The Civilian War

Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman's March

Lisa Tendrich Frank

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780807159996
• eBook ISBN:
  9780807159972
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

The Civilian War explores home front encounters between elite Confederate women and Union soldiers during Sherman's March, a campaign that put women at the center of a Union army operation for the first time. Ordered to crush the morale as well as the military infrastructure of the Confederacy, Sherman and his army increasingly targeted wealthy civilians in their progress through Georgia and the Carolinas. To drive home the full extent of northern domination over the South, Sherman's soldiers besieged the female domain-going into bedrooms and parlors, seizing correspondence and personal treasures-with the aim of insulting and humiliating upper-class southern women. These efforts blurred the distinction between home front and warfront, creating confrontations in the domestic sphere as a part of the war itself. Historian Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that ideas about women and their roles in war shaped the expectations of both Union soldiers and Confederate civilians. Sherman recognized that slaveholding Confederate women played a vital part in sustaining the Rebel efforts, and accordingly he treated them as wartime opponents, targeting their markers of respectability and privilege. Although Sherman intended his efforts to demoralize the civilian population, Frank suggests that his strategies frequently had the opposite effect. Confederate women accepted the plunder of food and munitions as an inevitable part of the conflict, but they considered Union invasion of their private spaces an unforgivable and unreasonable transgression. These intrusions strengthened the resolve of many southern women to continue the fight against the Union and its most despised general. Seamlessly merging gender studies and military history, The Civilian War illuminates the distinction between the damage inflicted on the battlefield and the offenses that occurred in the domestic realm during the Civil War. Ultimately, Frank's research demonstrates why many women in the Lower South remained steadfastly committed to the Confederate cause even when their prospects seemed most dim.

CHAPTER 1

BECOMING CONFEDERATES

In October 1860, North Carolinian Catherine Edmondston could not stop thinking about the upcoming presidential election. She could not have envisioned the turmoil and bloodshed that would follow, but she recognized the incredible stakes involved. No matter how she looked at it, the impending election threatened her privileged status as a slaveholder. As she saw it, all of the likely scenarios seemed troublesome. Stephen A. Douglas, she boldly and perhaps misleadingly proclaimed, was as “bad as Lincoln” as they both would “undermine the South & Slavery!”¹ She knew one advocated popular sovereignty and she deemed the other an abolitionist, but she considered them both equally hostile to her interests. Although women could not vote, she carefully followed politics and obsessed over the election that threatened her personal status. Her husband’s and her Halifax County estate included 1,894 acres, and they owned eighty-eight slaves. They had much to lose. Whereas national politics and the interference of abolitionists worried Edmondston, the possibility of war did not. As the election approached, Edmondston’s words echoed the Fire Eaters’ radical calls for disunion. Like the most vocal secessionists, she declared that “if S C did secede & there was any attempt made to coerce her, I would go to South Carolina & load guns for her men to shoot!”²

Lincoln’s election magnified Edmondston’s anxieties about the future, and like many other North Carolina planters she concluded that her state had no option but to secede from the Union. When North Carolina dragged its feet on the issue and seven other slaveholding states formed the Confederacy, Edmondston impatiently wanted to be part of the excitement. She especially felt the exclusion during the February inauguration of Jefferson Davis as Confederate president, and her state’s refusal to join South Carolina and others soured her on North Carolina’s political leaders. She could not understand why her state had not yet joined her “sisters in blood, in soil, in climate & in institution.”³ Edmondston continued to voice her political opinions and follow the secessionist deliberations, and she finally got her wish in May 1861 when North Carolina seceded and joined the Confederacy.

Edmondston spent the entire war as a civilian and on the home front—a place widely considered separate from the ghastliness of the war front. From there, she and other elite women advocated for the Confederate cause, raised money, gathered supplies, and otherwise supported the war effort, presumably without risking physical harm. As the war progressed, though, she watched as the distance between the battlefield and home front narrowed. With battles frequently being fought in and near Southern towns and farms, many Confederate families faced Union soldiers who entered the home front. Rather than resolve the political issues that threatened her status as an elite slaveholder, the trajectory of the war began to threaten her directly.

Edmondston’s awareness of her increasingly precarious situation resulted from her continued desire to gather news about the war. In her diary, she recorded details that included troop movements, battlefield news, and Confederate prospects. Some of these details corresponded with the fates of family members and neighbors, but many of them had to do with her interest in the Confederacy itself. As she read the news, Edmondston realized that the Union increasingly made war on elite women. When the Union imprisoned Rose O’Neal Greenhow and Eugenia Levy Phillips for espionage activities in July 1861, Edmondston decried their “vile treatment” at the hands of the enemy. She was outraged that elite women, of backgrounds similar to her own, could be treated so poorly.⁴ She likewise condemned Benjamin Butler’s 1862 Woman Order in New Orleans, which held that any woman who did not show respect to Union soldiers would be treated as a prostitute, as the result of “cold blooded barbarity.”⁵ In 1864, when Philip Sheridan’s troops razed Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, she saw it as further evidence of the Yankee war on women. Sheridan’s campaign outraged her because it had specifically targeted those who should have been safe in wartime but instead “the cries of houseless women & children alone mark his track.”⁶

In November 1864, Edmondston began to watch the campaign that she would personally confront. Although she would have had no reason to think that William Tecumseh Sherman and the Union army would ultimately enter her town, she carefully followed their activities in Atlanta. She despised his “infamous” eviction of women and children from the city and considered it to be inhumane and uncivilized. After all, it explicitly violated the distinction between home front and war front by turning one into the other. She expected that this betrayal of the rules of war would galvanize Southern support for the Confederacy and guarantee “resistance to the death from every Southern man, woman, & child in the future.”⁷ She could not imagine an alternate scenario as she concluded that the eviction of Atlanta’s women represented the continued attempt of the Union to bring the war directly to elite Confederate women. Edmondston, in particular, bemoaned the fate of “women & children, for it is on them that the magnanimous Yankee nation makes war.”⁸

Although Catherine Edmondston and many other elite women considered the Civil War to be their war, generations of scholars neglected to include them as active participants in it. Scholars excluded women’s participation in politics and the war effort from the conversation because they could neither vote nor serve in the military. In recent years, Catherine Clinton, Drew Gilpin Faust, and George Rable have led a generation of scholars to bring women out from the shadows in order to demonstrate their vital roles in the Confederate and Union war efforts. New works, as LeeAnn Whites and Alecia Long’s Occupied Women demonstrates, show “women as direct players in the conduct and outcome of the war.” Society may have officially restricted nineteenth-century women from politics and the battlefield, but as Whites and Long and other scholars have shown, Civil War women rarely remained on the margins. Instead, they found ways to take part in politics and other public aspects of life. Women did not sit on the sidelines or on pedestals, but instead they played an integral part in decisions during both peace and wartime.⁹

The slowness of the incorporation of women into Civil War scholarship may have partially resulted from the prevailing belief that the female home front and male war front were distinct entities. Nineteenth-century Americans certainly embraced this belief. Despite the home front destruction experienced in earlier American wars, nineteenth-century Americans clung to the assumption that wars took place on battlefields, far from the security of the feminine domestic sphere. Men willingly went off to battle to protect their wives, mothers, and sisters, and the glory earned on the battlefield became mythic on the home front. The death of loved ones, the most common consequence of war to affect women and children, became an honor instead of merely a hardship.¹⁰ Similarly, antebellum Americans, especially those in the South, often considered it worse to experience the shame of a relative who avoided military service than the grief resulting from wartime casualties. At the same time, the violence and gore of war remained on the battlefront and did not often interrupt the peace of the domestic household. Women’s increasing participation in the Confederate war effort and changes in Union military policies turned the idea of a separate home front on its head and redefined the nineteenth-century concept of warfare.¹¹

From the very beginning of the war, Confederate women helped conflate some of the distinctions that traditionally separated home front and war front. Many slaveholding women embraced the idea that they were responsible for the morale of their new nation and that their households were essential to fighting the war. As their states seceded, prepared for war, and sent men off to fight the Yankees, many elite Southern women became involved in the business of the Confederate war effort. When the war continued into its fourth year, their developing identities as Confederate women and their confidence in their increasingly public roles in wartime grew stronger even as Union general William Tecumseh Sherman’s troops approached their homes and farms in 1864 and 1865. Just as importantly, they recognized that they had become military targets and adapted themselves to deal with a campaign designed to attack their domestic and feminine worlds. Events leading up to the Georgia and Carolinas campaign clearly demonstrated that the Civil War had eased and erased most of the prohibitions that previously separated women and domestic life from the harshest realities of battle. Confederate women realized that their participation in the war as proponents of secession, suppliers of food and clothing, and defenders of the home front had allowed Union soldiers to see them as enemies in their own right. Confederate women, cognizant of the ways in which Sherman’s troops treated their domestic enemies, readied for a battle of their own.

As the Civil War approached, the lives of elite Southern women became more focused around and circumscribed by the home. This transformation occurred with the rise of the middle class and the separation of the male workplace from the home as well as with the rise of an elite slaveholding community.¹² Ideas about domesticity and the ideals of “true womanhood”—which stressed piety, purity, and submissiveness—did not merely confine white women to the home and domestic chores, but also empowered them.¹³ Many white women used assumptions about femininity in order to participate in an increasingly masculine public domain. They took on positions as teachers, writers, and reformers that played on public notions of “feminine” qualities.¹⁴ In this manner, although not always in the public eye, white women engaged in public life.¹⁵ In addition, the idea of separate spheres granted women, especially among Southern elite families, control over the domestic aspects of their lives. White women ran households and raised children as they saw fit. As the holders of the keys to all rooms, stores, pantries, and bureaus, slaveholding women controlled the domestic activities of their households. Those chores that they did not do themselves they directed others, especially domestic slaves, to do for them.¹⁶

The Civil War forced all Americans to reevaluate white women’s visible place in society.¹⁷ Politics consumed local communities, and the waging of the war required the active participation of households. White women also reshaped their roles as they dealt with wartime shortages and the deaths of loved ones. They became active participants in the battle for Southern nationhood and targets for enemy armies.¹⁸ Because the enemy recognized them as “busy and responsive, in the face of an occupying military presence” and as participants instead of as harmless bystanders, Union soldiers dealt with Confederate women as active rebels and enemies.¹⁹ This progression from civilian to female enemy grew out of the realities of life during the Civil War; Southern women could not avoid participation when soldiers fought battles in their backyards and when even the wealthiest families faced shortages. From the outset of the fighting Confederate women refused to accept a passive role, and they demonstrated their political awareness through their words and actions. As they personally encountered the hardships of wartime life, slaveholding women shouldered more active roles in the fight for independence. As such, the Union increasingly engaged them as enemy combatants throughout the Civil War, using tactics specifically designed for feminine adversaries.

White Southern women’s active participation in the public sphere predated the war. Many women initially drew attention to themselves as “rebels” and Confederates when they voiced their opinions on sectional issues and then on secession. Far from sheltered, politically ignorant ladies as they have often been portrayed, many Southern women paid close attention to the political events around them. As Elizabeth Varon and other historians have demonstrated, nineteenth-century women frequently engaged in the political discourse of the day.²⁰ They read the news and discussed it in depth with friends and family of both sexes. They also began keeping extensive journals in the 1850s and 1860s to record what they knew to be historic events.²¹ Antebellum white women did not have access to ballots, so they voted with their actions. Women, who had entered the realm of politics in varying forms in previous years, used their influence and abilities to push the men of their families to act in the political realm during the sectional crisis. When the secession crisis came to a head in 1860, elite white Southern women had much to say on the issue. They especially paid close attention to the contentious presidential election facing the nation. For example, Georgian Dolly Lunt Burge assumed that the 1860 election “may be the last presidential Election Our United Country will ever see.”²²

White women around the South filled the galleries of secession debates, wore ribbons and other accessories to proclaim their loyalties, wrote editorials and letters in support of their positions, and otherwise demonstrated their political acumen in the 1850s and early 1860s. In these ways, white women engaged in and expanded the political sphere in order to actively participate in it. During the secession crisis, white women of all classes, who could not exert their influence or express their political opinions through voting, nevertheless acted in ways that clearly demonstrated their involvement in politics. South Carolinian Leora Sims rejoiced that she lived in the state capital because she could attend debates and listen to the speeches. Sims, who hoped that her friend Harriet Palmer’s “southern blood is as fiery as mine,” professed herself a “regular fire eater.”²³ As self-proclaimed patriotic Southerners, many white women pushed their husbands toward secession after Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election. By appealing to their husbands’ sense of familial duty and honor, elite Southern women encouraged men to echo their political sentiments and vote for secession.²⁴

After Southern conventions voted for secession, many elite white women applauded their states’ decisions to leave the Union. For example, as other states began to follow South Carolina’s lead, Emma Holmes wrote that she was “doubly proud … of [her] native state, that she should be the first to arise and shake off the hated chain which linked us with Black Republicans and Abolitionists.”²⁵ Holmes was not alone in her anti-Union sentiments. White women across the South longed to join South Carolina and break free from the United States. On January 3, 1861, Georgian Anna Maria Cook ardently hoped that her state would join South Carolina in secession.²⁶ When Georgia finally seceded, another elite woman rejoiced that “the very name of Georgian is of itself a heritage to boast of.” She had “always been proud of my native state but never more so than now.”²⁷ Slaveholding women around the South similarly applauded the ultimate secession of their states. Although the horrors of war would dampen some of these women’s initial enthusiasm, many took an active and educated part in the movement to separate South from North. Mary Boykin Chesnut justified her support of secession as an outgrowth of her upbringing. Because her “father was a South Carolina Nullifier,” she boasted that she “was of necessity a rebel born.”²⁸ Elite white Southern women’s political and historical knowledge gave them the confidence both to voice their opinions to the men of their family and to know that their husbands, fathers, and brothers would listen to these ideas.

Elite women’s participation in the secession movement may have been restricted to words and symbolic acts, such as donating jewelry, but their roles in the public realm grew when men moved to the battlefield to exchange gunfire rather than insults. White women’s early celeb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: Sherman’s March and Southern Women
• CHAPTER 1: Becoming Confederates
• CHAPTER 2: Punishing Southern Women
• CHAPTER 3: Working for War
• CHAPTER 4: Confronting the Enemy
• CHAPTER 5: Asserting Confederate Womanhood
• EPILOGUE: Shaming Southern Soldiers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index