Karissa Collins was the winner of the High School Scholarship Competition. Karissa attended Caesar Rodney High School in Dover, Delaware. Karissa has had an impressive high school career with varied interests and experiences and looks forward to attending college at either Eastern University or Gordon College.
SWCW Scholarship Winning Essay Women were greatly known during the Civil War to be the greatest of spies. Maria Isabella Boyd was no exception. She was known for being the Confederate's most notorious spy. She utilized flattery and her knowledge to outwit the situations she was placed in. Her career began July 4, 1861 when a Union soldier began jeering at her mother, using vulgar and indecent language. Belle's defended her mother by shooting the inebriated soldier to death. In her defense she asked, “Shall I be ashamed to confess that I recall without one shadow of remorse the act by which I saved my mother from insult, perhaps from death - that the blood I then shed has left no stain on my soul, imposed no burden upon my conscience?” (Boyd 67). Her action was eventually justified and she was set free. This incident began her career as a Confederate spy at the age of seventeen.
Her strongest aegis was the way that she charmed and coquetted men. One time after she was captured by Union soldiers, “Boyd claimed to have sweet talked them into escorting her back to Confederate lines, where she promptly had them arrested” (DeMarco para. 5). Although Boyd refused to give men any sexual pleasures, she still enjoyed tempting her prey in order for them to reveal important information, which she then imparted to the Confederate army. Belle was arrested approximately 6 or 7 times and while in jail remained an avid Confederate Army supporter, by waving the Confederate flag, singing Dixie, and communicating with outside supporters through unique methods. She remained confident and daring even after her multiple cases of detainment. Boyd boarded the Greyhound in 1864 carrying Confederate papers to England. However, the trip was cut short when the ship was seized. Ironically, later that year on August 25th, she became wed to Samuel W. Hardinge, one of the Union naval officers who had stopped the ship.
After her career as a spy, Belle settled in London for two years and wrote her two-volume memoir. Upon returning to America, she did not return to nursing, like she had done before the war, but was a successful actress on stage and gave lectures about her wartime experiences. She married twice more to John Hammond, and had four children, and to Nathaniel High, Jr.. Belle's demise came in 1900 due to a heart attack. Her cunning skill made her a important figure to the Confederates during the great American Civil War.
Work Cited Boyd, Belle I. "In Camp and Prison: Volume I." Documenting the American South. Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition, 2004. Web. 9 Jan. 2013.
Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)
To fight aloud, is very brave -
But gallanter, I know
Who charge within the bosom
The Calvary of Wo -
Who win, and nations do not see -
Who fall - and none observe -
Whose dying eyes, no Country
Regards with patriot love -
We trust, in plumed procession
For such, the Angels go -
Rank after Rank, with even feet -
And Uniforms of snow.
Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 160 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8093-3130-7.
Reviewed by Sarah Handley-Cousins (University at Buffalo SUNY)
Published on H-CivWar (August, 2013)
Commissioned by Hugh F. Dubrulle
Repairing the "Melancholy Harvest"
Several years ago, I attended a small Civil War reenactment on a college campus. Visitors browsed through several small displays, but the one that garnered the most attention belonged to a surgeon. He and his assistant deftly “amputated” a leg, replicating the stomach-turning sound of the operation by sawing through pieces of wood and metal piping. Spectators were drawn to the scene and watched with a combination of fascination and horror. There was something about the imagined surgery that seemed to evoke an intrinsically Civil War experience.
In recent years, amputation has captured the attention of historians as it did those reenactment visitors. Several historians have begun to consider the issues that arose from the physical destruction of the Civil War. Most works have focused on the postbellum period, examining the issues that faced amputees as they tried to reintegrate into a civilian society. Several historians have considered how the bodily disarticulation caused by the war affected the creation of Civil War memory. Brian Jordan, Jalynn Olsen Padilla, and Frances Clarke, for example, have all investigated the essays written by the contestants of William Oland Bourne’s left-handed writing contests, held in 1866 and 1867, and have drawn important conclusions regarding amputees’ attitudes toward their disabilities, the war, and reunification. Other historians have considered the anxiety expressed by the American public at the specter of so many disabled men returning home--could they work? Would they be marriageable? How should their government repay veterans who had made such a sacrifice?[1]
Guy R. Hasegawa’s new work Mending Broken Soldiers adds an important dimension to the conversation. While recent attention to amputees has focused on the social, cultural, and political reactions to amputation after the conclusion of the war, very little exists that explains the practical consideration taken to provide amputees with prosthetic limbs during the war years. Hasegawa attempts to fill that gap by detailing both the Union and Confederate programs to provide artificial limbs between 1861 and 1865.
Hasegawa begins with an examination of the foundations of the American prosthetics industry. The manufacture of artificial limbs was by no means new when war was declared. The first patent for a limb was issued in 1846 to B. Frank. Palmer, an amputee who became a well-known prosthetic manufacturer. Over the next two decades, many new manufacturers entered the market, each with slightly different designs for their limbs. Some made their artificial legs out of vulcanized rubber, arguing that the material lasted longer than the traditional wood. Palmer apparently wrapped his wooden arms in “delicate fawnskin,” while his great rival, Douglas Bly, covered his with a “delicate tinted flesh-colored enamel, shaded to suit each particular case” (p. 13). Still others crafted limbs from brass, steel, rawhide, and even whalebone. Most of the limbs were articulated, meaning they had functioning joints, but a few experimented with lateral motion ankles or movable fingers. The proliferation of limbs in the antebellum years led to fierce competition. Manufacturers published advertisements in popular newspapers and magazines that boasted endorsements from well-known amputees or respected physicians, giving the growing industry increasing visibility.
When Congress passed an act to provide limbs to Union amputees in 1862, the competition between Northern manufacturers grew more intense. Congress designated $15,000 (a small figure compared to subsequent years) to purchase legs, and tasked Army Surgeon General William A. Hammond with deciding how to best use the sum. Hammond created a committee of several of the best military and civilian surgeons in the country to evaluate artificial legs, decide on price points, and choose what kind of prosthetics to provide. Should they keep it simple with plain pegs, or consider the more modern articulated models? After much deliberation, they finally agreed upon five manufacturers, B. Frank. Palmer, Douglas Bly, E. D. Hudson, William Selpho, and Benjamin Jewett, to provide articulated limbs at fifty dollars each. Despite his efforts, William Hammond was ousted by Edwin Stanton in 1863 and replaced with Joseph K. Barnes, who faced a nearly identical challenge when he was required to choose arm manufacturers.
Perhaps the most fascinating story in Hasegawa’s volume is the surprising saga of the attempt to supply limbs in the Confederacy. Many historians would have focused their energies on examining the policies of either the Union or the Confederacy, but Hasegawa does an admirable job of exploring both. The result is an important comparison between the two programs and, by extension, the two governments. When the Confederate Congress failed to make a decision regarding the provision of limbs in 1863, Mississippi minister Charles K. Marshall founded the Association for the Relief of Maimed Soldiers (ARMS). ARMS became the sole provider of prosthetic legs to Southern soldiers, without any recognition or assistance from the Confederate government, and run, essentially alone, by its secretary, William Allen Carrington. Since the South only had two limb producers, neither of which produced arms, Carrington faced a complicated undertaking. Carrington was able to secure two leg manufacturers, James E. Hanger and G. W. Wells, though at significantly higher prices than those paid by the United States to Northern manufacturers. Ironically, ARMS was never able to provide any artificial arms.
What is most compelling about the story of ARMS is that its struggle is emblematic of the larger problems of the Confederacy. “Indeed,” Hasegawa writes, “the South’s artificial-limb makers faced the same obstacles that hindered the Confederacy’s other businesses: a scarcity of skilled workers, shortages of vital materials, and ever-increasing prices”(p. 57). Conscription made it incredibly difficult to maintain a workforce with the skills to create artificial limbs, and although exemptions were supposedly allowed for work details, the dire military straits of the Confederacy in 1864 and 1865 made these details scarce. Carrington’s manufacturers struggled so much to get raw materials that he pleaded with J. Marion Sims to “procurefiles, brass wires for springs--gutta percha or india rubber, & some of the other constituents of the legs” while the physician was in Paris (p. 59). ARMS agents worked somewhat successfully to solicit donations, but these weren’t enough to cover the organization’s expenses. Carrington hoped to get state governments to reimburse ARMS for providing their soldiers with artificial limbs, but was never successful. According to Hasegawa, several states promised donations, but only Louisiana actually gave money. Carrington, along with several other ARMS officers, had to pour their own money into the ARMS coffers to keep it afloat. On March 11, 1865, the Confederate Congress passed a “Bill for the Relief of Maimed Soldiers,” which, among other provisions, exempted ARMS from manufacturer’s taxes, gave them access to materials at cost, and secured them skilled workers on details. This would have made a tremendous difference for the organization, but the bill was passed just weeks before the final defeat of the Confederacy. The record of ARMS ends on March 31, 1865.
In the final chapter of Mending Broken Soldiers,Hasegawa compares the Union and Confederate programs to supply limbs and argues convincingly that despite its many disadvantages ARMS matched the Union program in limb distribution during its short fifteen months of operation. The two Confederate producers were able to nearly outpace four of the five Union manufacturers in their production of legs, despite their struggle to obtain materials. However, what is missing is a discussion of how much ARMS could have accomplished if the Confederate government had only found the needs of its disabled soldiers of national importance. This shortcoming on the part of the South calls to mind Stephanie McCurry’s arguments in Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South(2010) regarding the Confederacy’s reluctance to provide support for its women, while using the same women as a crucial part of the ideological underpinning of the war itself. Hasegawa’s work suggests that Southern politicians saw soldiers in much the same way. The Confederacy depended upon the bodies of men to fill its gray uniforms, yet dragged its feet to help when those bodies returned, broken, from the war.
Hasegawa’s description of the continuing efforts to provide limbs to Union veterans under the Civil War pension system also raises important points. In 1870, legislation made it possible for veterans to receive an artificial limb, or its monetary value, every five years. Hasegawa’s examination of the number of limbs issued during that period shows that veterans overwhelmingly chose commutation payments instead of new prosthetics, suggesting that veterans were more likely to find themselves in need of money rather than another limb. Further, Hasegawa reminds us that aside from pension payments, limbs, and commutation funds, “a veteran with an artificial limb could not look to the government for assistance in mastering his prosthesis, finding a job, or dealing with the other difficulties that attended his injury” (p. 79). Civilians and politicians made much of their ability to “mend broken soldiers,” but it would take far more than an artificial limb to do that.
Hasegawa has filled a gap in the literature on disability in the Civil War era, and the accompanying database of soldiers who received limbs will be a great asset to students and scholars. While this book focuses more on relaying facts than on drawing conclusions, Hasegawa raises important points that will inspire future scholars to ask new questions about disability, the state, and the Civil War.
Note
[1]. For more on Civil War amputees, see Brian Matthew Jordan, “Living Monuments:” Union Veteran Amputees and the Embodied Memory of the Civil War,” Civil War History57, no. 2 (June 2011); Jalynn Olsen Padilla, “Army of Cripples: Civil War Amputees, Disability and Manhood in Victorian America” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2007); Frances Clarke, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Lisa Herschbach, “Fragmentation and Reunion: Medicine, Memory, and Body in the American Civil War” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1997); James Marten,Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation:Sarah Handley-Cousins. Review of Hasegawa, Guy R., Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. August, 2013.
URL:http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=38839
A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community.
Nicole Etcheson
University Press of Kansas, Lawrence 2011. xii + 371 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1797-5.
Reviewed by A. James Fuller
Published on H-CivWar (May, 2012)
Commissioned by Martin Johnson
The Civil War’s Impact on an Indiana County
A resurgence of scholarship in political and social history has begun to reexamine the Civil War in the North. Moving beyond studies of the home front, the best of these works reinterpret the ways in which Northerners experienced the entire period from the antebellum years through the Reconstruction era. This new periodization connects the prewar and postwar years and looks at both the continuities and changes wrought by the war that redefined the United States. Nicole Etcheson’s splendid microhistory of Putnam County, Indiana, brings together the now-tired lenses of race, class, and gender with political history, local matters, and memory in a groundbreaking study that shows how the Civil War transformed life in a Midwestern community.
For a generation of historians, race, class, and gender have offered the conceptual framework for insightful analysis of the past. Etcheson, Alexander M. Bracken Professor of History at Ball State University, employs this familiar conceptual triad at the local level, combining them with gripping stories embedded in the context of place as well as time, illustrating how well-worn concepts might still be usefully applied to gain new insights and fresh perspectives. She argues that for a “microhistory to have validity, the community under study must have some claim to representativeness or significance.” Etcheson is quick to note that “no single location, of course, can represent the larger society,” but, still, “a rural Midwestern community such as Putnam County, Indiana, may tell us much about a Northern society that was itself still primarily agrarian” (p. 13). She then demonstrates that the county serves as an ideal representation for Northern society in the era by listing the quantitative evidence showing that the area was both agrarian and industrial enough, both rural and urban enough, both politically and demographically diverse enough to offer insights in comparison with the rest of the North. She then argues that gender roles, racial views, class relationships, and political power were all affected during a generation marked by war.
Etcheson begins with the story of an ax murderer, using the grisly tale of a man killing his wife in 1857 and his subsequent trial and execution as a window on the antebellum world of Putnam County. Despite what a traveler might have surmised while observing the countryside, farms, and villages along the National Road, the county was far from a tranquil rural idyll. The growing market economy brought not only more industry and the profit motive, but also the expansion of internal improvements like roads and railroads. Class divisions surfaced politically in issues like temperance, as nativist fears of immigrants combined with Protestant Christian worries about the dangers of alcohol. Differences between the emerging middle class in places like Greencastle and the rural farmers revealed themselves in different ideas about gender. Middle-class notions of separate spheres challenged the old patriarchal order, but change was slow in coming, as most county citizens held to male-dominated views. The new Republican Party represented the middle-class residents and sought a more active government, while the Democrats held to the Jacksonian principles favored by the poor and rural factions of the county. White supremacy prevailed in Putnam County, as few African Americans lived in the area and those who did were pushed out in the decade before the war. Democrats appealed to racism, as local politicians supported the exclusion of blacks from Indiana (a measure passed as part of the new state constitution in 1851) even as Republicans rallied their supporters with antislavery rhetoric designed to whip up fears of the growing Slave Power in the South. Thus, as represented in Putnam County, the antebellum North was already experiencing the conflicts wrought by a changing society.
Prewar conflict expanded once the fighting began. Putnam County Democrats led by politicians like Daniel Voorhees resisted the efforts of Republicans like President Abraham Lincoln and Indiana Governor Oliver Morton. Violence erupted, as Indiana’s own internal civil war caused riots, gun battles, and mob actions. Unionists battled the Copperheads (as the most extreme Democratic opponents of the war were called), draft evasion was widespread, and secret societies operated even as official, legal politics continued with electoral victories and defeats for both of the political parties. Morton and other Republicans recognized that they needed the support of War Democrats to maintain power and win the war and this required them to pursue a more bipartisan agenda under the auspices of the Unionist party. But they still attempted to implement Republican policies designed to extend industrial capitalism and expand the power of the government. The divided Democrats went to great lengths to support their various positions, with War Democrats cooperating with their political rivals while those opposed to the war sometimes engaged in treasonous plotting against the Union. Both parties tried to fix elections, and the violence that tore the community apart made it difficult to forget the bitterness it engendered. Indeed, as Etcheson puts it, the war’s “animosities shattered county residents’ faith in the power of shared political principles to transcend partisan differences.” In fact, “the Civil War had so divided Putnam County that its people could no longer join together even to celebrate a universally beloved Union” (p. 122), as the two parties sponsored separate, exclusive Fourth of July celebrations in 1863. The war affected gender roles, as women fulfilled the tasks usually done by the men now gone off to fight. Families struggled to maintain the bonds that held them together through letters and packages sent to the soldiers and visits home or to the front. Such efforts allowed men to keep their authority, as they directed family affairs from afar. Women worked in charitable organizations to aid the war effort, the community tried to help the soldiers’ families with measures like reduced rent, and everyone worried about money. Despite their efforts to maintain contact, the war created a huge gap in experience between soldiers and civilians. Of course, the “greatest example of the gulf between soldiers and civilians was in the reality of death,” as many soldiers died during the war and families could not understand what the men had seen even as they often dealt with their own grief over the loss of loved ones. Etcheson argues that, ultimately, “the war did little change gender roles,” as “both soldiers and civilians struggled to preserve their roles as providers, fathers, and community members despite the war’s disruptions” (p. 147). Men who fought were changed, but they were not disconnected from home. Meanwhile, women “accepted the political or social roles assigned to them as women; they sought to accommodate the authority of even absent males.” But the war “radically changed the position of African Americans. Blacks’ role in the war threatened white supremacy and the racial order of prewar society” (p. 147). Indeed, African Americans serving as soldiers convinced many in Putnam County that blacks should enjoy full citizenship, although some racist whites resisted any notions of emancipation meaning equality.
The postwar period brought struggles over the meaning of the war and the settlement of the peace and Putnam County, like the rest of the country, was divided over the issues of Reconstruction. The political battles over Reconstruction legislation animated debates in Indiana as well as the South. Economic policy mattered, as the dramatic growth of industrial capitalism and class conflict spurred by the war continued in the so-called Gilded Age. Putnam County residents argued about currency, banks, railroads, immigration, and the rights of farmers and workers. Republicans waved the bloody shirt to remind voters of the Civil War even as the Democrats tried to offer an alternative and the Grange attempted to organize farmers. Everyone accused their rivals of corruption and evil intent. The Radical Republicans pushed a new racial order and supported the expansion of government to achieve it, but they also used that government power to promote capitalism rather to regulate it. Thus, the victorious party became conservative on economic issues. The Democrats held to conservative policies socially, but increasingly became associated with criticism of capitalism. But the national government committed itself to supporting the war’s veterans and pensions gave the former soldiers “unique economic advantages--and status as the saviors of the nation” (p. 197). Putnam County erected monuments to honor their war heroes and soldiers’ organizations were formed. Republican politicians used the Grand Army of the Republic “as a political vehicle” (p. 207), and the veterans enjoyed the benefits of government power in the form of pensions. Women’s clubs in Putnam County, however, did not “lead woman to challenge precepts of their society.” While women’s rights “received more support in the later decades of the nineteenth century than in the past” (p. 219), women mostly continued in traditional roles. Even when they were active in movements like temperance, women found themselves subordinate to male leaders. Men were still breadwinners and still held authority. Class divisions still animated politics. The issues were sometimes different, but much continued over the course of the generation that spanned from the 1850s to the dawn of the twentieth century. The one area where Putnam County saw truly dramatic change was race. In 1879-80, large numbers of African Americans became Exodusters, fleeing the South after the official end of Reconstruction. Some Exodusters came to Putnam County, where they met with ambivalence from white citizens. To be sure, some white residents held to their racist views and opposed black settlement. But many in the county embraced the emancipationist vision of the Civil War and adopted new views of African Americans. Where they often had thought of blacks as lazy before the war, many whites in Putnam County changed their minds after seeing black soldiers and hardworking black citizens. These egalitarian visions “marked a revolutionary change from the attitudes of the prewar period, in which antiblack racism had been universally accepted” (p. 259). Racial attitudes changed again in later decades, but the Civil War generation underwent a tremendous shift.
A fine storyteller, Etcheson traces the lives of individuals, allowing the reader to “get to know” the characters. But she might have given more attention to economic issues other than class conflict. In her conclusion, Etcheson employs the concept of historical memory to show how the Civil War generation recalled the war that dominated their entire lives. She uses the story of the building of the Indianapolis Solders’ and Sailors’ Monument on the Circle in downtown Indianapolis as another window into the world of Putnam County. In this brief section, one wishes that the author had included the Unionist/Nationalist memory as well as the reconciliationist and emancipationist visions of the Civil War, but that her work raises more questions only points to its value. A Putnam County resident was the leading proponent of building the monument dedicated in 1889 and Etcheson argues that the “monument’s story captures many aspects of the Civil War era in the North” (p. 262). The monument honored the soldiers and political leaders, commemorated “the contribution of women” (p. 263) and, unusually for Civil War memorials, also included a representation of emancipation. The meanings of the images on the statue remain controversial. For example, the emancipationist vision of a slave holding up his broken chains to the goddess Peace stirred debate in the early twenty-first century as an artist used it as a model for a piece along Indianapolis’s cultural trail, raising objections from those who saw it as racist. Etcheson notes that the rendering “is typical in its representation of the helplessness of the slave and his need for others to liberate him” (p. 266). Clearly, the memory of the Civil War continues to be contested today. But the monument also captured the visions of a generation at war and the story serves as a fitting end to a well-written book that contributes much to our understanding of the Civil War in the North.
Citation:A. James Fuller. Review of Etcheson, Nicole, A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. May, 2012.
URL:http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35453
Thanks to all our members and readers. Please remember that At Home and in the Field is an e-journal of and for the members of the Society for Women and the Civil War. Please feel free to send comments, suggestions and writings featuring your own interest to our editor at athomeandinthefield@yahoo.com We are seeking member involvement on one time or serial bases. We are interested in any member submissions including reviews of books, articles, museums and their current exhibits, events, websites, archives, libraries, collections and artifacts. If it is of interest to you, it is probably of interest of many of our other members. If you are interested in becoming a one-time contributor, a serial contributor or are interested in becoming a columnist for At Home and in the Field, please contact our editor, Meg Galante-DeAngelis at athomeandinthefield@yahoo.com
