history

The Civil War 1861 - 1865

Reshaping Boundaries and Redefining Womanhood

Southern confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861,and in

doing so, ignited the Civil War. The causes for the war had been long in

the making. Conflict over slavery, particularly if it should be allowed to

spread into western states and territories, intensified in the years leading

up to 1861. Ultimately, 600,000 Americans died as a result of war while

many survivors sustained permanent injuries. The Emancipation

Proclamation followed by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865,

emancipated four million enslaved people. In this lecture, we’ll explore

women’s roles leading up to the war, women’s contributions during the

war, and how women shaped the reconstruction following the war. Our

course theme of FAMILY, will play a central role in guiding our

exploration of women’s history through the three phases of the war. How

did women’s understanding of family and their role in it, shape their

experiences?

1

Motherhood & Family Louisa, an enslaved woman pictured with her legal owner in 1858.

While this photograph may initially portray a nurturing scene of a woman holding a small child, its caption reveals that an enslaved woman, identified as Louisa, is holding a white toddler listed as the woman’s legal owner in the year 1858. Although society regarded the institution of the family and put the role of motherhood on the pedestal of respectability in the nineteenth-century, the historical sources we’re examining this week provide a fuller and much more complex understanding of family and motherhood. Enslaved women and children faced vulnerable ties and painful separations. Enslaved women nurtured the children of white women while mourning the loss of their own children.

2

The Sanctity of Family and Motherhood

Slavery assaulted the institution of family and the maternal bond. Sexual assaults and the forced separation of enslaved children from their parents wounded the sanctity of families. While vulnerable to sexual abuse, violence, and exploitation, enslaved women exercised agency to resist exploitation. Some women resorted to the use of abortifacients and assisted one another with aborting forced pregnancies. Historian Darlene Clark Hine surmised, “possibly the most psychologically devastating means that the slave mother had of undermining the slave system was infanticide,” although documented cases are extremely rare. Enslaved woman Margaret Garner and her family escaped from Kentucky to Ohio in 1856. Garner was accused of killing her daughter Priscilla, once bounty hunters captured them. The action initiated legal proceedings that resulted in Margaret Garner being forced back into slavery and she reportedly died of typhoid fever several years later. Far more common than infanticide, was the forced removal of children from their mothers. The institution of slavery assaulted the sanctity of enslaved families, while at the same time impugned the moral integrity of the white, slave owning families. Mary Boykin Chesnut lamented, in her March 14, 1861 diary entry that white women of the South “tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think….”

3

Ashley’s Sack

My great grandmother Rose

mother of Ashley gave her this sack when

she was sold at age 9 in South Carolina

it held a tattered dress 3 handfulls of

pecans a braid of Roses hair. Told her

It be filled with my Love always

She never saw her again

Ashley is my grandmother

Ruth Middleton

1921 On display at the Smithsonian African American

History Museum on loan from Middleton Plantation.

One powerful example of a daughter and mother’s forced separation came to light after the discovery of a cotton sack with an embroidered inscription dating to 1921. This is the story of mother Rose and her nine-year old daughter, Ashley. Historian Tiya Miles’ research suggests that Rose equipped her daughter, Ashley, with the surviving sack and its contents around the time Ashley was sold away from her mother on a South Carolina plantation sometime in the early 1850s. Rose’s selection of the contents illuminates her commitment to equipping Ashley with practical and sentimental possessions. (Read embroidered inscription). Not only would the dress fulfill a practical need, but perhaps also represented an attempt to equip Ashley with armor against sexual exploitation. The pecans represented not only nourishment, but were considered a delicacy in South Carolina. Rose’s hair represented a very personal, sentimental, and physical bond between the two. Rose exercised incredible agency to equip her daughter and reinforce their loving bond. Thus far, a record of Rose and Ashley being reunited in this life has not been uncovered. Tiya Miles’ book entitled “All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake,” is available in the ARC Library.

4

The Power of Literature

Exalting Family Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852

Following the death of her infant son, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white Connecticut author began writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published in the year 1852. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has drawn lots of criticism since its 1852 publication. Within the antebellum historical context, defenders of slavery charged that Stowe did not have any direct knowledge of slavery and that the book unfairly portrayed slavery. More contemporary critics point to Stowe’s stereotypical beliefs and perceptions, that reveal she did not embrace racial equality. In spite of the criticisms, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” reached a circulation of over 300,000 copies. Reportedly, upon meeting Stowe President Abraham Lincoln said, “so you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” The enslaved characters of Eliza and Tom take great risks to preserve their family bonds and gain freedom. While Eliza reaches Canada and freedom, Tom suffers a horrible, violent death. Not only did “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” expose the horrors of slavery, it also emphasized the centrality of family and how destructive the institution of slavery was to it. Readers of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” especially Northern white women, became more committed to abolishing slavery after reading the book. Slavery’s assault to the sanctity of families fueled their opposition to slavery and in many minds, justified women’s participation in abolitionism. This represented venturing into the political realm.

5

Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, 1860

Published on the eve of the Civil War, William and Ellen Craft’s “Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom” detailed their heroic and ingenious escape to freedom. Ellen, with a fair complexion, dressed as a man with a wounded arm and sore tooth, accompanied by enslaved man, William. An excerpt of their account is included in our textbook. They reached freedom in 1848, but passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, necessitated that they relocate to London to preserve their safety. The Crafts insisted upon writing their own story and pursued an education to achieve this goal. Remember, as enslaved people, they were denied an education. Twelve years after escaping to freedom, the Crafts published their account of “Running a Thousand Miles For Freedom.” This narrative illuminated the tremendous risks two people took to maintain their union and prevent separation from one another. The institution of slavery threatened their bond and prevented their legal marriage. The account also highlighted the powerful impact of education and the Crafts’ intellectual capacities suppressed by slavery.

6

Harriet Jacobs: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861. “READER, be assured this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts. I have concealed the names of places, and given persons fictitious names. I had no motive for secrecy on my own account, but I deemed it kind and considerate towards others to pursue this course.”

Published the same year the Civil War began, Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” details the sexual abuse she endured as an enslaved adolescent; the way in which slavery separated her from her children and prevented her marriage; and the perverse ways impugned the integrity of the white slave owners’ marriage. Immediately following publication of her account, critics condemned it as abolitionist propaganda. They questioned Jacobs’ literacy, who by the way, learned to read and write as a child. Critics also questioned the validity of her narrative explaining that following her escape, she lived for seven years hiding in the crawl-space of her grandmother’s attic. Once they gained freedom, her children lived with their free grandmother. Harriet hid to be near her children and to preserve her freedom. To me, this account reveals the depth of her maternal love. “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” exposes the horrors of slavery, with a central focus on its destructive impact on families. Slavery prevented enslaved people from marrying and maintaining bonds; it separated children from mothers; it facilitated sexual violence and exploitation of enslaved women; and it damaged the moral integrity of white slave owning families. With the nineteenth-century’s focus on the sanctity of the family and virtuous motherhood – what was there not to abhor about slavery? While some explanations of the cause of the Civil War emphasize regional, economic, and political differences surrounding Slavery, when examined from the perspective of families, we can see how its assault to families drew moral outrage from sectors, including women, not typically involved in political discourse. Through literary contributions and readership, women contributed to the growing conflict surrounding slavery.

7

Courage & Persistence

By examining the life of Harriet Tubman, we’ll gain a insights into the eras before, during, and following the Civil War. Born in Maryland in the year 1822 (some estimates state 1820), to Harriet Green and Benjamin Ross, she was given the name Araminta Ross as a child. At the age of 12, she sustained a life altering head injury when she intervened between a white man trying to harm a fellow enslaved man. Harriet resisted slavery and exercised agency by forming a marital bond with John Tubman, a free African American man, in 1844. She took the name Harriet Tubman. Fearing that she would be sold further South, Harriet Tubman escaped in 1849, most likely with support from the Underground Railroad. In the years leading up to 1861, Tubman reported that she led eleven expeditions to south to Maryland where she led dozens of enslaved people to freedom, including a sister and her two children. Awareness of her success provoked the promise of a $40,000 reward for her capture. She achieved a long-held goal of liberating her parents on one of her final rescue missions. She supported John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, although she did not directly raid the arsenal. Tubman exercised agency to resist and escape slavery during the antebellum period. After gaining her own freedom, she risked her life to return South and lead others to freedom, while also supporting efforts to abolish slavery, including John Brown’s militant plan.

8

Expanding Boundaries Redefining gender expectations

9

Once the war began, both Northern and Southerners initially expected a victorious ending. Instead, the war lasted over four years and took the lives of over 600,000 Americans. Through support of the war effort, women expanded the boundaries that previously limited their activities based upon gender and race. Several well known examples of Civil War nurses are Dorthea Dix and Clara Barton. After seeking to reform the care of the mentally ill and prison conditions, Dorthea Dix received an appointment as superintendent of the Department of Female Nurses, for the Union. She sought to create a cadre of well prepared and serious nurses. She recruited women over the age of 30 who dressed plainly and revealed promise of being serious and committed to the task at hand. Although Dix proved to be poorly prepared to administer such a department, she was successful in recruiting over 3,000 Union nurses, and saw to it that they were paid $12 a month for their services. Together with America’s first woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, Dorthea Dix helped organize a program for training female nurses. Clara Barton immediately began collecting supplies for the Union after the war broke out. She became a self-taught nurse, learning how to dress wounds are care for injured men. She was a slender, petite woman, but her small stature did not prevent her from working right at the front lines of battle. While caring for one wounded soldier on the battlefield, a bullet whizzed through the sleeve of her dress and struck her patient, killing him. Barton believed in nursing wounded soldiers from both sides and she founded the American Red Cross, based upon the principle of helping those who are in need.

Challenging Gender Expectations

Through service as nurses, members of Ladies Aid Societies, and less formal roles, women demonstrated their capabilities.

Female military nurses were not likely to have paused and pondered whether or not

their work duties, as “indelicate” as they were, were proper for women to perform.

They were most likely to have been so committed to their work that they knew they

were doing the right thing, even if their work exposed them to severe wounds, death,

partially clothed men, and a variety of other situations that would have been deemed

inappropriate for women just a decade earlier. But the necessity of helping injured

soldiers justified women shattering those socially imposed constraints of propriety.

Military nurses experienced first-hand exposure to the horrors of war, to the battle

wounds, amputation procedures crudely performed without anesthetics, and the

deaths. In the Battle of Gettysburg, 51,000 union and confederate soldiers were killed

in three days of fierce fighting. A volunteer nurse from New Jersey, Cornelia

Hancock, wrote a letter to her sister describing her experiences with nursing wounded

soldiers in at Gettysburg. “I feel assured I shall never feel horrified at anything that

may happen to me hereafter…. I could stand by and see a man’s head taken off I

believe – you get so used to it here.” Through their service to the war effort, whether

it be as nurses or members of the growing number of Ladies Aid Societies, women

expanded their roles beyond previously held notions of women’s frailty and unfit

nature for the public sphere.

10

Battlefield

Once of the most fascinating ways women contributed to the war effort was the approximately 400 women who dressed as men in uniform to serve directly in or near the front lines of military action. Women engaged in battle for several reasons. Some,

like many men, believed so deeply in the cause that they did not want the fact that

they were females, to prevent them from supporting their side. Others were probably

seeking an adventure; and the opportunity to engage in combat was definitely rare for

women. Some women also probably missed their husbands or other family members

so much that they risked the dangers of being near the front lines and disguised

themselves in order to be closer to loved ones. One female Union soldier who was

captured by the Confederates in Tennessee was returned to the Yankees once her

captors realized her true identity. They sent a note along with her that stated: “As the

Confederates do not use women in the war, this woman, wounded in battle, is returned

to you.” When a Union nursed asked the returned prisoner why she had disguised

herself as a man, the female soldier replied, “I thought I’d like camp life, and I did.”

Our module resources provide us with insight into Loretta Velasquez’s heroic war time

service.

11

War time contributions Harriet Tubman served as a:

• Spy

• Scout

• Nurse

• Liberator

Like other women, Harriet Tubman defied gender expectations and broke through racial barriers to contribute to the war effort, in support of a Union victory. When the war started, President’s Lincoln’s initial reluctance to declare an end to slavery and accept African American volunteers to the support the Union deeply disappointed Tubman. After announcing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln approved African American volunteers in the Union army. Tubman joined over 186,000 African Americans by serving the Union army. She dressed as an elderly woman and traveled among Confederate forces to bring back valuable information to Union forces. She provided medical aid to injured soldiers, regardless of their race, relying upon her knowledge of herbal remedies. She continued to help African Americans escape to freedom and helped folks get established by providing assistance of securing food, housing, and employment. Harriet Tubman and the over 400 women who covertly served as soldiers defied gender expectations, while also seizing the opportunities to expand their service within the chaos and disruptions of war.

12

Defining Freedom:

The Civil War produced profound changes for enslaved women, but hardships persisted. The economic status of many former enslaved people changed very little. Many were unable to find work, and ended up working as sharecroppers on Southern plantations. Under this arrangement, sharecroppers agreed to plant and harvest a section of a property owner’s land and to turn over at least half of their crop. The sharecropper received a place to live and land to work, but by the time they paid for seeds and other expenses, they were able to achieve a subsistence existence, but little more. The Constitutional rights of formerly enslaved people changed significantly. Passage if the 13th Amendment, in 1865, abolished slavery throughout the United States. Passage of the 14th Amendment in 1868, called for protecting all citizens’ constitutional rights. By 1870, ratification of the 15th Amendment specified that all citizens are entitled to the right to vote by prohibiting the denial of voting rights “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The 15th

Amendment did not prohibit the denial of voting rights based upon sex or gender, nor did it prohibit implementation of poll taxes and literacy tests. Following the war, Harriet Tubman’s biography entitled, “Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman,” was published in 1869. She applied for her military service pension and after 30-years of denials, she received her first payment of $20 a month. Like her service before and during the war, Tubman continued to fulfill the needs of former enslaved people by opening a home for the elderly and working to secure military pensions for African American servicemen. She lived in Auburn, New York until her death in 1913.

13

Goals: Reunite with family members

Official marriages

Land!

Education

For many enslaved people, the first goal upon gaining freedom was generally to seek

and reunite with family members One Northern observer remarked, “Every mother’s

son seemed to be in search of his mother. Every mother in search of her children.”

Couples sought to legalize their marriages. Freedman’s Bureau agents performed

marriage ceremonies. Although locating and reuniting with family members proved

very difficult and impossible for many, the commitment and desires to reunite reveals

the importance of family. The redistribution of land that once belonged to

Confederate leaders resulted in only a small percentage of southern African

Americans receiving the promised 40-acres and mule. Between the years 1878 and

1881, approximately 50,000 African Americans, known as “Exodusters” migrated to

Kansas to stake land claims and begin farming. Nicodemus, established in Graham

County, Kansas, became the largest African American community in Kansas.

Education, once denied during servitude, became a priority. Soon after the war, four

Historically Black Colleges and Universities were established in the South, Howard

University in Washington D.C.; Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia; Morehouse

College in Atlanta, Georgia; and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. An agent

working for the North Carolina Freedmen’s Bureau observed in 1866 that African

Americans “are far more zealous in the cause of education than the whites. They will

starve themselves, and go without clothes, in order to send their children to school.”

Pursuit of an education enables students to develop our potential, envision and pursue

goals, and experience self-actualization – become who we are intended to be. We’ll

see in the next modules, that expansion of education opportunities continues in the

post-war era and facilitates a growing African American middle class.

14

Family The Gooch Family of El Dorado County in California

During the Gold Rush, William Gooch traveled to California from Missouri. As a slaveowner, he forced enslaved couple Nancy and Peter to leave their young son, Andrew, behind and move with him to California. In 1850, California adopted its first Constitution (that prohibited slavery) and entered the Union as a free state. Nancy and Peter seized their freedom and began working for wages. By 1858, Nancy and Peter, who used the last name Gooch, began purchasing land near Coloma. They eventually purchased the site of Sutter’s Mill along the American River. Following Peter’s death in 1861, Nancy continued to work, primarily performing domestic and laundry services. She saved money with the goal of reuniting with her son, Andrew. After ratification of the 13th Amendment, Andrew gained his freedom and by 1870, Nancy provided the funds for Andrew and his family to join her in California. Nancy’s determination to reunite her family persisted through slavery, forced relocation, the death of her husband, and the Civil War. She lived near Coloma with her extended family until her death in 1901.

15

Conclusion: “The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scared, and foot-sore bondman and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt, “God bless you” has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witness of your devotion to freedom.”

In an August 1868 letter he wrote to Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass offered an admiring tribute to her life and highlighted comparisons between their work. Douglas wrote: “The difference between us is very marked. Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scared, and foot-sore bondman and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt, “God bless you” has been your only reward. The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witness of your devotion to freedom.”

Harriet Tubman’s courageous efforts help secure freedom, safety, security, and dignity in the eras before, during, and following the Civil War. In 1978, the U.S. Postal Service adopted a Harriet Tubman stamp and in 2020, the U. S. Treasury announced that she will be featured on the face of the $20 bill.

16