Episode 4: The Women's War

Transcript

John Heckman: I am a big fan of new histories and trying to think of history in a new way. And growing up, when I did where I did, we mostly saw war as a male thing.

And that, I had to learn later, is not the truth. What led you in the direction of wanting to talk more about the gender-based history of the American Civil War?

Stephanie McCurry: Well, as a person who, like you, got interested in history when I was young, and out of my own experience, I grew up in Northern Ireland in the middle of a military occupation by the British.

And so, my own life experience was very much at odds with the things that I was hearing in Canada as an undergraduate, certainly in high school, and then even as an American history student in Canada. And it was very early in the women’s history world. There were no courses, there were no books, really, at that time.

But the questions just wouldn’t go away. And my preoccupation always has been with relations of power and how they help us take a perspective or get a new perspective. My preference has always been to write about the big political events of the past, not new subjects, but to write about them in a new way.

And the new way came. The new way was mandatory for me because I just didn’t see these events or think or feel about them in the same way that I was being taught. And the move to write about war came later. I wrote about the South initially, that’s what I studied, and that was my field. And I wasn’t known as a Civil War historian or a historian of Reconstruction. But my work was always about gender: gender as one of the key relations—if not the key relation—of power that crosses cultures, periods, histories. And does not go away, in fact, can be heightened in periods of conflict.

And so, for me, the combination lock that I was always trying to figure out is how do you address the major questions of these big political events, like why the South seceded, or, what was the objective of the Confederacy in the Civil War, or what happened in Reconstruction? How do you do that while having a landscape populated as richly as real life is so that you don’t just select in advance a very thin cast of characters, and then write about them. But try to understand what it’s like to live through the experience of these periods under slavery, for example. And the recognition that if you are thinking about relations of power and gender as one of them, it’s not one size fits all.

When I started doing women’s history, there was a big emphasis on very educated, women’s-rights-oriented elite women. And to me that was the kiss of death. I mean, this was just killing the field. You had to start thinking about relations of power between women, between men and women. Around the same questions of political economy and class and all these other things. And race, of course. And so, when I did come, most people who know my work would say, well, initially I was trying to make this move into the field of political history and redefine what that was.

And it was later that I started to think about the history of war as the problem in its uber form. So, if political historians who think about the vote, think about women as irrelevant to that history before they have the vote, then if you think about military history as the movement of armies and the formal histories of conflicts, then the home front, okay, maybe that’s a sidebar subject, but women are in the sidebar subject. They are not themselves key players in the history of war.

And in fact, the whole way the history is structured prohibits actually thinking about them and their role in it because it casts them, casts women, even in international law as protected parties in war. And because we’re invested in that—of course we’re invested in that—we want some level of civilian immunity and protection, it’s been very hard to try to think about what we know to be true in the modern world. Which is that women live through war like everybody else. They have stakes in it sometimes. Very often, they care as much about the causes and provocations. They feel strongly about invasions and legitimacy of occupations.

And some are willing to fight. Many are willing to take political positions or hold them as men do, within the same orbit of their family and kinship groups and whatever region, class, race. And then some are willing to fight. And we know this because look at the history of modern war, wars of invasion, civil wars, wars of national liberation, wars of decolonization.

This is irrefutable. But we’ve been gifted a history that really sees women as separate from war, outside of it. Maybe witnesses to it, maybe victims in it, maybe booty of war, or in the more modern terms, protected parties in war. But the experience of women in war, in all of their diversity and diversity of that experience, we’re only just beginning, I think, to write about.

And the other thing I would say, by way of opening, is it’s been especially difficult, because any feminist who writes on any given conflict knows that there were women involved in the conflict. But the generalization still holds in part because, during wars, armies are forced to acknowledge the enemy- women problem.

After wars, there’s a whole apparatus of repressing the consequences of that and that recognition. And I think that it’s a structure that constantly refreshes itself and reorganizes. And it’s very difficult to add up the pieces. None of us have the expertise to say, across the history of modern war, these are the patterns of X, Y, and Z.

So, it would require a collaborative effort. And one person can only read so widely. And so in my last book in 2019, that was what I was trying to do is at least suggest what the framework should be for our grasp of any particular conflict, and then go on to give some deep examples of what it would mean for the history of the American Civil War.

John Heckman: I had a moment where I had to chuckle to myself at a conference one time. There was a historian who was on a panel and was taking questions from the audience and someone asked why didn’t you look at the white women’s perspective of the South when you were looking at desertion rates amongst the Confederate army in—I can’t remember what year we were discussing. And he said, well, I don’t think women had a lot of power but I do blame them for the large desertion rate. And I’m like, well, wait a minute. If they don’t have any power to quote unquote do something during the war, but yet they have the power to make the soldiers come home because there’s something wrong at home or they’re just like, okay, this is enough. Then there’s a double standard here.

Do you see some of that pushback when you write about these things from some of the old guard, or do you think we’re starting to come around because in the ’70s, there seemingly was a turn with some of these social histories about conflict?

Stephanie McCurry: I do think that the resistance is greatest when it comes to the history of war. I faced this even around political history when I was younger, and leading political historians at best would say about my view of secession, for example, that you can’t understand it unless you understand the dynamics of households in slave society, the gender dynamics of households and slave society, the free men—we free men, not we slaveholders or secessionists. The argument that I would get at best was, well, that’s interesting, but it’s not political history. So, there’s a lot of gatekeeping that goes on and I think it continues to go on, but it’s much less than it was before.

The problem with military history, especially the military history of the Civil War, is that we got stuck in this very stale debate about why the South lost the Civil War. And there were only two answers to that question. They were repeated endlessly. One was they failed militarily, and the other was that they were undermined from within.

And by definition, that put any contribution that women might have made to the success or failure of any war effort, the Confederate in this case, into the domain of the home front. And it was played out, I think, in a not very productive way that I found very frustrating. Even when I wrote my book, Confederate Reckoning, about power and politics in the Civil War South, even the reviews wanted to say, well, which side of this binary does this fall on? When my whole point was that this binary doesn’t make any sense. I mean, in a slave society, the home front is the slaves. The plantation is the home front. And if you don’t think that there was political activity and military opposition going on among people who have no formal military role, then you’re not actually writing about that war at all. You’re writing about some imaginary version of it, where only soldiers in gray and blue uniforms are waging it. So, I don’t know. I haven’t had that much response to the 2019 book. Actually, I think there’s a way in which if something has women in the title, it just automatically is shelved differently. Probably has a different call number.

So, I feel like the intellectual benefit and the contribution to new knowledge is greatest on the cusp of these old interpretations and binaries. And I’ve always felt that way. I still do. And I think military history is a particularly difficult field to penetrate.

But my perspective would be, and has been, that if you’re talking about a slave society at war, you have to understand the particularities of what they face and the particular burdens they face. And in that way, I think that edifice of battlefront and homefront crumbles before you start.

From my point of view, that makes it easier. I don’t know what Gary Gallagher would say about that, or other people who have really tried to hold hard on the lines of it’s the formal military history that makes the difference. But I don’t really care at this point either. So…

John Heckman: Could you elaborate on some of the resistance that you saw from white women at that time? Because their ideas of resistance are seen differently than those trying to seek freedom.

Stephanie McCurry: I think the easiest place to start is with the Confederacy, although there’s a parallel development in the Union. And the most obvious example of resistance is when you have a population that’s Unionist in the heart of Confederate territory or a Confederate population in the heart of Unionist territory. And so, the border states and guerrilla war is the most clear example of this. And from the point of view of the Confederacy and the Union, you have enemy women within those territories. In the South, it’s Unionist women, not necessarily antislavery, actually usually not antislavery but anti-Confederate, and were anti-secessionist, and they come from Unionist communities. Western North Carolina is a very clear example. And their communities, not just them, but their communities are in open opposition to the Confederacy. They have Union brigades and Union units and they are fighting a kind of brush war or guerrilla war and everybody recognizes that the safe harbor for Unionists to operate is the kinship group or the community, which shelters them and hides them.

And so, the Confederate army has to move in against them. And we know it did. And it moved in hard. And it became a very explosive political issue when it became clear that they were torturing women for information about the whereabouts of their men in western North Carolina. Phillip Paludin’s book Victims is about this. And there’s court records, there’s all kinds of evidence of this. So that, I think, is the clearest example.

On the Union side, that’s resistance. There’s other kinds of opposition to the Confederacy, which I’ll get to in a minute. But in the Union side, you have the question of Confederate women who are operating as spies in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore and various places. But you have the more pressing issue of Confederate women in the border states as the Union moves through and starts to occupy. Especially in states that, like Kentucky, that proclaimed neutrality briefly. Or any of the border states, but especially in a place like Tennessee, where Henry Halleck’s occupation was thwarted by a Confederate resistance that he couldn’t keep down and ultimately resulted in mass arrests of women who were providing all kinds of both ancillary and primary support for Confederate activities. Including luring Union soldiers into ambushes, going armed themselves, working as spies, cutting telegraph lines, conveying information and intelligence across the lines, all these kinds of things. To the point where he issued some very, very harsh orders in, I think it was November of 1862, which actually ended up in Lieber’s Code. Which, if you’re not an American historian, Lieber’s Code is the only thing you know about the American Civil War because it became the basis of the Hague and Geneva Conventions.

Francis Lieber, author of the Leiber Code

And one of the things that I discovered and wrote about in my book is that the harshest authorizing action against enemy civilians in the section of the code was not actually in the original code at all, but was added by Halleck to Lieber’s draft. And it literally incorporates his field orders cracking down on these women. So, it really permanently expanded the scope of what you were allowed to do to civilians in war. And it totally eviscerated the idea of women’s innocence. Because, the idea of women’s innocence in war can be upheld to a point, until it’s militarily costly.

And that’s what the code says. These people can harm you. Therefore, you can act against them. And so, this isn’t just me making this up, or these aren’t just isolated examples. These are structurally informing the laws of war, the rules of engagement for the Union army in time and place, and the laws of war for a long time after.

So those kinds of examples are the most obvious forms of resistance. But there’s other kinds that are less politically conscious but that have massive consequences for military operations. Including, for example in the Confederacy, when the burdens of the war get so great that whole collectives of soldiers’ wives organize against military policies, including conscription, tax and impressment policies that are taking food out of their barns—when the “rich man’s war, poor man’s fight” argument really becomes an argument about who’s protected from the burden of war and who is not. And in that case, it’s not a politics of women’s rights. It’s not even a politics of anti-Confederacy. It’s what I called a politics of subsistence. It’s what happens when you’re trying to survive a war, as all people do.

And I think we would all acknowledge that many of the sort of lineages of war are not driven by intent or policy, but by the ramifications of policies. And the ramifications of Confederate conscription were particularly burdensome because they couldn’t enlist 40 percent of the male population because they were enslaved. So, the burden of conscription on white men was massive. It was 75 to 85 percent of white men. And by 1863, it brought the Confederacy to a breaking point. The head of the Conscription Bureau said, we can’t get any more men. And as you know, and some of your listeners probably know, that created all kinds of problems, including the thought that maybe they had to enlist enslaved men.

But one of the other consequences, which I wrote about, is that soldiers’ wives rebelled and became a political constituency that politicians had to answer to in a way they never were before. And out of that, you got a rescinding of certain military and tax policies. You got a implementation of a certain kind of welfare policy. The army literally had to send out broadsides saying, return food to the counties. Because they’d been taking the food to feed the army. So, I think those are extremely important elements of women’s war, and women’s experience of war, and the consequences of women’s actions in war.

And I think they’re often narrowly slotted into some preconceived idea of, say, women’s rights. Like, they’re acting as citizens, they’re insisting on their rights as citizens. No, they weren’t. They didn’t. These people had never engaged with an official before. So, they were acting really out of necessity and to provide subsistence. But it was consequential for the military and for the civilian governments in the Confederacy. That kind of thing didn’t happen in the Union because the war was fought in the South. The South was a slave society, which was literally fighting with one hand tied behind its back. That’s the way I see it. And because it was an agrarian society and it couldn’t look to industry or agribusiness to provide for the army, they had to literally lift it out of yeoman farmers’ households.

John Heckman: What about black female resistance? We hear so much about one or two who definitely deserve admiration, such as Harriet Tubman and others.

But what about the tens of thousands of other Harriet Tubmans who don’t have a statue? Those who still were involved in some kind of a civic act or an act of defiance on the home front in the South or in other places?

Stephanie McCurry: Well, I guess this is a very different story, but I think it’s a related story. The Confederacy goes to war and they go to war with this very thin vote of the part of the population that’s enfranchised—only white men—and then they have to fight a war and they have to earn the support of the population.

That’s always a problem. But you can’t earn the support of the enslaved population. They are defiantly antislavery and anti-Confederate—men, women, children. This is a priori. We start with that recognition. We know a lot about radical abolitionists and, on their writings, we know a lot about people who made it out of the South, like Frederick Douglass and all kinds of other amazing leaders.

But one of the things I was trying to do in writing about the Confederacy was talk about what happened on plantations and the immediate recognition by planters of enslaved people as the enemy within. And they were suspicious and vigilant about their activities from the minute any political activity started.

And the bloody crackdown was awful. I mean, I don’t think we’ve really ever taken proper recognition of this. And one of the things that’s clear from plantation records, which military historians don’t use, is that they were equally as worried about the women as they were about the men. In fact, they were constantly making lists of Rebels and leaders on my plantation.

And then there’s the names. And contrary to popular assumption, even women with little children could be on that list. In fact, they might be on that list because that guy sold their children and they’re moving immediately to find them. So, there’s a gender division in the roles and the gender division of labor in the way they get to express and make their opposition count.

And I think one of the things that we haven’t really grappled with is that, when we displaced the sort of old argument, the old model of Lincoln freed the slaves for the much more agentic, this enslaved people freed themselves, that quickly became wrapped in the military history model. They fled to Union lines. They joined the Union army, 200,000 black soldiers and sailors, etc. All of which is true, but there were 4 million enslaved people in the United States and the military, the Union military, did not want enslaved women flooding into their camps. They wanted men at a certain point, as laborers, etc., and eventually as soldiers.

But the women were just a burden and an encumbrance. And they tried to keep them out, but they couldn’t. So, there’s a level of antislavery, anti-Confederate activity going on on the plantations, behind Confederate lines. Most of it, I would say, is there. And all kinds of that, spies, all kinds of significant activity. Helping people like Harriet Tubman who move in and then learn about localities. But there’s also the story of freed women or women who became freed women who made it, who followed Union marches or troops, showed up at posts, just kept showing, they were completely uninvited, showing up and showing up. And then the Union army was faced with this problem of what do we do with all these people?

Edwin Forbes illustration of contraband slaves escaping to Union army lines

We’ve had amazing books on this in the last eight or 10 years, on the contraband camps as these self-made zones of freedom that black women were crucial to. Often because black men were lifted off for military service. But yeah, it’s a massive part of the story of the war in the Mississippi Valley and the low country of South Carolina and Georgia, where the navy and the army occupied very early on.

So, black women, enslaved women, they’re abolitionists by birth. And there’s no daylight between what they’re doing for themselves and their children and their families and their survival and what they’re doing to destroy the Confederacy and the legitimacy of slavery.

So, yeah, that’s a really fantastic part of the story. And I think the military history, I argued because of military policy during the war, has construed them as soldiers’ wives. But marriage was illegal for enslaved people. So, there was no legitimate marriage. Nobody was formally a wife.

And the consequences of this really even spilled over to military policy in enlistment and liberation orders, like the preliminary emancipation proclamation or the militia acts, which went hand in hand. They have to free the wives of the soldiers too, at a certain point.

They can’t expect men to fight for the Union army with their families enslaved. That’s fine, as long as your family is with you. If they’re in Kentucky, it took until, I think, January or February of 1865 for the Union to pass any law emancipating the wives of black soldiers in Kentucky because their owners were within Union lines, were Unionists.

And they had all kinds of Democratic politicians in Congress all through the war defending their rights to property because they weren’t traitors. They hadn’t seceded. They weren’t disloyal. And so, some black women bore a very long burden of that. And I think in general, historians have been writing increasingly about the Civil War as a humanitarian crisis.

And a lot of that has to do with the incredible challenges, additional challenges, enslaved women faced in their efforts to get free because the army didn’t want them. So, it made it harder. And that’s, I think, been obscured by the every-slave-became-a-Union-soldier kind of—the numbers don’t even make sense. I mean, most black men, most enslaved black men, didn’t become Union soldiers. So that narrative was really important because of the way it was linked to citizenship and the vote after the war. And I’m not trying to denigrate it or say anything negative about it as a historical development. It’s just not a coherent historical explanation of the fight for emancipation during the war. It’s one part of it.

John Heckman: Women’s roles as far as being involved with politics. They may not be able to vote, but they can voice their opinion. They can go to the streets and ask for change in certain ways. They can voice their opinion to someone else and have the change be put through a different route. Did that civic tremor that’s shaking, did that last into the end of the war and afterwards, or was it like, okay, we’re going to go back to a sense of normalcy with what we would call gender norms?

Stephanie McCurry: I mean, it’s a great question, and I think we’d probably have to tackle it separately for the North and the South.

And in fact, when I wrote Confederate Reckoning, which I published in 2010, I initially thought that I would trace out this question of what happened to these soldiers’ wives. As you said, whether they maintained their level of political vigilance and activity and bearing on legislative policies and so forth. These things have always interested me. And I gave it up because I discovered that there was no secondary literature of any sort to rely on. And I did do some of the primary work myself, but it was overwhelming and the book had to come to a close somewhere and I closed it there. I still think that is a crucial issue.

In the absence of research, the answer is no. And it has been provided by many people, including Drew Faust and others, is there’s generally an argument that there’s a kind of restorationist mentality after the war. Women are exhausted of the role they had to take in managing households and heading them during the war. Patriarchy is a kind of a refuge. I don’t believe it for a second, personally. Because I don’t think you can talk about the end of the Civil War, which came with defeat, occupation, and emancipation. There’s no plausible restorationist position imaginable. Everything has changed.

So, you’re restoring to what? It’s impossible. Reconstruction is by definition a complete rupture. And so, you can see people trying to hold on to elements of their power. And for sure, that’s a large part of what we write about. But it’s under new terms. There’s nothing replicating antebellum patterns about this.

And so, I think the short answer is I don’t think we really know. I don’t think people have done the work. What work has been done is on the women’s rights movement. And this is too narrow a frame, always, but also here, for this. The women’s rights movement in the South was primarily black women in this period, and they were agitating and moving black women’s suffrage forward through black conventions, through when black legislatures got representation in 1867, through those constitutional conventions and other things. White women in the South were not doing this. So that’s out. And that, I think, contributed to that kind of restorationist view. But I don’t think it’s a full answer to that question.

In the North, the story is very different and I think very interesting. There were, of course, seasoned activists coming out of the abolitionist movement who agitated all through the war for the linkage of a new birth of freedom for black civil and political rights and women’s civil and political rights. They formed national organizations. They were extremely well funded and organized. If you go to the Schlesinger Library, you can see the printed letterheads that went out, the equivalent of us getting a 1-800 robocall to call your senator. They were, as you know, behind the 13th Amendment petitioning campaign and all these kinds of things.

But they were also agitating for a reconstruction, a new birth of freedom and a reconstruction of gender relations, and they lost definitively on that. And the activity didn’t stop, but it suffered. And I would say that contrary to what a lot of people in the field think, I think—I was reading something recently that reminded me of why I disagree—that the idea of the male citizen, which is really conditioned on the obligation to military service, wasn’t weakened by the American Civil War, it was massively enhanced by it.

And I think it set back women’s suffrage for a very long time, in fact, till World War I, because women like Stanton, Anthony, other leaders, were trying to make an argument about women’s sacrifice in war, their contribution to the war, the price they had paid, the way they had earned a larger say. And it just didn’t stick. It couldn’t overcome the immediate burden of that proof of republican masculinity and citizenship. So, I think this is an idea that deserves more thought. Yeah, and the story of these Union women in the war, especially the highly organized ones, is we can do more. We need to know more about that. And also, I think it’s gotten bogged down in a kind of debate about the racism of the postwar women’s rights movement. These women, they know how to make a good argument. They know how to organize a movement. They know how to rally women behind them and they lose. Definitively. And I think that is really important to recognize and to think about why.

About the Guest

Stephanie M. McCurry is professor of history at Columbia University. She is the author of a number of books on the Civil War era, including Masters of Small Worlds (1997) and, most recently, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War (2019).

Additional Resources

Phillip Shaw Paludin, Victims: A True Story of the Civil War
Stephanie M. McCurry, Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South
The Lieber Code
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
For more on our host, John Heckman, visit him on Linktree