As many of you know, we had to cancel this summer’s Civil War Institute Conference. While unable to gather together in Gettysburg, we have attempted to share insights from many our Conference presenters through a series of Facebook Livestreams. (also available on YouTube) We are excited to share you with a busy slate of digital programming this week – free and accessible to all – in place of our 2020 Summer Conference. (Please Note: All Programming will happen on Facebook Live on “The Tattooed Historian” Facebook Page. Within a few days of each event, they will be made available on the Gettysburg College YouTube.)
June 11th- 7:00PM EST “Using the Civil War to Fight World War Two.” Dr. Nina Silber (Professor at Boston University and President of the Society of Civil War Historians).
This discussion will draw on Dr. Silber’s book “This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America.” Dr. Silber will discuss how the Civil War was invoked before and during America’s involvement in the Second World War.
June 13th- 9:00AM EST. “Reflections on the Antietam Campaign.” Scott Hartwig, (Retired Supervisory Historian at Gettysburg National Military Park)
Scott Hartwig will join us to discuss the Antietam Campaign. Hartwig is the author of the 800 page “To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign from September 3 to September 16.” He is currently working on the next book in the series which will cover the Battle of Antietam and its aftermath.
June 13th- 11:00AM EST “Meade at Gettysburg.” Dr. Jennifer Murray, Oklahoma State University.
Dr. Murray is currently working on her second book entitled, “Meade at War: George Gordon Meade and the Army of the Potomac.” Dr. Murray will discuss George Meade’s leadership of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg and beyond.
June 13th- 3:00PM EST “Walking Pickett’s Charge Livestream Tour” Ranger Chris Gwinn (Chief of Interpretation and Education at Gettysburg NMP), Dr. James Broomall (Director, George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, Shepherd University),
Ranger Gwinn, Dr. Broomall, and CWI Director Dr. Peter Carmichael will be doing a series of live videos from the fields of Pickett’s Charge, each with their own focus.
Nina Silber is an award-winning teacher at Boston University where she teaches in both the department of history and the program in American and New England Studies. Her research and teaching have focused mainly on issues related to historical memory, gender, and the Civil War. A recipient of numerous awards – including fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and Harvard University’s Warren Center – Professor Silber has also published works that have helped to expand the scholarly horizons in the study of the Civil War. Among her most important publications are: The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900(1993); Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War(1992); Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War(2005); and, most recently, This War Ain’t Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America (2019). Professor Silber has also worked in the field of public history, consulting on projects with the Gettysburg National Military Park, the History Channel, and the National Park Service. She currently serves as president of the Society of Civil War Historians.
Dr. Nina Silber (Boston University)
CWI: The crisis of the Civil War was clearly disruptive to the Northern home front when men left to join the Union armies. What were the expectations in the North for how women would factor into the war for the Union in 1861? Did these expectations shift during the course of the war? How did the war affect traditional gender roles in the North?
Silber: Unlike Confederates, who went to war to protect their homes and families, Northern men spoke explicitly about putting the fight for the country above the fight for home. Confederates, for example, said things like this: “We are fighting for matters real and tangible, our property and our homes.” In contrast, one Union soldier told his wife: “My duties to my country are of more importance now than my duty to you.” That’s a very different kind of sentiment. And I think that language reflected certain assumptions about women and gender: That Northern men expected women to fend for themselves, even doing chores (at least temporarily) that men normally carried out. One soldier from Iowa said precisely that to his wife: That she should “take hold and do for thyself and use thy own judgment about matters”. In other words, he urged her to become more self-sufficient, while Confederate men emphasized male protection and authority.
The one shift I noticed, mid-way into the war, was the way Northern men, perhaps because the war was not going well, urged women to show even greater patriotism and sacrifice than before. Women, I think, were increasingly becoming a convenient scape goat: Men were connecting their military failures to women supposedly failing to do their part, yet there’s not really any evidence to back that up. If anything, evidence points to active participation on women’s part, especially in procuring supplies for soldiers, sending aid packages to the front, and sponsoring fairs that raised significant funds for Union troops.
Some women took up new jobs outside the home to assist the Union war effort and supplement their household income. Such jobs included the dangerous task of working with munitions and filling black powder cartridges, as depicted in this image of female employees at the U.S. Arsenal in Watertown, MA. (Image courtesy Library of Congress)
CWI: How did Northern women respond to these changes? Were women more willing, or even eager, to push these boundaries and move out of their traditional domestic sphere? Did their responses to wartime changes depend on certain external factors, such as their geographic region; socioeconomic status; or the type of work they took on?
Silber: Women often had no choice but to assert the kind of self-sufficiency that some Union soldiers expected. They often did take on new responsibilities – from going to work in factories to doing men’s jobs on farms (e.g., chopping wood; harvesting crops; bringing produce to market). Some moved in with other family members (their own or their in-laws) to relieve some of the financial and physical burdens. Still, I don’t think women usually did these new chores with a sense of liberation. Indeed, many were often frustrated when they discovered how little they knew of the work men did: Debts that may have been owed or even the overall state of the family’s finances. Additionally, I think many simply felt overwhelmed by how much was expected of them during the war. Many couldn’t wait until their husbands came home so they could turn those “male” responsibilities back to them.
One exception to this may have been the kind of pride and ownership many women demonstrated when it came to their heightened political involvement: They became invested in partisan struggles, supported specific candidates, and learned as much as they could about the political and military struggles of the moment. Recognizing how critical women’s input was to the challenges at hand, one Connecticut woman wrote a letter to her husband in which she asked “why don’t they let the soldiers’ wives vote” while the soldiers are away.
Working class women faced added difficulties in losing the regular income of husbands and fathers. Some of those women found jobs – for example sewing uniforms or making other military supplies – but because they often worked for sub-contractors, not directly for the US government, their pay was exceedingly low. In some towns and cities, officials pledged relief money for struggling families, although women often had to wade through a considerable bureaucratic apparatus to procure this assistance. Increasing numbers of families, having no other means of support, found themselves turning to almshouses in these years.
The U.S. Treasury in Washington, D.C. hired increasing numbers of women to help produce currency and serve as clerks over the course of the Civil War—a trend that continued even after the war years through the end of the 19th century. (Image courtesy U.S. Treasury Department)
CWI: Did the impact of wartime changes on gender roles extend beyond the war? What happened to the women who became wage earners or participants in politics or nurses? Did their engagement in wartime activism end when the conflict ended? Where do most Northern women find themselves in the late 1860s?
Silber: Some things changed, and others did not. Many women who went to work in factories lost those jobs when the war ended; there simply wasn’t the need for the kinds of factory jobs women had occupied– in arsenals or in workshops that made uniforms or blankets or tents. In the nursing field, there was a growing acknowledgement of nursing as a profession, something which required precise and scientific training. Nursing schools – which admitted women – opened up in the postwar years.
Other women, those who had been politically active for causes like abolitionism and women’s suffrage, continued the campaign for suffrage and also for protecting the rights of freed people after the war ended. There was, however, considerable disagreement about how to prioritize those campaigns with some, including many African American women, ranking the struggle for black men’s suffrage and civil rights for African Americans as more important than winning votes for all women. Other women’s rights activists chose a different path: Refusing to support the fifteenth amendment – which granted black men the right to vote – they sought to build a new campaign focused solely on gaining the vote for women, a campaign that increasingly put white women at the center.
“They Brought in Their Dead and Wounded on Hay Wagons.” Public mourning became an all-too-common ritual for many women during the Civil War whose personal grief became synonymous with patriotic suffering and sacrifice. (Image courtesy Library of Virginia)
