Themes of the American Civil War
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| ALL ! by the American constitution freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness.” Annie Etheridge was rather a different case. She, too, had accompanied her husband to war, but when he deserted she did not, becoming instead the daughter of the rd Michigan, transferring, along with the troops, to the 5th Michigan later in the war. Her presence on the battlefield does not seem to be in much doubt, but she was therein a nursing capacity, in recognition of which she was accorded the unprecedented honor of being buried in Arlington National Cemetery. 11 Etheridge did not challenge men, either by seeking to adopt their dress or by usurping their combatant role. Her behavior reached but did not exceed the accepted gender boundaries of the day. Yet nurses still faced opposition in their attempts to support the soldiers. Women who abandoned the home in favor of the battlefront not only entered a violent world deemed unsuitable to their natures, but in the process relinquished the security and protection that the home environment provided, and were therefore prey to both suspicion and censure. Even in a time of war—perhaps especially in a time of war—women were expected to be all things to all men they were supposed to be brave and strong but at the same time remain loving and refined endurance and perseverance were to characterize the actions of young girls who had traditionally been seen as weak and frivolous It was a circle women could not hope to square. Even professionally qualified women met with outright hostility from the men they encountered. One of the best examples is that of Mary Edwards Walker, a medical doctor who served with the Army of the Cumberland. Initially, the medical profession disparaged her training, on the grounds that it was not appropriate fora woman to practice medicine. Walker, unlike Etheridge, did challenge the gender conventions of her day on several levels in her expertise, in her dress, and above all in her determination neither to compromise her ideals nor downplay her abilities. The Union army was more than happy to use her skills in an informal, voluntary way but not to recognize them as they would those of a male surgeon, nor to recompense her properly for her work. In frustration, Walker vented her spleen in a letter to Lincoln himself. She pointed out that she had been denied a commission, solely on the ground of sex despite her work having been tested and appreciated without a commission and without compensation Had a man been as useful to our country she concluded,“a star would have been taken from the National Heavens and placed upon his shoulder.” 12 Women and the Civil War • 273 Walkers experiences go to the heart of one of the main issues facing women during the Civil War the general unwillingness to acknowledge the validity and, more significantly, the value of their varied services for the cause, and historians are increasingly exploring the broader implications of this. There is some irony, however, in the fact that most works on the war itself and also, less explicably, studies of women’s role on the battlefield, be it as combatants or nurses, avoid any discussion of the Union’s most active woman on the battlefield and beyond, Harriet Tubman. Tubman was not challenging the gender conventions of her day—although, like Walker, she sought to wear the more practical bloomers in the course of her work, evidence enough for contemporaries of a woman deranged—conventions from which she, as an African-American, was largely excluded, but she was certainly challenging all the rest. It is remarkable, therefore, that she, of all women, should be missing from the women’s Civil War story. In part, it is the exceptional nature of Tubman herself that has produced this lacunae: her dramatic escape from slavery, her efforts to help others escape via the Underground Railroad, her support for John Brown’s famous raid on Harpers Ferry, her activities as a Union spy, scout, and nurse, and her advocacy in support of emancipation as an essential Union war aim, made Tubman a national icon, but this iconic status actually prevented, until very recently, her incorporation into the field of women’s history. We might better understand the reasons for this if we see Tubman as one of the nineteenth century’s invented greats”—to use Nell Painter’s phrase—an individual whose public persona has been available to historians largely through its construction by others, resulting in the loss of much of the complexity of the actual life. Painter uses the phrase in her analysis of the other prominent African-American woman of this period, Sojourner Truth, but the parallels, in so far as their respective historiographical positioning is concerned, are obvious. 13 Despite her work on behalf of National Freedman’s Relief Association and her efforts to aid former slaves who had escaped to the North during the Civil War, Truth is, like Tubman, largely missing from the history of the Civil War. Two studies of Tubman appeared during World War II, but both were descriptive biographical works rather than interpretative studies and there has been no shortage of dramatic tales of her life, many intended fora junior market. A recent flurry of interest has resulted in no fewer than three new biographies, all informed by the scholarship on slavery that has appeared between the sand today, by Catherine Clinton, Kate Clifford Larson, and Jean M. Humez. Truth has received rather more sustained scholarly interest over the years, but has yet to become the fixture in Civil War history that her activities as abolitionist, activist, and evangelical merit. Both Tubman and Truth are in some senses crossover figures, whose position on the middle ground between slavery and freedom, North and South, makes it difficult for 274 • Susan-Mary Grant scholars to place them in the Civil War narrative. In both cases, the historical individual is subsumed in the symbolic figure of the strong black female; “Truth created a persona that filled a need in American political culture,” Painter explains, and her image as former black slave and emblematic black feminist abolitionist, works metonymically as the black woman in American history She highlights the fact that Truth is frequently (misappropriated by historians of Southern slavery seeking a powerful symbol to stand for women under that institution. In Truth they find it, despite the fact “that Truth was a northerner, that her bondage ended before the antebellum era began, and that she never set foot on a plantation Both dominant in and yet simultaneously obscured from the historical gaze, Truth and Tubman stand outside the historiography of Civil War women, sidelined by a combination of their own very public histories and by a profession that, as Clinton suggests, prefers movements, collective identities rather than individual stories, however significant these may be. 14 Tubman’s unrecompensed work for the Union army, her struggle fora pension after the war—she eventually received one, $8 per month, in was doubtless exacerbated by her race but not atypical, and it is in the white Northern women’s experience that historians have, to date, identified the trends and collective identities that they seek. The Civil War highlighted the very different relationship that men and women enjoyed with the state, a relationship that historians such as Attie and Judith Anne Giesberg have explored in some depth. Men who volunteered to serve in the army received payment, along with a substantial bounty, making economic considerations a prime factor in the decision to enlist. Women, by contrast, were not only expected to provide the additional manual labor that the absence of their menfolk entailed, but encouraged to produce a variety of homemade goods for distribution among the troops. In this way, Attie points out, the “connection between labor and nationalism was not only brought home, it emanated from the home Women’s relationship with the state was not premised—as men’s was—on their role as citizens, but on the supposition that they were apolitical and altruistic members of society Rather than being a direct relationship, it was one that women sustained only through the men they supported, the men whose health they struggled for, not for their own sake but for that of the nation. As a consequence, there was a general expectation that women’s services—indeed, women’s patriotism— would not only be for the benefit of men, but directed by men. When women showed an inclination to act for themselves—most dramatically by seeking a combatant role, less controversially by offering their nursing or other support services—they encountered a multitude of difficulties. 15 The most recent research on the role of Northern women, especially, in the Civil War positions their activities within the continuum of women’s activism and the broader reform impulse. Giesberg, for one, argues that Women and the Civil War • 275 women’s work on behalf of the US. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War can be seen as the missing link between the localized reform activities of the antebellum period and the national reform movements of the Progressive era. The lessons women learned during the Civil War, she suggests, established the groundwork for the sweeping reform efforts and the emergence of mass women’s politics that characterized the rest of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century Attie, too, sees the Civil War as the catalyst for change for American women, and an important arena for the development of new social theories to justify equality between the sexes In the short term, however, the most significant lesson that women learned from the Civil War was that men were not readily willing to share either authority or responsibility with them. The Civil War brought opportunities for both men and women when these opportunities coincided, as in the case of the USSC, a clash was, in the context of the times, almost inevitable. In theory, the professionalization of women as nurses, medical personnel, sanitary agents, and so forth, meant the sharing of a type of public stature and power previously reserved for men In practice, much more was at stake than simply the care of the wounded. What the USSC sought to inculcate was nothing less than anew consciousness, anew national culture and female benevolence and supposedly disinterested patriotism became a means to that end. 16 The USSC was happy enough to channel women’s philanthropic impulses —and in the case of nurses even ensure that they received remuneration for their endeavors—but resolutely adhered to strict gender divisions in terms of labor and responsibility. In this context, it is not surprising that stories “about the disorganized character of female benevolence and the confusion it produced at the warfront” proliferated. These formed the basis of a narrative about the creation of the USSC that depicted the organization as the embodiment of rational benevolence and gave it the edge it needed to promote itself as uniquely positioned to support the troops. This, Attie argues, throws into sharp relief the unequal balance of social and economic power between the sexes in mid-nineteenth-century America Not only did the women behind it feel the need to involve what she terms, somewhat anachronistically,“non-feminist men but they proved powerless to prevent these men from appropriating their organizational ideas and structure to serve a distinctly masculine nationalist agenda Nevertheless, as the war dragged on, the USSC increasingly came into conflict with women who did not share its view of how their benevolence should be directed nor what forms it should take. By challenging the nationalizing tendencies of the USSC via a range of local initiatives—notably the Sanitary Fairs that took place in towns across the North—Northern women were able to expose, if only fora moment, the erroneous beliefs about female voluntarism In the process, they rejected the dominant version of female patriotism and 276 • Susan-Mary Grant instead stressed the parity between their loyalties and those of men In this way, Attie explains, women tried to make public the nature of their real economic contributions not only to the nation but to their families and local economies as well The most public women of all in the context of the Civil War North, of course—Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth—remind us that the struggles of the elite white women who challenged the USSC represent only the most visible tip of an iceberg of female activism during and after the war what lies beneath the surface has yet to be explored fully. 17 Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
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