Women and the Civil War lesson plan

tulip · #1 12-08-2002, 02:16 PM

Alicia -- love your name, my grandaughter's as well! Alicia Aurelie, named after her two paternal great grandmothers.

Crinoline Campaigns

When Princess Agnes Salm-Salm entered the winter camp at Falmouth VA she noted on January 8, 1862 that the place was “teeming with women.” She and her husband lived in a hospital tent with a damask upholstered sofa, large bedstead with white silk canopy, Turkish carpets and frou-frous to create a harem motif. She held soirees, balls and receptions even having a supper prepared by Delmonico and his staff. Needless to say, such high living was highly resented by the troops who were huddled in their dog tents or under hastily erected mud and branch huts.

The Civil War on all fronts was indeed “teeming with women.”They were everywhere; in both treasury departments signing paper currency; they worked as telegraphers, journalists, store clerks, teachers and, of course they streamed into the camps for a variety of reasons; as refugees, contraband, nurses, teachers, and visitors.

In the south where camps were located in the backyard of the
home front, young women flocked for day visits to flirt and maybe even catch a husband. The Carey cousins became famous for their visits, which included improvised musicales and dramatic presentations as well as informal socials and levees. The Cary’s even followed the army as they crossed into Maryland in September of 1862. “We were sitting outside a tent in the warm starlight of an early autumn night, when music was proposed. At once we struck up Randall's verses to the tune of the old college song, Lauriger Horatius, -- a young lady of the party from Maryland, a cousin of ours, having recently set them to this music before leaving home to share the fortunes of the Confederacy. All joined in the ringing chorus, and when we finished a burst of applause came from some soldiers listening in the darkness behind a belt of trees. Next day the melody was hummed far and near through the camps, and in due time it had gained and held the place of favorite song in the army.”

The most common women visitors North and South were officer wives and families. Officers themselves were divided on the propriety of encouraging these visits. Some were adamantly opposed. Mrs. John B. Gordon was a common sight at her husband's headquarters, which was a source of continuous irritation to Jubal Early and Richard Ewell. Early disliked Mrs. Gordon intensely and when he noted her carriage in line exclaimed, }"Well, I'll be! If my men would keep up the way she does, I'd never issue another order against straggling." Later, he was heard mumbling, "I wish the Yankees would capture Mrs. Gordon and hold her until the war is over." Ewell, of course, changed his mind when he married. His wife began to follow him, interfered with command decisions, and became a constant source of irritation among the officer corps.

No general had his wife with him more often than did Grant.
Ironically no one seemed to resent Julia’s regular appearances. The General’s staff, in fact, often suggested that Julia visit and there was never a shortage of volunteers to escort her. Julia was appreciated because she was always aware of protocol, invariably cheerful and helpful, and best of all she kept the General happy, a benefit his men appreciated.

In the fall of 1864 when Grant was becoming both restless and cranky as he settled in for a siege, the kind of warfare he hated most, his quartermaster Ruf Ingalls suggested that he send for Julia who was in New Jersey with the children. Grant said he would like to but there was no place to house her. Ruf said he would build her a cabin. He did and very quickly a street of cabins was created to house other officer wives and visitors. After arriving Julia wrote: They all flattered me by saying that I must stay with him and that at headquarters they missed me. And so for the rest of this eventful winter, I was domiciled in this little cabin, enjoying not only the society of the Commanding General but of all the distinguished men and generals that visited headquarters that winter." 

Laundresses also followed the army. Most were wives of enlisted men,
a few were refugees hoping to earn some coin to feed their children
and many were black either contraband fleeing from the South or
impressed labor in southern armies. The job of camp laundry was
brutal and odious. Having tried it on a limited basis, I can assure
you that it is exhausting. Women made little often settling for
rations in exchange for their labors.

It was during the Civil War that nursing developed as a profession for women. Phoebe Pember Yates, the extraordinarily competent matron of Chimborazo Hospital fought both male and female bias. “The day after my decision was made found me at "headquarters," the only two-story building on hospital ground, then occupied by the chief surgeon and his clerks. He had not yet made his appearance that morning, and while awaiting him, many of his corps, who had expected in horror the advent of female supervisors, walked in and out, evidently inspecting me. . .”

But of course not all women were cut out for nursing or self-sacrifice. Katharine Wormeley lamented in June 1862, “. . . today, at the close of such a week, comes an excursion party from Washington – Congressmen and ladies in silks and perfumes and lilac kid gloves! ‘Sabbath-breaking picknickers on a battlefield as Georgy called them in a rage.” Mary von Olnhausen wrote in May of 1863, “A lot of women came in today just as I was dressing . . . a wound. One of them, as she saw it, just gave a stagger and fell up against the wall. She was pale as could be, and I thought would faint. All the women crowded around, and one young one said, ‘Oh, I always thought I should like to be a nurse.’ She looked about as much account as a yellow cat.”

Sanitary workers were also a constant sight in Federal camps. Both
cursed and praised, these women nursed and cared for the men, taught
contrabands to read and write, complained incessantly about camp
conditions and effectively lobbied for changes. While serving on the Mississippi after Shiloh, Katharine Wormeley reported: "We all know in our hearts that it is thoroughly enjoyment to be here -- it is life, in short; and we wouldn't anywhere else for anything in the world . . . Hundreds of lives are being saved by it. I have seen with my own eyes in one week fifty men who must have died without it, and many more who probably would have done so. I speak of lives saved only;the amount of suffering saved is incalculable." 

While the camps teemed with visiting women, thousands more were energetically working back home to bring care and comfort to the camps. Mary Livermore in Chicago visited Wisconsin and Iowa as she worked to collect produce and gifts for soldiers in the camps. She noted that the verdant fields of the old NW were also teeming with women who replaced the manpower that had marched to war. While Livermore sat in her buggy on the edge of a Wisconsin field, a young women busy harvesting reported: “I tell mother . . . that as long as the country can’t get along without grain, nor the army fight without food, we’re serving the country just as much here in the harvest field as our boys are on the battlefield - - and that sort o’takes the edge off from this business of doing men’s work, you know.”

Livermore also organized the Great Sanitary Fair of Chicago in 1863. Her barriers in this effort were many. Men scoffed at her stated goal of raising $25,000 and she had difficulty implementing some of her ambitious plans, yet she persisted and was successful beyond all expectations. Her efforts set off a fair frenzy throughout the north that didn't end until the fall of 1865.

As the fair prepared to open, there were parades of wagons entering the city loaded with produce and items for the fair. One sign announced: THE GIFT OF LAKE COUNTRY TO OUR BRAVE BOYS IN THE HOSPITALS, THROUGH THE GREAT NORTHWESTERN FAIR. "There were no small loads here. Every wagon was filled to overflowing with great heaps of potatoes and silver skinned onions, mammoth squashes, huge beets and turnips, monster cabbages, barrels of cider, and rosy apples -- load after load, with many a gray-haired farmer driving."

One old man with a woman and two small girls huddled next to him waited patiently in line. A worker asked if he had a son in the army. "Well, no . . . we haven't now. We had one there once. He was buried down by Stones River. He was shot there. That's his wife there with the baby . . . He was a good boy."

At the conclusion of the fair, the women gathered and passed the following resolution: "That this Fair has been an unparalleled success -- not merely in a pecuniary point of view, but as a great uprising of women of the Northwest, in signification of their devotion to the cause of our beloved and imperiled country."

Southern women caught fair fever as well. At the Ladies Gunboat Fair in Charleston on May 10, 1862, Emma Holmes gleefully noted in her journal: "Almost everything at the fair is raffled and today there is to be a grand lottery of all the silver, jewellry, watches, china sets,etc. which have been given."

Even as Sherman tightened his noose on the South and was moving towards Columbia, South Carolina in 1864, a great bazaar was planned by the city. In her diary Grace Elmore bemoaned their frivolity in the beginning of the war when she used two pretty dresses to make tasseled smoking caps for "Capt. Hokes' company. I presented them myself and was immensely pleased when the men whirled them around their heads and gave three cheers for the ladies. If I only had those dresses now, how many cute tings I could make for the Bazaar and our sick soldiers would be much better served by the money than the well ones were by the caps."

Of course, the women of the south felt the painful hand of war on a very personal level as their homes were often on the edge of the battlefield. Emily Harris was beleagured by problems and spoke for thousands of Southern women as she wrote: " Husband gone to the army again, every thing resting on me, children troublesome, company forever, weather very cold, negroes in the newground, cows, calves and sheep on the wheat. Today I have herd that the Yankees were shelling Charleston. Oh! God preserve my husband!" And in 1862 Spartanburg, South Carolina Emily Liles Harris sobbed to her diary, "It has rained all day, the children have been cross and ungovernable. Old Judah and Edom [slaves] were both sick. Ann is trying to weave, and a poor weave it is, the sewing must be done, everything must be attened to, Laura is coughing a rough ominous cough, has scarcely any shoes on her feet, and no hope of getting any this week, West has the croup. I am trying to wean the baby and the cows laid out last night, and last and worst of all I know my husband is somewhere miserably cold, wet and comfortless."

Yes, the Civil War was teeming with women and the crinoline campaigns at the home front, the hospitals, the camps, and on the battlefield proved beyond a doubt that women were good organizers, patriotic, effective, efficient and irreplaceable in the large tapestry of war.

Katharine Wormeley Letters May 1862 on the Mississippi.
Mary Livermore My Own Story
Personal Memoirs of Julia Dent Grant edited and sourced by John Simon
Trials and Triumphs, The Women of the American Civil War by Marilyn Mayer Culpepper
Mothers of Invention by Drew Gilpin Faust
Women of the Civil War (formerly Bonnet Brigade) by Mary Elizabeth Massey
Southern Families at War, edited and sourced by Catherine Clinton
Yankee Women by Elizabeth D. Leonard
A Southern Woman's Story by Phoebe Pember Yates

(Message edited by tulip on December 08, 2002)

tulip · #2 12-08-2002, 05:40 PM

Three Handshakes Across the Centuries

Many years ago American Heritage published a letter from an elderly retired USAF officer. He told a story that still resonates today.

While growing up in New Jersey, he and his pals watched a patriotic parade. On the way home, he passed several Civil War veterans and an elderly man called to him, “Come here sonny.” When the boy reached the old veteran, the veteran put out his hand and ordered him to shake.

“You are just two handshakes away from the Revolution,” the veteran announced, explaining that once as a boy, he had met a Revolutionary War veteran and shook hands with him and he was now passing it along. The Air Force veteran promised that he too would pass it on and say to the next youngster, “You are three hand shakes away from the Revolution and two from the Civil War.”*

This linkage from generation to generation and the passing of the ideals and goals of earlier decades is the essence of history. It is personal and a reminder that we are the sum total of our past. Who we are and what we value is not our own, but belongs to all of our ancestors our neighbor's ancestors and is the result of long ago sacrifices, dreams, hopes and hard work.

History is not a collection of dates, names and events, but rather a journey to yesterday and a world that was rich and muscular, human and flawed, glorious and mundane. While that world was different from ours, our ancestors were not. They had the same range of emotions, hormones, appetites, sense of humor, problems and fears. They were in fact, just like us and only lacked the technology of today to make daily living more comfortable and certain.

Studying the past is the oil for keeping the links supple, living, creating, expanding and developing and to assuring that the handshakes will be passed to tomorrow.

*The three handshakes story was passed on from a gentleman in another group. Thank you Wayne.