Women at War

What do women have to do with the origins of the Civil War? Growing up in Virginia in the 1970s, I often heard this answer: nothing. Much has changed since then. A new generation of scholars has rediscovered the Civil War as a drama in which women, and gender tensions, figure prominently. Thanks to new research into diaries, letters, newspapers and state and local records, we now know that women were on the front lines of the literary and rhetorical war over slavery long before the shooting war began. They were integral to the slave resistance and flight that destabilized the border between North and South. And they were recruited by both secessionists and Unionists to join a partisan army, with each side claiming that the “ladies,” with their reputation for moral purity, had chosen it over its rivals. So what do women have to do with the origins of the war? The answer is: everything. Title page from Mary H. Eastman’s novel “Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is,” a proslavery response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”Clifton Walker Barrett Collection, University of Virginia Title page from Mary H. Eastman’s novel “Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is,” a proslavery response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Some of the women most involved in these political developments are well known to scholars and the general public. But countless others are still obscure. 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. But how many Americans know that Stowe’s book escalated a long-standing literary war over slavery? “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not only inflamed the proslavery press in the South, but it also prompted a concerted response from white Southern women writers like Mary Eastman and Louisa McCord, who countered Stowe with their own rose-colored fantasies about the purported gentility and harmony of plantation life. Works like Eastman’s “Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life At It Is,” published the same year as Stowe’s book, were widely hailed in the proslavery press, and are 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.” 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. But she was not alone: new work in the historical record permits us to recover 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. 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. To the antislavery press, she represented the slave’s natural yearning for freedom, and the courage and dignity of enslaved women. To the proslavery press, she represented the faithlessness of Northerners, who, in defiance of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, refused to act as slave catchers. Moreover, gender tensions over competing definitions of manly and womanly comportment, 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, and 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, was fundamentally hostile to the hierarchical, 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.” A portrayal of the attack of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina.Library of CongressA portrayal of the attack of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Gender politics made it into 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 and images of women were central to the slavery debates. Sumner’s speech had dubbed the forceful incursions by Southern settlers in the West, and their bid to establish a proslavery regime, 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. The “bully Brooks,” the Northern press charged, had “disgraced the name of man“; “there is no chivalry in a brute,” as a Boston newspaper put it, succinctly. 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, slave-like 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 the patriarchal family and of male authority. 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; 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. It is no wonder then that during the secession crisis, champions of Union and of Southern nationalism alike claimed the “ladies” were on their side. During the election campaign of 1860 and the subsequent secession convention debates in the South, women attended speeches, rallies and processions; contributed their own polemics to the partisan press; and, fortunately for historians, left a treasure trove of firsthand accounts of the deepening crisis. These accounts — letters, diaries, memoirs, poems and stories — furnish moving and astute analyses of the agonies of secession. Related Civil War Timeline Fort Sumter An unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors. Such sources are the most powerful argument for recognizing the centrality of women to the story of the war’s causes. For example, there is no more chilling account of how it felt to be a Southern Unionist in the midst of secession fever than that of Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond, Va. Van Lew was a native-born white Southerner, but one who harbored a loathing for slavery and a belief that her state, as the mother of the Union, should represent moderation and compromise. As she watched a secessionist procession snake through the streets of Richmond in the wake of Virginia’s vote to join the Confederacy, she knew the time for compromise had passed. “Such a sight!” Van Lew wrote. “The multitude, the mob, the whooping, the tin-pan music, and the fierceness of a surging, swelling revolution. This I witnessed. I thought of France and as the procession passed, I fell upon my knees under the angry heavens, clasped my hands and prayed, ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.’” Elizabeth Van LewVirginia Historical Society, 2002.689.1 Elizabeth Van Lew For Van Lew, secession was a kind of collective madness that had descended on the South. She chose to stay in Richmond during the war, although she could have easily sought refuge in the North, so that she could put her political principles on the line as the leading Union spy in the Confederacy. Her Richmond home was the nerve center of an elaborate interracial espionage ring that funneled critical information to Grant’s army. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman, Van Lew was remarkable — but not anomalous. The nation’s archives and attics contain the stories of countless other such women, who offer eloquent testimony on the war’s causes and meaning. The challenge that remains for scholars working in this field is to popularize the notion, among general readers and some skeptics in the ranks of academic historians, that women and gender were central, not merely tangential, to the story of the sectional alienation and strife. The stakes are high: the better we understand how women figured in antebellum politics, the better we’ll understand the wartime relationship between homefront and battlefront, and the tangled process by which Americans have defined patriotism and citizenship ever since.