Commenting of the need to treat the wounded of the war, the Confederate writer Mary Boykin Chesnut said that hospitals “want money, clothes, and nurses. So, as I am writing, right and left the letters fly, calling for help from the sister societies at home. Good and patriotic women at home are easily stirred to their work.” This was true of both Confederate ladies and Yankee women, for although they could not fight directly, the women took an important part in the war. Befitting the nation’s bloodiest and hardest conflict, the Civil War affected women as much as it affected men, and it’s necessary to study their involvement, sacrifice and hardships in order to truly understand the effects of the war.
The most direct way in which the war affected women is, of course, the necessary but cruel hardships of war. The fact that they stayed behind in the home front did not spare them from these cruelties, as ruthless Confederate raiders and vengeful Unionist guerrillas often did not make distinction between sexes. But even in relatively calm areas, women had to face economic hardship and political turmoil, and had to suffer the lost of husbands, fathers, sons. Such losses were harder in an era where women were stereotyped as fragile flowers and had limited rights and economic opportunity.
This did not stop women from doing what they could to aid in their countries’ war effort. This aid ranged from knitting socks for the boys on the front, to organizing charity efforts that provided medicine, food and spiritual comfort to the struggling soldiers. Northern women also led the efforts to provide education and organize freedmen labor. In fact, a majority of the “Yankee emissaries” that flocked to Baltimore and the Sea Islands were women, and it was thanks to them that the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission was founded. This Commission would in turn lead to the Bureaus of Freedmen and Refugees, Justice and Labor, and Abandoned and Confiscated Lands.
Nonetheless, in many ways the experience of war was more shocking and traumatizing for the Southern woman. This is due to the fact that the war was largely fought in the South, thrusting civilian women to the frontlines and exposing them to the horrors of the battlefield. Richmond women, for example, saw their city became an enormous field hospital during the Peninsula Campaign; the women of Georgia suffered a similar experience when Bragg’s battered army retreated from Tennessee. Dreadful and proportionally greater Confederate losses meant that more Southern ladies knew the pain of lost. As Mary Chesnut sadly observed, “Grief and constant anxiety kill nearly as many women as men die on the battlefield.”
Sometimes the battlefield came to the women. Naturally, this happened more often to Southerners, and the Confederacy’s women resisted Union occupation as bitterly as its men did. In New Orleans they three pots at the Yankee invaders, and women rioted too at Baltimore. Some Union women were forced to flee raids or invasions as well – Union officers in Harrisburg observed that the great majority of those who fled Stonewall Jackson’s advance through Pennsylvania were women and children. Many women were reduced to poverty or near-starvation, and as the war turned vicious and cruel, they suffered from abuse and guerrilla brutality too. Recent scholarship has even established that the Civil War is not a “low rape war” as previously believed, for women, especially Black and Native American, suffered from sexual abuse at the hands of soldiers from both sides.
Despite these horrors, American women were ready to take an active part in the war effort. In many ways, Dixie girls had to surpass greater hurdles than their Yankee sisters, for the agrarian Southern society was more resistant to anything that might seem like female empowerment, compared with the North were factory work and a dynamic economy had made female self-reliance a possibility. A patriarchal form of white supremacy was also at operation here. It’s no coincidence that Southern rhetoric often played on the theme of protecting “white women from the Negro’s lust”. This does not mean that White Southern ladies were not as committed to White Supremacy as their husbands were; indeed, some were even fiercer than them. But it does mean that patriarchy was part of the conservative Southern order the Confederates defended.
The war eroded this patriarchal order, but unlike slavery it was not enough to destroy it. Southern ladies, most Confederates believed, should stay home, take care of the house and the children, and limit their support to knitting when the boys were at the front and receiving them affectionately when they returned. But the women refused, and instead took a more active part in the war effort. In this they were inspired by Britain’s Florence Nightingale, the “Lady with the Lamp” that had inaugurated modern nursing and showed Victorian society what women could do. Following her example, Southern women volunteered to serve as nurses, “braving the frowns of brother or father” who thought the bloody battlefield was not place for a lady. Many threw these concerns aside, such as the young Kate Cumming, who “wondered what Miss Nightingale and the hundreds of refined ladies of Great Britain who went to the Crimea, would say to that!"
Some Southern girls quickly found out what the Dixie boys had already discovered: war was hell. Cumming herself was appalled at the carnage she observed in the aftermath of Corinth: “Nothing that I had ever heard or read had given me the faintest idea of the horrors witnessed here.” Yet she and thousands more braved these conditions in order to help the fighting men: "I sat up all night, bathing the men's wounds, and giving them water . . . The men are lying all over the house, on their blankets, just as they were brought in from the battlefield. . . . The foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick, but I soon got over it. We have to walk, and when we give the men anything kneel, in blood and water; but we think nothing of it."
These efforts suffered from the same lack of resources and coordination that affected the entire Southern war effort, yet they do reflect a complete mobilization of the country’s resources. Southern white women soon proved that they had “the stamina, the commitment, the organizational abilities, and the talent” necessary to aid the cause, and in turn surgeons and Army officers started to prefer them over drunk and/or invalid male nurses and slave attendants. The Confederate Congress would finally recognize them with a law that allowed the employment of civilians in Army hospitals, "giving preference in all cases to females where their services may best subserve the purpose." The efforts of Southern nurses were vital for the Confederate medical service, and after the war women’s contribution was “enshrined with a halo of lost cause glory equal to that of Confederate soldiers.”
Northern women also organized efforts of their own, which thanks to the Yankee superiority in population and manpower would go much farther. Under the direction of Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to earn a Medical Doctorate in the United States, some three thousand women formed the Woman’s Central Association for Relief in the Cooper Institute of New York, when the ashes of Washington were still warm. The W.C.A.R. was one of the largest associations thus far, but it was not the first for women had a long history of forming societies and associations advocating for many causes, from temperance to female suffrage to abolitionism. In fact, there are stories of men who voted Lincoln in 1860 because their sweethearts asked for that as a condition to marriage.
The W.C.A.R. and other societies would join together in 1861 to form the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Modeled in goals and methods after the British Sanitary Commission of the Crimea, “the Sanitary” sought to improve the life and health of the soldiers. This was not limited to training nurses; the Sanitary also raised food and medicine, aided veterans and furloughed soldiers, and inspected camps to correct poor hygiene and keep illnesses at bay. Many of the nurses of the Sanitary even served in “hospital ships” that were vital for the evacuation of the Army of the Susquehanna after the Peninsula Campaign. Despite being attacked by rebel artillery and mines, the women in these ships still probably saved thousands of lives.
The Sanitary faced opposition from the Army Medical Bureau, which, like other Bureaus, languished under antiquated bureaucracy and old procedures at the start of the war. Lincoln himself was skeptical (calling the Sanitary the fifth wheel of the Medical Bureau), but he signed the order that formally created it. The Sanitary would garner power and influence, and by middle 1862 they were able to successfully lobby for a bill that reformed the Medical Bureau, securing the appointment of their man as the new Surgeon General. The Sanitary and the Medical Bureau would go on to form a successful partnership, and in July, 1862, the Bureau ordered that at least a third of nurses in Army hospitals had to be female.
Clara Barton, who after the war formed the American Red Cross
The soldiers welcomed these reforms, for the female nurses were far more nurturing and capable than their male colleagues. Indeed, in both the Confederacy and the Union the lack of large-scale ambulance and medical services forced the armies to recruit invalid or underage soldiers who, with little morale and zero training, did a rather poor job. “Horror tales” of drunken surgeons and coward ambulance drivers abounded. During the Battle of Bull Run a regiment said that the male nurses assigned to them had got drunk and then bribed the ambulance drivers to carry
them to Washington instead of the wounded soldiers.
An Alabama soldier said in fear that “the Doctors kills more than they cour”, which reflected a widespread feeling that the medical services were incapable. Taking into account the dreadful disease rate and how often men perished even if they received medical attention, it’s easy to buy into the image of Civil War surgeons as butchers. In truth, the Civil War soldier fared better than the soldiers in Crimea or the Mexican War. The failure was owed to the unfortunate fact that the Civil War took place before major medical breakthroughs were achieved. Louis Pasteur had not developed bacteriology yet, and even the nexus between malaria and mosquitoes was still not established. Or, in other words, the doctors could hardly be expected to take into account concepts such as sepsis, antisepsis, and biotics when they hadn’t been developed yet.
Shortages worsened the situation more – it’s true that some Southern soldiers had to rely on whisky as the only anesthetics available. Despite this, Union and Confederate medics performed admirably with the resources and knowledge they had, and female nurses were an important part of this. Alongside the Sanitary and other associations, some women took matters into their own hands and became practical one-woman aid societies. Clara Barton and Mary Ann “Mother” Bickerdyke were the most famous examples. Barton, a mature spinster with friends in high places, helped to sieve out the incompetent surgeons and improve camp hospitals. Bickerdyke, a “large, strong, indomitable yet maternal woman”, did such a good job cleaning illness-ravaged camps that she earned even the respect of Sherman, a man who seemed to hold in contempt everybody but his fellow soldiers.
Civil War women could contribute in other ways as well. Some served as spies, scouts and couriers, taking advantage of how women were perceived as harmless. The socialite Rose O’Neal Greenhow, for example, was instrumental in gathering the intelligence that allowed for the assault on Washington. President Breckinridge would personally receive her when the Federals exiled her. On the flipside, Elizabeth Van Lew, who put up a façade as the eccentric but harmless “Crazy Beth”, helped the Union gather information in Richmond and aided Northern prisoners of war to escape. In areas ravaged by guerrilla warfare, it was the women who nurtured and fed the guerrillas, and some women even directly took part in the raids – a Union officer reported that a bridge in Tennessee was burned by a mother-daughter duo.
Black women were just as valuable, escaping and providing intelligence to the advancing Union armies. Those who stayed behind helped along as well, like Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a servant to Confederate Secretary of War Jefferson Davis. Bowser, playing the part of the loyal but dim-witted slave, peeked at important military orders and eavesdropped in his chats with other prominent Confederates. She would then report her findings to Union officials. The most famous, of course, is Harriet Tubman. A veteran of the Underground Railroad, Tubman defied gender expectations and served as a nurse and spy for the Union armies. In early 1863, she personally took part in a raid that liberated some 700 slaves, many of whom would go on to take part in the victory at Union Mills. Tubman was present at the ceremony in honor of the first Black recipient of the Medal of Honor, where the Heroes of Union Mills cheered her.
In conclusion, the Civil War was not just a man’s war, but affected women as well. The women who remained in the homefront had to face hardship and grief, yet they still contributed to their country’s war economy and proved an important part of the war effort. Thousands took a more active part as nurses that revolutionized the medical services or spies who provided important intelligence. At the same time, they suffered from economic hardship and guerrilla brutality just the same as men, and although the war claimed far more men, many civilian women died as well while others gained emotional scars that would burden them the rest of their lives. Ultimately, examining the role of women is important to understand the full scale of the Civil War.
