. Bynum of North Carolina, for example, declared in 1837 that it was an “awful omen, when women were stepping into the political sphere, calling on men to act.” Women’s agitation would result in a “civil war … that would drench the fairest fields of this great republic with brothers’ blood.”¹¹

Such attacks, which became more pointed in the 1850s, greatly eroded the trust between the North and South. Indeed, by the eve of war, many Northerners and Southerners had come to believe that the gender conventions of the two regions were antagonistic and incompatible. Defenders of slavery and “Southern rights” charged that Northern society, with its bent for social reform and its nascent women’s rights movement, was fundamentally hostile to the patriarchal social order of the slave South. As the proslavery Richmond Enquirer put it in 1856, in a typical accusation, antislavery Northerners who supported the new Republican Party threatened all of the pillars of traditional society: they were “at war with religion, female virtue, private property, and distinctions of race.”¹²

Gender politics continued to roil Congress as well. In 1856 Preston Brooks, a representative from South Carolina, savagely beat Sen. Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate with a cane after Sumner insulted the “honor” of the South with a speech on slavery in Kansas. On its face, this seems the perfect illustration of the maxim that politics was a man’s world. But when put in its context, the incident illustrates how gender aspersions were central to the slavery debates. Sumner’s speech had indicted the forceful incursions by Southern settlers in the West, and their bid to establish a proslavery regime in Kansas, as the “rape of a virgin territory.” Such sexualized imagery fueled the abolitionist critique of Southern men as rapacious and uncivilized, and of Southern society as saturated by violence against women. Proslavery forces who rallied around Brooks, by contrast, claimed that Sumner’s defenseless capitulation to Brooks’s blows proved that Northern men were weak and submissive, slavelike in their subservience. This fueled the proslavery critique of the North as a world turned upside down, in which “strong-minded” abolitionist women and radical free blacks had raised the specter of social equality and effected the erosion of male authority.¹³

Even as they imputed gender transgressions to their opponents, antebellum politicians routinely called on women to join the ranks of political parties and movements. Of course, women could not yet vote, and there was a very strong social taboo in place against female public speaking; nonetheless, elite and middle-class women—to whom Victorian culture ascribed a penchant for piety and virtue—had a distinct role to play in electoral politics, both in influencing and mobilizing male voters and in lending an aura of moral sanctity to political causes. In the 1840s the Whig Party was more enthusiastic about female partisanship than the rival Democratic Party; the Whigs’ agenda was one of economic modernization and moral reform, and women, especially in Northern cities and towns, had demonstrated that they could be effective agents of reform movements such as the temperance (anti-liquor) cause. Such activism could be and was justified as an extension of women’s maternal, domestic duty to promote piety and virtue—and women’s support for the Whigs could be seen, in turn, as an extension of their benevolent work. Whig women in Richmond, Virginia, for example, used their social connections and fundraising skills to erect a statue in that city to Whig idol Henry Clay; Clay was a symbol, in their eyes, of political moderation and compromise. The Democrats by contrast, committed to defending slavery, agrarianism, and traditional values, were at first ambivalent about women’s partisanship. They singled out for condemnation the Republicans’ celebration of Jessie Frémont in the presidential ...