War does not only impact the soldiers involved in the fighting. War always has a profound impact upon the lives of civilians. During the Civil War, over 600,000 American soldiers died. The devastation of the war had a profound impact on the lives of civilians in both the North and the South. Huge numbers of women became widows as a result of the war. Women in both the North and South played important roles in the war effort. In both the North and the South, women served as spies. In the North, women formed sanitary commissions and volunteered to serve as nurses to alleviate the suffering of Union soldiers. In the South, civilians faced food shortages. Southern women participated in food riots during the war. No one was left untouched by the devastation of the conflict.
Civilian War
Despite Union success in the summer of 1863, discontent over the war ran throughout the North. This was particularly true in the wake of the Enrollment Act—the first effort at a draft among the northern populace during the Civil War. The working class citizens of New York felt especially angered as wealthy New Yorkers paid $300 for substitutes, sparing themselves from the hardships of war. The Emancipation Proclamation convinced many immigrants in northern cities that freed people would soon take their jobs. This frustration culminated in the New York City Draft Riots in July 1863. Over the span of four days, the white populace killed some 120 citizens including the lynching of at least eleven black New Yorkers. Property damage was in the millions, including the complete destruction of more than fifty properties—most notably that of the Colored Orphan Asylum. In an ultimate irony, the largest civil disturbance to date in the United States was only stopped by the deployment of Union soldiers, some of whom came directly from Gettysburg.
Elsewhere, the North produced widespread displays of unity. Sanitary fairs originated in the old northwest and raised millions of dollars for Union soldiers. Indeed, many women rose to take pivotal leadership roles in the sanitary fairs—a clear contribution to the northern war effort. The fairs also encouraged national unity within the North. The northern homefront was complicated: overt displays of loyalty contrasted with violent dissent.
A similar situation played out in the Confederacy. The Confederate Congress passed its first conscription act in the spring of 1862. Military service was required from all able-bodied males between 18 and 35. Notable exemptions likewise existed in the Confederacy, especially for those who owned twenty or more slaves. Discontent on the present state of affairs in the Confederacy reached a boiling point in 1863. Through the spring of 1863 consistent food shortages led to “bread riots” in several Confederate cities. Confederate women led these mobs to protest food shortages and rampant inflation within the Confederate South. Exerting their own political control, women dramatically impacted the war through violent actions in these cases, as well as constant petitions to Governors for aid and the release of husbands from military service.
For some women, the best way to support their cause was spying on the enemy. When the war broke out, Rose O’Neal Greenhow was living in Washington D.C., where she travelled in high social circles, gathering information for her Confederate contact. Suspecting Greenhow of espionage, Allan Pinkerton placed her under surveillance, instigated a raid on her house to gather evidence, and then placed her under house arrest, after which she was incarcerated in Old Capitol prison. Upon her release, she was sent, under guard, to Baltimore, Maryland. From there Greenhow went to Europe to attempt to bring support to the Confederacy. Failing in her efforts, Greenhow decided to return to America, boarding the blockade runner Condor, which ran aground near Wilmington, North Carolina. Subsequently, she drowned after her lifeboat capsized in a storm. Greenhow gave her life for the Confederate cause, while Elizabeth Van Lew sacrificed her social standing for the Union. Van Lew was from a very prominent Richmond, Virginia family and spied on the Confederacy, leading to her being “held in contempt & scorn by the narrow minded men and women of my city for my loyalty.” Indeed, when General Ulysses Grant took control of Richmond, he placed a special guard on Van Lew. In addition to her espionage activities, Van Lew also acted as a nurse to Union prisoners in Libby Prison. For pro-Confederate Southern women, there were more opportunities to show their scorn for the enemy. Some women in New Orleans took these demonstrations to the level of dumping their chamber pots onto the heads of unsuspecting Federal soldiers who stood underneath their balconies, leading to Benjamin Butler’s infamous General Order Number 28, which arrested all rebellious women as prostitutes.
Pauline Cushman was an American actress, a perfect occupation for a wartime spy. Using her guile to fraternize with Confederate officers, she snuck military plans and drawings to Union officials in her shoes. She was caught, tried, and sentenced to death, but was apparently saved days before her execution by the occupation of her native New Orleans by Union forces. Women like Cushman, whether spies, nurses, or textile workers, were essential to the Union war effort.
Military strategy shifted in 1864. The new tactics of “hard war” evolved slowly, as restraint towards southern civilians and property ultimately gave way to a concerted effort to demoralize southern civilians and destroy the southern economy. Grant’s successes at Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Tennessee prompted Lincoln to promote Grant to general-in-chief of the Union Army in early 1864. This change in command resulted in some of the bloodiest battles of the Eastern Theater. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Cold Harbor, and the siege of Petersburg, demonstrated Grant’s willingness to tirelessly attack the ever-dwindling Army of Northern Virginia. By June 1864, Grant’s army surrounded the Confederate city of Petersburg, Virginia. Siege operations cut off Confederate forces and supplies from the capital of Richmond. Meanwhile out west, Union armies under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman implemented hard war strategies and slowly made their way through central Tennessee and north Georgia capturing the vital rail hub of Atlanta in September 1864.
Action in both theaters during 1864 caused even more casualties and furthered the devastation of disease. Disease haunted both armies, and accounted for over half of all Civil War casualties.
In the North, the conditions in hospitals were somewhat superior. This was partly due to the organizational skills of women like Dorothea Dix, who was the Union’s Superintendent for Army Nurses. Additionally, many women were members of the United States Sanitary Commission and helped to staff and supply hospitals in the North.
Women took on key roles within hospitals both North and South. Mary Chesnut wrote, “Every woman in the house is ready to rush into the Florence Nightingale business.” However, she indicated that after she visited the hospital “I can never again shut out of view the sights that I saw there of human misery. I sit thinking, shut my eyes, and see it all.” Hospital conditions were often so bad that many volunteer nurses quit soon after beginning. Kate Cumming volunteered as a nurse shortly after the war began. She, and other volunteers, travelled with the Army of Tennessee. However, all but one of the women who volunteered with Cumming quit within a week.
Death came in many forms—disease, prisons, bullets, even lightning and bee stings, took men slowly or suddenly. Their deaths, however, affected more than their regiments. Before the war, a wife expected to sit at her husband’s bed, holding his hand, and ministering to him after a long, fulfilling life. This type of death, “the Good Death,” changed during the Civil War as men died often far from home among strangers. Casualty reporting was inconsistent, so women were often at the mercy of the men who fought alongside her husband to learn not only the details of his death, but even that the death had occurred.
“Now I’m a widow. Ah! That mournful word. Little the world think of the agony it contains!” wrote Sally Randle Perry in her diary. After her husband’s death at Sharpsburg, Sally received the label of she would share with more than 200,000 other women. The death of a husband and loss of financial, physical, and emotional support could shatter lives. It also had the perverse power to free women from bad marriages and open doors to financial and psychological independence.
Widows had an important role to play in the conflict. The ideal widow wore black, mourned for a minimum of two and a half years, resigned herself to God’s will, focused on her children, devoted herself to her husband’s memory, and brought his body home for burial. Many tried, but not all widows were able to live up to the ideal. Many were unable to purchase proper mourning garb. Silk black dresses, heavy veils, and other features of antebellum mourning were expensive and in short supply. Because most of these women were in their childbearing years, the war created an unprecedented number of widows who were pregnant or still nursing infants. In a time when the average woman gave birth to eight to ten children in her lifetime, it is perhaps not surprising that the Civil War created so many widows who were also young mothers with little free time for formal mourning. Widowhood permeated American society. But in the end, it was up to each widow to navigate her own mourning. She joined the ranks of sisters, mothers, cousins, girlfriends, and communities in mourning men.
1864 and 1865 was the very definition of hard war. Incredibly deadly for both sides, these Union campaigns in both the West and the East destroyed Confederate infrastructure and demonstrated the efficacy of the Union’s strategy. Following up on the successful capture of Atlanta, William Sherman conducted his infamous March to the Sea in the fall of 1864. Sherman’s path of destruction took on an even more destructive tone as he moved into the heart of the Confederacy in South Carolina in early 1865. The burning of Columbia, South Carolina, and subsequent capture of Charleston brought the hard hand of war to the birthplace of secession. With Grant’s dogged pursuit of the Army of Northern Virginia, Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865, effectively ending major Confederate military operations.
Source: The American Yawp. A Free and Online, Collaboratively Built American History Textbook, 2017-2018 Edition.
Civilian War
Foner, E. Confederate Women: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1865. (2015, January 28). [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOyBEE9-irE
Foner, E. The Transformation of Reform: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1865. (2015, February 5). [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDQwm6aWMtQ
Summary
Women played a very important role in the Civil War and were deeply impacted by the war. Women in both the North and South contributed to the war effort. In the North, women organized sanitary commissions and sanitary fairs to improve health care for ill and wounded soldiers. In both the Union and Confederacy, women often served as nurses for the wounded. In both the North and South, women served as spies. Among the most prominent female spies were Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Pauline Cushman, and Elizabeth Van Lew. Over 200,000 women became widows as a result of the Civil War. According to the custom of the time, widows were expected to formally mourn their husband’s death for 2.5 years. In the South, civilians commonly faced food shortages. Southern women often participated in bread riots to demand food.
