Beyond the Plantation Emancipation

proximate dependants, and their ages, was a crucial factor in the decision whether to make a bid for freedom or remain on the plantation. Some black women worked for the Confederate war effort as nurses, cooks, or general support staff others remained on plantations or in city households and had to cope with an urban environment increasingly swamped by refugees and characterized by an almost total breakdown of antebellum social norms.
There was, in short, no single definable African-American women’s Civil War,
nor even broad parameters within which this can easily be reconstructed.
There are, however, certain dominant themes to the historiography of the black female war experience of war.
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The historiography of the war years and the emancipation process, at least since the late s, was initially devoted to correcting the impression of slaves as passive victims and establishing them as active participants in a process that, from the war’s outset, gradually dismantled the antebellum
South’s peculiar institution. The massive Freedmen and Southern Society”
project, begun in 1976 at the University of Maryland, reflected this initial impetus and in its structure echoed, and to a degree also influenced, the general shape of the historiography on black women in the Civil War. At the start it was, on the one hand, a documentary history of emancipation”
and, on the other, a study of the wartime genesis of free labor the second series explored the black military experience the most recent volume looks at land, capital, and labor but we will have to wait for the fifth series before we get to the black community and to the larger themes of families, education, and society during and after the Civil War. The broader historiography,
some of which has developed as an offshoot of the Freedmen project, has,
however, followed a similar pattern. The sands saw a plethora of studies appear—from Clarence Mohr’s study of the bumpy road to freedom in Civil War Georgia, through Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch’s analysis of the the economic consequences of emancipation and the racism that hampered African-American economic stability, to Julie Saville’s exploration of The Work of Reconstruction—that focused primarily on the transition from slave to free labor. Women were part of that story, of course, but with the notable exceptions of Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow
and, over a decade later, Leslie Schwalm’s A Hard Fight for We, not its focus.
Black women’s shifting expectations, the gendered nature of the expectations placed upon them, and the sometimes insurmountable difficulties that changing work patterns caused them and their families were sometimes sidelined in studies that sought to paint the larger picture of the processes involved in the transition from Old to New South.
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Some of the studies that did focus their attention on black women were influenced, to some degree, by the contemporary political issues of the late sands, specifically the Moynihan Report of 1965 that identified the apparently weakened family bonds of slavery as influential in
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twentieth-century black family structures. Concerned to challenge and repudiate the matriarchal myth, historians devoted much of their attention to the composition of, and the complex support mechanisms that sustained,
the slave family, but this focus slanted the historiography away from the Civil War as a transition period and toward slavery itself or its aftermath,
specifically the processes involved in shifting from slave to free labor systems in the South. More nuanced studies of black Southern women’s lives within and beyond the family both during and after the war are appearing now,
but for the period of the war itself much work remains to be done. Here the difficulty regarding sources is acute, but there is another problem deriving from the African-American war experience as a whole, specifically the challenge it poses to the portrayal of the Civil War as the conflict that transformed a Union into a nation. From the letters reproduced in the Freedmen project volumes that have appeared to date, the accounts of owners attempting to maintain control of enslaved children as one means of stemming the tide of flight during the war to the forcible separation of families by federal troops and the removal of women from contraband camps back onto plantations historians have traced a process that pitted the white desire for control against the black demand for freedom, a process that hinged, to a great extent, on the black woman. The sobering reality of the black women’s
Civil War conflicts with the image of the war as an emancipatory experience for America as a nation to incorporate fully the black women’s Civil War into the story means changing, in fundamental ways, not just the form but the substance of the narrative.
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The work of both Jones and Schwalm highlighted the fact that emancipation was fundamentally a gendered experience in the American South,
as elsewhere in the Atlantic world in the nineteenth century. For enslaved women particularly, but not exclusively, the middle ground between slavery and freedom during the Civil War was defined by the need to sustain the family, both proximate and extended. With the care of the young, the old, and the infirm falling on their shoulders, combined with the upheaval induced by the war, the pressure on enslaved women was acute. When partners left to join the Union army, their problems only intensified, forcing many women to follow their partners into Union lines, where their reception was, at best, mixed. Union territory symbolized the end of an old life and the beginning of anew one Jones observed, but it was an inauspicious beginning. Crowded together, often lacking food, shelter, and medicine,
these human contraband of war lived a wretched existence Branded—as many white Northern women who followed their menfolk to war also were—
as either prostitutes or idle, lazy vagrants freedwomen forced into close contact with the Union army often had a hard time of it. Work was sometimes difficult to find, and there were cases of flagrant and sadistic sexual abuse by Union troops whose attitude toward black women expressed in an
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overt and sometimes brutal way the most negative gender and racial assumptions of the nineteenth century. In contrast to black men, whose value to the Union was obvious, even in a nonmilitary capacity, black women were frequently regarded as a hindrance, a drain on crucial federal military resources, which to an extent they were, if only because of the practicalities of waging a war on a slaveholding society—even before emancipation became a recognized war aim—had not been adequately thought through.
Neither the military nor Northern politicians were prepared, physically or psychologically, for the numbers of contrabands who escaped to Union lines. As the war progressed, and Union forces penetrated deeper into the
South, the responsibilities placed on black women’s shoulders increased.
On the one hand the proximity to Union lines made flight an option on the other, it also meant an increased likelihood of their partners joining
Union forces, leaving them either to endure the anger of their white owners or face the challenge of leading their families out of slavery alone and into an extremely uncertain future.
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Race and gender, Thavolia Glymph stresses, combined to define the
African-American woman’s war experience together they established a rigid line of demarcation that seemed to rule out any public or quasi-public supporting roles for black women White Northern women’s contribution may have been challenged but was usually grudgingly accepted white
Southern women defined their own role, up to a point, amidst the confusion of war, and firmly so in the postwar era but black women were viewed as, at best, dependants of black males, with no contribution of their own to make.
Despite standing for freedom and the Union and as the wives, mothers,
daughters, and sisters of black soldiers Glymph observes, black women found their efforts rebuked and Federal guarantees of protection rarely honored Their position as women, and specifically as mothers with dependants, only exacerbated their situation. As Wilma King reminds us, slave
“mothers lived and prospered only to the extent that their children did.
They shared each other’s triumphs and defeats. Their lives were so firmly interlocked that they did not behave as individuals with singular purposes.”
When the war brought the possibility of freedom, mothers and children were often seen fleeing together. Anything to the contrary would have been incongruous For many enslaved women, of course, the war did not bring the opportunity for flight, but forced them to stand and fight on the home front, confronting and encouraging the disintegration of the peculiar institution in the domestic arena. Schwalm detailed this process in her study of the South Carolina low country, and Noralee Frankel has highlighted the valuable material to be found in federal records, Civil War soldiers’
pension files and the Freedmen’s Bureau records, material that she has used to provide us with a study of the war’s impact on black women and their families in Mississippi. Here the story is one of increasing deprivation as the
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Union blockade bit and concomitantly increased workloads as goods—
notably clothing—previously purchased were now manufactured by slaves and the removal of men to work on military projects left even more of the fieldwork in women’s hands.
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It is with some degree of understatement that Frankel identifies federal
“arrangements” for providing plantations with female contraband labor as problematic for African-American women because they were inadequately compensated and they were separated from their families Frankel, like Jones and Schwalm, emphasizes black women’s continuing struggle to hold families together as slavery was collapsing across the South, and highlights the start of a trend regarding female labor and its application that would persist into Reconstruction and beyond. Understanding the practicalities of the free labor system is the key to understanding the emancipation process,
since, as Jones pointed out, control over one’s labor and one’s family life represented a dual gauge by which true freedom could be measured. Blacks struggled to weld kin and work relations into a single unit of economic and social welfare so that women could be wives and mothers first and laundresses and cotton pickers second Yet the odds were against freedwomen achieving that kind of crucial compromise excluded from the middle-class domestic ideal, during Reconstruction the pressure to return to the fields was exerted from both former owners and northerners. The “victorious
Yankees and the vanquished Confederates agreed on very little Jones observed, but one assumption they did share was that black wives and mothers should continue to engage in productive labor outside their homes.”
By the end of the Civil War, Glymph wryly notes, no consensus on the question of contraband women had emerged beyond the debate over how best to put black women to work White women’s war work was seen, both at the time and since, as remarkable, and frequently as a significant step on the road toward equality. Black women’s wartime efforts were assumed to belittle more than an extension of the norm. In the transition from slavery to freedom, both their gender and their race remained the constants through which they were understood, by which they were judged, and from which freedom itself offered them only a limited form of escape.
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