Conclusion: A National Vision

centered on that part of the explanation for this lies in the impulse behind the construction of the public Civil War narrative, and the war’s place in
America’s national story. Although Leonard takes issue with the writers who in chapter after chapter . . . denied the war’s function as a crucible of change for the interrelationship of men, women, and power she also notes—almost in passing—that the construction of the Civil War narrative had a definite purpose. That purpose was not, in fact, to denigrate women’s achievements,
but rather to resurrect a stable world temporarily battered by strife, a prewar Victorian world to which they would happily return once peace was declared Women’s role in the Civil War, however, was an uncomfortable reminder of all that the war had cost, and what the nation had endured. In the process of challenging the paradigm of Civil War women as no more than weeping widows, historians have sometimes been in danger of sidelining the fact that the war did leave a great number of women widowed, children orphaned, and communities destroyed. That was the harsh reality that postwar Americans had to deal with. How they did so offers some clue to the process that gradually excluded women from the Civil War story. Victorian
Americans, Rose argues, were unwilling to let suffering stand in war as the final word. The will to recover a positive message threaded equally through peace and war because they perceived the conflict’s trials to be spiritual as much as physical Yet to dwell on the woman’s Civil War narrative, and in particular on the African-American women’s war, was to dwell on suffering;
only by avoiding the troubling reminder of that suffering—by removing women from the picture—could a more positive narrative of the Civil War be constructed.
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The Civil War was for many years the most sanitized of conflicts. It was a war fought between two great generals in the figures of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee whose troops fought for heroic ideals and did not,
apparently, indulge in any of the less savory activities to which armies have,
historically, been prone. The tendency to portray the Civil War in this way only increased overtime, as General William Sherman’s famous change of heart on the matter makes clear. War is hell, he asserted in 1880. A decade later he had revised his opinion the Civil War, he told a group of veterans from the Army of the Tennessee, was the holiest fight ever fought on God’s earth In the process of transforming the Civil War from hell to holy,
the very real suffering that the war involved became muted, blurred, and,
eventually, all but obliterated. The women’s war suffered a similar fate because it offered too sharp a reminder of the fact that Sherman had been closer to the mark in 1880 than he was ten years later. Yet historians have sometimes been too concerned to right the wrongs done to women in Civil
War historiography to place the problem in its broader context. Leonard,
for example, takes issue with Henry Bellow’s admittedly dismissive observation that Civil War nurses had received a spiritual reward for their work
Women and the Civil War
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and sacrifice for the Union cause. His attitude, she argues, contributed to an early postwar image that cleansed the topic of women in Civil War nursing of its unpleasant and threatening aspects Yet the Civil War was, in its entirety, fairly promptly cleansed of many of its most unpleasant aspects,
and the diminution of the work of Civil War nurses comprised only one element in that process.
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The problem facing Americans, North and South, in the war’s aftermath can be divided into two segments the local, involving men and their communities, and the national, involving the war and the nation. From the perspective of local communities, both during and after the war they had to deal with the troubling issue of what war does, of the changes it effects in those involved in combat. There was, as Reid Mitchell has argued, a very real need to avoid confronting the reality of what it is that people actually do in war kill. Too much attention to the horrors that Northern soldiers inflicted he points out, would have raised questions about their reintegration into postwar society Both men and women were instrumental in the construction of a narrative that succeeded in avoiding the reality of healthy soldiers and of conflict by portraying the war in almost romantic terms, even as they acknowledged the horrors perpetrated in war’s name.
Within the context of the times, of course, what Linderman has termed the idiom of elevated sentimentality was simply the means by which the horrors of war were made bearable. The language of heroism with its vocabulary of brave soldiers, spirited action, and noble sacrifice was the foundation of public discourse, the language of speechmaking, Sunday sermons, newspaper reportage, and even soldiers letters It was a language that Americans continued to employ to describe the war long after the fighting ended, and especially in their efforts to translate the war from horrific ordeal to heroic catalyst of national definition. The gendered nature of its vocabulary, however, excluded women from the war’s narrative, even as they employed it to describe their own war experiences.
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In national terms, North and South predicated their rather uneasy peace on the battlefield experience, on the military heroism of both sides, on the stories of the Blue and the Gray This process reached a peak of sorts during the semicentennial of the battle of Gettysburg in 1913, summed up in the grainy newsreel footage of old soldiers, former enemies, shaking hands across the stonewall over which they had battled fifty years before. This was the
Civil War as, in the Nation’s phrase, a triumph of brotherhood and white brotherhood at that. The Gettysburg commemoration ceremony of David Blight argues, represented a public avowal of the deeply laid mythology of the Civil War By then the war was seen primarily as a tragedy that forged greater unity, as a soldier’s call to sacrifice Women were not entirely absent from proceedings. The New York Times had hired Helen
D. Longstreet, the widow of Confederate general James Longstreet, to report
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Susan-Mary Grant

on the reunion. In her columns she reminded readers of women’s sacrifice during the war, and called fora tribute to their endeavors to form the theme of a future Blue–Gray reunion. But the ceremony really belonged to men. In the process of binding up the nation’s wounds the women’s story was not all that was lost, but it was nevertheless a casualty of a process that transformed a brutal and bloody conflict into a war for national unity. The work of historians to reintegrate women into the Civil War story, to highlight both race and gender as crucial determinants of that story, is not simply a process of recovering the voices of the forgotten or of reinstating women as significant players in America’s most critical national experience to date. It represents a fundamental challenge to traditional explanations of how that war, or any war, functions as a force for national cohesion and shows how such cohesion is almost always achieved via a process of exclusion as much as inclusion. Integrating black and white women into the war’s narrative clarifies some of the reasons for their exclusion in the first place but also, and more fundamentally, reveals the racial and gendered constructions that both defined and undermined America as a nation.
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Notes
1.
Belle Z. Spencer, From a Soldier’s Wife Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 26: 173 (October, pp. 622–9, quotation p. 622. The author refers to the aftermath of the battle of Shiloh,
which took place in April 1862, hence I surmise that her husband left for the war in that year.
2.
Spencer, From a Soldier’s Wife pp. 622, Fora valuable survey of the work done to date on women in the Civil War, see Theresa
McDevitt, Women and the American Civil War An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, CT,
and London, 2003) which offers a comprehensive listing of books, articles, and Websites on women’s war activities on home front and battlefield, North and South.
4.
Extremely valuable essays on the impact of the war on courtship and marriage during and after the Civil War can be found in Patricia L. Richard, Listen, ladies, one and all Union
Soldiers yearn for the Society of their Fair Cousins of the North and Megan J. McClintock,
“The Impact of the Civil War on Nineteenth Century Marriages both in Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds, Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front Wartime Experiences,

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