Themes of the American Civil War

CHAPTER
“To bind up the Nation’s wounds”
Women and the American Civil War
SUSAN-MARY GRANT
Writing in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1864, when the Civil War was in its fourth and bloodiest year, Belle Spencer recalled her reaction to her husband’s departure for the battlefield over two years previously:
I had seen much before, and borne a great deal, yet it seemed but little comparatively when I came to take leave of my husband,
and turned back to my lonely room to await his return. True, I had expected this, was prepared for it in a measure yet a strange and overpowering sense of my position came over me that I had not felt before, when I stood by the window to catch a last glimpse of a beloved form. He was standing upon the deck of a large boat,
with hundreds of others around him yet I seemed to see him only,
his sad face turned tome in mute farewell as the bell clanged and the ponderous vessel swept slowly out into the stream, and turned her prow toward the mouth of the Tennessee. It was but a moment,
during which I leaned against the casement, breathless, agonized.
There the waters lay cold and glittering under the spring sunbeams,
and the sadness of utter desolation seemed to have fallen upon my spirits.
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Belle Spencer was not the type of woman content to weep at home,
however. As she herself put it, with three hospitals insight of my window”
the direction her war work would take was obvious and, indeed, commenced soon after her husband left. Initially welcomed by the doctor to whom she
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applied, her horror at the conditions she encountered soon set her at odds with the hospital authorities. Undeterred, she struggled to bring comfort to the men she encountered, noting their rapid improvement under her care.
Her response to the news that her husband had been killed at Shiloh was to set off in search of him or his body. Finding him wounded but alive, she took him home to nurse him back to health, in time, she noted, for the Fall campaign.”
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Belle Spencer’s story is, in many ways, typical of our image of women during the Civil War. Its publication some two years after the events described in it suggests that it was published with the specific intention of reinforcing morale on the Northern home front in an important election year. It did not dwell on Belle Spencer’s difficulties with the hospital authorities, although it did hint that these did not abate. Instead, the central thrust of the article was the wife’s willingness to support, first, her husband and, second, through him the Union cause. At the article’s conclusion, it is made clear that Belle has nursed her husband back to health, not for herself,
but for the benefit of the Union army. In her selfless devotion to the cause,
in her work to support it through nursing the troops, and especially in her willingness to give up the man she loved to it, Belle Spencer was the ideal soldier’s wife of her time. Although critical of male authority within the medical environment, she never directly challenged it although devastated by the risk of personal loss, she never flinched from it.
For women like Belle Spencer the Civil War was one of the most significant events of their lives and that of their nation it is, indeed, the central event in America’s national story. It was the nation’s defining conflict, the war whose outcome justified both America’s claim to nationhood and the central ideals of freedom and equality supporting that claim. Yet the war established neither freedom, in anything but the legal sense, for African-Americans nor equality in any sense for women.
Although historians continue to challenge the image of the Civil War as a brothers war that ultimately reaffirmed national unity, and specifically work to bring women into the history of the conflict, our understanding of why women’s role in the Civil War has been so downplayed remains incomplete. Only by placing the women’s Civil War within the broader context of America’s struggle for national identity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can we trace the process that led to women’s exclusion from the war’s narrative. Such exclusion was by no means reflective of contemporary perspectives on women’s importance to the war effort and their role in sustaining it. Nineteenth-century warfare was a man’s game,
no doubt, but, as Belle Spencer’s experience shows, it was also a woman’s business. War work—at home or on the battlefield—presented women with new social and even political opportunities, even as the traditional social structures altered in the absence of men.
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Susan-Mary Grant

For all women, North and South, black and white, the responsibility of running the home, farm, or plantation was only the most obvious change in their circumstances. For white Southern women, many of whom lost not just husbands but homes and, for the planter class, an entire way of life predicated on slavery, the impact of the conflict was particularly acute. African-
American Southern women kept the hope of freedom alive even in the face of the brutal reality of physical upheaval, loss of family, an increased workload, and the realization that some northerners were as racially blinkered as their former owners had been. The shift away from the Victorian cult of true womanhood ideal in response to the war’s many challenges—more of an issue for white than for black women, as the latter were frequently excluded from these restrictive precepts—the need to reestablish a marital relationship unsettled by the male war experience or disrupted by slavery or, worse, the economic and personal responsibilities involved in facing the future alone, all point to gender boundaries influx during and after the
Civil War.
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The war had reached its most brutal, and crucial, juncture in 1864 when
Belle Spencer’s story appeared and when Abraham Lincoln was reelected fora second term. In his Second Inaugural, delivered the following March,
Lincoln stressed the need to strive onto finish the work we are into bind up the nation’s wounds to care for him who shall have borne the battle,
and for his widow, and his orphan Of course, Lincoln did not have in mind the actual bandaging of battlefield wounds, but rather the binding together of a severed nation, the reconstruction of a body politic dismembered by a brutal internecine war. Yet, paradoxically, the requirements of this reconstruction operated against the recognition of the full extent, and implications, of women’s Civil War experiences. The need to bind up the nation’s wounds resulted in the diminution of women’s role in the America’s most destructive, and yet nationally most formative, war. Although it was not his intention, Lincoln’s words neatly encapsulated the traditional image of Civil War women who, in their nursing capacity, were called upon to quite literally bind up the nation’s wounds a phrase frequently deployed to announce studies of or exhibitions on medical care during the Civil War. Alternatively, if not stereotyped as nurses, then Civil War women were allotted the role of grieving dependant, consolidated, as Elizabeth Leonard argues, in the culture’s historical memory into the dominant paradigm of the intersection between women and the Civil War Civil War women as the weeping widows of the dead.”
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Historians have, over the years, sought to challenge this paradigm in studies that highlight women’s very real contribution to the Northern and Southern war effort within the broader context of those that explore the war’s impact on women, families, and society in general. The Civil War reinforced traditional gender roles in theory, but in practice the upheaval of
Women and the Civil War
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war produced a reformulation of the prevalent gender stereotypes of the day.
The historiography of the women’s Civil War acknowledges, indeed is to a large extent structured around, this gap between ideal and reality, but it is also constrained by the limitations of the available evidence. At its most simple, the historiography of the women’s Civil War had, until quite recently,
a tripartite structure, comprising works on Northern women and the longer- term political implications of their Civil War involvement studies of
Southern women, their support—or lack thereof—for the Confederacy and their function in the development of the Lost Cause and studies of African-
American women, whose war and postwar experiences, somewhat opaque to historians as a result of fewer firsthand accounts, were couched mainly—
although by no means exclusively—in the context of the changing work patterns and familial structures that freedom introduced.
Of these three groups, Southern elite white women have received by far the lion’s share of scholarly attention, in part because the war affected them in such dramatic ways, in part because so many of them left written accounts of their war experience, composed either during or, more usually, after the war, but mainly because of the central role accorded such women in the war’s aftermath, as the Lost Cause emerged as a response to, in someways a rejection of, but ultimately a means of coming to terms with, defeat. For all of these reasons, Southern women can no longer be termed the “half-sisters of history as Catherine Clinton once described them, but both the Northern and the African-American woman’s Civil War has been overshadowed, to a great extent, by the attention given to the Confederacy.
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Just over a decade ago, George Rable—himself a historian of Confederate women—noted that, traditionally, Civil War historians have been rather dismissive of women’s history while social historians, in their turn, are too frequently simply contemptuous of military history. The Civil War, he suggested, might constitute the badly needed common ground fora rapprochement . . . The sources are so rich and varied that the possibilities for striking combinations of fields and methods are nearly endless . . studying social definitions of gender and the ways in which real people embraced, lived up to, or rebelled against these ideal types should he argued,
“have a broadening rather than a narrowing effect on Civil War studies.”
Yet, despite the shift in Civil War historiography toward what used to be called the new military history and the merging of home front and battlefront in the work of many historians, the subject of women in the Civil War continues to sound a jarring note. Women’s experiences of war, according to some, cannot be as valid as men’s experiences, even if both fought, even if neither did. The popular image of the Civil War as a white man’s fight”
has been slow to give way to a more inclusive picture of a war involving many players, black and white, male and female, soldier and civilian.
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