Busy Hands: Images of the Family in the Northern Civil War Effort (The North's Civil War, Issue 26)

Busy Hands

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BUSY HANDS Images of the Family in the Northern Civil War Effort

PATRICIA L. RICHARD

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York • 2003

Copyright © 2003 by Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. The North’s Civil War, No. 26 ISSN 1089-8719 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Richard, Patricia L. Busy hands : images of the family in the northern Civil War effort / Patricia L. Richard. p. cm. — (The North’s Civil War, ISSN 1089-8719 ; no. 26) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2300-0 (alk. paper) 1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Women. 2. Middle class women—Northeastern States—History—19th century. 3. Working class women—Northeastern States—History—19th century. 4. Charities— Northeastern States—History—19th century. 5. Family—Northeastern States—History—19th century. 6. Sex role—Northeastern States— History—19th century. 7. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865— Social aspects. 8. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Moral and ethical aspects. 9. United States. Army—Military life—History—19th century. 10. Corruption—History—19th century. I. Title. II. Series. E628.R53 2003 973.7’082—dc22 2003014968 Printed in the United States of America 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

vii

Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

1. The Moral Source: The Family During the Civil War

13

2. Corruption Abounds: Reactions to the Soldier’s Life

40

3. “In a Most Tangible Form”: Northern Women Respond to the Nurturing Needs of the Civil War Soldier

87

4. “Listen Ladies One and All”: Soldiers Search for the Comforts of Home Through Correspondence Ads

138

5. The Communal Contract: Northern Women Care for the Union Family Through Aid Societies

176

6. “The Kind Attentions of Woman”: Female Nurses Bring Home to the Hospital

222

7. The Soldiers’ Home and the Journey Homeward

288

Bibliography

307

Index

325

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For as long as I can remember, history has intrigued me. Listening to my father recount the morning of December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked his ship the USS Tennessee as it sat in Pearl Harbor, has always fascinated me. His stories and my mother’s have inspired me to learn more about untold stories of the past. Through my studies at Marquette, I have been able to bring my passion for history to fruition. I thank James Marten for his unwavering support and inspiration and for providing guidance at crucial times in the development of this project. He endured much bantering from me with humor and should know that I respect his scholarship and advice and that I appreciate his compassion. He truly deserves the title of “the adviser who cares.” I am also indebted to Dr. Paul Cimbala at Fordham University. He realized the importance of the Northern war effort and made it his goal to bring this history to light. I am grateful that my women are part of his Civil War series. The professors who accepted the obligations of serving on my board also deserve recognition. I am indebted to Carla Hay for reading the dissertation and providing scholarly insight and suggestions. Professors Steven Avella, Lance Grahn, and Heather Hathaway at Marquette and James Drake at Metropolitan State College also read the manuscript in its entirety and gave incisive criticism. Numerous archivists helped me in my search for women’s war work. I thank in particular the archivists at the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, Massachusetts), the Chicago Historical Society, Duke University, Illinois State Historical Library, Indiana Historical Society Library, Library of Congress, Massachusetts Historical Society, New York Public Library, New York Historical Society, Ohio Historical Society, Pennsylvania State Archives, United States Military History Institute, Bentley Historical Library (University of Michigan), Western Reserve Historical Society (Cleveland), and Wisconsin State Historical Society.

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I also thank friends and fellow historians who have encouraged, prodded, and supported me from the beginning. Karen Kehoe’s tenacity and work ethic were especially inspirational. She acted as a sounding board, a historical reference, and style consultant. I cannot thank her enough for her friendship and wisdom. Terry Cain and Kim Gray offered loving support and were confident that I could finish. My parents, George and Thelma Richard, have always served as models of hard work and moral fortitude. They have encouraged and supported my scholarship, provided financial support, and became a moving service at least a dozen times during this process. I have no doubt that I could not have accomplished my goals without their understanding and assistance. And my heartfelt thanks goes to my husband, Cliff Simmons. He has shared a love for history and storytelling that has inspired me to complete this project and pushed me to dream.

ABBREVIATIONS NWSC USCC USCT USSC WCRA YMCA

Northwestern Sanitary Commission United States Christian Commission United States Colored Troops United States Sanitary Commission Women’s Central Relief Association Young Men’s Christian Association

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INTRODUCTION When Elvira Aplin wrote to her son George in May 1862, she began a correspondence filled with maternal advice that would guide George during his service in the Union army. Through “moral-suasion,” she hoped to “instill” in him a “sense of duty” to God and to his country by awakening his conscience and gently directing his conduct. Although she felt sorry that his “lot was hard” and wished she had the “power to ameliorate” his condition, she, like hundreds of thousands of other women across the North during the Civil War, realized that all she could do was “to commend” George to Him who was able to keep him “safe through all the trying scenes through which [he] may be called to pass.” Even though she defined her “ameliorating power” as limited and encouraged him to turn to a greater power than herself, she did not leave her son exclusively in the hands of God. On the contrary, she gave him a Bible, which she assured him was “the best companion you can possibly have,” and urged him to “peruse the pages often and try to become familiar with its teachings.” Nor did her instruction stop there. She continued to warn him that “a soldier is surrounded by everything that has a tendency to make him forget God,” and, she emphasized, “those who do not make His word their study and guide will lose much of their morality.” As one last effort to influence him, she added a postscript in which she advised him to “be obedient to your superiors in office, kind and respectful to all of the rest,” and to do “all the good you can without harm to yourself.”1 Elvira’s exchange with her son represents the prominent role of the family in nineteenth-century American society and the way women responded to their families’ needs during the Civil War. Indeed, both Victorian men and women felt the dominance of the domestic circle in their personal lives. Women, as the moral arbiters of the home and as the moral counselors of their husbands, commanded critical social authority as they affected the public sphere

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through the education and socialization of their children. They used the household as a means to justify their power and as a base from which to extend their influence beyond the protective shelter of their firesides. Men depended on the home as the realm of love, kindness, and morality, and as the source of emotional and spiritual rejuvenation. They relied on the ennobling forces of female society because an environment without such influences was considered uncivilized and doomed to corruption. The home wielded tremendous influence because people believed that it protected the virtuous woman from outside degradation, provided a haven where the tainted man could regain his morality, and represented for all a sense of continuity and security in a rapidly changing world.2 This volume focuses on middle-class women’s contributions to the Northern Civil War effort and on how women like Elvira Aplin utilized their power as moral agents to shape the way men survived the ravages of war. It also considers domestic imagery found in working-class and African American women’s war work. It argues that military life exposed men to corruption in the form of prostitution, gambling, profanity, and drink, thus threatening their postwar civilian fitness and ultimately the commonweal of the republic. Women used images of the family and domestic life in their war relief efforts to counter the corruption and to regenerate the soldiers. Men responded to this stirring of their conscience because it fit into their schemas of communal responsibilities and gender relations. The volume looks at how Northern white and African American women from the middle and working classes affected the prosecution of the war through a system of aid societies based on personal contacts. It examines how the war caused shifts in the gender system, wherein women expanded their sphere, utilizing their roles as moral agents to justify their bold behavior, but stayed within it as they used the traditional method of moral suasion to influence the soldiers for whom they cared. The soldiers in the camps and hospitals appreciated the women specifically because of their femininity. They yearned for female companionship and the feminine culture that made domestic life distinctive from the military world. Women responded with homemade goods and with letters filled with “sweet home-chat” and moral and spiritual guidance.3

INTRODUCTION

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Concentration on women’s efforts reveals a new perspective of domestic influence on the war. Domestic imagery can be seen in the kinds of goods women sent, in the way nurses arranged their wards, in the wholesome activities women promoted in hospitals and encouraged in camps, and in the way they constructed their societies.4 Women felt compelled to work for the cause, but they responded on an intimate level. They meant to help the soldiers survive the corruption in the camps, and moral suasion was their greatest weapon. Most mothers believed, or at least hoped, that their sons would carry with them the moral lessons of childhood, which they had so lovingly instilled. But these same mothers also realized that the world outside of the home posed many problems for the unwary, naive soul. Not surprisingly, the all-male environment of the camps loomed menacingly for pious mothers. Void of the softening influences of the female and rife with immoral activities, the soldier’s lifestyle struck loved ones with fear. They were anxious about what these degrading influences would do to their male relatives, who now were unable to return home for spiritual renewal. The soldiers themselves confirmed the women’s worst fears. A Michigan soldier wrote that “the army is the worst place in the world to learn bad habbits [sic] of all kinds.” Several men of his regiment were “nice respectable men who belonged to the Church of God” when they enlisted. “But now . . . they are ruined men.”5 Chapter 1 looks at the role of the family in nineteenth-century America and explores the nature of Victorian manhood and womanhood in order to establish a paradigm by which to measure the behavior of both the “boys in blue” and the women engaged in war work. Although most historians call into question, as Leonard notes, “the actuality of ‘separate spheres’ ” and the rigidity of men’s and women’s gender roles, it is important to lay out the ideal to get a sense of parameters. Women may not have lived strictly by the tenants of True Womanhood, but the model applied to the reality of their lives on some level.6 Chapter 2 examines the foundation of women’s anxiety. It shows the extent of the immorality within the camps and of both the public and the personal concern for solutions. National leaders theorized that if the corruption went unchecked, the immoral conditions could ruin the soldiers more seriously than battle. The public responded to

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the demoralization of the troops by creating a national commission preoccupied with sanitation. Relatives of the soldiers, on the other hand, relied on tried-and-true methods of motherly care. Chapter 3 describes how women battled the corruption with letters and goods laced with domestic imagery not only to remind the men that they fought to preserve their homes, but also to show them that those homes had not forgotten them. Chapter 4 focuses on correspondence ads from the Chicago Tribune and the New York Herald, which reveal the importance of the family to soldiers’ morale and how the soldiers yearned for the company of Northern women and the feminine culture that went with that company. This correspondence phenomenon is instructive because it reveals soldiers’ familial dispositions; becoming a husband and father was the next step in manhood for a middle-class Victorian. And women’s participation in the “craze” not only reveals a more aggressive middle-class woman than the model of the “true woman,” but also shows women’s willingness to use correspondence for patriotic means. The communal contract between the men and women of the towns shaped the structure and work of the soldiers’ aid societies, as examined in chapter 5. Men fulfilled their duty to the town by enlisting as soldiers, and women completed their part of the contract by supporting the troops with supplies and letters. Before the war, the success of women’s benevolence societies was based on a “village mentality.” During the war, however, the government restructured this system and replaced it with an efficient but cold bureaucracy in the form of the United States Sanitary Commission (USSC). The women thus felt disconnected from their goods and responded by withholding their supplies. For them, familial and communal ties took precedence over USSC structural goals. They believed that sending their supplies through a community representative or an agency that promised personal attentiveness kept familial affections alive between the home and the camp and best served the needs of their soldiers.7 Chapter 6 suggests that female nurses bonded with the soldiers like no other members of the community and for this reason had enormous influence on their patients’ physical, spiritual, and moral recovery. They were surrogate mothers, and the patients were their “boys.” They tried to re-create a familial setting on their wards through decorations, social activities, and emotional and spiritual

INTRODUCTION

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support of the men. Because these lady nurses suffered similar privations as the soldiers and exposed themselves to the same diseases, the two felt a closeness and a respect for each other that eclipsed most other camp-to-home relationships. These familial-based relationships with their patients sometimes put the women nurses in conflict with medical and military professionals regarding who exactly was in charge. The clash was necessary, however, if women were to tap the power of their femininity. Because women were distinctively linked to the home, their efforts placed a moral stamp upon the war and justified the men’s actions.8 Women’s war work is brought full circle in chapter 7 in a discussion of the importance of the Soldiers’ Homes, which were established independently by numerous aid societies throughout the North. The Soldiers’ Home embodied all of the elements of women’s war relief. Like all of the other forms of benevolence, it was meant to sustain and comfort the troops. But, most important, it was set up to protect the soldiers from postwar financial predators. The Home was the last of the surrogate relatives to assist the soldiers and to help them homeward so they could arrive with body, soul, and money intact. The story ends much as it began, with women guiding the soldiers to the loving embrace of home. I have relied on diaries, letters, memoirs of female nurses and sanitary agents, and the records and correspondence of soldiers’ aid societies. I also include letters between soldiers and their relatives (wives to husbands, mothers to sons, and sisters to brothers) to uncover moral suasion, spiritual guidance, and any advice with shades of domesticity. Although this study includes the war work of Northern white and African American women from the middle and working classes, available sources limit the examination of race and class. Few letters or diaries of African American women survived the war, and we are left to find their voices in snippets of newspapers, pension records, and letters written by African American soldiers, chaplains, and war correspondents.9 Hints of their war role also exist in the letters of white, middle-class women. The inclusion of class further complicates the study because although pinpointing middle-class values and ideals is easy, as Debby Applegate argues, categorizing individual women as middle or working class is a daunting task. People’s incomes change with the whims

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of the market, and basing a person’s status on income alone is naive. Instead of using income levels to determine class, this work relies on a more subtle understanding of ideals. The working classes were those who sold their labor power, and working-class women maintained their own households instead of hiring servants. From here, though, class lines blur. Income may have affected whether a woman was paid for her nursing or society work or how much time she could contribute, but working-class women did not appear to be any more or less patriotic than their wealthier sisters, or any more or less familial. It is not clear how much the middle class adhered to the ideals set forth in etiquette manuals and advice books, but what is clear is that the middle-class model had little if no competition. Furthermore, although working-class people may not have lived according to the middle-class paradigm, the middle classes judged all others by these standards. According to abolitionists and temperance workers, all that blacks and the working classes needed to become more respectable and economically successful were a stable and lawful marriage, hard work, temperate behavior, and piety.10 The scope of women’s involvement in the war is also somewhat elusive. A hodgepodge collection of national, state, and local groups sponsored female nurses without creating uniform titles, duties, or pay scale. Consequently, no master list exists to reveal the depth of women’s nursing work. Basing her research on letters, diaries, and pension records, Jane Schultz suggests that at least twenty thousand Northern women labored as nurses and laundresses. She argues that more women volunteered than these records show, but their stories are lost because many did not have the time, education, or will to record their service. Similarly, the arbitrary assigning of titles, duties, and pay blurs the picture even more. For instance, middleclass elites worked on the hospital transports run by the USSC and were known as “lady volunteers.” Most of these women worked voluntarily, but not all of them. The most prestigious title of nurse was given to women who had been handpicked by Dorothea Dix, head of the Women’s Army Nursing Corps (also known as the Army Corps of Women Nurses of the United States or the Union Army Woman Nurses Corps). But in letters home, women who volunteered for state or local groups also defined themselves as nurses. Matron was a catchall term reserved for the middle- and working-class white

INTRODUCTION

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women who worked as regimental laundresses or nurses or who were in charge of a hospital ward. The terms cook and laundress, however, were usually reserved for the poorest whites and African American women. A title did not always coincide with pay or responsibilities. Government officials stripped an African American woman named Annie Keyes of her pension in 1897 when they discovered that her title of hospital matron did not require her to care for the white or black soldiers at the Armory Square Hospital where she worked.11 Understanding African American women’s nursing contributions in terms of domestic imagery is also limited. As Schultz explains, only two African American women’s memoirs have surfaced—Susie King Taylor’s and Charlotte Forten’s. Other scholars have written about Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth, but this research does not include the women’s own views about their work. Likewise, African American newspapers have revealed other women, such as Lydia Penny, who nursed African American soldiers, but nineteenth-century newspapers in general spoke of women in brief and convoluted language for propriety’s sake, and African American newspapers were no exception.12 It is also difficult to get a clear picture of the number of women involved in the aid societies because reliable membership rolls were not kept or were destroyed. Defining what constitutes participation is also difficult because the society managers considered any amount of work useful. Women who worked once or twice a month helped the cause, but they may not have been members, so their names do not appear on the membership rolls, and their involvement is thus lost to the historian. Charles J. Stille claims that in the official history of the USSC, however, “more than seven thousand” aid societies were associated with the commission. Dr. Henry Bellows, president of the USSC, believed the number was closer to ten thousand. Because neither of these statistics includes the independent societies that refused to join the USSC or those solely affiliated with the United States Christian Commission (USCC), the numbers were probably higher. Still, there is a way to get at an estimated number of participants. The typical aid society consisted of a corps of officers that included a president, six vice presidents, a treasurer, a recording secretary, and a correspondence secretary. Most societies also had a

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board of directors that consisted of two women from each of the churches in the city. The directors were supposed to solicit donations and obtain members for the association from their congregations. The officers were aided by committees assigned “to purchase, cut, pack, and forward” their articles, as a Rochester aid society circular put it. On the high end of the scale, a society could have as many as seventy officers, directors, and superintendents of committees, as did the Ladies’ Hospital Relief Association in Rochester, New York. On the low end, a society could have as few as six officers with no committees, like the Whitewater Soldiers’ Aid Society in Wisconsin. Hypothesizing that the typical number of officers fell somewhere between the New York and Wisconsin examples, I am estimating that the average society had approximately two dozen women as its heart. Multiplying this number with Bellows’s estimation of ten thousand aid societies, we come to just under a quarter of a million women working for the aid societies. These numbers, of course, are meant only to provide an idea of the scope of women’s participation in the Northern war effort.13 What is clear is that women from all classes worked for the soldiers and that middle-class women were the backbone of the societies. Working-class women worked only sporadically for the societies because household chores and sometimes employment outside the home consumed much of their time. Many of the societies paid soldiers’ wives and especially their impoverished widows to sew for the societies. We have brief glimpses of black women working with white aid societies. A black “young lady” by the name of Sarah Holland worked for the Union Refreshment Saloon in Philadelphia, from the Saloon’s creation in 1861. The black soldiers she waited upon reported that they would not soon forget her because of her “kind attention to” them. And black women of Brooklyn helped in the preparations and running of the USSC sanitary fair held in that city. Although knowledge of a greater scope of cooperation is not available, it is likely that with the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, the spirit of patriotism may have convinced both whites and blacks that they were working for the same cause. However, black women had their own societies in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana, Ohio, New York, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Kentucky, Virginia, North

INTRODUCTION

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Carolina, and South Carolina. Because I have not been able to locate any constitutions, membership lists, donation records, or minutes of black ladies’ aid societies, I rely on newspapers and men’s letters to bring to light the work of these societies. Middle- and upper-class white women, however, usually initiated the war work. Upper-class women used their influence to maintain connections to support the societies financially, but withdrew from the offices once it was obvious that work for the soldiers’ aid societies required daily management. Middle-class women gladly took this responsibility and managed the day-to-day business of the societies.14 Although most Northern middle-class women volunteered their services at some time during the war, the level of their involvement varied. At the lowest level, women participated periodically when battle casualties necessitated supplies or a sanitary fair required extra help at the booths. In between the low and high end of involvement were women who worked regularly and volunteered on a monthly or weekly basis. Some ladies took projects home and returned with the finished products, whereas others worked at the society offices on certain days of the week. At the most intense level of involvement, women such as Mary Livermore worked at the aid societies from morning until night at least five days a week. As one of the managers of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission (NWSC) in Chicago, Livermore answered correspondence, counseled aid society officers in the means and methods of the commission, directed goods, planned visits to aid societies and trips to the army, and discussed methods of raising money and supplies. Few women devoted so much of their time as Livermore, but most middle-class women had a part in Northern aid society war work, if only for a brief period.15 Elvira Aplin did not devote herself to her local aid society with Livermore’s dedication, but she did devote herself to the well-being of her son George. She believed that soldiers who did not take “especial pains to keep their morrals [sic] alive will soon be worse than heathens.” The war, in fact, was producing a “dreadful state of things” in the North, and Aplin believed that the “effects would be felt 50 years.” To ensure that her son was not among the heathen, she sent moralizing letters and care packages filled with food, medicine, books, hometown newspapers, stationery, and stamps. In this small way, she played her part in sending the home to the camp.16

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NOTES 1. Elvira Aplin to George Aplin, May 18, 1862, Aplin Family Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 2. Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830–1860 (New York: Institute for Research in History, with Haworth Press, 1982), 18; E. Anthony Rotundo, “Manhood in America: The Northern Middle Class, 1770–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1982), 167; Carrol Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 60, no. 2 (September 1973). 3. Elizabeth Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994). 4. Reid Mitchell studies the impact of what he calls “domestic imagery” on Northern soldiers in his work The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). My study expands on this theme by looking at how domesticity influenced women in their war work. 5. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 247. 6. Leonard, Yankee Women, 210. 7. The term village mentality is taken from Jeanie Attie’s Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 5, 17, 18, 103–5. Attie combines William Q. Maxwell’s work on the USSC, Lincoln’s Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York: Longman’s Green, 1956), and Lori Ginzberg’s study of antebellum and Civil War benevolence, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 15, 36, 65–66, 78. Attie also suggests that benevolence became nationalistic and scientific because men assumed control of the USSC and tried to remake benevolence on a national scale. I am extending Ginzberg’s and Attie’s arguments by suggesting that women continued to use moral suasion within the context of domestic imagery because it was effective. 8. See Kristie R. Ross, “Women Are Needed here”: Northern Protestant Women as Nurses During the Civil War, 1861–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993), 6–7, and Jane E. Schultz, “Women at the Front: Gender and Genre in Literature of the American Civil War.” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1988), 24–25. Jeanie Attie claims that women’s labor proved

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that “the integrity of the Union was self-evident because it was embraced by the least partisan and most virtuous members of the community.” See Patriotic Toil, 4. 9. The encouraging story about recovering African American women’s past is that more is being discovered every year as scholars sift more carefully through the records. For instance, during a search for African American soldiers through the Union pension records, Lisa Y. King discovered the names of women who had served as laundresses for the Union navy during the Civil War. See “In Search of Women of African Descent Who Served in the Civil War Union Navy,” Journal of Negro History (1998). 10. Debby Applegate, “Henry Ward Beecher and the ‘Great Middle Class’: Mass-Marketed Intimacy and Middle-Class Identity,” in The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class, edited by Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2001), 107, 123; Sven Beckert, “Propertied of a Different Kind: Bourgeoisie and Lower Middle Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” in The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class, edited by Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston (New York: Routledge, 2001), 287, 288. 11. Jane E. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (winter 1992), 369–70; To Commission of Pensions from Webster Davis, March 1897, Annie Keyes Pension File, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 12. Schultz, “Women at the Front,” 20, 21. 13. Charles J. Stille, History of the United States Sanitary Commission: Being the General Reports of Its Work During the War of the Rebellion (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), 172, 488; Linus P. Brockett and Mary C. Vaughan, Woman’s Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience (Philadelphia: Zeigler, McCurdy, 1867), 59, 78–79; Report of the Wisconsin Soldiers’ Aid Society, from July 1st to December 1st, 1864 (Milwaukee: Starr and Son, 1864), 9–10; Circular of the Ladies’ Hospital Relief Association, Rochester, N.Y., October 16, 1862; Diary of Georgiana Dingman, Charles Mintin Baker Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Regional Archives, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 3. Attie figures that hundreds of thousands of Northern women worked for the societies. 14. Christian Recorder, February 13, 1864, and April 2, 1864. From black newspapers, it is clear, however, that white men and women did help black soldiers and black soldiers’ aid societies with money, supplies, and labor.

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15. Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1888), 143. 16. Elvira Aplin to George Aplin, May 6 and 25, 1862, and January 10, 1863, Aplin Family Papers.

1 The Moral Source The Family During the Civil War UNCOVERING IMAGES of the family in the Northern Civil War effort is not difficult. Soldiers, sanitary agents, and nurses understood the war in familial terms. Luis F. Emilio, a white officer in the famous Fiftyfourth Massachusetts regiment, for instance, explained that “the regiment is a family” in which the commander is a father, his superiors elder brothers, and his recruits younger kinsmen. As such, the men expected no recognition for themselves, but rather for their regiment, their “family,” their brothers in arms. Corporal James H. Gooding, an African American soldier also serving in the Fifty-fourth, wrote to his hometown newspaper the New Bedford Mercury to inspire others of his race to enlist. “Let every man feel,” suggested Gooding, “that he has got a personal or family interest in this war.” As he saw it, the war had one of two possible outcomes: “slavery and poverty” or “liberty and prosperity.” Only victory would ensure them autonomy over their families. Even women society workers characterized the consequences of the war and their work in familial terms. Eliza Porter, assistant to Mary Ann Bickerdyke and a member of the NWSC in Chicago, described gruesome hospital scenes that she observed near Sugar Creek, Georgia, in 1864 and their effect on the family. The wounded, fresh from the battlefield, were “precious sons of northern mothers, beloved husbands of northern wives.” The deaths she witnessed left “fond wives in widowhood and many children fatherless.” “Mothers, wives, and sisters” prepared the sanitary goods she delivered. And battlefield nurse Mary Ann Bickerdyke, “like a true mother,” was ready for every emergency while caring for their sons.1 The context of the family, then, seems the perfect vehicle by which to understand the motives and actions of mid-nineteenth-century Americans. If Northern citizens viewed their world through a

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domestic lens, so to speak, then it seems logical to examine the roots of the Victorian family in order to understand how domestic ideology shaped the way that Union soldiers and female civilians participated in the war. The family and the management of the home were the special preserves of the mother and wife, and many women understood the war in familial terms. They saw the destruction and carnage on the battlefield as sons and husbands lost and as families and homes irreparably damaged. They saw their work for the aid societies as a means to rescue their men from the corrupting forces of the camp and ultimately as a means to save the Union family from the rebels. Women may have given their blessings to relatives to enlist, and some encouraged such shows of bravery in their men, but they did not leave the soldiers to their own devices. Soldiers viewed the war in similarly familial terms. The men, of course, performed their most important familial responsibility by defending their homes, but they also linked their political liberties to their way of life. If they permitted the South to secede, the Union would be destroyed, and their political rights, which anchored their families to their local communities, would be jeopardized. Understanding both Civil War soldiers and female civilians thus begins at home.2 The forces that shaped the family ideal began at the end of the eighteenth century and the dawn of the nineteenth century, when the market economy was gaining strength in the United States. By the end of the eighteenth century, many farmers’ sons began looking for employment in the cities, where the land-based economy was slowly being driven by the market. Some farmers changed from subsistence to commercial farming, whereas others left farming altogether and went into trade. Printed currency was used more, and the barter and trading system was relied upon less. The ideas of free competition in the marketplace gradually began to affect people’s attitudes about the nature of man and his place in society. An unrestrained economy and enlightened ideas about equality among men eroded a social order based on rank and the definition of man as a communal being. In addition, larger ideological transformations occurred as a result of the scarcity of resources and the growing population. Rather than pooling resources and protecting the community as a whole from the impulses of greedy individuals, the townspeople increasingly protected only their own households.

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According to Jeanne Boydston, the “tight communal identity” that once permeated every aspect of colonial life began to give way to “the spirit of individualism.”3 The American Revolution brought a nominal and temporary return to the communal ideals of the early colonial period, as all citizens banded together to fight a common foe. These collective ideas did not last past the end of the war in urban areas, however, because the patriots fought first and foremost for individual freedoms, particularly for political and economic independence. Society returned to the course of individual pursuits as men sought private property and the market economy continued to grow. Communities boasted their own small manufactories, and a growing variety of services became available outside of the household. As the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum and production moved from the household to the factory, the familial and societal order became less communal. By migrating to the cities and finding jobs separate from their families, young men and women gained a new sense of freedom from parents and community, and with that freedom came more individualistic ideals. At the time, this “spirit of individualism” and the democratic ideology unleashed by the revolution helped to redefine family life by gradually making familial relationships more egalitarian and intimate.4 Middle-class husbands and wives gradually came to view one another as partners in a companionate marriage, and they regarded their children as individuals who required love and nurture. They became more conscientious about child rearing and child development, and a new division of sex roles emerged. The father assumed the position of sole breadwinner for the family, and the wife reared the children. Although the middle-class household became the domain of the mother, fathers continued to play an active role in their children’s lives, according to Stephen Frank. The business world may have pulled them away from their families, but the competitive nature of business “made [them] realize the importance of the family” all the more. In other words, the father’s first obligation to the family was as breadwinner, but this does not mean that he abdicated all child-rearing responsibilities to his wife. Victorian fathers continued to be advisers and disciplinarians, especially to their sons. Both parents’ primary object, though, was to develop the child’s conscience and his or her ability for self-government. During

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the colonial period, children were trained to fear authority; in the nineteenth century, in contrast, parents taught their children to have a capacity for self-control so as to counter the anarchic tendencies of democracies and individualism. Several historians have argued that with the emergence of individualism and society’s new focus on personal advancement, nineteenth-century couples actively practiced contraception to ensure that they produced smaller families for whom they could provide both materially and emotionally.5 At the same time, the family slowly lost its market productive function by relinquishing the production of a complete product first to the “putting out” system and then completely to the factory and the office. Wives continued to produce household goods for their families, however. The church, the town, and benevolent societies gradually usurped the family’s communal responsibilities, and the family withdrew from the center of the community. The middle-class family began to concentrate on its own members and their well-being as the line between public and private became more defined and as society and the economy became more differentiated and specialized. Nancy Cott asserts that this line was “portrayed most powerfully in the separation of production and exchange from the domestic arena—the division between ‘world’ and ‘home.’ ” Although the Victorians divided their world, as Frank notes, the home became the “meeting ground of the sexes.” It became a place where mothers, fathers, and children found spiritual guidance, emotional support, and physical sustenance. It became a place that nurtured and protected its members from the heartless, immoral, and acquisitive world—a spot from which the family “ventured forth to make the world a better place,” as Louise Stevenson describes it. The family may have lost its productive value, but as the moral barometer of society it gained a more important role in the community.6 Although the middle-class family of the nineteenth century came to be defined by its retreat from the public realm and by its loss of productive function, it still had similarities to the colonial family. Both viewed authority as paternal, and the Victorian family continued to treat the government and the country as a whole with familial pride, viewing the nation’s founders as fathers to be praised and emulated. Steven Mintz notes, however, that the middle-class family’s move toward equality created tension between “a goal of cultivating

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self-government . . . and the opposing goal of deference to paternal authority.” Furthermore, even though the family relinquished many services, it continued to be regarded as the basic unit of society, which now simply had new and different responsibilities than the colonial family.7 Perhaps one of the most important of these familial duties was to provide the growing nation with well-behaved and moral citizens. Following the American Revolution, a common tenet was that the commonweal of the country depended on a moral citizenry. Because democratic ideals stimulated individualism, which flew in the face of patriarchy, many feared that these liberties would degenerate into licentiousness. Therefore, the only way to ensure the perpetuation of the republic was to produce virtuous citizens. This responsibility naturally fell to the family as the socializing unit of society. Republican training would begin at home and be reinforced in the public schools. Colonial physician Benjamin Rush declared that either children would be inculcated with “industry, frugality, temperance, moderation, and the whole lovely train of republican virtues, [or] the nation itself would be placed in jeopardy.” This ideological development would shape men’s and women’s roles in and outside the home.8 Until the late 1700s, E. Anthony Rotundo has argued, men were seen as the more virtuous sex and “credited with greater reason which enabled them to moderate passions like ambition, defiance, and envy more effectively than women could.” Thus, men commanded both the household and other institutions in society. With the birth of the new nation, the spread of the market economy, and the growth of the middle class, ideas about the importance of individuals emerged, so their ambitions were given freer rein, and men began to assert themselves for their own advancement. During the colonial period, the community as a group controlled men’s passions, but the social, population, and ideological shifts after this period made it impossible for such communal oversight to continue in the cities. Many people became concerned that the “unbridled competitive spirit” unleashed by this new economic and social order would wreck havoc in society and threaten civilization. Because men pursued their own financial goals, they could no longer protect the “bonds of society” as well as they had previously. At the same time, society replaced Puritan morality with a more practical business ethic, but a domestic

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morality (with women as its arbiters) soon emerged that compensated for this self-serving ethic. Likewise, beginning in the nineteenth century, women’s nature was redefined as morally superior to men, and they were now looked to as the guardians of civilization. Women’s new tasks were to help control men’s passions and to train them in the art of self-denial.9 The need for virtuous citizens brought changes not only in women’s status and the domestic realm, but also in men’s familial role. The home became the source of virtue and the force for a stable government because it was believed that morality could be more easily and effectively learned through the loving teachings of parents rather than through rigid religious instruction. Fathers relinquished the daily supervision and instruction of their children to their wives, but they continued to have the final authority in the family. “Men were to complement women by being good providers, loyal companions, and effective if distant fathers,” Michael Grossberg points out. Women, on the other hand, as the domestic managers, became the moral agents for their families and for the community at large. Susan Huntington understood the maternal power she wielded when she recorded in 1813 that “Governors & kings have only to enact laws & compel men to observe them—mothers have to implant ideas and cultivate dispositions which can alone make good citizens or subjects. . . . [T]he mother’s task is to mould the infants character into whatever shape she pleases.” A woman had enormous influence over her husband and her children; if she used it wisely, she could play a supportive and civic role by imbuing those under her direction with principles of morality and patriotism.10 This emphasis on women’s influence also shifted familial relationships and revealed the need for improving education for women. Mothers began to play a more active role in their sons’ lives by instilling a moral conscience that as men they could then summon in the vice-ridden world. But if women were to have such a significant role in the shaping of the country’s next generation, they had to be prepared, which meant they needed to be provided with more schooling. Education for girls changed from a curriculum based on ornamental accomplishments such as French, music, dancing, and fancy needlepoint to one based on the study of grammar, rhetoric, history, geography, mathematics, and some natural sciences. In this

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way, by the time girls became women, they could teach by pious example and intellectual knowledge. Domesticity began to be treated as a vocation and motherhood as a profession. Women would use the Republican Motherhood ideal to garner power within their homes and to justify their involvement in benevolent projects outside of their homes.11 The transformation of the domestic realm and the mother’s increasingly important role in society in turn helped to raise middleclass women’s status. More extensively educated and revered as the guarantors of civil morality, middle-class women by the nineteenth century played a more substantial part in the country’s development. Through their virtuous influence, they not only touched the lives of the next generation, but also influenced the activities of business and politics by morally directing their husbands. The power of Republican Motherhood was a double-edged sword, however, which, although allowing women more power, eventually led to a more constricted role for them as it evolved into the “cult of true womanhood.” Coupled with the doctrine of separate spheres and the “canon of domesticity,” women’s power and influence was restricted to and emanated from the home.12 These three ideologies—the “cult of true womanhood,” the doctrine of separate spheres, and domesticity—combined to define a woman’s nature, her role in society, and her sphere of operation. The “cult of true womanhood” defined middle-class women as “pious, pure, domestic and submissive,” according to Barbara Welter. It idealized women and confined and controlled their behavior in the home and in public. A true woman maintained sexual purity, attended church regularly, worked in the home exclusively, and, above all, submitted to the authority of the men in her life, whether father, brother, or husband. The “cult of true womanhood” glorified a woman’s role as mother and wife and restricted her behavior outside of this sphere, unless justified in domestic terms. The “true woman” of the mid–nineteenth century, then, encompassed numerous qualities that enhanced her ability to fulfill her duties as mother and wife. A woman was to use her influence to soften and refine the society around her through direct instruction of the next generation.13 Although women continued to produce goods for their families as they had in colonial society, the household took on a special aura

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through the canon of domesticity. Women came to be appreciated and revered as the moral arbiters of the family and the community. They could play this role because it was believed that they were morally superior to men and because the home protected them from the harsh and corruptive influences of the world. Within this special and elevated role, they were nurturer, mother, and wife. Home became an oasis in a world defined more and more by individualism, greed, and personal advancement.14 Finally, the doctrine of separate spheres segregated men and women and their social responsibilities. Women’s rights advocate Samuel May described this ideology best when he stated that it required that “men must go forth, take part in the collisions of political party, pecuniary interest, or local concernment [and] get themselves care worn, perplexed, irritated, soured [and] angry, while women are to stay at home, and prepare themselves with all the blandishments of maternal, sisterly, conjugal, or filial affection, to soothe our irritated tempers, mollify the bruises we have received in our conflicts with other men; and so prepare us to strive with renewed resolution, and bruise or get bruised again.” Nancy Cott attributes the development of the idea of separate spheres to when men began distinguishing between the premodern aspects of women’s work— which appeared unsystematic, inefficient, and nonurgent to them— and their own time-disciplined and specialized occupations. Women’s sphere was not just simply physically separate from men’s work, but it also “elude[d] rationalization and the cash nexus, and [failed] to integrate labor with life.” Men began to have divided loyalties to the home because it so conflicted with the modern forms of employment, so they simultaneously “glorified and devalued” the home, as Cott puts it. They glorified it because the sanctuary of the home allowed them to regain their moral balance and readied them to return to their own sphere. But men also devalued the domestic circle because it became the exclusive domain of women; consequently, the home had less value because it was presided over by the weaker sex. Mid-nineteenth-century men gradually spent less time at home and came to define the household as a woman’s place where the mother was sovereign. The consequence of the doctrine of separate spheres, argues Rotundo, was that it “entrusted women with the care and nurture of communal values—of personal morality, social

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bonds, and ultimately, the level of virtue in the community,” while men, in the meantime, “were left to pursue their own interests, to clash and compete, to behave . . . selfishly.”15 The nineteenth-century middle-class man, according to Rotundo, was a man of many parts. He was a man of action who thrived on the hustle and bustle of the public realm and who worked unflaggingly to provide for himself and his family. He was a man who was measured by his financial success and the social position he achieved, and yet who was condemned by the same society if his ambitions were tainted with the appearance of greed. He was a courageous and moral man who firmly defended his principles and maintained selfcontrol in his physical appetites and emotional temperament. He was to be in the world but not of the world by sustaining a constant watch against temptations of all kinds.16 For the “true man,” life consisted of a coterminous existence. He was expected to straddle the two worlds in which he lived. Each day he left the “good and godly” protection of the home, which provided both physical and spiritual refreshment and rejuvenation, to work in a public world “fraught with evil,” which relentlessly preyed on his weaknesses. The sphere of the true man lay in the world beyond the home. He relied on and relished the comforts of the domestic circle, but he did not wish to remain there. To do so would be an affront to his manhood, but at the same time he needed the civilizing powers of home to moderate his behavior.17 The Victorian world consisted of two separate and distinct spheres, but they were not mutually exclusive, nor were their boundaries fixed and permanent. Men daily stepped back and forth between the two realms, and women used their moralizing influences to mold, shape, and direct events from the confines of the home. It was a complex system that assigned roles to both sexes and made them dependent on each other. Men provided the economic support and protected the home, while women emotionally nurtured, spiritually guided, and physically refreshed family members. This dynamic relied on the malleable exchange between the two sexes in order to preserve a balanced and stable society.18 The antebellum society consisted of many classes of people, however, who did not always maintain this balance, or so the middle classes believed. On the contrary, the working-class family actually

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had much in common with the middle-class family. The two-parent, nuclear family was the norm; the wife seldom worked for wages outside the house; division of labor was gender based; and the working classes believed in the sanctity of the home. As Stephanie Coontz notes, “middle-class domesticity, in its original form, was critical of excessive accumulation, ambition and individualism—values that would have resonated positively for working-class people.” Most of these similarities derived not from shear emulation, but because it was more economical. Working-class families discovered that a wife’s labor inside the home produced more for the household economy than her work outside the home. Wives increased household provisions by gardening and by manufacturing their own soap, candles, clothes, linens, mattresses, and pillows. Poorer wives would scavenge for discarded household items and mend them. Wives also brought cash into the household by having boarders, by doing laundry or sewing, and by selling items on the streets. Historians suggest that working-class men may have demanded that their wives work in the home so that they could use that factor as a bargaining chip to ask for a “family wage” from their employers. By accepting gender-based division of labor and separate spheres, men also may have been asserting their male prerogatives.19 The working classes did not stress female virtue as much as the middle classes did, but trade unionist William Sylvis made it clear that women had a special mission. Women were “to guide the tottering footsteps of tender infancy in the paths of rectitude and virtue, to smooth down the wrinkles of our perverse nature, to weep over our shortcomings, and make us glad in the days of our adversity, to counsel, and console us in our declining years.”20 Furthermore, the working classes believed in the sanctity of the home and yearned for home ownership, if for no other reason than as a place of autonomy and a place to reassert family and class obligations. They did not simply borrow or adapt these ideologies to fit their needs, but rather, as Coontz suggests, they created their own distinctive familial and cultural patterns. The realities of an unstable economy circumscribed the lives of working-class family members as they attempted to meet economic and familial obligations. The children, for instance, were given early independence (within bounds) to teach them, as Christine Stansell

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describes it, “to shoulder those heavy burdens of labor which were the lot of their class, [and] to be hardworking and dutiful to kin and neighbors.” Parents expected their children either to enter an apprenticeship, to gain employment, or to scavenge for materials to help in the family’s survival. Economic hardships also forced working-class families to depend on kin and neighbors. Few networks of support beyond churches and benevolence groups existed in antebellum America, so help from friends and family could mean the difference between surviving an economic panic or being plunged even further into poverty. Socializing with friends and neighbors was also a hallmark of the working classes. According to Coontz, workingclass taverns were “often located in private homes, and up through the 1870s much drinking ‘remained rooted in the . . . kitchen grog shop.’ ” Husbands brought their pails of beer home from the saloons, and families gathered on the stoops or in a friend’s apartment. Working-class men were used to socializing with women and other families, which meant that the division of spheres was different and less rigid than in the middle class. Much of what disturbed the middle classes about the lower classes, in fact, was the working-class people’s use of the streets. To members of the middle class, scavenging, hawking, and selling goods and socializing outside of the home appeared promiscuous and, indeed, dangerous. Stansell claims that middle-class reformers attempted to rescue the lower classes from their own seeds of destruction by “teaching the poor the virtues of the middle-class home.”21 Middle-class missionaries during the Civil War had similar goals in mind when they went south to rehabilitate the freedmen. Abolitionists and missionaries argued that slavery destroyed the morals of slaves, leaving them promiscuous, uncontrolled, and unable to maintain a family. Whether slave or free, according to the middle-class view, African American men and women were innately inferior and needed to be taught work ethics and familial morals. But, in reality, freed African Americans and slaves shared a culture and value system. This shared culture developed over time, but it began with their landing on the North American continent in 1619. Africans inhabited all the colonies, and every colony had slavery. In states like Pennsylvania and New York, where slavery was abolished last in the Northern states, slavery remained a fairly recent memory.

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And as border states, Pennsylvania and Ohio had growing numbers of former slaves who escaped from the South. African American families had characteristics in common with middle-class white families, and only because of slavery and racism did they have to adapt and accommodate. The two-parent, male-headed, nuclear family was the dominant household among both slave and free populations. As historian Orville V. Burton suggests, African American families provided “physical, emotional, and cultural support for childbirth and child rearing.” They recognized the sanctity of marriage and had a genderbased division of labor. As slaves, African American women may have worked as field hands, but Noralee Frankel argues that they were still responsible for “traditional domestic functions of the family.” Like rural whites, slave fathers fished and hunted to supplement their families’ rations, and mothers tended small gardens near the slave cabins. Free African American men usually worked as manual laborers or artisans, and women most often worked outside the home as domestics, laundresses, and seamstresses. Slave children began performing small chores around the age of five or six and usually were employed regularly by the time they were ten, whether in doing fieldwork or in learning a skill. Free African American children, like working-class children, assisted family survival by scavenging and hawking.22 Although similarities existed between working-class and African American families, slavery, racism, and economics defined the lives of African Americans. Under slavery, marriage was not legally sanctioned, even though slaveholders encouraged and desired their slaves to marry. Lack of legality resulted in broken families when slaveholders chose to sell, give, or lend a husband, wife, or child. Marriage between a man and woman from different plantations complicated family life even further, and because family members could more easily be separated if one owner decided to move, family integrity was also more vulnerable. Slaveholders, furthermore, undermined the authority of the slave husband by providing food, clothes, and shelter for the slave’s family, and they undermined the fathers and mothers’ authority by determining when and how their children would work and by having ultimate powers of discipline. In spite of these problems, the slave family shielded its members from some negative aspects of slavery and was one of the most important factors

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in survival. Racism in the North affected the type of employment African Americans could get, where they lived, and their access to education and transportation, which in turn ultimately influenced a family’s income, status, and survivability.23 The two greatest sources of support for both free and slave families came from the African American community and from the emotional strength and hope gained from religion. Slaves depended on extended family and kinship ties; lacking those, historian Ann Paton Malone notes, the slave community provided “slaves with support, security and a sense of belonging during life-course transitions, at crucial turning points, and in periods of crisis.” Similarly, in the North, blacks formed benevolence societies initially to “pay sick and death benefits and to assist widows and fatherless children.” Free African Americans, like slave families, also absorbed orphaned children into their families whether they were relatives or not. More than poor whites, African Americans had no other form of aid than the ones they created for themselves. Free African Americans took in boarders for money, but also from a sense of responsibility to their community. Finally, religion was a crucial stabilizing factor for both freeman and slave. Slaveholders pushed religion onto slaves for a variety of reasons, the strongest among which was that they believed religion would tame them and make them more docile and obedient. Slaves understood their masters’ reasons but accepted religion anyway because it affirmed their value as creations of God and because it gave them hope that they would eventually gain freedom. Religion also had the benefit of “reinforcing slave domestic organizations—the family, the household, the kin group, and the community,” according to Malone. In freedom, James Horton and Louise Horton would add, the “church was the major black institution outside of the home for most black people of all ranks and all stations.” The church provided social contacts, economic aid, and cultural events, and acted as a socializing agent for new residents. The church and community reinforced the most important and basic institution—the family. African Americans survived slavery because of their familial ties, and they would fight the Civil War for autonomy over their families.24 Whether middle class, working class, free, or slave, Victorian men and women lived gendered lives. This gendered dynamic manifested itself during the Civil War when Northern men and women offered

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their services to the government. Men played their appointed sex roles by joining the army to protect their homes, their families, their government, and their country. Sallie Reed, in a letter to the Wisconsin governor, noted that women, “deprived [of] the privilege [of] taking up arms in defense of [their] countrys [sic] rights” and “denied the holy privilege of fighting in defense of liberty,” offered their services as nurses, sanitary agents, and aid society workers, thereby fulfilling the sustaining roles of their sex. Because most people at the time believed soldiering exposed men to corrupting influences, it was important that women continue their moral role during the war by bolstering the men with spiritual guidance and emotional support. But most men could not return home regularly for spiritual and moral rejuvenation, as they had done prior to the war. As volunteers, they received few opportunities for leave, and when they were lucky enough to go home, it was usually for only a brief time. This short time, however, enabled them to return to the world refreshed and rebalanced. Most women could not go to their loved ones in the camps, yet thousands of working-class and African American women labored for the army as nurses and laundresses, who, according to a member of the Third Maryland Cavalry, “endured hardships and privations with the stoutest soldier and [who were] ever ready to be useful to all who need[ed] the gentle care of a woman.” Many of these women were “universally respected by the officers and soldiers of their regiment[s]” for their hard work and devotion.25 The majority of women who wished to aid the soldiers, however, had to do so from the proximity of their own firesides because the camp was deemed unsuitable for the virtuous female. Because of their inability to attend to their male relatives on a regular basis, and because of men’s continuous need for moral purification, women thus had to devise new ways to counter the corrupt forces of the public sphere. As the anonymous author of A Few Words in Behalf of the Loyal Women of the United States noted, women had to “find new channels of help, new inspiration for good,” and “new modes of evincing our love of country” in order to fulfill their charge as the agents of public morality.26 Northern women were accustomed to the kinds of work expected of them, but not with the volume of goods they needed to produce or with the complications of sending supplies to the men. So

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they heeded the “few words” of the “loyal” author by devising “new modes” and modifying some tried-and-true methods used in their work in antebellum benevolent societies. Because they understood the power of the home and the effect of their moralizing influences over men, they employed domestic ideology in order to preserve the morals of the “boys in blue.” They aided the men physically, emotionally, and spiritually to help ensure that the men returned home as the responsible citizens, husbands, and sons they were when they enlisted. Under the protection of the ideology of domesticity, women were able to go physically beyond the limits of the household to work in the offices of the soldiers’ aid societies, in the army hospitals and camps, and, in some cases, in the field of battle itself. And they extended their ethical power into the soldier’s world through the materials that they sent him. Because Victorians were immersed in domestic rhetoric, women could easily use “homelike” language and imagery to arouse the moral sense in their men. Rather than work outside their proper sphere, most women utilized the power of their role as nurturer and exercised their motherly authority by simultaneously guiding, encouraging, and correcting the behavior of their male friends and relatives. Women who worked from their homes allied themselves with the women who traveled to the battlefront, and together their labors contributed to the successful Northern war effort. Women applied themselves in three different ways. First, women who worked for the aid societies, but who did not travel beyond their own communities to help the soldiers, were the solid foundation upon which the entire homefront supply effort rested. Without their continuous struggle to sew, knit, and cook, much of the work of the USSC (which, as indicated previously, was a government-sanctioned supplier to the army), the USCC (the supplier of religious tracts and hospital goods, sponsored by the Young Men’s Christian Association [YMCA]), and various state agencies would have been impossible because of the sheer cost of having to buy supplies. Homefront medical stores, food, and delicacies kept the hospitals running, relieved many soldiers on the battlefield, and supplemented the meager army rations. Women’s efforts to raise money for the societies similarly kept the aid offices solvent and stocked with the bolts of cloth, the skeins of yarn, and the raw fruits

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and vegetables the societies used to make their supplies. In fact, without the proceeds from the oyster dinners, the ice cream socials, and the seemingly ubiquitous sanitary fairs—the granddaddy of all fund-raisers—the societies could not have functioned. Likewise, by staying home and keeping the home fires burning, so to speak, these women afforded the soldier a semblance of stability by sustaining his home life. Their feminine work of cooking and sewing from the home reinforced the current gender ideals and assured the men that their networks of support thrived. The soldiers gained emotional comfort from knowing that their home was physically safe and functioning. At the same time, they felt that they were dutifully protecting their families, who were safely sheltered in their homes.27 Second, some women labored for the aid societies by making goods or by working in some managerial capacity. They visited troops in local military hospitals, and some even ventured to the makeshift hospitals closer to the front. These women were a blend of the tenacious homefront workers and the female sanitary agents who inspected the camps and hospitals. They knew through firsthand experience the value of the goods they carried to the soldiers. They knew the cost of the materials and the amount of time and labor it took to make the supplies. Through their visits to the hospitals, they could testify to the use of the gifts and inquire about the men’s needs. This contact between homefront women and the soldiers was important to both the home and the camp. The women’s presence, even though brief, had an ameliorating effect on the men. Many of the recruits had not been around women for months or even years, so the sight of women in camp cheered them and “seemed to bring home nearer,” as the soldiers themselves would put it. Indeed, women were so linked with domesticity and the idea of home that the thought of one would naturally conjure up the other in men’s minds. Furthermore, this domestic presence assured soldiers that their communities, families, and friends had not forgotten them. The trip to the camps gave female visitors a perspective on the peculiarities of the battlefront. Although women, as their families’ nurses, were familiar with the sickroom, they were wholly unacquainted with illness in huge numbers or with battlefield injuries. Through visits, the female worker noted the nature of the wounds, asked the men about any special needs or wants, and verified the distribution of a society’s goods and

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the state of the supplies. After such a visit, she could then return home and inform her societies about the worth of the society’s efforts and give advice as to what was needed and what was most helpful to the soldiers and to the surgeons. For instance, Katherine Wormeley began her war work with her local aid society, but by 1862 she volunteered to work aboard a USSC hospital transport ship during the Peninsular Campaign.28 She wrote to a friend that while unpacking stores that her society had sent the previous fall, she “several times came across packages labeled in my handwriting.” She wanted her friend to “tell this to the Women’s Aid Society,” suggesting that she wanted her society to know that their supplies had indeed arrived. Then she went on to provide an extensive list of goods that included gray and red flannel shirts, socks, good brandy, canton flannel drawers, boxes of spotted pocket handkerchiefs, towels, nutmeg, bay water, and “Muringer’s beef-extract,— this is precious as gold to us,” she added. 29 Third, some women worked at the hospitals or went to the front to assist the wounded. Many of these women followed their relatives to the front to nurse them after they had fallen from illness or injury. Other women volunteered to be nurses with the same patriotism that inspired men to take up arms in defense of the country. Once in the military hospitals, these ladies realized that nursing required much more physical and emotional stamina than they were used to expending while nursing at home. They became indispensable to the soldiers, though, because they had a unique opportunity to live among them. This daily contact afforded female nurses and agents the occasion to influence the men directly with sisterly and motherly care. Conversely, their frontline life exposed them to the kinds of physical deprivations and psychological stress that the men endured. In other words, they became the family members who could identify, albeit only partially, with the soldier. At the same time, they were representatives of the home and usually had intimate relationships with their hometown soldiers’ aid societies. They became the liaison between the home and the hospitals. They acted simultaneously as surrogate mothers and hometown reporters. As mothers, they conversed with the soldiers, caressed their fevered brows, changed their bandages, washed them, read to them, fed them the delicacies sent from the North, and made home feel all that closer to them. As hometown

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reporters, the ladies kept a critical eye on the use of the goods, the treatment of the soldiers, and the moral temper of the hospitals. When goods were misused, soldiers mistreated, or morality absent, not only did the lady nurses write home, but several took it upon themselves to rectify the situation. Female nurses were the holders of the domestic rope that tied the soldiers to the home and connected the hometown ladies to their own moral battle on the war front. Together, homefront and battlefront women worked for the preservation of the Union by preserving their men’s morality.30 An article from a soldier’s newspaper supplies a final note regarding the use of familial imagery during the war. “Married, something about the year 1856, by his Satanic Majesty, King Beelzebub, Esq., Mr. Copperhead Democracy and Miss Rattlesnake Slavery, both of the United States,” reported the volunteer author in the Armory Square Hospital Gazette of Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1864.31 In the article “How the Relationship Runs,” he characterized the Civil War as a wedding between two ideological reptiles whose unruly offspring were presently tearing the country apart. He noted that the capricious and unchaste newlyweds had produced children in quick succession. Their first child, born in 1856, just six months after the marriage, was a son, “Lecompton Border Ruffian,” having been conceived during the warring between pro- and antislavery factions in the Kansas Territory. Their precocious and true second son, “Secession Pro-Slavery Rebellion,” was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1860, when the state seceded from the Union. Their third son, “Patrick Riot,” was born in New York City in 1863, springing from the draft riots that engulfed the city that summer. Their firstborn, after only a few months of “sickly existence,” died from a “peculiar disease called Free State.” The son “Secession,” who “looks so much like Daddy,” was then four years old, broke his back at Vicksburg, burned his face at the fire at Gettysburg, and had a foot amputated at Atlanta. The writer confided that it was universally believed that “Secession” was “too smart to live,” and his death was looked for soon. “Patrick Riot,” the third son, came “near being stillborn” in New York City, but was aided by Dr. Seymour and his friends and lived for three days. The soldier concluded that “the fatality which has attended these children shows that no child of these can ever live, and yet they survive long enough to cause great

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trouble; and so long as the old folks live there is danger of an ‘increase in the family.’ ” He proposed, therefore, that they behead the old woman and hang the old man so as to prevent either of them from “generating any further trouble” or from marrying elsewhere.32 The fact that the author chose the family as a metaphor for the crisis of the country is telling. Although describing political problems in familial terms was nothing new (for instance, in the American Revolution, Thomas Paine had characterized the conflict with England as a “domestic disturbance”), it is interesting that the Victorians veiled everything, not just politics, so heavily in the imagery of domesticity at the very moment when the middle-class urban family had lost most of its functions. Stripped of its traditional social role as the productive and religious unit of society, the middle-class urban family retreated into the private sphere, where it provided emotional and psychological support for children and adults and acted as a counterweight to the acquisitiveness required of men in the public domain. Within the greater community, the domestic circle no longer represented the hegemonic power and even seemed at odds with society’s goals. But as historian George Forgie argues, the effect of these opposing commitments did not “make the spheres of the family and society more distinct and antithetical, but rather less so.” The public realm may have co-opted many of the family’s obligations, but it modeled its work on an “idealized family.” The result, so Forgie claims, was to make the state “seem like the family writ large, embracing the whole country.” Thus, Victorians sentimentalized domesticity and used familial language to describe both their own personal actions and the national events unfolding around them. The soldier’s use of “homelike” imagery in the Copperhead story takes on even more significance in this context because it suggests that his readers not only would have identified with this metaphor, but would have agreed that the Copperhead family was the antithesis to the “true family.”33 Because the most important function left to the nineteenth-century family was to rear its children to become virtuous and patriotic citizens, the Copperheads obviously failed not only in their parental responsibilities, but also in their civic obligations. Their three offspring threatened the very fabric of society by their undisciplined, self-serving, and impassioned behavior. Their tale represented the kind of destructive conduct that could come from rebellious children

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unschooled in the proper republican mores, which above all included self-restraint and civilized morality. Indeed, nineteenth-century Americans believed that insubordinate children grew up to be insubordinate citizens. Noted contemporary domestic adviser Lydia Maria Child argued that if “indolent parents” are unwilling to check their child’s evils at an early age, “when it might easily have been done, [the child] afterward grow[s] too strong for their management.” Historian Katherine Kish Sklar explains that domestic expert Catharine Beecher took Child’s concerns about rebellious behavior a step further by investing women’s maternal duties with national importance. Beecher realized even more than Child that the family represented the model of behavior for citizens of a democracy. Women submitted to the will of their husbands, but mothers in turn wielded power over the management of their homes and their children, just as citizens submitted to the governments of their towns, their states, and their country. This hierarchical relationship established an organized pattern of behavior that people emulated in the greater society, where the whims of the market and the unrestrained nature of democracy created turmoil among “a dangerously chaotic, classless society,” as Sklar describes it. It was not a far stretch, then, for the readers of the soldier’s story to recognize that the Copperheads’ ruinous qualities represented a threat to the welfare of the nation, and soldiers must surely have linked the fictitious rebels with their enemies on the battlefield.34 Union soldiers believed they differed from their foe by their display of morals, controlled behavior, and unwavering patriotism, all of which they learned at their mother’s knee. Unlike “Miss Rattlesnake,” who neglected her maternal duties, the noble women of the North, according to Rotundo, developed in their sons the capacity for “self-reliance, self-assessment, and self-direction,” which enabled these young men to regulate their behavior and “suppress their aggressive impulses.” Through such teachings, the Northern mothers laid within their sons’ psyches the foundation of legitimacy and authority. Northerners conceptualized the war in familial terms by accusing Southerners of acting like impetuous children who had to be taught a lesson. One soldier explained after the Battle of Shiloh, “We showed them on the 2d day that northern obstinacy and coolness was more than a match for southern impetuosity.”35

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Furthermore, it is significant that this article was published in a soldiers’ newspaper. The familial rhetoric that Forgie argues permeated the civilian world also influenced the soldiers in camp. Reid Mitchell asserts that the home’s strongest claim on the soldier was the memory of his family and community. A soldier dreamed about his home, longed for it, and planned his eventual return to it. A Maine soldier reported that the men in his unit “had become as one family.” Thus, the domestic imagery portrayed in the Copperhead tale represents the kind of familial ideals that played a central role in the Northern soldiers’ understanding of the Civil War.36 Volunteers very likely recognized the Gazette author’s solution to destroy both the old woman and the old man as a metaphor for overthrowing the mismanaged families of the South. The Copperheads stood for all rebellious Southerners who produced similarly defiant children, clear contrasts to the self-restrained, civilized men and the moral women of the North. If they would not repent and end their unruly ways, war and ultimately death were the solutions. The author may have caricatured the Southern family, but the seriousness of the message was not lost. His use of homelike language reinforced, for the soldiers, the powerful imagery of the family and the reverence for familial ideals present in mid-nineteenth-century America.37 Northern women hoped that their “boys’ ” behavior would not resemble that of the Copperhead offspring and that their maternal teachings would guide their volunteers to invoke the power of the mother through prayers like the one by this soldier: Mother dear, oh pray for me! When pleasure’s syren call Shall tempt thy child to wander free In paths where he may fall. Mother dear, oh pray for me! When all looks bright and fair, That I may all my danger see, For, surely, then ’tis near!38

The true women of the North worked for the physical and moral benefit of the troops in hopes of preserving the republic through the stability of the true family of the North.

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NOTES 1. Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865, 3rd ed. (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1990), 322; Virginia Matzke Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, Corporal James Henry Gooding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 19; Mrs. E. C. Porter, “Diary of Mrs. E. C. Porter,” United States Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 21 (September 1864), 659–62. 2. Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 4; Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 12. 3. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 64; Philip Greven, “Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century Andover, Massachusetts,” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, edited by Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 86. According to both Nancy Cott and Jeanne Boydston, modernization changed all women’s lives, both married and unmarried, but a woman’s class status and whether she lived in a rural or urban setting also influenced her responsibilities. Cott claims that women who lived in “more densely populated and commercial locations might have less labor to perform, especially if their husbands’ wealth allowed their families to purchase goods and services.” See Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 40–41, and Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 26–28. 4. Boydston, Home and Work, 32–36. 5. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 23, 43, 44, 63; Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 71–73; Tamara K. Harevan, “Modernization and Family History: Perspectives on Social Change,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2 (autumn 1976), 203; Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 195–226. 6. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 67; Frank, Life with Father, 69; Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and

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Culture, 1860–1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991), xxvi; Steven Mintz, Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 15. Mintz also suggests that the middle-class family became more isolated from the “world of work” because fewer families took in apprentices, trade assistants, and clerks. 7. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 196; Mintz, Prison of Expectations, 28–31, 38. 8. “Excerpts from the Papers of Dr. Benjamin Rush,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 29 (1905), 21, quoted in Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 243; see also Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity 1830–1860 (New York: Institute for Research in History, with Haworth Press, 1982), 24. 9. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 3–4. 10. Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 248; Mintz, Prison of Expectations, 29; Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Clio’s Consciousness Raised, edited by Mary Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 127; Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 8; Susan Mansfield Huntington Diary, February 7, October 25, 1813, quoted in Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 47. 11. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 200, 210, 284; Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 256–57. Both Kerber and Norton argue that the Republican Motherhood ideology was soon pulled in conservative and reform directions. It grew restrictive as women’s domestic roles came to be seen as so important that only women confined to these activities, or to activities like these, were truly accepted. Likewise, although some women utilized the power that their moralizing influences gave them to work for reforms in the greater society, the emphasis on domesticity was also absorbed by “the cult of true womanhood” and continued to restrict women’s participation outside of the home. 12. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 122–23. The phrase “cult of true womanhood” comes from Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, edited by Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973).

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13. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 225. Frances B. Cogan, All American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 88–89. Cogan also contends that another model woman was available for nineteenth-century middle-class women to emulate: the “Real Woman.” Real Women maintained the same types of virtues, but they interacted with men more aggressively, sought a rounded education, dressed sensibly, and asserted their beliefs and knowledge more boldly. They did so in such a way as to continue to preserve their propriety and to fulfill their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers. 14. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 135; Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 94, 98. 15. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 61–62; Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood”; Samuel May quoted in Anthony Rotundo, “Manhood in America: The Northern Middle Class, 1770–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1982), 23–24. 16. Rotundo, “Manhood in America,” 23–24, 142, 151. Charles Dickens’s Scrooge notes the same contradictory reasoning of society when his betrothed accuses him of idolizing money. “This is the even-handed dealing of the world!” he says. “There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth.” See A Christmas Carol, edited by Edmund Kemper Broadus (New York: Scott, Foresman, 1906), 66. 17. Rotundo, “Manhood in America,” 163, 167. 18. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 142–43. Lystra explains that although the doctrine of separate spheres was rigid, both men and women shifted “in and out of standard sex-role expectations” through what she refers to as the act of “reframing.” Reframing allowed a man to behave in culturally defined feminine ways and a woman to behave in culturally defined masculine ways without violating “sex-role prescription. Reframing violated and respected nineteenth century sex roles, and through its use the system was flexible and workable.” 19. Stephanie Coontz, “Working-Class Families, 1870–1890,” in American Families: A Multicultural Reader, edited by Stephanie Coontz, Maya Parson, and Gabrielle Raley (New York: Routledge, 1999), 104, 105; Jeanne Boydston, “To Earn Her Daily Bread: Housework and Antebellum Working-Class Subsistence,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History, edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1994), 45, 49, 52; Christine Stansell, “Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850–1860,” in Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S.

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Women’s History, edited by Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz (New York: Routledge, 1994), 113, 114; Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 56–57. 20. Quoted in Boydston, “To Earn Her Daily Bread,” 48. 21. Stansell, “Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets,” 113, 114, 119; Coontz, “Working-Class Families,” 105, 109, 113. 22. Ann Patton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 14, 258; James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 21–25; Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 8–13; Orville Vernon Burton, In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 148, 149, 163; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 217–23. 23. Malone, Sweet Chariot, 233–35; Burton, In My Father’s House, 177–82; Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 8–11; Nash, Forging Freedom, 223–28. 24. Malone, Sweet Chariot, 237–39, 241–49; Burton, In My Father’s House, 154–57; Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), 105; Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians, 44–45, 51–52. 25. Sallie Reed to Mr. Randall, May 20, 1861, Wisconsin Female Nurse Applications, Manuscript Archives, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; Third Maryland Cavalry to Anonymous, September 18, 1865, Benjamin and Catherine Oliphant Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 26. A Few Words in Behalf of the Loyal Women of the United States by One of Themselves (New York: Loyal Publication Society, 1863), 22. 27. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 22, 32, 125, 126. 28. The Peninsular Campaign was Gen. George B. McClennan’s attempt to take the Confederacy capital at Richmond in the spring of 1862 by invading on the rivers and transporting the Northern troops as close to the city as possible. The USSC provided hospital ships equipped with middle-class women, acting as nurses, to transport sick and wounded soldiers to hospitals in Washington, D.C. For more on this campaign, see Herman Hattaway, Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 81–90.

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29. Katherine Prescott Wormeley, The Cruel Side of the War: On the Hospital Transports with the Army of the Potomac (Boston: Ticknor, 1889), 90. 30. The idea of the home and camp being connected by a rope was borrowed from Earl J. Hess, who notes that families maintained contact through letters, “which constituted a paper tether that kept the soldier from sinking irretrievably into the military environment.” See The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 123. 31. Political opponents created the term Copperhead as a pejorative epithet. James McPherson notes that “Ohio Republicans seem to have used it as early as the fall of 1861 to liken antiwar Democrats to the venomous snake of that name. By the fall of 1862 the term had gained wide usage and was often applied by Republicans to the whole Democratic Party.” See Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 494. 32. Armory Square Hospital Gazette, October 15, 1864. The “Dr. Seymour” referred to in this story was Horatio Seymour, who was governor of New York during the 1863 draft riots in that city. Although he was a Democrat who hoped to avoid war, once the hostilities began he “counseled loyalty to the government.” See Mark M. Boatner III, The Civil War Dictionary, 4th ed. (New York: Vintage, 1991), 733. 33. George B. Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 17–18. The history of the Victorian family is an ever-expanding field. Some of the most prominent works are: Mintz, Prison of Expectations; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions; Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront; and Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class. Family studies have grown to include the father’s role. Recent studies show that instead of becoming the mother’s domain in the nineteenth century, the family was a “meeting ground” of the sexes. See Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic, 1993); Rotundo, American Manhood; and Frank, Life with Father. 34. Lydia Maria Francis Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1831), 16; Katheryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 157–58. Mitchell reveals that parental teachings, in particular that of the mother, were a concern throughout the nineteenth century. As early as 1846, domestic guides warned women about the political implications of poor mothering, implying that mothers who failed at their duties could easily produce rebellion. See Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 92.

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35. Rotundo, American Manhood, 21; Mintz, Prison of Expectations, 31; soldier quoted in Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 15–16. 36. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, xiii, 43–44; Maine soldier: James Edward Holmes to Abbie Holmes, May 21, 1863, in Nina Silber and Mary Beth Stevens, eds., Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters Between New England Soldiers and the Home Front (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 44. 37. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 31. Mitchell notes that soldiers from both sides regarded the other side as savages and uncontrolled brutes. Steven Mintz also argues that by instilling filial obedience in their children, nineteenth-century parents hoped that the principles of duty and order would carry over into their children’s behavior in public life. See Prison of Expectations, 31–33. 38. H. H. Penniman, 1863, and Byron Wilson, no date, in Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters from Camp, Battle-Field, and Prison (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865), 199, 99.

2 Corruption Abounds Reactions to the Soldier’s Life WRITING FROM CAMP DEFIANCE in Cairo, Illinois, in May 1861, Benjamin H. Grierson asked his wife, Alice, if she believed he would be “a success, or a failure” in the army. She considered his question and replied with what she described as “a dash of cold water”: “If nine out of ten men who succeed in getting situations under the U.S. Government are spoiled by their very success, & you prove to be one of the tenth, then it will not be a failure.” However, she continued, “whether your post is one of physical danger or not, I have no doubt but you will be surrounded by influences which morally speaking are fearfully perilous.” Tempering her words, she added, “I am not going to give you a long sermon, but if your situation ‘pays well’ I hope you will discharge its duties faithfully & honestly, and not take ‘Uncle Sam’s’ money without serving him well.” Alice understood her wifely position as the moral arbiter of her family and the power and limitations that role carried with it. She did not believe it was within her duty to advise Ben to remain in the army or to leave, nor did he ask. But it was within her sphere to make him aware of the military’s immoral environment and to awaken his moral duty to his country, to his family, and to himself.1 Three days later Alice penned another letter to Ben, this time expressing her pleasure in hearing that his commander, General Prentiss, might be a true Christian. Believing leaders had enormous influence on their subordinates, she observed, “if all men who hold high and responsible offices, were good men, we should have a different state of society.” Indeed, she had felt for years that the men Ben “most intimately associated” with had a bad influence over him. His friends were not only “intemperate in the use of liquors, tobacco &c, but with two or three exceptions, they were men, not governed

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by religious principles, and of various other bad habits.” She had rejoiced when they moved from Meredosia, Illinois, to Jacksonville, Illinois, believing he would no longer associate with these ill-behaved men. But since Ben had “talked of joining the Army,” she feared he might be “under even worse influences” and perhaps be in even more danger “without the restraints of home.”2 Alice’s concern about Ben’s friends’ ability to “influence” him may seem exaggerated, but the Victorian culture in which she lived believed in the almost mysterious potency of influence. Karen Halttunen explains that “influence was believed to be the power by which any person’s character affected the characters of others, for good as well as for evil.” Moreover, “[a]s a force for good, influence was spoken of as a moral gravitation, a personal electricity, a cosmic vibration. But as a force for evil, influence was compared to a poison, a disease, a source of contamination and corruption.” It becomes apparent from this description why Alice and other wives and mothers feared the degrading atmosphere of the army, which they imagined to be overrun with intemperate men who lacked self-control and honor and who undoubtedly would “poison” their loved ones through their association. But women also knew that they could exert their purifying influence to counter the corrupting forces of the camp. Through her weekly missives, Alice attempted to do just that.3 NATIONAL CONCERNS Before Ben entered his first battle, Alice recognized the moral and physical “perils” that he would face. She did not hesitate to share her concerns with her husband, and throughout the span of their fouryear wartime correspondence she continued to act as his moral counselor and guide, especially when she discovered that he persisted in his indulgence of “liquor, tobacco . . . and . . . other bad habits.” She never tired of being his conscience and even hoped that the war might produce the circumstances that would arouse his “moral nature” so that he “would be[come] a changed man,” whether she “lived to see it or not.” Their correspondence illustrates the fears the relatives of the volunteers felt and the ways they bolstered the men with familial support.4

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While Alice responded privately to the degradation of camp, national leaders reacted publicly by informing Northern citizens of their concerns about the physical and spiritual jeopardy of the troops. Their fears also grew out of the disturbingly bloody battles of 1862. While Stonewall Jackson led Confederate troops in a series of victories in the Shenandoah Valley from mid-March to mid-June 1862, George B. McClellan led Union forces on the drive for Richmond up the Rappahannock River. The Peninsular Campaign, as it was called, began in April and May 1862 and was quickly followed by the costly Seven Days’ Battles at the end of June 1862. The thirty thousand men killed and wounded in this campaign equaled the number of casualties in all the battles in the western theater during the first half of 1862. These battlefield casualties and the corruption in the camps prompted Dr. Henry Bellows, president of the USSC, to determine the costs. For instance, in the summer of 1862, the USSC calculated that if the war “continue[d] a year longer, not less than a hundred thousand men, of impaired vigor, maimed, or broken in body and spirit, will be thrown on the country.” Bellows, writing to S. G. Perkins, elaborated on his anxieties. Add to these disabled veterans “another hundred thousand men,” whom he feared would inevitably be “demoralized for civil life by military habits,” and all “would be thrown on the country,” he warned Perkins. Aware of the social consequences such a burden would have on the commonweal of the nation, Bellows enlisted Perkins’s expertise in preparing for this inevitable calamity by asking him to investigate “all the chief Military Hospitals” and veterans’ pensions while he toured Europe. A good pensions system might financially supplement veterans without challenging the self-help ideal, he reasoned. He hoped Perkins could “have a careful report on the subject of the foreign institutions for the care of invalid soldiers, before the next meeting of Congress.”5 Bellows had a more grandiose plan in mind than the moral suasion that Alice utilized to guide her husband through the trials of war, but his solution also rested on civilians’ cooperation. He suggested forming a “policy on the part of our municipal and town governments” to “discourage all favor to mendicity.” He believed that such a policy would simultaneously support and protect society, but he was also worried that without this type of action, well-meaning civilians would treat disabled veterans “as a class with a right to be idle, or to beg, or to claim exemption from the ordinary rules of life.” Taking his cues

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from the Victorian axiom of self-help, Bellows surmised that this communal kindness would only undermine the soldiers’ “self-respect, selfsupport, and the true American pride of personal independence.”6 The policy Bellows imagined would interfere as little as possible “with natural laws and self-help” and would promote the “healthy absorption of the invalid class into the homes, and into the ordinary industry of the country.” His definition of “natural laws” was threefold: “Their natural kindred are the first protectors of our invalids; the local community the next; and the State the last.” He feared that any general scheme that called for “herding the invalids of the war into State or National Institutions” would be a “dangerous blow to domestic order, to the sacredness of home affections and responsibilities” and would ultimately weaken “the law of local sympathy.” Therefore, he argued, “we must exhaust the two first” before “resorting to the last, which in the end will require to be heavily drawn upon.” But it was not the financial burden to the state that most concerned Bellows. On the contrary, he earnestly believed that any great reliance on state welfare only weakened the soldiers whom the pension was established to help. By placing the veterans into the hands of the very people they had enlisted to protect, namely neighbors and kin, and by allowing them to maintain a sense of self-reliance, he hoped to “save the spirit of independence” among the men, “preserve the[ir] self-respect, and the homely graces and virtues of the People.” Thus, the community would help to rescue the “dignity and strength of the Nation.”7 In order to accomplish his goals for a system of aid beyond that of the “natural kindred” and “local community,” Bellows suggested that the government establish a pension law that would provide for men who had visible wounds and also for those who had “broken constitutions, or impaired vigor, traceable unmistakably to military service.” The pension was meant to ease financial burdens caused by the soldiers’ disabilities without being “humiliating or enslaving.” The veterans must feel that the “payment” has been earned and “should be made regular, punctual, immediate, and with as little loss by agencies and obstructions as possible.” In addition to the pensions, Bellows wanted the veterans to be encouraged to “settle in the neighborhoods from which they came” and to rely on the “fraternal responsibility of their neighbors for employment and sympathetic aid.” If communities were to provide light work for the

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disabled veterans, he believed the “invalids of the war” could be “re-absorbed” into the “civil life of the nation.”8 Bellows’s concerns and visions of a national pension system grew from his understanding of the implications of the soldiers’ physical and moral susceptibility to the hazardous military environment in which they lived. He recognized that the personal consequence for each volunteer, although unfortunate, was a fraction of the bigger picture. Whether the veterans could function as fit, moral citizens again would indeed have an impact on their families and on their communities, but also, more important, on the health of the country as a whole. Bellows was not hyperbolic when he suggested that these men will become a “trial to order, industry, and the security of society”; he truly believed the immoral influences of war to be “more damaging and more permanent in their consequences” than the casualties.9 The Reverends Alfred Emerson and E. P. Smith predicted a similar outcome in a “Pastoral Letter” they presented at the meeting of the Massachusetts General Association of Congregationalist Churches in June 1864. They asked their audience to consider the moral outcome of the present conflict. Although they recognized that many men would not return home, they warned that those who did “are to tone and shape society, for at least two generations.” The soldiers’ military experiences would influence the type of men they would be when they reentered society, and Emerson and Smith believed that influence could go one of two ways: it could be “very perilous” or “very hopeful.” These clerics believed the army was “not only the hope of the nation,” but “also the field of destiny to hundreds of thousands, [and] in no small degree of the country itself.” The future of society, they claimed, depended on “the spiritual condition of the returning troops.” Elisha Weaver, the editor of the African American weekly the Christian Recorder, also realized the impact that the soldiers’ condition would have on the Northern society. Speaking from a more optimistic viewpoint, he noted that “the universal revival of our army would be the universal revival of all of our churches, and villages, and cities of our land, to which our converted soldiers would carry the holy fire.” Just as Bellows laid the responsibility at the civilian’s feet, so too did Weaver beseech Christian ministers and people that “this is your work” to make a “thank-offering” to aid the work of the USCC.10

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These men recognized the devastating results of the war’s corrupting influences on young men. Bellows saw soldiers returning from battle with impaired vigor, with maimed bodies, and with spirits demoralized by “military habits.” Emerson and Smith believed the volunteers’ wartime experiences could produce either “reckless and wicked” men or noble heroes, depending on their army influences. The three agreed that as citizens and as the benefactors of the soldiers’ sacrifices, they owed a debt of gratitude to the volunteers. Bellows believed moral institutions such as the USSC could protect and guide young men where their families’ succor could not reach them. Emerson and Smith also believed that dire consequences loomed on the national horizon unless the established religious community woke up to their duty to attack the wickedness prevalent in the officers and men who daily were “becoming more hardened and reckless.” All, however, agreed with Bellows’s premise that aid should begin with the family and that social institutions should act only as a safety net for those unfortunate enough to fall from the grasp of familial protection and communal support. They recommended that veterans turn to “their natural kindred,” in Bellows’s words, as their first protectors and encouraged families to promote moral rectitude. To do otherwise would only upset the “natural laws of self-help.”11 Whereas Alice Grierson felt compelled to warn her husband privately of the moral dangers that surrounded him, as national leaders, Bellows, Emerson, and Smith publicly heralded the problems to come. Moral destruction awaited Northern communities if citizens did not heed the warnings about the corruption in the camp. Together, private citizens and public leaders attempted to awaken both the soldiers’ and their kins’ consciences to the destructive forces of alcohol, gambling, and prostitution, which seemed part and parcel of a soldier’s life. By exposing the corruption in camp, they would prove the need for the countering forces of the home in the successful prosecution of the war effort. CORRUPTION IN THE CAMP Private individuals such as Alice Grierson and national leaders such as Bellows were not the first to express their apprehensions about the

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threat to society posed by an immoral environment. Early in the nineteenth century, moralists, clergymen, and civic leaders had expressed similar concerns about the rapidity of social change in their cities. Between 1820 and 1830, thousands of young rural men, convinced that there was not enough land available to subsist as farmers, migrated to the cities seeking employment. By 1850, 94 percent of Chicago’s male population was under fifty, and 67 percent was under thirty, with approximately half the latter group of young men in the fifteen to twenty-nine age range. New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other large cities experienced a similar rise. As discussed in chapter 1, under such pressures the eighteenth-century village mentality based on deference, communal accountability, and familial support gave way to a society in which personal ties to employers, neighbors, and family continued to loosen among the increasingly mobile population. At the turn of the century, the economy also shifted from one propelled by home manufacturers to one fueled by the factory. The apprenticeship system also began to break down because of this shift. Apprenticeships, which stressed reciprocal obligations between master and apprentice, had once provided a young man’s education and social preparation, influenced his choice of company, and controlled his leisure time. This structure was gradually replaced by employeremployee relationships in which, as Allan Horlick puts it, young men “found themselves increasingly less inhibited by traditional restraints on” their social conduct as single workingmen.12 Karen Halttunen explains that the “traditional vertical institutions,” which controlled the cohesion of a community, “could not contain the new complexity of national social life. New social organizations emerged that were formed along the lines of economic class and social status.” Young men joined these organizations and began to replace authority-based relationships with modern peer relations founded on a more egalitarian social framework. Moralists, clergymen, and city leaders viewed the elements of this transformation as sure “signs of the spirit of anarchy,” according to Halttunen. They saw their power of authority being eroded by the new ideals of equality, and they feared their views would no longer garner respect from the younger generation. Even more disconcerting, Halttunen adds, was the idea that within this new social system “authority could be seized by any charismatic figure.” A man with a magnetic personality could

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emerge from the masses and quickly gain the confidence of thousands. Naive young men, used to “the open trust of the domestic circle,” according to Steven Mintz, could easily come under the influence of and fall victim to villainous characters who seemed virtuous. Furthermore, Mintz adds, advice writers cautioned their readers that the adolescent male was particularly susceptible to the corruption and temptation of the adult world because he was in an “unsettled phase of life,” when judgment was weakest, and passion and impulse strongest. A persuasive character would undoubtedly inveigle these young men who were without parental guidance and support.13 Moralists, clergymen, and city leaders saw themselves battling for possession of their young sons against the vile men of society, whose “camp” was the “Theater, the Circus, the Turf, or the Gaming-table.” To gain the upper hand against this “evil race of men,” they offered advice in numerous behavioral manuals, and reformers began crusades either to rid their cities of the foul sources of gambling, prostitution, and alcohol, or to found their own institutions, such as the YMCA, which attempted to re-create traditional communal support structures. Lincoln’s call for troops in April 1861 re-created the scenario of rural young men leaving hearth, home, and paternal oversight to expose themselves most certainly to bodily danger, but also to moral dangers similar to those of city life. Like young men seeking employment in the cities, the volunteers faced temptations without the benefit of parental or communal guidance. In camp, these innocent youths lived free of familial morality, so they quickly fell victim to their worldly comrades, who seduced them with profanity, liquor, and gambling.14 Physical wounds received in battle, although not received through any fault of the volunteer, corrupted the soldiers, physique in the sense that the injuries weakened them. Overall, they were healthy men whose bodies were being invaded by foreign objects and whose capacity to function and contribute as members of society was thus instantly transformed. Although soldiers recovered from their battlefield injuries, either they lost a limb, or their health was seriously altered by overexhaustion and repeated illnesses that weakened their vigor for the rest of their lives. As a result, their usefulness to society was impaired, and they instantly became if not a problem, then at least a concern for the rest of the population. Bellows’s 1862 calculation that two hundred thousand men would be broken in body and

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spirit and “thrown on the country” portended a burden on a community’s ability to function. Bellows also recognized that these volunteers represented the country’s finest young men and that to lose so many men of this caliber could seriously cripple a society.15 The soldiers’ potential physical impairment alone created serious reflections about the consequences of the war. But Bellows and other leaders also understood that the soldiers’ experiences of combat and the brutality of war had the power to transform them morally, which in many ways posed an even greater threat to the progress and stability of society. Historian Earl J. Hess suggests that in order to produce an effective army, men “went through a learning process that forced them to change their self-images and become players in a drama very different from that of their civilian lives.” The fierce nature of the battlefield threatened to “produce hardened men who were indifferent to civilian concepts of moral behavior.” The Federal army, then, could become an “unstable, lawless element in society,” a projection that produced “some cause for concern that physical survival might not be enough, that emotional and moral degradation could be as serious a problem in the postwar world as amputated limbs.”16 Historian Reid Mitchell likewise argues that soldiers went through a “hardening process” in which they gradually shed their “small town mores” for belief systems that enabled them to understand, accept, and participate in the savageness of war. Hardening meant getting used to the privations of soldiering, becoming “accustomed to death and violence,” becoming apathetic and numb to suffering, and acquiring a “mental vigor” that went beyond military and moral discipline, and that required a soldier to stay alert and to transcend all of his cares, perhaps even those for his family. War created a dichotomy in which the nation asked its volunteer soldiers to put aside their morality—a morality that in essence they were defending and that made them such valuable members of society—to become the antithesis to virtue and brutish enough to kill. What defined a good soldier—indifference to creating or seeing carnage and apathy toward both his victims and his suffering comrades—ran counter to the nineteenth-century definition of the virtuous man. A “true man” of the Victorian period characteristically was industrious, reasonable, courageous, independent, honest, charitable, virtuous, and above all self-controlled. According to Rotundo, true manhood “required not

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release, but restraint” and the ability to master mental, emotional, and physical desires that might cause an individual to stray from the path of righteousness. It is not surprising that the battlefield presented several moral obstacles for the “true man.” Most men understood and expected the barbaric aspects of war. What came as a shock to some was the way in which “virtuous” men fell so easily and willingly into the brutality of battle. Soldiers could not reconcile their understanding of a “true man” with watching their comrades viciously attacking the enemy or ransacking homes and personal property with little thought to owners. For others, the shock came when they saw soldiers attracted to the vice that was such a prevalent feature of army life. Alice Grierson, Bellows, and Revs. Emerson and Smith were correct when they warned of the inevitable depravation during the dull days of camp.17 Corruption in the camp took many shapes and threatened the volunteer’s physical and spiritual health. On a sanitary inspection to the camps and hospitals in and around Cairo, Illinois, in the fall of 1861, Rev. William W. Patton, vice president of the NWSC, was appalled by what he and his entourage “saw with their own eyes, and heard with [their] own ears.” He informed the NWSC board that the behavior and condition of the troops “[were] sufficient to fill them with grief and alarm.” Drawing a direct correlation between the soldiers’ immoral habits and the proliferation of disease among them, Patton suggested that the army should respect the Sabbath and “suppress profanity, intemperance, gambling and licentiousness” in order to overcome these debilitating conditions. He feared that ignoring the foul behavior would increase the “prolific source of disease” and further contribute to “military weakness.” To Patton’s consternation and disappointment, by the spring of 1864, three years later, little had changed in the army. After completing a sanitary tour of the Chattanooga area, Patton shared his misgivings with the members of the First Congregational Church of Chicago. “The need of spiritual labor in the army cannot be exaggerated,” he declared. Indeed, “wickedness is there in its boldest and vilest form.” He attributed the men’s swift decline to “profanity, drinking, and licentiousness.” He warned the congregation that these “are the three terrible vices that infect our army” and the three problems that they, as representatives of a moral society, needed to attack. Although Patton’s opinions about

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the corrupt nature of the camps may be a bit tainted by his religious convictions, other civilian observers and even the soldiers themselves testified to the disturbing sinfulness of soldiering. The volunteers ran the risk of spiritual perversion from the gambling, the drinking, and the profanity within the camps and of both moral and physical decay from the alcohol and prostitution that tempted them in the cities.18 From the very start of the war, physical corruption took the form of illness and disease that ran rampant in cities crowded with soldiers and in camps where poor discipline and filthy living conditions made them breeding grounds for germs. Sent off by communal fanfare and filled with patriotic enthusiasm, many soldiers met a reality void of glory or fighting. Before they had a chance to engage their foe on the battlefield, many suffered the undignified experience of falling victim to disease. Because the soldiers contracted common illnesses, their plight was not taken seriously until the effects became epidemic in proportion and physically crippled many of the regiments. Mary A. Livermore, one of the NWSC organizers in Chicago, recounted in her memoirs the horrible conditions that greeted the volunteers on their journeys to the seat of war. “Crowded onto cattle cars as if they were beasts” and with few provisions, soldiers arrived at their camps exhausted, where they received unwholesome rations and “rotten straw, wrapped in shoddy blanket[s]” for beds. Exposed for hours to a “broiling sun or drenching rain,” thousands of men succumbed to illness and disease.19 Livermore learned about the volunteers’ experiences in letters from her “young citizen soldier” friends as early as June 1861. That same year, New York volunteer Constant Hanks revealed the toll of disease in his own camp and how ill equipped his unit was to care for the sick. In December, he informed his mother that “every day I see men young and old with all sorts of disease stretched out on a pallet [of] straw on the bare ground.” A camp mate “lay more than 3 weeks in his tent” on a bed made out of “a board and bundle of leaves.” He continued, “Whatever else happens to me I pray that I never shall be sick in Camp” because “we stand but poor chance.” By the following February, his frustration with disease and his disgust with the army’s inability to begin a campaign had grown even greater. He confessed to his sister that “I have no right to criticize the powers that be but it seems that there must be a pin loose some where that keeps an army

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of 200,000 men . . . in a state of inglorious inaction” where “death through disease [is] reaping a greater harvest of victims then [sic] the most hotly contested battles.” Hanks apparently believed that if the soldiers had been engaged in battles, they would have been away from the disease-ridden camp and probably healthier. At the very least, they would have died a more glorious death on the field.20 The conditions Hanks described would be repeated with each new set of recruits, whether among the white or black regiments. Black soldiers suffered from horrific conditions within their camps because they generally received inferior rations, fewer supplies, and poor medical care and were assigned a greater share of fatigue duty.21 James C. Beecher, a colonel of a black regiment, for example, noted the effect of excessive fatigue duty when he complained to his brigade commander that “the fatigue duty of my regiment has been incessant and trying—so that my sick list has increased from 4 to 5 to nearly 200 in a little over a month.” Although white commanders of black units tried to provide fair and equal treatment for their men, black soldiers in general would be discriminated against throughout the war, and their health would suffer as a result. Of the thirty-six thousand black soldiers who died during the Civil War, eleven died of disease for every one who succumbed to battlefield wounds. The deprivations that black soldiers experienced would convince their mothers, wives, and sisters to become involved in the cause.22 At the beginning of the war, though, the dismal camp conditions concerned civilian leaders enough that they acted immediately. The USSC was established in June 1861 in order to determine “the condition and wants of the troops” and to provide sanitary advice to the army. Their first action was to appeal to the citizens of New York to aid the commission because, they claimed, disease was already “stealing through the camps” and “menacing our dearest treasure.” USSC agents sent out to inspect the sanitary condition of regiments and hospitals reported that the filthy camps, the shamefully dirty uniforms, the unwholesome food, and atrocious cooking methods contributed to the proliferation of “measles, diarrhoea, pneumonia, rheumatism, and typhoid fever” among the soldiers. The lack of proper hospital facilities compounded the unhealthy condition of the camps. USSC agents described regimental hospitals in Virginia and Maryland as overcrowded, filthy, understaffed, and worse than any other hospitals “in

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the civilized world”: “Bed pans and chamber pots, containing urine and excrement, were standing in many of the rooms out on the floor, uncovered. The stairs are crowded with chamber pots, slop buckets, and other utensils,” the agents reported in disgust.23 But the problem went beyond the need for simple cleanliness. Disease ran rampant, Bellows reasoned, because the officers “rashly assume[d] that intelligent men know how to take care of themselves.” Officers did not consider that their men, for the most part, were accustomed to the comforts of home, where they would be “under the tender providence of mothers, wives, and sisters” who “prepared [their] food” and gave them “careful medical supervision.” Female relatives also maintained the cleanliness of the households and washed and mended their men’s clothing, of course. The irregularity of camp life exposed the volunteers to exhaustion, “filth, heat,” and “novel conditions” in which they were wholly unprepared to care for themselves. Ohio soldier David Stetham’s account of his bathing habits illustrates Bellows’s point. In a letter to his sister, he described himself as very dirty because he “only washed good but once since” he had enlisted three months earlier. After a year of service, he had grown accustomed to the privations and proudly shared with her his system for washing his socks. Although he had a “pair of Mrs. Woods make (sent to me last winter) in my knap sack,” he had never worn them. Instead, his method was “to wear them till they begin to smell,” then he would “go to the creek jerk them off wash them out and put them on again.” He pondered, “I was wondering to day how long since I changed socks.” Soldiers’ unhygienic behavior predated the Civil War. In fact, revolutionary soldiers suffered similar distress without the benefit of women to care for them. Not “used to doing things of this sort,” the men chose “to let linen, etc., rot upon their backs then [sic] to be at the trouble of cleaning em themselves,” observed patriot Benjamin Thompson.24 Arguing along with Bellows that the volunteers had little experience in caring for themselves, Dr. John Ordonaux honed in on the problem. Soldiers who were camped in or around towns regularly received passes that allowed them to leave the camp for rest and relaxation in the city. In his book Hints on Health in Armies, Ordonaux gave advice to volunteer officers on how best to influence their soldiers’ actions on the battlefield, in camp, and in town. Men

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who were allowed to “roam through a town” caused themselves bodily harm by what they ate or drank. “Lounging all day from shop to shop, eating sweets here, drinking spirits and acids there, gorging themselves with all manner of incompatible edibles, and drinking too often of spirits to excess, together with exposure to sun and dew; these are the parent causes of the mischief which so often attends upon ‘passes.’ ” What followed the next day, argued Ordonaux, but a visit to the camp doctor. He suggested that the officers advise their soldiers, “temperance in all things, imprudence in none, should be their rule and shield.”25 USSC agents feared that soldiers’ reckless and intemperate behavior destroyed their military fitness and contributed to the prolific disease in the camps. They believed that the first step toward a healthier army lay in discipline. They assured military leaders that the “public would hail with joy the inauguration of a decisive, prompt, and rigid rule.” They argued “that the health, comfort, and efficiency of the Army are all united in their dependence on a strict, uniform, and all pervading military discipline.” Many officers ensured discipline through stringent obedience to rules. Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of the First South Carolina Volunteers (made up mostly of freed slaves of the Sea Islands off the South Carolina coast), took a page out of Ordonaux’s book. He made it a “cardinal” rule that his men maintain an impeccable appearance by requiring them to have their coats buttoned at all times. He reasoned that unbuttoned coats indicated a loose character. As he explained to his wife, “if a man begins with swearing & stealing, bad practices grow & you always find him at last with his coat unbuttoned.”26 Indulgent behavior compounded by filthy living conditions and the lack of adequate equipment led to many unnecessary deaths. In many ways, though, the idleness of the camp held more dangers for the soldiers than the physical trials they had to endure. Concerned about the effects of the monotony of camp life and the seduction of vice for the bored and lonely recruits, religious groups published health and spiritual advice in the form of tracts, cards, and books aimed specifically at the soldier. One such group, the American Tract Society, began its work immediately following the call for troops. By May 1862, at an annual meeting of the New England branch of the association, members happily reported that of the 175 publications they had prepared for the armed forces, 225,000 volumes and more

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than 1 million distinct tracts had been issued. As early as 1861, the Philadelphia branch had published and distributed The Soldier’s Pocket Book. Within a small volume, purposely compact to make it convenient to carry in a haversack or pocket, the author presented healthful hints and spiritual advice. Among warnings to keep the feet dry, to avoid drafts, and to place “a band of flannel around the abdomen” as a “precaution against disease,” he charged soldiers to “resist all the enticements of sin”: “In camp-life there are many temptations, which it will require much resolution to resist.” Realizing that the way of the Lord was narrow, he cautioned the faithful soldier about the “infidels” he would meet within camp. “Some of your comrades may scoff at all religion; others may be profane swearers, who take God’s name in vain. Others may be obscene and licentious in their conversation,” and still others “may be drunkards, liars, and thieves; and in a word, every vice may possibly be exemplified in some of the residents of the camp.” A good soldier was supposed to “set his face as flint against all those enticements to sin” and use God to “guard him against falling into these snares.” The soldier who did not heed the authors’ warnings would only “degrade and dishonor” himself, but “the soldier who wish[ed] to be trusted and respected . . . will show that he is above those low vices.” “My son,” the author directed, “if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.”27 These authors were not being hyperbolic about the depravation of army life. In letter after letter, soldiers testified to the corrupt nature of the military world. “I know this is a bad place for a man to live,” wrote a Michigan soldier, unless “he is inclined to be a rogue.” F. Calkins, deeply concerned about the “effects of sin” in camp, wrote to a dear friend. “Not any have I found who have any interest in the Savior’s precious blood,” he lamented, “they seem to care only for things that are low and devilish and to gratify their lusts and passions.” Indeed, Minnesota soldier Henry Hagadorn confessed in his diary that, “I have seen but little of the wickedness and depravity of man until I Joined the Army.”28 In general, most officers of black troops and visitors to their camps testified that black soldiers were not as corrupted by camp life as the average white volunteer. Historian Benjamin Quarles speculated that for the average black soldier, camp life was an improvement from slavery. They were better dressed, clothed, and fed by the United

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States Army than by their former masters. Black soldiers (both Northern and Southern) took pride in their elevated status to soldier and therefore kept their uniforms and camps neat and clean in order to dispel beliefs that blacks were innately lazy and unkempt. Dedication to their units and the Northern cause would prove that they deserved and earned freedom and the duties of citizenship. As a result, there was generally less swearing, gambling, and drinking among black troops. White officer Luis F. Emilio’s history of the famous Fifty-fourth Massachusetts indicates “that there was less drunkenness in this regiment than in any that had ever left Massachusetts.” He believed it had more to do with lack of funds than with the soldiers’ moral fortitude: members of the Fifty-fourth had not been paid before leaving their camp. But upon reflection, he agreed that no regiments were more “amenable to good discipline, or were more decorous and proper in behavior.”29 Whether in white or black camps, corruption appeared in many forms. One of the least serious, but perhaps most prevalent, was the habit of swearing. Within the army, foul language seemed to be second nature to recruits and officers in spite of a regulation in the Articles of War that forbade the use of profanity and that fined officers a dollar for each offense. According to historian Bell Wiley, even for those with strong convictions, the pull of profanity was difficult to withstand, as a Connecticut captain noted in 1862: “It is wonderful how profane an army is. Officers who are members of the church, . . . who would not even play a game of cards, have learned to rip out oaths when the drill goes badly or when the discipline ‘gets out of kilter.’ ” Recent recruits found their new surroundings unpleasant and repulsive. Upon arriving at Fort Tillinghast, “Henry” could not believe “the filth and profanity that saluted” him that night and that had “been kept up ever since with slight diversion, or cessation.” Riding on the steamer Adelaide, a civilian noted that, “it was unpleasant to hear” the soldiers of the Fourth United States Colored Troops (USCT) “use so much profane language.” George Stephens, a black noncommissioned officer of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, argued that the profanity among the black troops was learned from the “low whites,” whom he felt set a bad example. It was only natural, he explained, that “those who had been restrained by the association at home when they get in the army seem to obtain a sort of immoral license.”30

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Female nurses also heard vulgar language from the soldiers on their wards. Sarah R. Blunt, a nurse at Lookout Point, Maryland, was shocked and disappointed by her patients’ ill manners. On Easter Sunday, she read the Bible to the “boys,” but later she complained that as they “listened they chewed all the while on smoke beef and kept their hats on.” She admitted that she could “not expect to find only respectable boys fighting for their country.” She believed that she and the other female nurses at the hospital were supposed to act as a moralizing factor. “[We] give medicines, say pleasant things,” and, Sarah explained, were to be “a kind of check i.e. stop swearing.” Another nurse also discovered that being a soldier did not necessarily mean being a gentleman. Emily Parsons had to reprove a patient, whom she described as “among the lower classes,” for swearing. “I told him never to use such a word again while in the ward, for I would not have it. I suppose I shall have all sorts of characters to deal with.” Elizabeth Wheeler offered her help at McDougal Hospital, Fort Schuyler, after the Battle of Gettysburg. Because the female nurses lived on the ward with the soldiers, they occasionally heard foul words, which most likely were not intended for their ears. While some patients read, others “had the habit of sitting at the head of the ward and playing cards” to pass the time. They played near Wheeler’s room, and she could hear their oaths as she passed in and out. One day she decided to confront them. “Boys, I never knew people to pray so much over their cards as you do.” Astonished, they said they “did not know they prayed.” “Well,” she replied, “if I should ask God to bless as much as you do to curse, I should call it praying.” Satisfied that she had made her point, she prided herself in the fact that she “never heard swearing there again, except [by] visitors from other wards.”31 It was appropriate that Wheeler caught her patients cussing while they were playing cards because by all accounts soldiers were particularly profane while engaged in a game of cards. They participated in such diversions to fill dull hours in camp or in the hospitals, where time seemed almost oppressive. For Ben Grierson’s recruits, however, cards became a serious endeavor. In a letter to his wife Alice, Ben described the popularity of a card game called “Chuck Back” in his camp. They played “using cards & corn—or grains of corn as money to which the value is understood between them.” The game became serious when “some of the men . . . lost nearly all the money they

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drew” on payday. To put an end to this, Ben ordered the captains of the different companies “to arrest and place under guard any man found gambling in the Camp.” He realized that it not only rendered the soldiers penniless, but also, even more devastating, left their families at home destitute. As he explained to his wife, “Many of the men in the Regt. have families at Home in want—actually suffering for the necessities of life and if men are allowed to gamble away their money their families will not be likely to receive any relief from them.” He assured her, “I am determined that this gambling shall be stopped.” Volunteer David Stetham reported a similar situation to his sister in April 1862. “Card playing has been all the rage, but this morning Col. Groesbeck issued an order, that playing for money or sutler checks would not be allowed by either officers or privates, and no card playing on Sundays.” Among the Sixty-second USCT stationed in Brazos Santiago, Texas, in October 1864, Lt. Col. David Branson used literacy as a punishment for gambling. He warned his troops that if they were “found gambling in any way, the money at stake will be seized and turned into the Regt. Hospital fund” and the offenders would be “placed standing, in some prominent position in the camp with book in hand, and required then and there to learn a considerable lesson in reading and spelling.” He reasoned that, “no freed slave who cannot read well has a right to waste the time and opportunity here given him to fit himself for the position of a free citizen.” For others, such as Sgt. Albert Graves, this entertainment was simply an innocent pastime. He described in a letter to his wife how soldiers filled their time in camp while not occupied by drilling. “The balance is spent in reading[,] talking and playing cards according to the taste of the individual.” Female nurses reported that many of their patients played cards “only to pass the time” because they did not know what to do with themselves. Sanitary inspectors also believed regiments that did not provide outdoor recreation for their men contributed to an environment in which men resorted to card playing out of boredom. As harmless as the card games seemed, they usually devolved into gambling, warned the USSC agents, which “prevents the men from maintaining both mind and body in health by active amusement in the open air.”32 While camped near towns and cities, soldiers took advantage of the “active amusements” available in the form of dancing and mingling

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with the local women. These amusements were not, to be sure, the kind of open-air activities the USSC agents had in mind. Morris Fitch admitted to his family that there were “a good many gatherings” near his camp, but he could not tolerate the “swearing, chewing tobacco & spitting it upon the girls dresses.” What made the crude behavior even less appealing was hearing about his family’s “intertainments [sic] of the day.” Fitch contrasted the rude soldiers’ behavior with social gatherings at home, lamenting, “I should like very much to attend a good party.” While camped near Minnville, Tennessee, Judson L. Austin assured his wife that even though “I have plenty of chances to go to partys & dances,” I “dont [sic] feel like doing so.” He could not say the same of his companions. “Some of the boys can write to 2 or 3 girls at home & then flirt with every thing that looks like a girl here & some who have a wife & family can be off somewhare [sic] to some party every night they are not on other duty.”33 While stationed at Camp Yates near Shawneetown, Ben Grierson filled several nights attending parties with his “brother Officers.” After telling Alice he had just been invited to another such gathering, he casually stated, “I will go if I feel well—it will pass the time away and as the saying is kill time.” Concerned about his new interest in parties, Alice scolded him in her next letter, noting that it was “a larger number of parties than you have attended in the same length of time since we were married.” A month later, Alice continued to reprimand his behavior. This time she expressed her disappointment with his frivolous expenditures on extravagant dinners and her concern with the ill effects of his oyster dinners and late-night meals, which she feared were not good for his stomach. Plus, she added, the money he spent on the liquor, cigars, and billiards was intolerable. “It seems to me,” she advised, “that the Camp is the place where you ought to be most of the time, & unless you are positively uncomfortable at night I would rather you slept in your tent usually.” It is uncertain whether it was her counseling, the expense, or his duties that persuaded Ben to lessen his visits to Shawneetown. A month after her missive about the parties and money, Ben wrote to allay her concerns, but also to assert his own will by stating that other factors kept him from town. He found that he could not “go to Town without spending more or less money and as I think it my duty also to remain

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here as much as possible, I will not I think in future go to the Town as much as I have here to fore.”34 Ben did not always heed his wife’s words, though. Aware of this, Alice wrote a more suggestive and less forceful letter that summer on the topic of his religious duties in hopes of gently nudging him to acquiesce. “I don’t know that it will be any use to say it to you—but I wish you would sometimes go to hear Chaplain Jacques preach,” if for no other reason than “for the sake of your influence on the men.” She conceded that the chaplain was not the most entertaining speaker, but “I think even poor preaching for a regiment is better than none at all.” After all, “from what I saw of him I would not consider him a bad man.”35 Ben’s spiritual laxness was not reflective of all soldiers. In fact, religion was very important for many volunteers. After three months in the service, David Stetham lamented the unceremonious way in which he passed the Sabbath. “I dont [sic] like this way of spending Sunday[;] there is no difference between it and any other day out here.” In March 1862, he continued to complain about the irreligious nature of the army. “How sweet is the Sabbath to me[.] The day when the Savior arose. That’s what we used to sing about this time of day when I was home a year ago, but as far as the sweetness of the Sabbath is concerned in the army you can put it in your eye (to use a common expression).” Patrick Guiney, of the “Irish” Ninth Massachusetts, reported his spiritual behavior to his wife. “I went to Communion last Saturday morning. This will be pleasant news for you—a good precaution for me.” Other soldiers grumbled about the complacent and even immoral army chaplains. Rufus Stanick complained that he rarely even saw his chaplain. “We do not often have religion services—as it most always happens that something or other prevent it[;] our chaplain makes no great exertion I think.” Although Rufus admitted that he “like[d] to hear him talk” because his “remarks when he makes any are generally very good & very brief,” he considered him a very “mild soft- spoken man” who was “harmless for evil.” Milton Bailey had deeper concerns about his chaplain. He informed his cousin Ann that the “army is the most outlandish place on earth[;] no man ever live [sic] religious that comes in the army.” He believed that “over half the preachers that our Government employs at suchy [sic] high price turns out to be the most depraved sinners in the

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world.” In fact, he revealed that his company’s first chaplain “maid [sic] no scruples to take things out of houses where people had left them and was always in company with abandoned women.”36 With such evidence of irreligion, it is no wonder that Thomas Wentworth Higginson recorded in his diary that after being with the First South Carolina Volunteers, “all white camps seem very rough & secular.” Every night while in camp, his soldiers would have what Higginson described as a “shout.” It was a ceremony of sorts that included singing and dancing around the camp fire with the intention to “raise something sperritual [sic].” Higginson described the enticing pull of the event when he wrote, “every man who comes within reach, oldest & youngest, is wriggling & shuffling, as if by an irresistible necessity & even those who affect the sarcastic, glancing round at us, are drawn into [it] ere long.”37 Although the soldiers who indulged in profanity, gambling, and dancing or who ignored the sanctity of the Sabbath did not endear themselves to their homefolk, their behavior marred only their souls. On the other hand, the soldiers who partook of spirits too liberally or enjoyed the sins of the flesh in the numerous bawdy houses jeopardized not only their souls but their reputations and their health as well. Whiskey played an integral part of the army experience. Until 1830, the army had issued alcohol as part of the ration. After that date, whiskey was issued to men who performed extra duty or for special occasions. Drinking while on duty was not uncommon, however, and many officers found their soldiers drunk on guard duty in spite of penalties of days of “hard labor with a ball and chain attached,” as Edward Coffman puts it. On their way to Paducah, Kentucky, Ben Grierson’s men covertly “procured whiskey at Shawneetown” and proceeded to get drunk. As soon as Ben found out, he “made an examination of the Canteens” and emptied twenty or thirty filled with whiskey. He then “ordered the Captains of the different companies to spill out all of . . . the whiskey they could find.” After gaining control of his men, he continued his investigation and found that the keeper of the bar on their boat, although “forbidden to sell liquor” to the men, “was dealing it out on the sly.” Ben warned the man that if he heard of him selling again, he would “throw him and his contents” overboard. He then had “to place a guard around the bar to keep the soldiers from tearing it down.”38

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Intoxication was not solely an enlisted man’s problem. Men of every rank and position were known to have tipped the bottle. Wisconsin State agent Cordelia Harvey noted the deplorable conditions she found in a St. Louis hospital where recuperating soldiers were shamefully treated by the drunken steward and surgeon. She immediately put the facts on paper and had twenty of the most prominent and influential men, “both officers & citizens,” sign it and then presented the evidence to the medical director. He assured her the intemperate men would be “removed at once.” William Noble noted in his diary that on several occasions “the band [was] all Drunk and also Lt. Martin officer of the day.” A couple of weeks later he wrote about the persistence of the same musicians: “Last night our Dutch Band was blowing at Col. Leggetts tent for whiskey.” This occurrence was apparently common because he commented that, “they would blow their brains out for one bottle.”39 Well aware of the evils of alcohol, the editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel, as early as May 1861, published an article entitled “Temperance among Solders.” He informed the Milwaukee volunteers of the wise example of the Medina Union Volunteer Company of New York, who pledged to “abstain from the use of spirituous liquor during their term of enlistment.” He urged Wisconsin soldiers to emulate such behavior. Similar action was taken in Madison, Wisconsin, where Emilie Quiner witnessed fifty-two members of the recently mustered Randall Guards “binding themselves to abstain from every thing which could allow weak[ness].” She “sincerely hope[d] those pledges” would “be kept and that [alcohol would] have no power over them.” The Armory Square Hospital Gazette reported that soldiers in “large numbers pledge[d] total abstinence” as the “Sons of Temperance” movement had recently been inaugurated at the Washington, D.C., hospital. Most soldiers did not follow such models, but instead indulged themselves by drinking freely and liberally. As a sanitary agent in St. Louis, Weston Flint noted the need for organizing the temperance cause in the army. “Oh! there is a work,” he exclaimed, “it is frightful to see the corruption of officers and men in this regard[.] We are thinking of having a Temperance badge march to wear.” A Pennsylvania volunteer described to his parents the lengths to which soldiers would go for liquor. “About 15 deserted out of our company because they could not get no whiskey

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about here as they are all whiskey bummers,” he explained, “and we are glad to get rid of them.” Other men who came into the army as temperance men “learned to take a little stimulant” to support themselves after the fatigue of long marches. A New England captain confessed to this habit, and although he did “not expect to become a drunkard,” he admitted he was not “willing that a sister of mine should marry a man who drinks as much as I do.”40 Lydia Hamilton Smith, black servant of Republican senator Thaddeus Stevens, rushed to Camp William Penn in Philadelphia when she discovered her son Issac’s “free-spirited ways.” Her powers of moral suasion had little effect on his habits, however. She tried to escort him to their priest to “mend his ways before he faced the dangers of the battlefield,” but he lost her while in town and proceeded to get drunk anyway. What is significant about this story is not the ineffectiveness of motherly powers, but rather that Lydia felt compelled to follow her son and believed that she could influence his behavior, much like the white middle-class ideology of moral suasion. By doing so, she was enacting the rhetoric of the black antebellum temperance and benevolence societies. It is not clear how vulnerable black units were to the corrupting forces of the camp. On the one hand, it appears that Issac Smith’s behavior differed very little from that of many white soldiers. On the other hand, white officers of black units were keenly aware of the attention focused on their men and wrote that their black soldiers were exceptionally well behaved. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, for instance, informed his wife, “[drinking] is absolutely omitted from the list of vices [among his men]. I have never heard of a glass of liquor in the camp nor of any effort to keep it out. A total absence of the circulating medium might explain the abstinence, but not the non allusion to the subject.” He admitted that “the craving for tobacco is hourly and constant, like that of a mother for her children; but I have never heard whiskey even wished for, save on Christmas Day, & then only with a hopeless far off sighing as you on that day might have visions of strawberries.” As noted earlier, considering the political pressures applied to both the black soldiers and their officers to prove their worthiness, it is not difficult to believe that black volunteers had a better record of behavior than white soldiers. It would be foolhardy, however, to argue that black recruits were impervious to camp vices. Just like white volunteers,

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they were vulnerable to alcohol and other corrupting behavior. One reason for white soldiers’ higher incidence of drunkenness may have been the greater availability of liquor in their camps.41 Soldiers found alcohol easily in camp through sutlers, in spite of USSC objections.42 Some officers, such as Col. T. J. Turner of the 115th Illinois, would not “allow liquor sold in camp or within a mile and a half of camp” or allow his “soldiers to go beyond the lines.” But in more than half of the regiments inspected by USSC agents, the men could “get liquor with more or less freedom and facility from the sutler or other wise.” In a regiment 1,040 strong, which had been in camp for only three weeks, “drunkenness was so prevalent that 25 or 30 men were sent daily to the guard-house in consequence.” In general, agents concluded that in camp “most of the liquor drunk by the volunteer” was “probably obtained from the pie-peddlers.” They discovered that “when other means fail, it is conveyed in the pies.” The sutlers were not looked upon kindly by anyone in or out of the army. The USSC accused the sutlers of corrupting the soldiers because sutlers rarely followed army regulations, which forbade them to sell “intoxicating liquors.” In addition, “proper control and supervision of the sutler” was “scarcely ever maintained in volunteer regiments.” The sutlers were known to ply regimental officers with money, wine, and other types of presents to gain permission to sell alcohol and to sell goods at exorbitant prices. Gen. Henry W. Halleck’s argument that the army could improve “discipline and morale” and remove “from the camps the prolific evils of drunkenness” by abolishing the whole sutler system was a bit simplistic, but there was much truth to it.43 Camping near towns was even more dangerous for the volunteers’ moral fortitude because “the opportunities of intoxication” increased. Soldiers let loose or, as the Milwaukee Sentinel put it, “bent on ‘going it’ while they” were “out of strict control of military discipline” caused consternation and disappointment among civilians back home. The Sentinel also reported that “brawling, disorderly” soldiers participated in “ale house riots,” and “loud brawls o’night” while they flourished their revolvers, drew dirks, and committed other “such disgraceful demonstrations” in their city. The Milwaukee police force was so overburdened that they turned to the army for help in maintaining order in the city. The residents of Springfield,

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Illinois, experienced similar destructive behavior by soldiers from nearby Camp Butler. Citizens complained that “the constant swaggering and rollicking of . . . private soldiers through our streets, would necessarily make the impression that the city of Springfield, and not Camp Butler, was a military rendezvous.” The situation climaxed in the summer of 1864, when “night after night, twelve policemen went from one saloon to another chasing mobs of soldiers who spit at them and ‘threatened to blow [the police chief] to atoms’ or [who] simply broke up in all directions and regrouped later to cause disturbances farther down the street.” Most incidents involving intoxicated soldiers ended with minor property damage and with bumps and bruises, but occasionally, and to the concern of USSC leaders, drinking binges could have lethal results.44 As the USSC special relief agent in Washington, D.C., Frederick Knapp was responsible for assisting sick, furloughed, and discharged soldiers passing through the city. Early one morning Knapp was called by the police to take charge of three returned prisoners who, “instead of going directly to their homes, had remained behind and been spending their time and money in the drinking saloons.” Well “knowing the temptations” in the city, Knapp explained that it was his special aim to see that all the “returned prisoners, as soon as paid and furloughed, immediately took passage on the cars.” But he confessed that, “among so many men and amid such confusion, some escape us.” That morning he “found these three men in a cheap lodging house; one of them was already dead, another very sick, and the third suffering with delirium.” After sending the two ill soldiers to the hospital, he had the other man’s body examined and then saw to his burial. He found on the man letters that he had received from his parents while he was in prison at Richmond. “They were full of home-like tenderness,” noted Knapp, who recognized the full irony of the situation when he reflected that the soldier “died by the worst of enemies, after he had passed unharmed through a battle and through months of imprisonment.”45 The members of the Union League Club of New York established similar relief services for “sick, disabled, discharged, or furloughed soldiers” passing through their city. One of the founders, Vincent Colyer, confirmed the need for such an institution because of the widespread and systematic corruption practiced by the keepers of the

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bawdy houses. “Thousands of soldiers” arriving daily, “many of them fresh from the front where they had not seen a female for months, and with their pockets filled by the paymaster,” facilitated “keepers of the vile dens” in “[driving] a thriving business.” The “brothel keepers had an agent, who dressing himself up in the uniform of a soldier, would mingle with the boys and distribute the cards of his den.” Colyer explained that “what the ‘Agent’ could not effect the proprietors would seek to accomplish by other means.” They would entice the battle-fatigued volunteers with melodies of the “harp, violin, accordion, and piano,” with the “savory smell of meats and vivands cooking,” and with a richly dressed and “highly perfumed young lady.” Colyer and his assistants would find many of the hapless victims in the morning on the “outside sill, . . . stupefied with liquor, their pockets turned inside out, money, papers and honor, all gone.” It was unlikely that all the city’s brothel housekeepers had such elaborate schemes with which to lure freshly furloughed volunteers, but prostitution thrived wherever there were boys in blue, creating health and moral issues for the soldier, for his family, and for the military.46 Prostitution has been a part of soldiering as long as there has been war. Women who trail the troops have traditionally been labeled camp followers. This term is ambiguous at best, however, because not all women who shadowed the armies of the past were prostitutes. In fact, in his study of camp followers, Barton C. Hacker reveals the intimate relationship that women and the military had before the nineteenth century. These women camp followers “had always been an integral part” of the military for at least four centuries, and only through “the centuries-long process of bringing military support services under direct military control” were they barred from participation in army life. “Like the soldiers in the ranks,” camp followers “tended increasingly to be drawn from the lowest strata of the social order.” As a result, these women were “reputed to have particularly loose morals” and in general had “the label of whore.” Some of the women were the wives of the soldiers, though, and sex within marriage was accepted and encouraged. The recreational sex that the men practiced with the unmarried female camp followers, on the other hand, “was more overlooked than approved.”47 But women who tagged behind armies were tolerated only as long as they earned their keep by performing domestic services for the

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soldiers. Hacker observes that “the most striking fact about women’s activities in the army is how little they differed from the ordinary run of women’s work outside it—finding, cooking, and serving food; making, washing, and mending clothes; tending the sick, the infirm, and the wounded.” Armies gradually began to define more clearly who was a wife, how many wives could accompany the men, and what duties were required of them. Over time, “as armies became more professional and bureaucratic—as they became, in fact, more exclusively military—they also became more exclusively male.” Hacker suggests that as these lower-class women began losing their army places to bureaucratization, they also may have been pulled away by more attractive opportunities in the industrializing economies. Finally, although “women of rank” began to replace lower-class women as nurses, army officials by the mid–nineteenth century thought of women’s presence as both “unnecessary and objectionable.” With the passage of the Contagious Disease Acts in England in the 1860s, camp followers were “equated with prostitutes,” and women in the military “lost what legitimacy they had left.”48 Making army life an all-male experience, however, as Reid Mitchell notes, went counter to the Victorian social dynamic. To nineteenthcentury men, “there could be no such thing as a purely masculine world.” Soldiers consequently missed the feminine influences in their lives and yearned for female companionship. They took every opportunity to fulfill these desires or their sexual desires for women and had the best hope of success when camped near a city.49 In the official Medical and Surgical History of the War, published in 1888, the U.S. surgeon general noted that the occurrence of venereal disease among the soldiers increased in “troops stationed in the vicinity of cities” and that the disease was more prevalent “with the accession of fresh levies or the return of furloughed veterans.” Although the average number of cases, reported at eighty-two per thousand men annually, was lower than the pre- and postwar numbers in the army, officials believed that venereal disease continued to be a problem because prostitution remained a booming business throughout the war. Public and military officials generally accepted prostitutes as part of soldiering and learned to ignore their men’s illicit behavior unless it became either too much of a nuisance (for instance, the soldiers’ suffering from venereal diseases) or too

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obvious. Historian Anne Butler suggests that although a clear policy to institutionalize prostitution does not exist in U.S. military law, “the ambiguous phrasing of regulations, coupled with a variety of odd episodes . . . supports a de facto policy of accommodation [of] prostitutes at military reservations.” She states that prostitution was not only expected, “but encouraged at military encampments.”50 Victorians in general, however, treated sex in a discreet manner “as the ultimate expression of love” and as an “act of self-disclosure.” Nineteenth-century men and women identified sex with the “inner life” and “perceived [it] as part of the privileged revelation of an ‘authentic’ self.” Properly sanctioned by love, sexual expressions were read as symbolic communications of one’s real and truest self, part of the hidden essence of the individual. Sex was a very private and sacred exchange, and any sexual behavior that was not honorable and respectful was deeply offensive to Victorian culture. Prostitution perverted sexuality and love, and its proliferation represented the dichotomous nature of Victorian morals.51 In his study of prostitution in New York City, Timothy J. Gilfoyle contends that the changes in the cultural and social settings of the mid-1800s contributed to the transformation of prostitution and helped to develop a new ideology for urban men. Before 1820, prostitution was a “controlled enterprise, restricted to a few blocks and physically linked to the city’s waterfront commerce.” By the 1830s, male sexual behavior became more promiscuous, and bold young men “courted prostitutes, ‘kept’ women, paid their rent, and assumed aliases to hide such activities.” Along with this brazen behavior, there emerged, argues Gilfoyle, a “sporting male culture” that was “organized around various forms of gaming—horse racing, gambling, cockfighting, pugilism, and other ‘blood’ sports.” This “sporting male culture” defended, encouraged, and promoted “male sexual aggressiveness and promiscuity.” Gilfoyle asserts that this new “male sexual fraternity” developed as a result of “the ever greater transiency of urban life” and the “changing structure of work,” which disrupted “older traditions of courtship for young men.” Frustrated by the “severe social restrictions” that “limited intimacy between” themselves and women, men began to seek “sexual activity outside of marriage and courtship rituals.” Just as these new urbanites replaced their households and families with the

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boardinghouse and peer groups as by-products of the new market economy, in their “moral economy” they replaced “apprenticeship, employer control,” and “church stricture” with the ethos of the “sporting male culture” that espoused personal autonomy unencumbered by oversight of friends or kin.52 This new sexual ideology continued to expand in the 1830s and throughout the rest of the century. The clandestine nature of the activity and the “broad context of male heterosexual behavior” tended “to promote male camaraderie.” Men, married and single, of all economic classes and social groups, embraced the ideology and began to frequent brothels in increasing numbers. “Sporting male culture, in effect, displaced older rules and traditions governing sexual behavior for young, married, and ‘respectable’ men.” Gilfoyle argues that the up-and-coming members of the middle class likewise found it more and more difficult to marry and raise a family on the economic level expected of them, so they postponed marriage. On the other end of the scale, some working-class men “felt compelled to marry (while still avoiding a family) for economic reasons.” A working-class man would marry to gain a wife’s earnings because she brought in more than it would cost to maintain her. These behaviors thus “separat[ed] physical intimacy from marriage.” Both groups of men turned to prostitutes instead of to wives for sexual intimacy and pleasure, a trend that pushed societal notions about sex even further. By midcentury, notes Gilfoyle, “journalists and doctors were convinced that sex with prostitutes was the norm for young male New Yorkers.” And by the Civil War, the “sporting life” had become an integral part of the urban culture, and prostitution in New York “was virtually ignored by Gotham’s leading law enforcement officers.”53 Obviously not all of the soldiers who fought in the war were residents of New York City or even of New York, but Gilfoyle suggests that sexual ideals were changing, and, like ripples in a pond, these new ideas moved from New York City outward and influenced men in outlying areas. During the war, the population of the North became even more mobile, and men of all sexual mores interacted. It is not difficult to believe, then, that many of the soldiers who visited the cities on furloughs encountered the ideas of the “sporting male culture.” Likewise, the “sporting male culture,” which promoted male camaraderie, would have blended nicely with the soldiers’

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new “sense of masculinity.” According to Reid Mitchell, part of the hardening experience of war included indulgence in illicit sex. The Civil War soldier sought masculine vices, such as gambling, drinking, and whoring, as an integral part of the rite of passage into manhood. Like Gilfoyle’s New Yorkers, the soldiers could luxuriate because they, too, were no longer under parental or spousal guidance. Free to act as they wished, many of them pursued the activities that to them defined manhood.54 Ben Grierson could hardly have been described as a “sporting male.” Even so, Alice was quick to scold him when she believed the numerous parties he attended would make him unfit for his duties. She conceded that “a certain amount of society, where there are ladies,” was a “decided benefit,” but only “if they are the right sort of women.” She made it clear that there was a right sort and a wrong sort of woman, and the latter would not be a benefit to men. Although men assuredly would have argued with the definition of benefit, Alice clearly referred to beneficial morals. She was concerned that Ben’s parties may have exposed him to the wrong sort of women who openly flirted and flaunted themselves in front of men. The parties Ben went to seem harmless, but the same cannot be said of the parties that other soldiers frequented. In embracing the ideals of the “sporting male culture,” even if they had never heard of it, many soldiers and officers took advantage of the sexual opportunities in towns overrun with prostitutes. While fighting in Arkansas, Thomas Larkin wrote about the abundance of prostitutes in the area. His lieutenant kept his woman on board his boat. “There is plenty of them here for those that fancy that kind[.] For my part I would rather not take any in mine.” Judson Austin maintained an unusually open line of communication with his wife in which he would report the abundance of sexual opportunities available around his camp. “Thare is lotts [sic] of pretty girls in the country,” reported Austin, “that attracts the attention of some of our Soldiers.” He never engaged in this licentious behavior but was privy to this information through his friend Nat, who told him the “girls are secesch [sic] to the backbone. I suppose he has felt of some of their bones.” Nat must have contracted a disease as a result of his frolicking because Austin noted, “you know it is not safe to be to [sic] free with these ladys unless you want to get your pay back & winters firewood in the bargain.” Henry

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Schelling’s graphic language and enthusiasm for prostitutes reflected the loosening morals among the soldiers. He advised his friend and comrade-in-arms William Hertzog about the kind of entertainment waiting for him when he arrived in Charleston. “You will have Lots of nigger fucking I hope.” Schelling believed he would have no trouble finding wanton women while he was in Tennessee because he knew of “four hore [sic] houses here where a man can get a single Tramp for 3 dollars five Dollars all night in Tennesse Monney.” Gilfoyle’s new sexual ideology can be seen in Schelling’s unrepentant and irresponsible attitude about his own behavior. Even though he wrote so plainly and slept with prostitutes, he did not want his friend to think he was a “hard case.” He assured Hertzog that he was “as pious as you can find in the army.”55 If the number of prostitutes was any indication of the popularity of such activities among soldiers, it is no wonder Schelling was so bold in his actions, his attitudes, and his words. Whether a volunteer fought in the eastern or western theater made little difference as to the availability of lewd women. Prostitutes followed the troops wherever they camped. As Bell Wiley describes it, they even occasionally made “excursions in the wake of the advancing army.”56 Most established themselves in towns near camps, such as in the northwestern cities of Milwaukee and Chicago, in occupied towns such as Memphis and Nashville, and in cities where thousands of men camped, passed through, or frequented, such as Washington, D.C. As for the prostitutes themselves, Gilfoyle notes that between 1840 and 1870 “prostitutes were usually from northeastern United States and Ireland, under twenty-three years of age and recent migrants to the metropolis.” The number one factor to induce young women to prostitute themselves was the low wage paid for female labor as a servant, tailoress, chambermaid, or milliner. He also suggests that between the 1840s and the 1870s, the progressively younger and younger women became prostitutes for a variety of reasons, but the most common was the “death of a parent, especially the father.” In New York, as would be the case during the war, black women were often prostitutes. As historian Noralee Frankel notes, black women were believed to be “highly sexed and motivated by carnal impulses.” This idea was so common that white soldiers’ wives feared their husbands would fall prey to black women in the South.

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William Willoughby’s wife, Nancy, worried that he might be enticed by the black women of Morris Island. He assured her that it would take more than a “‘smoked Irish woman’ to corrupt his morals.” Likewise, according to Frankel, until white officers got to know black women individually, they “viewed them as prostitutes.” But just like white women, black women “engaged in prostitution because they needed the money,” Frankel argues. It is also worthy to note that white officers’ views about black women were both classist and racist. Because black women followed their men to the camps (they rarely had any other option) and thus appeared dirty and unkempt, whites viewed them as morally loose, whether they were or not. Frankel makes it clear that black soldiers, on the other hand, did not “view African American women as exotic or innately licentious and did not assume that all African American women were potential prostitutes.” Regardless of the reasons why black and white women became prostitutes, cities around the country experienced increased prostitution during the war.57 In 1862, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported the proliferation of the sexual activities in the municipality. “The inmates have apparently increased and flaunt themselves at all hours upon the street,” lamented the editor, “and the revel and rout of the dissipated soldiers can be heard in all the by-streets, where these orgesses [sic] lie in wait for bounty money.” Throughout the war, citizens of these cities endured the increased numbers of troops and prostitutes, as their towns seemed to be overpopulated with both. Their presence was so overwhelming in some of these communities that the editors of the local newspapers bemoaned the fact that the painted ladies were pushing respectable women off the pavement. In many of the eastern and occupied towns, respectable women who had recently arrived to visit their soldier husbands or to serve as nurses found the local boarding houses unwilling to rent to unchaparoned women because of the mere suggestion of impropriety attached to a single woman renting a room.58 Washington, D.C., “with its population of unattached males, had always been noted for its prostitutes,” but with the onset of the war it was as if the fallen angels had also been recruited and thereafter reported to the city. Major Doster, the provost marshal assigned to Washington, kept a list of brothels and reported that in 1862 there

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were 450 “registered houses in the capital.” The following year it was estimated that there were approximately five thousand prostitutes within city limits, “while there were half as many more in Georgetown and Alexandria.” For the years 1864 and 1865, the list also included the names of twelve proprietors of “colored bawdy houses.” Boarding houses rented and managed by wealthy women sprang up all over the city. Brothels were numerous in the First and Second Wards, to the east and west of the White House and Lafayette Square. Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets had a large quota, and so had D and E Streets. As in the other cities, soldiers brazenly visited the “notorious places of infamy,” with little regard for their own physical or moral health. By 1862, they were familiar with the bordellos known as “The Ironclad, Fort Sumter Headquarters U. S. A., the Devil’s Own, the Wolf’s Den, the Haystack, the Cottage by the Sea, the Blue Goose, Madam Wilton’s Private Residence for Ladies, and Madam Russell’s Bake Oven.”59 In Nashville and Memphis, prostitutes became so numerous that the local authorities attempted to relieve the situation by literally shipping the profligate women downriver. When city officials, first at Louisville, Kentucky, and then at Cincinnati, Ohio, “refused to receive the exiles,” the ship returned to Nashville, and the provost marshal enlisted a new scheme to legalize prostitution. Based on a plan designed by the physician William Sanger, who in 1855 studied the nature of prostitution, the marshal required prostitutes to receive weekly physical examinations. A healthy woman would earn a license, and a diseased woman would be sent to a hospital for treatment. The women, in turn, were obliged to pay fifty cents a week for the license in order to defray the expenses of the hospital. According to James Boyd Jones Jr., officials warned that “public women found plying their vocation without license and certificate” would be “arrested and incarcerated.” Army officials declared the system a success. Nashville and, later, Memphis authorities were able to counter the destructive forces of disease and to control the viable sexual business.60 Although army officials seemed less concerned with the morality of the situation and more fearful of the ravages of syphilis and gonorrhea, not all of the consequences of prostitution could be rectified so easily. Soldiers’ relations with lewd women threatened to leave the recruits morally stained and physically ruined. In letters to President

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Woodrow Wilson, mothers of World War I soldiers voiced their fears and opinions about the hazards of the training camp. In one epistle, the moral sentiment of an Oregon mother could easily have been found in a letter by a mother of the Civil War generation: “we are willing to sacrifice our boys, if need be, to die to make men free, but we rebel and protest against their being returned to us ruined in body and ideals.” In the nineteenth century, from the pages of the Christian Recorder, William Johnson of the Third USCT similarly asked his comrades to consider what their behavior cost their mothers. He assured them that a mother “would regard with maternal pride the crippled limb, the scarred face, the halting step of a child, who had fought manfully and unshrinkingly,” but “the danger that awaits the soul of her boy” was the vision that would appall her. Female relatives—mothers and wives, in particular—had a vested personal interest in the virtuous welfare of their “boys.” As the moral source of the family, the female of the household was responsible for the ethical habits of all its members. She believed that her power and empire was “Home.” She was called on and expected to add “spirituality to its happiness, dignity to its dominion, and power to its influence,” as Mrs. A. J. Graves, a nineteenth-century moralist, put it. By doing so, home would become “the best security for individual integrity, and the surest safeguard for national virtue.”61 Civilian leaders agreed that the home should safeguard the integrity of the soldiers, so, with this in mind, they awakened the public to the soldiers’ degeneration. Rev. Patton witnessed the presence of “vice of every kind” in the camps that he visited, and it was his opinion that these base habits “sap[ped] the health and condition of the army” and retarded military efficiency. Other community leaders such as Bellows, Emerson, and Smith believed they knew the likely outcome if something was not done to prevent depravity. Bellows, for his part, pressed for the establishment of a national system and policy to ensure that hundreds of thousands of discharged men would not fall victim to “destructive notions” of humanity or “temptations of a sentimental kind” that would undermine their selfrespect or their ability to support themselves. In other words, he encouraged soldiers to look to their families for assistance and simultaneously directed civilians to care for their volunteers. Likewise, Emerson and Smith believed that the very “future [of the country]

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depended on the spiritual condition of the returning troops,” and whether they came back “a blessing or a curse” was the civilians’ duty and responsibility. “We owe [the soldier] a debt of gratitude,” they argued, “which many lightly appreciate, but which we can never pay.” The soldiers’ claims were “the duty of the present hour,” they exhorted. Although great spiritual work had been done in the camps, they cautioned their audience not to become too certain of the men’s steadfastness. “Wickedness abounds,” warned Smith and Emerson: “In multitudes still, officers and men are becoming more hardened and reckless.” Rev. John Ware, representing the American Unitarian Association, also voiced domestic concerns in a pamphlet addressed to the soldiers. “We will not conceal from you that there are many among us who are apprehensive of the effect of camp-life upon your moral character and your after usefulness. Some very foolishly think that you will come back only to curse us, while there are others of us who believe that you may come back better men than you went away.” He assured them that “we want to welcome you back, not only with the laurel of victory about your banners, but with the halo of honor around your brows.” He believed that the soldiers could hope to return with such honor only as long as the women in their lives fulfilled their moral duties.62 Imbued with a deep sense of morality, Alice Grierson exerted her influence to safeguard her husband’s soul. In March 1863, she dreamed about Ben becoming hardened from army life. In the retelling of her dream in a letter, she reveals the emotional strain women experienced while their husbands and sons were in the war and the moral responsibilities they felt toward the men in their lives. “I dream about you very often,” Alice confessed, “and two or three nights ago [I thought your mother] was talking with me about you & . . . saying you were growing coarse in the army.” “I tried,” she explained to Ben, “to excuse you with tears in my eyes, telling her of the many temptations to which you were exposed.” To help him, in the dream she decided to marry him, “believing that I would have more influence for good” as his wife and moral guide. She dreamed “that Mary [Ben’s mother] had seen you drunk,” though she went on to write, “Now darling I have no special fears for you on that score, but I cant [sic] help wishing that you would give your influence more strongly against the use of all sorts of liquor.” She reasoned that his

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position was high and his “influences great, & you well know how almost universal the habit of drinking is & its terrible evils.” Willing to risk his anger, she continued with her moralizing: “and don’t feel annoyed or vexed if I tell you, that I don’t like at all to think of your going to the theater.” Fearful she may have stepped beyond her sphere, she assuaged his masculine pride by adding, “I do not mean this in any spirit of wickedness or faultfinding but I wish you would think seriously of it.”63 Within this missive, Alice shares her apprehensions about the corrupting influences of camp on Ben, which threaten both his name and his family honor, but, perhaps more important, she characterizes her role as moral arbiter. Alice saw Ben’s actions as a reflection of her own morality and as a statement about her competency as the source of virtue in the family. Nineteenth-century culture, in general, assumed women were given a “more delicate moral sensibility” that placed them at the family’s moral center. They were its conscience, its guide, its source of purity and goodness. From the home—which, according to moralist Mrs. Graves, was “the cradle of the human race”—the female was supposed to fashion her family members’ moral character for good and to teach them the “lessons of virtue and of wisdom.”64 Likewise, Alice imagined that her own moral fortitude could save him. In her dream, she married Ben, believing she would “have more influence for good” on him. This dream is representative of the idea of woman as the moral “regenerator” of society. Graves suggested that women, as “keepers at home,” would “influence by their presence, example, and instruction” and thereby “promote the welfare of their families.”65 Through their purifying influences of enduring love, they would “counteract the evil influences of the world.” With Alice’s marriage to Ben, her purity and nobleness would surely counter the wicked forces of camp. Moreover, although Ben’s wayward behavior hurt Alice, she was more concerned about the repercussions his actions would have on their children. As Robert and Charlie’s mother, she was responsible for their moral character as well. It was the mother’s sacred duty to socialize and train her children to be moral citizens. A woman should become cultivated and learned, not for her own edification, but to be able to instill into her children’s “minds the lofty and generous

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principles of equal rights, and a profound regard for just laws and rightful authority,” as Mrs. Graves put it. More important for these women, who were steeped in religious rhetoric, was “their deep sense of responsibility for the spiritual life of ” their sons. A mother was supposed to nurture the love of God in her children, form their moral temper, and act as their spiritual guide. Mothers also feared more for their sons’ moral future than for their daughters’ because more temptations awaited men in the public sphere. Likewise, fathers had a more direct responsibility for raising their sons by offering an example of pious manhood. Ben’s undisciplined behavior threatened not only to undo Alice’s work, but ultimately to jeopardize their sons’ character. They “are old enough to observe our habits & ways of amusements,” she assured Ben, “& very naturally want to imitate.” As moral arbiter of her family, Alice could ill afford these consequences.66 Alice and Ben’s wartime dialogue represents the domestic and moral dilemma of many Civil War couples: that of re-creating a familial support system without the benefit of being in each other’s company. The realization that men could not return home for moral refreshment and the understanding that military life was more heavily fraught with corruption than civilian life distressed men and women alike. The paucity of feminine influences in the army presented a problem for soldiers such as Ben, who wanted his “service to be a sign of [his] good moral conduct.” Without women, men lacked the capacity to live up to their own standards or to recognize virtue. The crux of the problem came when men realized that to be “true men” they must fight for the Union, but the depraved nature of army life threatened to destroy their morality. Without moral sustenance, how would they maintain the very morals they needed to wage the righteous war they professed they were fighting? Women, in turn, realized that their duty to the Union lay in their sacrifice of their sons, husbands, and brothers and in their ability to continue the moral regeneration of the soldiers. But their opportunities to influence their men morally were limited.67 Few women visited the soldiers, and fewer still did so on a regular basis because both men and women believed that the camps and hospitals were not the proper places for women. Would the “gentler sex” not fall victim to the very depravations she went to protect the soldiers from? From the outset of the war, male and female civilians

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spoke out against women going to the camps and hospitals because military camps had a reputation for corrupting men. The fairer sex would be exposed to nauseating smells, festering wounds, and the unnerving groans of the sick and wounded. They would be in allmale preserves without the sheltering protection of home or male relatives. Indeed, how could women maintain their propriety in such degrading environments and in the company of single men? Rev. John Ware surmised that the result would be similar to the corruption of the women who had recently journeyed to the gold mine camps in California. Gold fever hit California in 1849, and fortune seekers from all over the world descended on the territory. Most of the newcomers were men. Only 5 percent of early California gold rushers were women and children. Most of the men were young and had never been out of contact with women (much like the Civil War volunteers). The mining camps became havens for gambling, saloons, violence, lawlessness, and prostitution. Although a few respectable women resided in these camps, at first the majority of women residents were prostitutes. Thus, social critics wondered, Would women mold the mining frontier or be molded by it? This was Ware’s concern when he explained that, “woman can have no place in the [military] camp.” The only women about camps were degraded and ruined. They had lost all purifying power and consequently could enliven the men only through the “demon of lust.” The proper role for mothers, wives, and sisters was as inspirational spirits. When the “dark temptation” came, Ware advised soldiers to seek a “still voice from home” with which to save their souls.68 In order to execute their virtuous war duties, women had to devise new ways in which to inject an influence that would be felt in the camps in spite of their absence. Their solutions came in numerous forms, but all had shades of domesticity. The women acted confident in the knowledge that they were fulfilling a patriotic duty for their country and certain that without their support, their men would return morally ruined. Alice’s dream symbolized the nightmare that embroiled the country as a whole. Loose habits, disease, battlefield injuries, and the hardening experience of killing were ravaging the nation’s young men. Alice’s subconscious fears paralleled the concerns of the nation’s leaders. It was their duty to awaken the public to the possible aftermath

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of the war, but it was Alice’s responsibility to guide and guard her husband against spiritual and physical corruption. Her solution, “doing him good” by marrying him and becoming a purifying influence for him, represented the foundation on which Northern wives and mothers built their war work to help both the country’s cause and their personal causes of familial survival. NOTES 1. Alice Grierson to Benjamin H. Grierson, May 16, 1861, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield, emphasis in original. Grierson enlisted in the army as a private in 1861, was commissioned major in the Sixth Illinois Cavalry on October 24, 1861, and was promoted to colonel on April 12, 1862. He was assigned command of First Brigade and was promoted to major general of volunteers in 1863. After the war, he remained in the army and was eventually appointed brigadier general of the regular army. He retired in 1890. 2. Ibid., May 19, 1861, emphasis in original. 3. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 4. Steven Mintz explains that popular nineteenthcentury writers were “pre-occupied” with the theme of influence because they lived in a period when “questions of power, authority, and legitimacy seemed increasingly problematic.” During this time, educators were growing repulsed by coercive methods of teaching and believed “invisible” forms of inculcation, such as maternal influence, were much more effective. See Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1983), 31–32. 4. Alice to Ben, May 19, 1861, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 5. James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 455–60, 461–72; Herman Hattaway, Shades of Blue and Gray: An Introductory Military History of the Civil War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 81–90; United States Sanitary Commission, Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 2 vols. (New York: USSC, 1886) (hereafter, “USSC Doc.”), USSC Doc. 49, “Provision for Disabled Soldiers—Letter to S. G. Perkins,” October 13, 1862, 1. Bellows asked for Perkins’s help because he was “acquainted” with Perkins’s “familiarity with subjects of this nature” and believed he “had a fitness of mind to contemplate and digest them into form.” Patrick J. Kelly notes that a “broad public interest and concern” with the care of wounded soldiers began in the

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spring of 1862 as a result of the seven-month period of battles that left tens of thousands of Union troops dead and wounded. This concern was further manifested in the General Pension Law passed by Congress on July 14, 1862, which “established uniform pension rates for veterans disabled” from causes directly traced to injuries received in battle. See Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans’ Welfare State, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 18. 6. USSC Doc. 49, 1–2. 7. Ibid., 2–3. 8. Ibid., 3–4. Bellows realized, however, that there would be men for whom “home protection or local sympathy and co-operation” would “not adequately care” and who would need the full assistance of the state. He made it clear, however, that such help would be the last channel of support to which the veterans should turn. He hoped that by designing the national “homes” for the soldiers “in such a way as to maintain the military spirit and the national pride” of the men, and by nursing “the memories of the war” so as “to keep in the eye of the Nation the price of its liberties,” the returning “regiments might be a conservative rather than a disorganizing influence” in society. The “national” institutions Bellows envisioned would “honor both military and civil life,” but also provide an “industrial” environment in which the veterans would be offered “a variety of labor” to “discourage listlessness and monotony, and prevent the feeling of utter dependence.” 9. Ibid., 1. 10. Emerson and Smith quoted in Rev. Lemuel Moss, Annals of the United States Christian Commission (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1868), 200–201; Christian Recorder, November 26, 1864. Catholic priests also hoped that “soldiers saved from sinful ways” during war “might reinvigorate the church in peace.” See Randall M. Miller, “Catholic Religion, Irish Ethnicity, and the Civil War,” in Religion in the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stouth, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 264. 11. Moss, Annals of the USCC, 204; USSC Doc. 49, 2–3. Kelly notes that although Bellows was concerned about the plight of the soldier and about the effects that disabled veterans might have on society, he was distracted by organizing a national philanthropic response. Kelly calls this choice “tough-minded humanitarianism.” Bellows wasted precious time trying to coordinate the help, but in the end the men of the USSC and other national organizations did little. In the meantime, women responded individually, as evidenced by Alice Grierson, and corporately within their soldiers’ aid societies. It was because of the work of women that a national system of homes was ever established. Once women began these independent

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refuges, however, men wrestled control from them and established a nationwide arrangement. See Kelly, Creating a National Home, 22–24, 31. 12. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 109, 113; Allan Stanley Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes: The Social Control of Young Men in New York (Cranbury, N.J.: Bucknell University Press, 1975), 12. 13. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 12–13; Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 59. 14. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 20–23. Reid Mitchell argues that military service proved to be a maturation process for the majority of Civil War soldiers. Most soldiers left their parents’ households to join the army and “came of age” while they were in the army. They therefore experienced the same kinds of freedom from authority that the young men of the 1820s and 1830s did. See Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 4–5. 15. USSC Doc. 49, 1. 16. Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 154. 17. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 7–11; E. Anthony Rotundo, “Manhood in America: The Northern Middle Class, 1770–1920” (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1982), 18–24. 18. USSC Doc. 38, “Report on the Condition of Camps and Hospitals at Cairo and Vicinity, Paducah, and St. Louis,” October 1861; “Account of My Chattanooga Sanitary Tour,” April 10, 1864, Rev. William W. Patton Papers, Chicago Historical Society. 19. Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1888), 123–24. 20. Constant C. Hanks to “Mother,” December 14, 1861, and Constant C. Hanks to “Mary Rose,” February 12, 1862, emphasis in original, Constant C. Hanks Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. Charles Musser joined the army in December 1862. By January of the following year, he was reporting from Arkansas that not one man out of the “whole regiment [of] four hundred men [was] fit for duty . . . [because] the measles got among them.” At least half of these men eventually died or were discharged for disability before they were able to fire a shot. See Barry Popchock, ed., Soldier Boy: The Civil War Letters of Charles O. Musser, 29th Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 18–20.

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21. According to Bell Irvin Wiley, “fatigue duty consisted of policing the company grounds and tidying up the quarters digging drainage ditches, cutting wood and similar activities.” See The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 46. 22. James McPherson, Ordeal By Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: McGraw Hill, 1982), 379–80; James Beecher quoted in Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112, 126. Berlin notes that African Americans also suffered more deaths by disease because they were assigned to duty in unhealthy settings under the mistaken belief that men of African descent could withstand tropical climates better than white men. 23. USSC Doc. 4, “Letter to the Public,” June 21, 1861; USSC Doc. 16, “Appeal of the Executive Finance Committee in the City of New York,” July 13, 1861; USSC Doc. 17, “Report of a Preliminary Survey of the Camps of a Portion of the Volunteer Forces Near Washington,” July 9, 1861; USSC Doc. 26, “Report of a Preliminary Survey of U.S. Forces in Ohio and Mississippi Valleys,” June 28, 1861; USSC Doc. 41, “Two Reports on the Condition of Military Hospitals at Grafton, VA, and Cumberland, MD,” March 10, 1862, emphasis in original. 24. David Stetham to “Dear Sister,” December 1, 1861, and August 11, 1862, emphasis in original, David Stetham Papers, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; Thompson quoted in Walter Hart Blumenthal, Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution (New York: Arno Press, 1974), 61–62. 25. John Ordonaux, Hints on Health in Armies (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1863), 97–98. The Woolsey family of New York made the care of the soldiers a family affair. From their family of eight, three women volunteered as nurses, two women and the mother worked at the sanitary rooms and visited hospitals, and the only son volunteered as a soldier. With so much interest in the Union cause, it is not any wonder that Abby, the oldest daughter, suggested to her nursing sisters Georgeanna and Eliza that they give copies of Ordonaux’s book, which she had sent to them, to the company captains in their vicinity. She explained that the book contained “useful advice” to help each captain “to be a father of his company, and [to] look after its welfare in every respect.” See Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon and Eliza Woolsey Howland, Letters of a Family During the War for the Union, 1861–1865 (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1899), 159. 26. USSC Doc. 15, “Letter of the President to the Executive Committee in New York”; USSC Doc. 21, “A Record of Certain Resolutions of the Sanitary Commission,” July 12, 1861; Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete

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Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 138. 27. Order of Exercises of the New England Branch American Tract Society (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 4; The Soldier’s Pocket Book (Philadelphia: American Tract Society, 1861), 9. 28. Hagadorn quoted in Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, 247; F. Calkins to “Dear Friend,” September 10, 1863, Special Collections, Virginia Polytechnic Library, Blacksburg. 29. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 210; Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865, 3rd ed. (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1990), 22. In general, black soldiers’ morality was of great concern to the Northern black community. Black newspapers regularly printed unofficial reports from black civilians and chaplains attached to black regiments. For instance, Chaplain Mars reported to The AngloAfrican (August 15, 1863) that of the fifteen hundred men he “mingled” with on a daily basis, he had not seen one man under the influence of alcohol or heard many men use profanity. 30. The Soldier’s Pocket Book, 1; Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, 248; “Henry” to “Sister,” February 3, 1864, Benjamin Johnson Papers, Nina Ness Collection of Civil War Manuscripts, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Christian Recorder, October 24, 1863; David Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 282. 31. Sarah R. Blunt to Parents, April 6, 1863, emphasis in original, Sarah R. Blunt Letters, 1863–65, New York Historical Society, New York; Theophilus Parsons, Memoir of Emily Elizabeth Parsons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1880), 41; Elizabeth Wheeler sketch in Mary A. G. Holland, Our Army Nurses: Interesting Sketches, Addresses, and Photographs of Nearly One Hundred of the Women Who Served in Hospitals and on Battlefields During Our Civil War (Boston: B. Wilkins, 1895), 318. 32. Ben to Alice, January 26, 1862, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers; David Stetham to “Sister,” April 20, 1862, emphasis in original, David Stetham Papers; Branson quoted in www.bufalosoldier. net/62nd65thRegimentsU.S.ColoredInfantry.htm; Graves Family Correspondence, December 25, 1862, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Jane Chambers McKinney Papers, February 11, 1863, Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis; USSC Doc. 40, “Report of the General Secretary to the Secretary of War of the Operations of the Sanitary Commission,” December 9, 1861, 30. The Christian Recorder (November 14, 1863) reported that the soldiers began

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the habit of playing cards because of lack of “something better to occupy their time.” The habit became deadly when soldiers could not stop playing, even on the field of battle. At the Battle of Chickamauga, a USCC agent witnessed soldiers playing cards until ordered to form a line. When the smoke cleared, only two of the card-playing soldiers were alive. They pledged never to play cards again. The message seemed clear. Card playing wastes the player’s precious time—time that could have been better spent in spiritual learning. 33. Morris Fitch to “Mother,” November 17, 1863, Morris Fitch Papers, Nina Ness Collection of Civil War Manuscripts, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Judson Austin to Sarah Austin, December 25, 1863, and February 3, 1864, Judson L. Austin Papers, Nina Ness Collection of Civil War Manuscripts. 34. Ben to Alice, December 23, Alice to Ben, December 30, 1861, and Ben to Alice, January 24, 1862, emphasis in original, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 35. Alice to Ben, June 8, 1862, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 36. David Stetham to “Sister,” December 1, 1861, and March 30, 1862, David Stetham Papers; Christian G. Samito, ed., Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 87; Rufus P. Stanick, January 5, 1863, Virginia Polytechnic Library, Special Collections, Blacksburg; Milton Bailey, August 4, 1863, Milton Bailey Papers, United States Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. 37. Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal, 62–63. 38. Edward M. Coffman, The Old Army: A Portrait of an Army in Peacetime, 1784–1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 191; Ben to Alice, February 20, 1862, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 39. Mrs. K. P. Harvey to Gov. Edward Salomon, January 20, 1863, Mrs. K. P. Harvey Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; William H. Noble Papers, Diary, March 23, 1864, April 7, 1864, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 40. Milwaukee Sentinel, May 27, 1861; Emilie Quiner Diary, May 7, 1861, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; Armory Square Hospital Gazette (Washington, D.C.), December 10, 1864; Weston Flint to Mary Fisher, August 2, 1863, William Righter and Mary Wager Fisher Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; William White to Parents, November 20, 1861, William White Letter, Virginia Polytechnic Library, Blacksburg; “Temperance in the Army,” United States Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 34 (March 15, 1865), 1072.

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41. Smith’s story told in James M. Paradis, Strike the Blow for Freedom: The 6th United States Colored Infantry in the Civil War (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1998), 36; Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal, 75. African American antebellum benevolence and aid societies grew out of their churches. They believed it their Christian duty to better themselves and society. During the war, supporting soldiers who promoted the cause of freedom and equality for their race became an easy transition for these societies. See Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 42. Sutlers were merchants who had contracts with the U.S. government and were allowed to follow the Union army and sell provisions to the soldiers. Sutlers and soldiers had a love-hate relationship. Soldiers believed (with good reason) that sutlers sold their products at artificially high prices because they could, considering that the soldiers had no other way of buying these goods and food while camped away from towns. Sutlers, in contrast, believed that the soldiers would take any opportunity to rob them. 43. USSC Doc. 40, December 9, 1861, 24; USSC Doc. 26, June 28, 1861, 11; USSC Doc. 17, July 9, 1861, 19; Francis A. Lord, Civil War Sutlers and Their Wares (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 39, 57, 28; USSC Doc. 40, 24–25. 44. Milwaukee Sentinel, March 3, 1864; Illinois State Register, December 19, 1861, quoted in Camilla A. Quinn, “Soldiers on Our Streets: The Effects of the Civil War Military Camp on the Springfield Community,” Illinois Historical Journal 86 (winter 1993), 252–54. 45. USSC Doc. 26, 11; Milwaukee Sentinel, March 3, 1864; USSC Doc. 39, 15. 46. Vincent Colyer, Report of Vincent Colyer on the Reception and Care of the Soldiers Returning from the War (New York: G. A. Whitehorne, 1865), 10. 47. Barton C. Hacker, “Women and Military Institutions in Early Modern Europe: A Reconnaissance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6 (summer 1981), 645, 651. 48. Ibid., 653, 666, 670. 49. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 72. 50. Charles Smart, ed., United States Surgeon General’s Office: The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1888), 891; Anne M. Butler, “Military Myopia: Prostitution on the Frontier,” Prologue 13 (winter 1981), 234. 51. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 59.

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52. Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 26, 98–99, 112. 53. Ibid., 102, 104, and 107. 54. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 113, 114; Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 6–7. 55. Alice to Ben, December 30, 1861, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers; Thomas Larkin to Matilda Larkin, January 14, 1864, Thomas and Matilda Ann Larkin Papers, University of Kansas, Lawrence; Judson Austin to Sarah Austin, August 24, 1863, December 25, 1863, Judson Austin Papers, Nina Ness Collection of Civil War Manuscripts; Henry Schelling to William Hertzog, undated, William Hertzog Papers, Chicago Historical Society. 56. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, 258. 57. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, 61–62, 66, 42; Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 39, 40; W. A. Willoughby to his wife, Nancy, July 21, 1863, and January 7, 1864, William Noble Papers, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 58. Milwaukee Sentinel, August 22, 1862; Margaret Leech, Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941), 265. Bell Robison worked as a nurse at the Indiana Hospital in Washington, D.C., and considered returning home because she could not afford to rent a room. “If I cannot find a house to go to housekeeping,” she told her family, “I shall be obliged to leave. I cannot afford to board at thirty-five dollars a month and I cannot find a room for a lady.” She explained that “the city has been so full of questionable characters that no one will think of renting a room to a woman alone.” Bell Robison to “Brother,” May 31, 1863, Pardee-Robison Papers, United States Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. 59. Quotes from Leech, Reveille in Washington, 261–65; demographics from Thomas P. Lowry, The Story the Soldiers Wouldn’t Tell: Sex in the Civil War (Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1994), 72–75. 60. James Boyd Jones Jr., “A Tale of Two Cities: The Hidden Battle Against Venereal Disease in Civil War Nashville and Memphis,” Civil War History 31 (1985); Smart, ed., United States Surgeon General’s Office, 893–94. 61. Nancy K. Bristow, Making Men Moral: Social Engineering During the Great War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 1–2; Christian Recorder, April 15, 1865 (Johnson wrote the letter February 28, 1865, but it was not published until April); Mrs. A. J. Graves, Woman in America; Being an Examination into the Moral and Intellectual Condition of American Female Society (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1843), emphasis in original.

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62. William Weston Patton, “Mississippi Sanitary Expedition Discourse,” April 8, 1863, William W. Patton Papers; Bellows from USSC Doc. 49, 4; Emerson and Smith from Moss, Annals of the USSC, 202; J. F. W. Ware, Home to the Camp: Addressed to the Soldiers of the Union (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1861), 11. 63. Alice to Ben, March 6, 1863, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 64. Graves, Woman in America, 156. 65. Ibid., 147, 156. 66. Ibid., 68; Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830–1860 (New York: Institute for Research in History, with Haworth Press, 1982), 56–58; Rotundo, “Manhood in America,” 162–63; Alice to Ben, March 6, 1863, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 67. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 72–75; Alice to Ben, March 6, 1863, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 68. Elizabeth D. Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 12–15; Jeffrey, Frontier Women, 133, 134, 136, 137; Ware, Home to the Camp, 12.

3 “In a Most Tangible Form” Northern Women Respond to the Nurturing Needs of the Civil War Soldier ON A COLD FEBRUARY EVENING in Salem, Ohio, Sallie and a few of her friends “gathered together” to make “comforts to send” to the hospitals in hopes “that when the fierce cannon had inflicted a wound and perhaps maimed” a soldier, “or when disease and sickness ha[d] seized” him and brought him to the hospital sick bed, their “comforts would tend to alleviate [his] sufferings and cause” him to know that he was “not forgotten nor forsaken by the ladies of the north.” Sallie admitted that, as women, they had not the “power to hasten the day of peace” through use of arms. But she declared that Northern women “willing[ly] . . . cast in [their] mite to ameliorate the distress and encourage the brave boys to do their duty,” and so through their war work they, too, would help to “hasten the day when Freedom [would] be proclaimed with joy in [a] grand shout throughout the nation.” As Sallie penned this missive to the anonymous soldier who would receive her comforts, she made “no apologies for forming these lines.” On the contrary, she was under the “conviction that the sick and wounded soldiers were glad to get letters from their friends at home”; and, she noted, “we are all your friends, even though unacquainted.”1 Sallie’s letter to her anonymous soldier represents the kind of sexrole compromises that women made during the war to accomplish their patriotic goals. Although Sallie and her friends plied their domestic skills to produce a box of supplies for the volunteers and thus worked within their feminine sphere of influence, the letter was bold in terms of social etiquette. Not only did the women correspond

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with a gentleman with whom they were unacquainted, but they also enlarged their list of recipients to include all the Northern family of patriots. By doing so, the ladies extended their domestic domain and influence beyond their communities. Likewise, Sallie and many of her Northern sisters stretched the gender boundaries by politicizing their efforts. Thousands of women volunteered for their local soldiers’ aid societies to cut cloth, sew shirts, pickle onions, cook preserves, and collect manufactured goods, all in the cause of freedom. Believing they were “volunteers” for the Union, they worked to preserve the legacy of their forefathers by perpetuating the republic through the preservation of men’s personal and civic morals.2 Many women, however, understood that volunteering was not a simple matter of employing their usual methods of caring for the physical and spiritual needs of the men in their lives. The distance and the separation from their loved ones for months and years at a time challenged them to seek other means of aid. As the author of A Few Words in Behalf of the Loyal Women of the United States accurately described, patriotic ladies tried to “find new channels of help, new inspiration for good, new modes of evincing our love of country.” Women devised new modes by combining their household skills with the moral power they derived from the domestic sphere and described their work in terms of political purpose. Northern ladies ultimately utilized three primary techniques to re-create the moral restraint and influences that the mingling of the sexes produced in the family circle. The first and most common method was to forward food and medical supplies to the camps and hospitals. The homemade food, shirts, hospital gowns, and slippers women sent embodied the ideals of family life and became tangible links to the soldiers’ loved ones back home. The clean clothes and delicacies civilized the soldiers by allowing them to maintain their appearances and satisfy their hunger. The second method was to send intimate articles such as favorite foods, photos of loved ones, or a lock of hair, which reified a wife’s love for her husband and evoked a deeper level of connectedness between home and the camp. These personal items countered the soldiers’ feelings of anonymity that developed from being plunged into the cold world of military bureaucracy and reminded them that the home they defended remained the ideal home they had left. As a third method, the women maintained a correspondence with the

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men, so the emotional and psychological link between the home and the camp was strengthened. Letters represented the personal presence of loved ones and provided a consistent glimpse into domestic life and values. Within their letters, women encouraged and sustained the troops with talk of home and stimulated the soldiers’ consciences to remember their mothers’ warning voice. By concurrently working within and expanding their spheres, they continued their feminine duties to their husbands, sons, and fathers and fulfilled their civic responsibilities to their country.3 The separate sphere ideology that women utilized was grounded in the prescriptive rhetoric of antebellum society, articulated by moralists such as Rev. George Burnap, who wrote advice literature that defined the social geography of the sexes. In 1841, Burnap, of the First Independent Church of Baltimore, published a collection entitled Lectures on the Sphere and Duties of Woman, which outlined the basis of women’s moral authority and their civic and domestic responsibilities. He reasoned first that God had created men and women with differing physical, intellectual, and moral constitutions, thereby ordaining two separate yet interdependent spheres of influence. Males and females performed their unique duties and actions in these separate arenas, but through divine design each sex also required the other to form the “beautiful whole” of human existence. The physical, moral, and emotional distinctiveness of the sexes, however, also furnished for moralists such as Burnap a perfect framework from which to derive gender roles based on a separate sphere ideology. Within this doctrine, the two halves complemented each other in their shared familial responsibilities, but their contrasting traits also fashioned them for different social obligations.4 Men’s more robust physique was intended for an active, public life, whereas the delicate features possessed by women suited them for a sheltered, domestic existence. Equipped with physical hardiness, men could endure the “dangers of the chase, the toils of the field, [and] the perils of the ocean,” according to Burnap. In nineteenth-century America, this trait translated into the men’s role as the economic providers and protectors of their households. Women’s weaker frames, on the other hand, demanded a guardian, made them dependent on men, and defined a supportive role for them. As men’s helpmate, they cared for their homes and their families as cooks,

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seamstresses, nurses, and educators. Women’s domestic labors dovetailed with men’s public duties, creating a workable ideology based on symmetry and harmony between the sexes.5 In addition to complementary physiques, God had endowed, according to Burnap, each sex with distinct emotional, intellectual, and moral characteristics, which reinforced the ideal of separate spheres. Men’s “wisdom, constancy, firmness and perseverance” contrasted with women’s “larger measure” of “sensibility, tenderness, . . . patience,” and greater capacity for love. Whereas men’s attributes enabled them to “buffet [their] way through [the] rude world,” women’s physical and intellectual traits forced them to rely on others. In spite of women’s limitations, Burnap assured his readers that in God’s grand scheme of mutuality between the sexes, the Almighty blessed women with a sturdier moral nature. Women’s mission of “humanity, gentleness, tenderness, generosity and love” was “foreshown” at their birth, and by their mere presence they could elicit these qualities in others. The sheltered environment of the domestic circle shielded females’ innate virtues from the degrading forces of the public world throughout their youth. The hearth, which represented all that was pure and good in the world, imbued them in adulthood with moral authority. From the protected fortress of the household, women reigned as mistress of the home, where they became “the solace, the aid, and the counsellor” for their families. As wives and mothers, they wielded immense power by utilizing their “delicate moral sensibility” to “purify and refine society.” With women ensconced in the home, their moral influences could be spread to the greater community through their husbands, brothers, and sons, who had listened at the domestic pulpit to their sermon of maternal counsel.6 Burnap explained that men’s active lifestyles necessitated such feminine guidance. Although men were physically and intellectually strong, their work in the public domain exposed them to the “conflicts of the world.” To help them “recover [their] equanimity and composure,” home had to represent “a place of repose, of peace, of cheerfulness, of comfort,” where they could renew their souls and again go “forth with fresh vigor to encounter the labors and troubles of the world.” Women, by training those dearest to them in “intelligence, virtue, and love,” not only established in their domestic circles

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“the nearest glimpse of heaven that mortals ever get on earth,” but also morally regenerated society.7 Like his contemporaries, Burnap used the uniqueness of the sexes to explain the development of their own spheres of influence. He assigned neither men nor women to a superior role in the divine plan, but instead he recognized the significance of each sex to the smooth operation of the system and suggested that in God’s blueprint the “opposition and corresponding tastes” of each sex complemented the other to form a congruent whole. This arrangement thus made the sexes “indispensable to each other’s happiness in every way.” Likewise, Burnap suggested that their mutual society not only ministered to their contentment, but also to their moral improvement. It seemed obvious to him that each sex had an instinctive reverence for the other, which he described as a “sort of human religion.” This reverence acted as a moral restraint when one was in the presence of the opposite sex. As a result, men and women were “perpetually exerting upon each other” an “immense moral influence.” Burnap posited, “No man ever felt in the presence of a man the same awe and restraint that he feels in the presence of a woman; and no woman is ever so much put on her good behavior before one of their own sex as she is in the presence of a man.” Indeed, he warned that God’s social order called for a mixing of the sexes; he predicted that without this free association between males and females, a “deterioration and corruption” would befall civilization.8 In the public sphere, however, the sexes rarely mixed. Women were not restricted from leaving their homes, according to historian John Kasson, but when they ventured beyond the protective hearth, they were conscious of their behavior and wary of their surroundings. Moreover, the saloons and theaters were distinctive male enclaves where proper women would not enter for fear of losing their respectability. Men compensated for the absence of the salutary effects of feminine society in their public activities by mingling with the fairer sex in their private lives. Men returned home every evening, as Burnap depicted, to sustain a “tranquil mind, and a whole heart.” By administering to men’s moral needs, women in return felt the virtuous effects of doing good. The two benefited from each other’s society and depended on that society to aid them in maintaining their own virtue.9

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The social interaction between the sexes, however, denoted more than simply a moralizing agent for men and women. Although this moral agency in itself was important, in the bigger picture the reciprocal arrangement also purified the greater community and provided the social framework for nineteenth-century Americans. Thus, the world of separate spheres, according to Burnap, defined gender roles, provided a field of influence for each sex, and, most important, thrived because of a continuous physical and verbal dialogue between the sexes. Nineteenth-century men did not experience life without women, and anything approaching a real separation would have seemed unnatural or uncivilized. It should also be noted, however, that men and women did not rigidly adhere to gender boundaries. A number of historians have argued that the separate sphere ideology provided guidelines only and that men and women “blurred” the lines between the two worlds and, as Karen Lystra explains, “accepted the violation of sex-role boundaries with the help of protective rhetoric.” As suggested earlier, during the war women extended their sphere in order to preserve their power and the gender balance.10 Interestingly, an African American man under the nom de plume “Hernois” made a similar argument (with less moralizing) to the readers of the Christian Recorder. “There is no place like a happy home,” began Hernois. The home is made happy by a loving wife and children who cheerfully greet the father when he returns from a hard day’s work. This loving reception “at once cheers his spirits, and makes him feel in a good humor, and enables him to go to, and do his work cheerfully the next day.” An unhappy home comes from a disorderly house, a wife in a bad humor, and disobedient children. The father feels “low-spirited,” which makes him unfit for his daily duties. Hernois lamented, “How often is this the case with the people of our color!” It, he argued, “is one of the reasons why we cannot be united together as a nation.” He suggested, “if there was more affection and happiness at home, there would be more unity among us as a people and a nation.” He continued, “Home is the centre of happiness, and the hope of the nation is in our children.” Although Hernois did not strike the same kind of balance in sex roles as Burnap, the same message was still there. Among African Americans, the women were responsible for the home and the children, and the men were the

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breadwinners. The men relied on the women to keep them in “good humor” so that they could do their jobs properly. Hernois believed that without this balanced relationship, African Americans would forever languish and so would the nation. He and Burnap agreed that balanced families produced a successful society.11 Because the separate spheres ideology acted as the cornerstone of social interaction, anything that upset the equation threatened the stability of society and its very base of morality.12 Understandably, the all-male environment of the military camps at the outset of the Civil War thus alarmed civilians. As early as 1861, Rev. John Ware recognized the potential danger inherent in such a social composition, when he addressed Northern soldiers in a pamphlet entitled Home to the Camp. “Communities from which woman is excluded,” he cautioned, “are exposed to special moral depravity” because they lack the controlling influences of woman; “where she is absent, man soon loses ground as a moral being.” In a letter to a cousin, a Michigan woman similarly identified the problem bred by the moral dearth of army life. She recognized the need for feminine influence when she remarked that the soldiers “are situated in the midst of trials and temptations with no kind Mother or Sister near them to soothe their burning brow.” Like Burnap, these mothers believed that in order to maintain a moral environment, soldiers needed to interact regularly with women.13 The difficulty of maintaining this social interaction arose when men could not return home for spiritual and moral rejuvenation, as they had done prior to the war. Historian E. Anthony Rotundo reveals the importance of temporal considerations by noting that “the social fabric was torn every day in the world and mended every night at home.” In order for women’s regenerative powers to be most effective, they needed to be applied as frequently as possible. The military arrangement, involving few and brief furloughs, inhibited domesticity’s ameliorating power, which depended on constant and incremental application. To compound the problem, women could not regularly go to their loved ones in the camps. Officers’ wives had the luxury of staying with their husbands in winter quarters, and thousands of women labored for the army as laundresses and nurses, but the majority of women who wished to aid the soldiers had to do so from their own firesides. Not only did Victorians

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believe the camp was unsuitable for the virtuous female, but they also understood that as the civilizing agents of their families and society, women would be most effective from the powerful moral position of their domestic circles.14 The problem was more complex, however, than women’s inability to “soothe the burning brow” of a loved one consistently. The war pitted the citizen’s duty to his country against a man’s moral responsibility to his family and himself. A soldier from the badger state recognized the dual claims of patriotism and family and believed that the two were not necessarily dichotomous. When John Brobst decided to fight for the Union, he explained it in terms of mutuality. “Home is sweet and friends are dear,” he explained, “but what would they all be to let the country go to ruin and be a slave?” Echoing Brobst’s loyalty, William Wallace, who paid the ultimate sacrifice with his life at the Battle of Shiloh, rationalized his choice to remain in the army as a duty to both his family and his country: “My duty as a citizen & a patriot—my true duty to you, dear Ann, requires that I should not leave the service of the country at this time.” African Americans, too, were caught between their loyalty to family and country, but, in addition, their willingness to serve was tried by the burden of unequal pay. As the men of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts recorded in a remonstrance to President Lincoln, “we came to fight For Liberty justice & Equality,” and “For these We Left our Homes our Famileys [sic] Friends & Relations most Dear to take as it ware [sic] our Lives in our Hands.” But for these sacrifices, “we Have Received no Pay & Have Been offered only seven Dollars Pr month.”15 All of these volunteers understood that by not yielding their time with their families, they could lose not only the country they so deeply cherished, but also the hearth they depended on for stability and—in the case of the Fifth-fifth—for the chance for equality. By fighting for the Union, John, William, and the men of the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts, trusted that they were protecting both their homes and their homeland. Northern women reconciled this bifurcation of faithfulness by giving their relatives their blessing to fight in the war. Ann Wallace responded to Will’s patriotism with a wife’s sacrificial support by saying, “I love you every moment & am so proud of you [but], I would far rather be your loved wife at home alone, than the wife of a home sick soldier returned.”16

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Other Northern women echoed Ann Wallace’s support of Will’s obligation to the state. Jeanie Attie notes that young Northern women imitated their Confederate sisters by “linking patriotism to romance.” Women north and south threatened that they would not marry a man who would not defend his country. Although the women of the Confederacy did not always gladly yield their men to the cause, they realized that the survival of the South depended on feminine support. Thus, the Southern press encouraged women to cultivate a “spirit of self-reliance” and to practice self-denial. Songs, plays, and poems were written to enlist women to help fill the ranks. Likewise, Corp. James Gooding encouraged black women of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to “drive all those young loungers off to war, and if they won’t go, say ‘I’m no more gal of thine.’ ” Both Northern and Southern women’s affirmation, then, gave men the assurance that by serving the state they were doing right by their families. By supporting the troops through supplies, women continued to convince their menfolk that they had made the right decision.17 The conditions of war, however, created a paradox in which patriotic duty required the nation’s most faithful, physically able, and morally sound citizens to enlist and in so doing threw them into degrading environments that jeopardized the very health and virtue that made them such valuable citizens in the first place. Gerald Linderman explains the mentality that made this paradox possible. Victorians could not conceive, he argues, of a courageous man being “unjust, unwise, or immoderate.” The two were mutually exclusive. They also had no concept of a person being able to compartmentalize his behavior. For instance, what separated a virtuous man from a corrupt man was his ability to control his passions. On the battlefield, a man who stood and fought in spite of his fears showed he could overcome his desire to run. This man off the battlefield, it was assumed, would summon that same self-control to temper his drinking and abjure vice. In other words, as Karen Halttunen explains it, a man’s outward actions were a sign of his “inner moral qualities.” Thus, civilians saw bawdy behavior in a volunteer as a “sign of a character defect” and an assurance that this unsteady man was an equally poor soldier. The best candidate for the country’s military was the most upstanding citizen.18

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But army life, by its very nature, was corrupt and endangered the integrity of the citizen-soldier. The moral laxness of camp life introduced the volunteers to the vices of profanity, gambling, alcohol, and prostitution. Fighting exposed men to the horrors of the battlefield, where for the first time they saw close friends and relatives being shot. During the battle, recruits witnessed what Hoosier Augustus Van Dyke described as ghastly sights: “To see a man’s brains dashed out at your side by a grape shot and another body severed by a screeching cannon ball,” he wrote, “is truly appalling.” The inhumane treatment of the wounded and dead compounded the gruesomeness of war. While the battle raged, volunteers learned they had to continue to fight and even disregard the impulse to help their fallen comrades. This approach may have honed their soldiering skills, but it gradually hardened them to the pain and agony of others. At the field hospital, the inhumanity seemed at its sharpest because soldiers lost their manly dignity. Screams and groans escaped from some of the bravest souls, and the human body was reduced to mere parts as the doctors callously amputated arms and legs. The savagery of battle required men to act viciously and over time made them numb to brutality. By participating in such behavior, they consequently forfeited their virtuous innocence. The fathers, sons, and husbands of the North lost the very morality they were trying to protect. The national conflict entangled the volunteer in a moral dilemma that left him and his family wondering if and how he and his comrades could return with the same unspoiled characters they had when they enlisted. It did not take long for soldier and civilian to realize the seriousness of this situation; they had been taught since childhood that the country’s welfare depended on both individual and collective moral fortitude.19 Since the establishment of the United States, Thomas Jefferson and other Founding Fathers had proclaimed the importance and, indeed, the necessity for virtuous citizens. According to the classical republican tradition, men protected their private liberties by participating in politics and exercising their public or political liberty. Liberty, both public and private, was attained when citizens were virtuous. To be a “completely virtuous citizen,” Gordon Wood argues, men “had to be free from dependence and from the petty interests of the marketplace.” In other words, classical virtue required that a

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citizen sacrifice his “private interests for the sake of the community.” Precisely because republics depended on the virtuous or disinterested behavior of their citizens, they were susceptible to corruption. For instance, they demanded more morally of their citizens than monarchies, which bound their citizens to the king through “blood, family, kinship, patronage, and ultimately fear.” Republics, in their “purest form,” Wood contends, “had no adhesives, no bonds holding themselves together, except their willingness to obey public authority.”20 This lack of bonds was the crux of the problem. How to attach the people to the state? By the mid–eighteenth century, political theorists had deemed classical virtue “too demanding and too severe for the civilized societies of Europe.” What the revolutionaries desired was not perfectibility, but simply virtue that promoted fair play; they believed human nature would take care of the rest. Or, rather, as Jan Lewis submits, the revolutionaries wanted a virtue that would maintain order by renouncing coercion without embracing individualism. The modern virtue that developed was more affable and sociable. It was less self-sacrificing and more “identified with decency.” Thus, the public virtue that remained stood outside of the state and was found not in military or governmental participation, but in churches, schools, and families. The transformation included a cultural process that had begun well before the hostilities with Britain. Ruth Bloch believes that in meaning of virtue, the transition was “associated with changes in ideas about sex difference.” As “women and the emotions became increasingly associated with moral activity, men and reason became more exclusively associated with the utilitarian pursuit of self-interest.” By the time of the American Revolution, the feminine notion of virtue was established and what changed as a consequence of the war was that “virtue took on a political significance it had previously lacked.”21 Linda K. Kerber and Mary Beth Norton define this cultural and political phenomenon as “Republican Motherhood” and assert that after the American Revolution republican theorists and Founding Fathers alike increasingly looked to mothers to imbue young citizens with “principles of morality and patriotism.” These republican philosophers contended that through their maternal roles women had the power to “‘plant the seeds of vice or virtue’ in their offspring,” so by their feminine hands the nation would rise or fall.

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Hence, during the first decades of the country’s existence, women were responsible for the virtuous nature of America’s citizens and consequently for the health of its democracy. Nothing revealed the importance of this motherly education like the conditions of war, when the nation asked its citizens to assume their civic responsibilities and to protect the country’s sovereignty.22 During the Civil War, both antagonists claimed their cause comported with the true wishes of the Founding Fathers. Northerners believed that unless they took up arms, the nation that they had inherited from their revolutionary grandfathers was doomed. Southerners fought for “liberty and independence” from what they considered to be a despotic government that was trying to rob them of their sovereignty. Combatants from both sides enlisted for patriotic and ideological reasons. In fact, according to James McPherson, these soldiers “lived in the most politicized and democratic country in the world.” Yankees and Confederates alike had a better understanding of the political and ideological arguments of the war than any soldiers previous, or, one could argue, since.23 With this understanding in mind, soldiers’ political astuteness, it could be said, was a direct result of women’s patriotic child-rearing skills. The ideals of Republican Motherhood had motivated women to teach their children moral principles and civic responsibilities. The fact that an unprecedented number of soldiers could discuss the intricate ideological arguments of the day was a strong indication that mothers, North and South, took their maternal duties seriously. For example, McPherson reports that a popular topic in Union soldiers’ debating societies was, “Do the signs of the times indicate the downfall of our Republic?” Bell Wiley also reveals that Civil War volunteers established and maintained forensic clubs throughout the war, where they discussed topics that ranged from religion to the political questions of the day. Likewise, men begged relatives to send their hometown newspapers so they could keep up with community events and also be knowledgeable about the country’s shifting politics and ideologies.24 Not surprisingly, women used the Civil War as an occasion to continue lessons in patriotism and humanity. For instance, the ladies of the Milwaukee Soldiers’ Aid Society proclaimed that in benevolence there was “work for all ages.” Children as well had a deep interest in

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the conflict, the society women argued, and the spirit of pity and generosity should be encouraged. They hoped that “juvenile societies” would be established in Milwaukee, as had been done in other cities, so as to encourage the youngsters to ply their skills in the great work of the country. Similarly, the women of Hartford, Connecticut, declared within the “Loyal League’s” constitution that their democratic duties as the mothers of the country continued during the war. They vowed to “study the great principles of civil liberty which constitute the spirit and life of our republican government,” and thereby to “instruct our children and all dependent upon us, that they may grow into such filial reverence for this best of all governments as shall make them always Patriots—never mere Partizans [sic].”25 Northern women turned their words into action by extending their role as patriotic teachers and joined the war effort themselves. As announced by the “First Annual Report” of the Ladies Springfield Soldiers’ Aid Society, women did not “sit with idly folded hands to be engrossed by pleasure or frivolity, or selfishly absorbed in the daily domestic . . . routine, while husbands, sons [and] brothers” were “offering their heart’s blood upon Freedom’s altar.” Women across the North seized the moment by sewing, cooking, gathering supplies, and doing whatever needed to be done in those heady early days of the war. The Springfield society provided their departing volunteers with “gifts and comforts.” Along with clothing and food, they distributed a variety of reading materials, including religious tracts and “quite a large number of testaments.” They proudly reported that the books “never fail[ed] to meet an eager welcome.” They were convinced that a vast amount of good might be accomplished by such mentally stimulating items. Sarah Fuller Hill noted in her memoir that her mother “prepared pails of lemonade for many a hot, thirsty boy” passing through her town. Sarah and her three sisters “made sewing machine[s] hum by night and day.” And all winter she kept her “knitting needles clicking, fashioning socks and mittens.” According to Nina Bennett Smith, “At first there was no system or order” to their work. Their “main object” was simply to help the “boys in blue.” Soon soldiers’ aid societies sprang up in every village, town, and city across the North.26 Although African Americans (North and South) were initially rebuffed when they offered their services as soldiers in 1861, being

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told this was a “white man’s war,” African American women organized themselves into Freedmen Relief Societies when thousands of slaves crossed into Union lines and became “contraband.” Once their own men began donning the federal uniform in 1863, African American women established their own network of soldiers’ aid societies to support their men. For instance, while still in training at Camp Meigs, the ladies of New Bedford supplied each man of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts with the domestic comforts in the form of a “sewing purse containing needles, thread, buttons, yarn, a thimble and papers of pins.”27 Within their society constitutions, women explained their “sympathy and attention” for the boys by proclaiming their rights as “Wives, Mothers, Sisters & Friends,” who “band[ed] together for the purpose of affording such aid & comfort to our dear Friends.” The cult of domesticity provided the rationale for their war work and a justification for their involvement in activities that ranged within the nontraditional realms of office, hospital, camp, and battlefield. In these activities, as indicated previously (see chapter 1), they always had “home” with them, in both language and imagery.28 In her study of benevolence, Lori Ginzberg explains that women first utilized their domestic power during the antebellum period. By rationalizing their work outside the home as an extension of their domestic domain and by basing their authority on moral superiority, women were able to establish benevolent societies that took them beyond their hearths. Ginzberg argues, however, that by the Civil War a new generation of women “replaced the language of gender identity—and a female moral superiority” with a more masculine ideal that emphasized “scientific rather than moral principles.” Jeanie Attie describes how the women who formed the Woman’s Central Relief Association (WCRA) hoped to organize women’s efforts throughout New York State and the surrounding area by channeling all of the societies’ goods through their agency. But, she explains, the female directors of the WCRA established a relationship of cooperation and mutuality with these various societies and did not attempt to change the local nature of benevolence. With the establishment of the USSC in June 1861, however, the dynamic between a central organization and the homefront women changed from cooperation to bureaucratic dictation.29

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The exclusively male executive committee of the USSC—led by Dr. Henry W. Bellows, Frederick Law Olmsted, and George Templeton Strong—had, according to Attie, “grandiose personal and political plans” to “transform America’s political condition and raise the moral character of it citizens.” The three men believed they could “cloak their demands for leadership in the language of patriotism, female benevolence, and the exigencies of military crisis” and achieve their goals of nationalism. By promoting nationalism, they hoped to ameliorate the social and class discord experienced before the war. They believed they could achieve their ends by “systematizing the impulsive, disorderly and uninformed sympathies and efforts of the women of the country.” The USSC would be a national agency to which all the societies of the North would forward their goods. Supplying armies through state and local aid societies, the commission board told the ladies, was inefficient and wasteful. Attie maintains that it was not just Bellows’s condescending tone that doomed the relationship between the USSC and the homefront women, but also the USSC leaders’ inability to understand the composition of women’s benevolence. This new centralized system stripped women of the control over their labor and with it the social power they gained through their charitable work. Not only did the aid societies lose the authority to determine the destination and use of their gifts, but the USSC demand for a consistent flow of goods to their agency left women few resources with which to attend to the needy in their own communities. Attie admits that women did contribute to the USSC, but their contribution was inconsistent, and they used the USSC’s efficient transportation system for their own purposes. The calls for supplies from state and local organizations and from the other national benevolent agency, the USCC, divided women’s efforts and loyalties and allowed them options that were less coercive than the USSC.30 Although the infrastructure of aid societies became more bureaucratic and efficiency minded, women clung to their traditional methods of benevolence, which were based on the ideology of domesticity and cast within the context of the village. Women were most successful in securing goods, labor, and money for the cause through personal appeals to citizens of their hometowns and in the name of the needs of the local boys. Likewise, women continued to rely on their

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roles as the moral agent of their families to influence the soldiers personally and to justify their presence in hospital and camp. Attie notes that the domestic ideal had already lost some power before the war because women reformers fighting for women’s property rights felt that they could accomplish their goals only through legislative authority. On the other hand, she also attests that middle-class women, who believed that their housework and volunteer work had social and moral value, continued to support the cult of domesticity. This is not to suggest, however, that women rationalized their participation in the war effort solely based on moral superiority. Just like the men who volunteered to fight, women offered their services, as Priscilla S. Adams explained it for herself, “to serve my beloved country in the present struggle for liberty.” But rather than work outside their proper sphere, most women utilized domestic rhetoric because it still held power and because it was a tried-and-true method of influence. They exercised their motherly authority by simultaneously guiding, encouraging, and correcting the behavior of their male friends and relatives. They aided their men physically, emotionally, and spiritually to ensure that they returned home as the responsible citizens, husbands, and sons that they were when they enlisted.31 The support of the “true and earnest” women of the North came in many shapes, but all methods incorporated reassuring and comforting familial images. By cloaking their goods with domestic imagery, they were able to project onto the soldiers the much needed familial nurture of home. This imagery took the shape of desperately needed hospital supplies, common household goods and foods, and luxuries such as cakes, wines, spices, handkerchiefs, and cologne. Less tangible items were the notes of “hope, love and cheer” included with these articles and the letters “full of sweet home chat and bright visions of the future,” as William McClain explained to an anonymous donor. These packages and letters not only met the soldier’s physical needs, but, more important, bolstered his spirits, boosted his resolve, and reminded him that there were “true hearts beating . . . and warm souls that remember[ed]” him.32 After “visiting the regimental & Government Hospitals in & around Washington” following the First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, 1861, Mrs. George Harris of the Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society suggested to a fellow society member that goods from home would

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provide moral and physical benefits to the troops. “We can do much to encourage the poor fellows in camp,” she proposed, “by sending them occasionally a jar of pickles, apple butter, jams & J[elly].” She reasoned that the boys were “tire[d] of their hard fair” and that “occasional additions” would be not only “conducive to their health,” but “encouragement in moments of defeat and sadness.” To support her point she reported that she had witnessed that a mere “slice of ham between slices of bread & butter [was] received with wild expressions of gratitude, . . . and a jar of pickled onions Lead [sic] a whole camp to shouting.” She concluded that by sending homemade supplies, the women could support the volunteers and “do them good both in soul & body.”33 A Massachusetts lieutenant underscored Mrs. Harris’s account of such enthusiasm for a piece of ham with his unsavory description of hardtack. In a letter to his family, he explained that along with the beans, pork, coffee, and sugar that the soldiers received as rations, they got a dry, salty biscuit called “‘hard tack,’ ‘eyelet pie,’ and other euphonious names.” Some biscuits were so granitelike “that they had to be brought in contact with a boot-heel to break them.” Other packages contained “moldy and decayed [crackers] and were speedily thrown away.” African American soldiers also received inferior hardtack. The Supervisory Committee on Colored Camps investigated a report about harmful hardtack at Camp William Penn in August 1863. Not only was the bread so hard a “hatchet could barely break it,” but it “looked as though coal dust had been mixed in the flour,” according to the Christian Recorder. Writing from the Washington Navy Yard in early July 1861, James T. Gillette turned to his family for food and equipment. He explained that he needed “preserves, ginger snaps . . . [and] small cakes” because the army’s “feed . . . almost sickened” him. His health remained good, he admitted, but only because he “refrained from bad meat and grease.” His friend Thomas did not fare as well. He “is in a wretched condition with boils,” James warned them, “and some of the [other] boys are swollen up so you would hardly distinguish them from fat men.” He suggested that they suffered such a fate because “their money has given out & they are forced to eat whatever is set before them.” Henry Harmon of the Third USCT sent a plea through the pages of the Christian Recorder that housewives might send “food to satisfy [the

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soldiers’] appetite.” Henry was certain that if the women “could look into our hospital and see the wasted frame of manhood,” they would not forget the soldiers. If the condition of their food were all the soldiers had to worry about, however, they might have rejoiced. The bland nature of their provisions also wore on their spirits. With very little to distinguish one day from another in the army, they looked forward to meals. Although the army eventually solved most of the supply problems by contracting private enterprise, difficulties with logistics occasionally slowed and sometimes halted supply lines. Some troops had an overabundance of food, but others nearly starved for want of rations. Even when the soldiers regularly received their hardtack and coffee, it did not take long for the authorities to realize that this hard fare did very little to sustain the troops physically or morally and actually contributed to illness.34 As the primary cooks for their families, women understood that men needed vegetables, fruits, and a more substantial diet to aid them in their daily lives and to prevent scurvy and other ailments. They may not have understood the connection between vitamins and health, but they recognized that a variety of foods would not only produce salubrious results, but also boost the soldiers’ morale. As early as June 1861, the women of the Cleveland Ladies’ Aid Society notified civilians that “unless supplied by their friends at home,” men in the army and hospitals did not receive “dried fruits, lemons, or jellies, etc.” Similarly, the New England Women’s Auxiliary Association explained that the fresh vegetables “keep up the health of the men, . . . and if amply supplied they will make the wounds . . . far less painful and aggravated.” In fact, “statistics show,” they argued, “that the wounds of an army supplied with vegetables, heal much more rapidly than those of men who have been fed only on salt rations and hard-tack.” Furthermore, they contended that fresh food “represent[ed] lives saved on the battlefield.” Women clearly understood the importance of a balanced diet to an army’s performance and to the ultimate worth of their aid. Whether to provide encouragement, as suggested by Mrs. Harris, or to “keep up the health of the men,” the fresh food and vegetables sent by Northern civilians promoted morale and saved lives. Without this support, more men would have died in hospitals like the thousands of boys who fell to illness or disease before ever stepping foot on a battlefield.35

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In January 1863, the Twenty-ninth Iowa, for example, suffered the demoralizing and deadly effects of illness when they joined a waterborne task force up the White River in eastern Arkansas for their first military assignment. Instead of being baptized by the fire of battle, these men spent more than two weeks aboard a crowded transport ship and then returned to their camp at Helena, Arkansas, with four hundred of their men on the sick list. At least half of the sick eventually died or were discharged for disability without having the opportunity to fire at the enemy. The Twenty-ninth succumbed to disease because, as the commander of the Thirteenth Division complained, “men of my command . . . were murdered outright by crowding them into dirty, rotten transports, as closely as slaves in the ‘middle passage.’ ” The overcrowded conditions were compounded by the lack of proper food. Charles Musser explained to his parents that “the watter [sic] is so very bad . . . [and] all we have to eat is hard bread, meat, and coffee.” Although the Twenty-ninth had the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of men who died of disease in the Union army, at 12.5 percent, all regiments suffered from illness. Civil War soldiers fared better than soldiers in previous wars, but, on average, disease cut the size of a regiment in half before the men ever went into battle. Death caused by disease reached its apex in 1863 and began to decline as men became more seasoned and as authorities paid more attention to sanitation and food.36 Women recognized early, however, that their war work encompassed more than simply supplementing the soldiers’ rations. As men eagerly enlisted at their local recruiting stations and began readying themselves for war, their womenfolk gathered provisions with which to equip them. This work was necessary because the Union army could not provide for the thousands of new volunteers. Americans had always been wary of standing armies and not until the present conflict had they had a force larger than fifteen thousand. As a result, when Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand men, the skeleton-like federal government was ill prepared to fight a war of this magnitude and had very little military infrastructure with which to organize and equip an army. At the beginning of the war, this lack manifested itself in individuals’ and local governments’ having to provide their own uniforms, weapons, food, and general equipment such as knapsacks, blankets, and tents. Lincoln gave General Quartermaster

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Montgomery C. Meigs the daunting task of supplying the mammoth army. Meigs did not disappoint. By the winter of 1861 and 1862, he had a system in place that combined federal production with private enterprise and succeeded in meeting most of the army’s needs. J. Matthew Gallman argues that the Meigs system brought about the best-supplied army the world had ever seen. Even so, there were still holes in the timely supplying of troops, and the aid societies filled the needs where the government could not. Case in point: Mary Perley, corresponding secretary for the New Hampshire Soldiers’ Aid Society, informed the society president that the medical director accompanying the Third Regiment wrote to her that the “government had furnished him no blankets or other bed covering for the hospitals” and pleaded, “I have no other resource but home.”37 Women did not wait to be asked for their assistance. Speaking before the Cleveland branch of the Grand Army of the Republic years after the war, Caroline Younglove Abbot related the story of how she and other society members responded to the basic needs of soldiers rendezvousing in her city. “In April, 1861, we heard that 1,000 men from adjoining towns were coming to Cleveland without blankets or provisions.” With no time to lose, the women of the city hired “eight hacks, and with two young ladies in each,” drove through the town and stopped at every house asking for blankets, quilts, and “comfortables.” “For two days,” she recalled “we drove up one street and down another, until every volunteer was amply provided for.” Similarly, when the ladies of Philadelphia heard of the attack on “Fort Sumpter [sic],” the news “touched a chord in every true woman’s heart and evoked a spirit of loyalty which yearned to find expression in appropriate action.” The women immediately and systematically organized the Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society and began furnishing the local military hospitals with stores and supplied the recently mustered soldiers. The women took care of their men, body and soul. Along with shirts, drawers, havelocks, and stockings, they sent handkerchiefs, towels, soap, combs, and sewing items to help the men maintain their physical appearance. To ensure that their souls were protected, they sent “upwards of 50,000 pages of Tracts.” While the Cleveland and Philadelphia women fulfilled domestic duties by providing clothes and blankets, all of the goods took on new meaning in the atmosphere of war. As Julie Roy Jeffrey suggests,

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nineteenth-century Americans linked cleanliness with civility and civility with morality. By supplying the men with domestic items that enabled them to maintain a tidy appearance, the women reinforced the ideals of the home.38 As the traveling soldiers began their journey to camps and battlefront, the ladies of the numerous communities across the North met them with food and cheering support. Elizabeth J. Burt recorded in her memoirs that telegrams were sent ahead of the troops asking citizens of the towns through which the troops would pass to meet them with provisions. “This request was most hospitably granted,” remembered Burt, “by lavish supplies of fried chicken, biscuits, milk, coffee, pies and doughnuts.” Likewise, another group of ladies in Philadelphia, who eventually would establish the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, noticed that the troops passing through their city on their way to the capital were without rations. As the recruits waited for transportation, “the ladies of the vicinity formed themselves into a committee, and, with the assistance of their friends and neighbors, distributed coffee and refreshments to the hungry and grateful troops.” This act quickly became a routine. The Cooper Shop historian noted that it was not unusual to see one hundred women “arranging themselves along the railroad track” ready to hand steaming cups of coffee through the train windows to the thirsty boys. When the black soldiers of Camp William Penn left for the front, they first stopped at the Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon for a “sumptuous dinner and then continued their journey out of town,” according to the Christian Recorder. True to their nurturing nature, mothers, wives, and sisters continued to care for their relatives and for the recently expanded Union family of soldiers by providing them with food, blankets, and other supplies as they passed through their towns. On a practical level, the food nourished the troops and ended their hunger. On a psychological level, however, the food allowed the men to maintain continuity in their rapidly changing lives, as each mile carried them farther from home, community, and civilization. The ladies’ attempt to offer stability was not trivial. The homemade food symbolized the support of the Northern communities for the war effort, reminded the soldiers of the homes and lifestyles they fought for, and suggested that their currently chaotic life was temporary. In return, this symbolic tie to home

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spurred feelings of appreciation and manly behavior in the new volunteers. For the time being, the raw recruits acted the part of the gentleman soldier by graciously accepting the patriotic hospitality.39 Homemade comforts engendered even more significance for fresh recruits who had recently left behind the amenities of the household. In the camps, the distinction between civilian and army life soon became apparent. Borrowed blankets replaced clean sheets, the hard ground functioned as a bed, a cold stream served for bathing, and moldy rations substituted for hearty, homemade meals. To cope with their ascetic environment, men petitioned family members and friends for personal belongings. Most requests included a special type of food such as jellies, cakes, or bread; clothing such as shirts, socks, and mittens; and items to while away the hours, such as writing materials and books. Soldiers usually shared their bounty with their comrades, and if their families could not provide the necessary articles, they appealed to the soldiers’ aid societies for supplies.40 Goods from societies sometimes had as much of an emotional effect on the recruits as articles they received from relatives. Upon receipt of sixty pairs of mittens and dried fruit, Captain Bload immediately penned a letter of gratitude to the Cleveland Ladies’ Aid Society. His testimony suggests that the handmade goods did more than physically protect his men against the elements. Hand-knit mittens were prized among the soldiers, who believed the quality of yarn and stitching was far superior to the mittens the government issued. Moreover, the fact that the Cleveland women knit and sent these mittens especially for Company H of the USCT gave the proud new owners a sense of importance they would not have felt from receiving government provisions. When one considers that the army routinely placed the black troops at the bottom of their supply requisitions, the gift clearly has even more significance. In contrast to the inferior food, fatigue duty, and less pay that black soldiers usually received, the mittens and fruit would have been a sign of equal treatment and appreciation. Furthermore, the mittens represented ideological support for the cause for which the men fought and gratitude for the volunteers’ personal sacrifices. Whether relatives or society members sent the domestic articles, the fact that the wares came from homes, were touched by loving hands, and sent with

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patriotic intentions appealed to the soldiers’ feelings of love and importance. As Rev. J. W. Hood of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Springfield, Massachusetts, explained while encouraging the women of his congregation to organize a soldiers’ aid society, if, in the lonely moments of camp, “there come[s] a small token of rememberance [sic] from loved ones at home, it would cheer their drooping spirits; it would be a balm for their wounds, a cordial for their fears, and it would nerve their arms to acts of heroism.” In other words, the psychological benefits of a package equaled and at times surpassed the physical value of many materials sent from home.41 Women sent distinctive articles to transform abstract sentiments such as love and support into objects the men could see, touch, taste, and smell. Personal items were a tangible reality that could manifest any number of feelings the women might have had for their men. By sending physical materials laced with intimate messages, they hoped to evoke a deeper level of connectedness with their relatives and new patriot friends. Using a wife’s favorite cup or pen, for instance, might help a husband to feel closer to his spouse. Or wrapping oneself in a quilt embroidered with patriotic sentences could elicit a feeling of protection. The quilt represented the many hands involved in crafting such a blanket, cocooning the user and guarding him from the hostile war. Soldiers’ associations throughout the North appealed to the loyal women to send such “tokens of affection.” “No government, however complete or efficient,” noted Mrs. Spear, “can provide the little ‘nameless comforts’ which kind friends can bestow.” These “nameless comforts” cheered the soldier and brought “vividly to mind” the “associations of sweet home.”42 Alice Grierson took this suggestion to heart. Knowing that dried beef was one of her husband’s favorite foods, she enclosed some “chips” in a letter to him. She knew Ben would relish the treat, but beyond this the smell and taste of the beef would conjure thoughts of their family circle and Alice’s cooking. In a like manner, the smell of “green tea” stimulated the memory of one of Julia Wheelock’s patients. Wheelock recalled that Warren Maxfield asked for green tea not because he cared to drink it, but because the smell of it “would seem so reviving, and would remind me of home, for we always drink green-tea at home.” Similarly, Mary Faxon sent a piece of her bonnet ribbon for a bookmark in her husband’s testament. The

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intimacy of this gift cannot be overstated. The ribbon may have held a scent of her fragrance and could easily have reminded John of quiet evenings they shared together. Caressing the delicate material with his fingers may have had a civilizing effect because such fabric was definitely feminine, and the men associated anything feminine with civilization. Furthermore, if he used the ribbon as his wife instructed, as a bookmark for his Bible, then it also represented her spiritual wishes for him to remain steadfast in his faith. So every time he touched, smelled, or gazed at the ribbon, it reminded him of her ardor and her spiritual support.43 Recovering soldiers at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., felt themselves privileged when an anonymous lady from Portland, Maine, sent them a quilt resembling the nation’s flag with patriotic sentences and lines of poetry embroidered on it. They prized the quilt so much that they made appeals in their hospital newspaper for other patriotic women to make similar quilts. Rebecca Pomroy, a nurse at Georgetown Hospital near Washington, D.C., also received a special blanket she called an “album quilt.” Each colored square of the quilt had a white center with an inscription for the soldier. Some of the squares had Scripture, some had patriotic lines, and others had a witticism. As with the patients at Armory Square, the quilt was a prized possession and passed from patient to patient for an hour at a time, so the men might “feast their eyes on the bright colors and read its comforting messages.”44 A final example of this tangible sentiment was bestowed on one of Emily Parson’s patients. During one of her rounds at Benton Barracks Hospital in St. Louis, Emily stopped to chat with that man. In the course of the conversation, the convalescing soldier proudly presented a picture of his wife and with it a “card with eight braided rings of hair, his wife’s and seven children.” Emily realized the significance of such a token, not only because he felt compelled to show it to her, but also because of the look of warmth and contentment on the man’s face as he embraced the memento. The photo obviously helped the volunteer to visualize and fantasize about spending time in his wife’s arms. The ringlets of hair, through the sense of touch, allowed him to experience physically being with his wife and children, in spite of their absence. Each braid, by its own texture, color, and smell, embodied the distinctiveness of the owner and emphasized for the soldier each

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family member’s special personality. Together, the strands of hair represented the family circle that he helped to create and within which he was the guiding member. This “token of affection”—like Alice’s chips, the hospital quilts, and Mary’s ribbon—did not physically save a soldier’s life. But just as an appropriately placed whisper can be more powerful than a shout during a speech, these simple tidings from home sustained and comforted with more strength than a hearty meal. Homesick soldiers craved the details of family life that made them feel special and gave their lives direction and meaning. Receiving such a unique present surely filled the recipient with a feeling of belonging as it turned loving thoughts into action. In this way, physical materials became the agent of women’s devotion to the volunteers and to the cause.45 Devotion to the soldiers and to the cause knew no color or class barrier. Women of all races and classes donated their time and labor to produce goods for the soldiers. The ladies of Pittsford, for instance, had “patriotic hearts” and “willing hands but not any abundant means” to aid the soldiers. One “washer-woman” gathered cherries and currants and dried them for the sick and wounded. A farmer’s wife sacrificed the new pillow she had made for her baby so that a wounded soldier might soothe his head. Another woman described as having “very little of this world’s goods” grew horseradish, believing it “may help to season the course food, and make the boys think of home.” Other ladies gave their mite in the form of cash. Somehow, through scrimping and saving, they managed to send in ten cents here and fifty cents there.46 Many of the soldiers’ aid societies helped the soldiers by employing the soldiers’ wives and widows. The Wisconsin Soldiers’ Aid Society obtained government contracts for making soldiers’ underclothes and hired the destitute wives of soldiers from the state (most of whom were Germans) so they might “get tea to soften their bread, and salt to flavor their children’s potatoes.” In Chelsea, Massachusetts, Helen Gilson obtained a government contract to make flannel shirts for the army. Wives and daughters of soldiers were paid eleven cents per shirt. Each woman could usually sew four shirts a day. While continuing to raise money for their church projects, African American women formed soldiers’ aid societies and worked for the Union cause. They held “festivals,” concerts, and fairs to raise money to buy supplies for the soldiers, and

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they made their own goods. They gathered books and newspapers; preserved peaches; made jelly; purchased smoking and chewing tobacco, pipes, sugar, and cocoa; and visited local hospitals with “refreshments of various kinds.” These African American women labored with the “feeling that the wants of the soldiers should be attended to by those for whom they are suffering every privation, and doing deeds of valor.”47 The underlying rationale in all of their efforts to supply and comfort the volunteers, though, was to maintain a link between the home and the camp that would spirit the rejuvenating and ameliorating power of feminine morality to the soldiers. In spite of the lives they saved by sending pickled onions and rolled bandages, women would have felt their pains were all for naught if they nourished the men’s bodies but not their souls. As mothers and wives received letters from their dear patriots reporting the degrading conditions of camp, Rev. Burnap’s warning that the segregation of the sexes would result in “deterioration and corruption” seemed to ring true. Capt. Redington’s observation that “men who at home had a reputation for honesty and uprightness will steal everything that comes their way, . . . [be it from] friend or foe” sent a sobering message homeward. Men’s wayward actions in the heat of battle could be rationalized, though, if not wholly accepted. What concerned women most were the signs that their behavior in camp had coarsened and that the tediousness of soldiering would make them easy prey for demoralizing influences.48 After hearing that her husband Caleb had been playing cards, Mattie Blanchard wrote an anxious letter to him that illustrates the preoccupation women had with men’s daily conduct. For Mattie, it was not only that the news caught her “so suddenly,” but, more significant, that she was unaware that her husband even played cards. This revelation sowed in her the germ of doubt that many women experienced: Would Caleb return home the same virtuous man who went away to war? Her doubts did not overpower her hope, however, and she wrote her husband that she knew that he would come home with a spotless character. But she also felt compelled to condemn card playing and warn him about its dangers. Mattie recognized the enticing power of cards, and she wanted Caleb to understand that by falling victim to them he tainted his soul, his family, and his friends. She realized that “when a man is alone he gets

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lonesome and does that which he ought not to do,” but she warned Caleb that “many a young man [is] ruined by beginning to play for amusement,” and if he continued to play cards, he would “bring disgrace upon [his] childs [sic] head.” She ended her letter with a suggestion that Caleb take “lessons from [his] father and brother,” who knew how to “set such an example for their children.”49 Mattie’s concerns resonated with many soldiers’ wives and mothers across the North. Within her letter, she touched a cord that not only revealed her own fears for Caleb’s moral safety, but also exposed the country’s maternal apprehensions about the effects of camp life on the nation’s troops. A friend of James Scever, for instance, shared her concerns with him about war’s degrading affects on the men: “I almost shudder at the thought,” she wrote, “of the many enticements that are . . . around young Christian soldiers [and] how very few will return with [the] same unspoiled characters.” James’s mother wrote to him with similar concerns. She explained that while she was “busy making cheese” with her friend and neighbor Mrs. Horr, they “shed a few tears” thinking about how hard it was “to raise boys to go into the army to be exposed to all the evils of the army not to say anything about the danger of being shot.” Female relatives, like James’s mother, understood that their men were not easily inveigled, but the camp environment did nothing to foster moral behavior. For example, Mattie Blanchard recognized that monotony and lonesomeness acted as the agents of ruin for Caleb. Similarly, stories from female nurses suggested that many men strayed from the path of righteousness to play cards and gamble because they were bored and had nothing to occupy their time. As a nurse in Nashville, Jane Chambers McKinney passed a group of convalescents playing cards on her ward. “One of them saw me looking at them,” she confided in a letter home, “and said ‘we are playing only to pass time. We do not know what to do with ourselves, we have nothing to read.’ ” Women believed that if they could provide wholesome diversions for the soldiers, the men would have a weapon against the evil enticements of cards and other immoral activities.50 When considering proper activities for the soldiers, women used their home life as a model. One can easily imagine the ladies rummaging through their households for games and books that their sons and husbands had enjoyed around their own hearths. Associations

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solicited the public to donate “backgammon and chequer boards for the amusement of the men . . . [while] books, magazines, and illustrated papers, will serve to beguile many a weary hour.” Society records show that families faithfully responded by contributing not just backgammon and checkerboards but also chess, solitaire, and Tivoli boards, dominoes, puzzles, “chinese puzzles,” ring puzzles, and marbles. Women also ransacked the family library. They forwarded old and new editions of Harper’s Weekly, Living Ages, Atlantic Monthly, the London Illustrated News, Putnam’s Monthly, art journals, homemade scrapbooks, illustrated newspapers, novels, biographies (especially about Washington), Bibles, tracts, and religious pamphlets. African American women sent African American newspapers such as The Anglo-African, the Christian Recorder, Frederick Douglas’s Monthly, as well as Bibles and tracts. Women sought out family songbooks filled with patriotic tunes, hymns, and the current popular melodies, and they included Jew’s harps and harmonicas as accompaniments.51 In their sending of wholesome books and games, the ladies of the Springfield Soldiers’ Aid Society were “convinced that a vast amount of good [could] be accomplished.” The good they had in mind was to provide a more virtuous environment in camp. Of course, the games and books meant more than just an alternative to card playing, but once again gave tangible proof that women cared about the volunteers’ spiritual health. With the games came a subtle but very sincere message that Northern women would continue to provide moral guidance in spite of the distance between home and camp. They may not have been physically present to persuade men to quit gambling, but with the gift of these wholesome diversions the men knew that their womenfolk had not abandoned them to their own vices. Women made it clear that even in wartime, or perhaps especially during wartime, men’s spiritual needs were just as important as their temporal. On another level, the games contained the essence of home in their representation of civilization. Army life, which exposed men to the capriciousness of weather and engaged them in sudden skirmishes, was unpredictable and left men feeling anxious and vulnerable. Home, on the other hand, embodied stability and security and gave men a sense of belonging and protection. The games, then, reminded the soldiers of the way they would have passed time in

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their own homes, surrounded by walls, furniture, and the knickknacks that decorated their parlors. A good-natured game of backgammon surely evoked similar rounds spent with dear relatives and old friends in the comfort of their domestic circles. Singing from the hymnals undoubtedly conjured up images of Sunday service, and the popular songs reflected pleasant evenings spent around the family hearth. Games, books, and music helped the “boys in blue” to pass the monotonous hours of camp in a more wholesome way and by doing so tethered them to home, to women, and to the morality that both of these ideals symbolized for them.52 Soldiers assured the women of the sustenance derived from the supplies. In September 1861, Assistant Surgeon George Ellis sent a letter of gratitude for the two boxes he had recently received. “The kindness of the noble ladies of Cleveland has indeed thrown a cheering sunshine into our hearts,” he sincerely intoned. “The brave men fairly wept with grateful tears over the kindness of their patriotic country women. Such kindness and sympathy will melt the soldier to tears where the roar of the cannon and the whistle of the bullet and the crash of the bursting bombs are unheeded by him.” In expressing his gratitude, Maj. Gen. O. O. Howard remarked that the care packages reminded him of home. “Nothing gives us more heart,” he began, “than the constant reminder that we are never forgotten at home— from the loving child, from the affectionate wife and the cherished mother articles of incredible value are constantly finding their way to the soldier in the field.” Four soldiers of the Sixth USCT thanked the ladies of Baltimore for the box “containing delicacies of the rarest kind to a soldier.” They wanted the ladies to know that such gifts left them feeling their “highest joy” that they were “still kindly remembered.” They explained that the gifts had a civilizing effect because “were it not for woman, man would still dwell in caves and dens.”53 Perhaps no greater example of how provisions from home morally and emotionally strengthened the volunteers can be given than the personal account of David Stetham’s reception of a care package. “Last evening I received three letters,” wrote the Ohio volunteer camped in Corinth, Mississippi, in 1862, “one from Dan Ayers, one from ______, and one from Mary Vail.” “Mare asked me how we liked the ‘pickanilly,’ ” confided Stetham. “Now as that was something new to me I asked half the Co. what ‘pickanilly’ was, but none

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could tell.” Wisely using the context of the sentence, he assumed that since it was “used with the word cake I naturally supposed it meant something good to eat.” At which point, he and his tent mate, Bill, “held a council of war and concluded the ‘something good to eat’ must be connected with the Boxes!” They agreed that “Bill should repair to the Express Office at [an] early hour on the morrow in quest of all packages, boxes, monies, &c.” With their plans set, they crept under their “blankets to dream of homes, sisters, friends, cake, war, ‘pickanilly’ &c.” The next morning Bill returned with the box, and before a “staring multitude” they “smashed her open” with a hatchet. To their joy, the “wonderful ‘pickanilly,’ ” which he noted was “excellent,” spilled out before them. Stetham confessed that the contents “reminded us of home, and called to remembrance the good things of other days.”54 Care packages held such enormous power to evoke thoughts of home and friends that civilians working at the front felt similar emotions when they unpacked their supplies for the troops. Clara Barton, an independent nurse from Massachusetts who cared for the soldiers as she followed them from battlefield to battlefield, depended on the home goods she received from supporters in Worcester, Massachusetts. She confided to her good friend and loyal supplier Mary Norton that while opening the “splendid boxes of stores,” she constantly thought of the sender. She indulged herself and carefully examined the contents and took “every piece and jar, and can” in her own hand. When she came upon the apple jelly and saw “Lydia’s neatly written name [on the label,] it welcomed like the face of the wearer.”55 The delicacies and supplies sent by societies and family members had a variety of meanings for the men.56 On the most basic level, the jellies, jams, cakes, and “pickanilly” met physical needs, as Mrs. Harris noted, but they also symbolized a literal taste of home that the soldiers could not get in camp. The food’s aroma could transport a soldier home to times when similar smells filled his house. Many soldiers confided that the taste of the homemade morsels carried them back to their own dinner tables surrounded by loved ones and where they were engaged by friendly conversations. The food did not need to be homemade either. Simply eating items they rarely received in the army was enough to conjure thoughts of home. In a letter to her

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brother David, Clara Barton revealed that the watermelon he sent her had such an effect on a New York volunteer. It was the first watermelon he had seen since he enlisted and the mere sight brought tears to his eyes “as he thought of the Long Island melons at home” that he had shared “with his wife and little ones.”57 Beyond this, the edibles became “a constant reminder” to the soldiers that friends, family, and the women of the numerous aid societies with whom they were unacquainted had not forgotten them. In the soldiers’ newspaper the Camp Kettle, the boys published an article thanking the women of western Pennsylvania for the comforts they had received. The authors announced that “whoever else forgets us, we have evidence now, in a most tangible form that we are remembered by those dearer to us than all things else.” A Pennsylvania soldier affirmed that the cap sent by Eliza Brown “fits well . . . & is very comfortable.” He confided, “when I am in the rice swamps of Louisiana or among the frozen peaks of Kansas that little cap will cause me to think of the kind friends at home.” A convalescing soldier likewise summed up the value of the book he received as “a great pleasure, . . . for while we are running over there [sic] pages we will have that thought that while we are so far from our homes . . . there are loved ones who are thinking of our welfare. . . . Those whom we have never seen.” The books will “bring us joy . . . to think we are not forgotten while we are sacrificing our very lives for this country.” The home goods reified the love, concern, and support of the Northern women for their family of patriots. The homemade preserves, the dried fruits, and the papers of spices became priceless articles that nourished the body as well as the soul. The boys saw the materials as tangible evidence of the sincerity of women’s wishes. By utilizing domestic items in this way, mothers, wives, and sisters were able to keep the nurturing power of home ever present in the soldiers’ minds.58 On another level, the packages meant luxury and a return to the civilized world of the home. Stetham’s box contained not just the mysterious “pickanilly,” but also two pairs of drawers, two shirts, two silk handkerchiefs, two pairs of socks, writing paper and envelopes, a fine comb, pencils, tobacco, postage stamps, a pen, and two letters. The drawers, shirts, and socks allowed Stetham the opportunity to change his clothes more often, which in turn offered him a feeling of

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domesticity because soldiers did not always have extra clothing at their disposal. The silk handkerchiefs obviously provided him an expensive luxury he would not have received from government suppliers and most likely stood out in his otherwise austere environment. Some anonymous “friends” ensured that the men of Company C of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts would maintain their appearance with the “towels, looking glasses, blacking and brushes” they sent to the men. Ben Grierson had a similar civilizing experience. After a fortuitous night’s sleep on a feather bed made up with clean sheets, he exclaimed in a letter to his wife, “It was such a sudden change that I overslept and did not awake until 9 O’ Clock—I feel very well this morning.” As common as this episode appeared, the fact that Ben even mentioned it in a letter gave the event substance. Sleeping between clean sheets on a feather bed were comforts Ben associated with civilian life. To enjoy such niceties in the midst of warfare must have infused him with memories and feelings of his own dear bed and the intimate moments he spent with his wife. In another vein, contact with such pleasures also had a refining effect on him. He admitted he slept better and felt refreshed. These two experiences were highly prized and hard to come by in camp.59 Clara Barton, recognizing the contrast between home and camp life, noted that ordinary items took on new value in the spartan surroundings. She explained to her civilian advocates that the household wares that they routinely used became cherished goods in camp and field. “The Box of pillows was charming to look at,” she remarked to Mary Norton, “so neat and clean in their chintz dresses.” The mundane pillow represented a priceless comfort to the soldiers, who had no room in their haversacks for such luxurious items. “If you could ever distribute and place pillows after a battle, you would see a new value in them,” assured Barton, “which one scarce learns by simply lying the head on them at home where there is plenty of everything else.” The homemade supplies enabled the soldier to sustain a semblance of civility, propriety, and morality by maintaining the link between him and the virtuous home he was protecting. Judging by Stetham’s response, the box of goods represented much more to him than their intrinsic value suggests. The mere presence of those articles projected images of home and of the refinement and ease that home life symbolized. It also helped to remind him why and for

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whom he was fighting the war. The women left behind supported the troops by fulfilling their physical needs with food and household goods and their psychological and spiritual yearnings with letters.60 It was no coincidence that most of the other items in Stetham’s box were materials for writing letters. During the Civil War, the postal service saw an unprecedented number of letters pass through its doors.61 Families and friends maintained relationships through the art of correspondence, yet just as common items became laced with subtle meanings, letters, too, embodied greater importance for the soldiers. The description of mail call in the army by a soldier in Logan’s Division demonstrates the new value of a letter. “You would laugh to see the excitement when the mail arrives,” reported the volunteer. First, “it goes to the division headquarters” where it “[is] assorted . . . and then . . . sent round to the adjutant of each regiment.” The soldiers learn of its arrival when “a man with a drum steps out before the adjutant’s tent and [gives] a call for the orderlies”: “a short prelude or roll and four separate taps of the drum.” Then the “orderly of each company . . . receives the mail . . . takes it to the tent of his company and calls out ‘Boys, come out for your mail, and then comes the rush!’ ”62 The soldiers rushed for their mail because letters represented not just communication with family and friends, but an essential psychological link with their loved ones. In their correspondence, they treated relatives to a taste of military life, revealing their cares and woes of war, and friends and family responded with domestic details. On the other hand, domestic correspondence also reinforced the ideals of the home and gave the men a moral base. Soldiers needed to know that the firesides they left persisted in representing all that was pure and good in society. Learning about the “daily details of home life” reassured the volunteer of the innocence of the family and enabled him to balance the chaotic, uncivilized, and at times barbaric world of the army with the civility projected from home. As noted previously, Earl J. Hess argues that letters “constituted a paper tether that kept the soldier from sinking irretrievably into the military environment.”63 The strength of the “paper tether” lay in the intimacy that could be achieved through letters. Letter writing in general, like social interaction, had rules of comportment and boundaries. The “social geography” of correspondence deemed business letters as formal and

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unemotional. As Karen Lystra explains, letters to “distant relatives, acquaintances, colleagues, and social friends formed a middle landscape; and letters to close relatives and friends shaded over into the ultimate unmasking of love letters.” Within love letters, men and women, as friends, relatives, and lovers, “disclosed their ‘true self’ ” and made themselves vulnerable to the reader. This ability to unmask was particularly important to the Civil War generation. It was through their correspondence with family and friends that soldiers were allowed social space for self-revelation, a place where they could unburden their souls and receive tidings of love and encouragement. This dialogue occurred in two parts. First, the writer physically isolated himself to concentrate on his letter and to gain privacy. In the army, this was not always an easy task, but corresponding was so important to the soldiers that any slightly private space where they could write would suffice. Although Illinois volunteer George Avery could find only an “inconvenient place to write,” he endured sitting on the ground with the head of a drum as his table to pen a letter to his lover, Lizzie.64 Prescriptive literature encouraged letter writers to word letters as if they were having a conversation with their friends. While composing a letter, writers became emotionally and mentally focused on their topics and exposed their thoughts to the addressee. George, for example, wrote to Lizzie that “I am wholly at your service for a time—tis pleasant indeed.” The exclusive atmosphere generated by the correspondence dynamic and by the sharing of personal information added to the feeling of being in the company of the other person. For a brief period, the soldier could psychologically leave the war and interact with the people from home. George characterized the moments that he “employ[ed] conversing with” Lizzie in his letters as “the happiest I spend.” The two worlds between reader and writer were further connected when the writer described her setting at the time of composition. “My desk is always that same old portfolio on my knees, and my ‘position,’ ” penned Alice Grierson, “is such that one foot can ‘rock the cradle’ and one hand brush the flies from our ‘sleeping beauty.’ ” With this description, Alice’s husband Ben could visualize her, his child, and their home, gain a sense of intimacy, and perhaps feel that he was in the room with her. John Faxon felt transported while reading a letter from his wife, Mary. “The language

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of your letter was so much like home I almost imagined I was with you, I enjoyed it much.” Another patriot, Emily Parsons, a nurse at Fort Schulyer Hospital, urged her mother to write more often because while reading the letters, she, too, “imagine[d]” home. Patrick Guiney found his wife’s letters to be proof of her love. “I have received three letters from you within two days,” wrote Guiney, “your kind and wife-like advice will not be lost on me. How delighted I am to be assured by you that my little pet still remembers me.” Ann Wallace sent the comforting glow of her “cracking fire” to Will to guide “you home, up the hill & through the trees.” She noted the power of correspondence when she wrote, “Its far reaching welcoming glow does reach you my life, (through this letter).”65 The dialogue continued when the reader received the letter. Usually a reader, like the writer, would seclude himself to be alone with the writer, again to maintain a sense of intimacy and privacy. John Faxon was in the habit of retiring for the evening and “plac[ing] the candle upon the window [would] stand at the head of my cot,” where he would read his letters in solitude. As the recipient read the letter, he was also spending time with the writer. The personal information being exchanged between the two and the writer’s familiar expressions created the atmosphere of a conversation and briefly cheated spatial distance by connecting the reader and writer mentally and emotionally. The ability of a letter to transcend time and space was so powerful that several correspondents read and reread letters to lengthen and savor the feeling of intimacy. Ann Wallace explained her habit by saying, “When I just see your name in print although it does not tell me any thing I did not know before, it makes my heart bound & I read it over & over again. I have almost got your letters by heart.” Her husband, Will, returned the sentiment. “My darling wife, I have read over and over again your very dear letter of Tuesday evening last.” Lizzie’s “good loving cheering letter” compelled George Avery to relish every word. “It did my soul good to read it,” he admitted. “I could not stop at once reading; but had to read twice & thrice, & then meditate.”66 The letters also had a physical aspect to them. The stationary itself became a physical link between reader and writer. The paper was a tangible object that the correspondent had touched, held, and written on; therefore, for the recipients, it was invaluable because it had

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come from the hands of their friends or relatives. The love letter became a sacred article because it also embodied the personality of the writer. Karen Lystra discovered that in a more extreme way lovers anthropomorphized “the letters of their loved one into the person of the absent lover.” Correspondents would kiss, hold, and embrace the letter as if it were their beloved. Likewise, the paper might hold the scent of the writer or of his or her surroundings and bridge the distance between the two through smell, although the sending of odors did not always have positive results. For instance, Alice Grierson complained that some of Ben’s “letters lately, have smelt very smoky.” She could not determine if the tobacco came from Ben or from other men in the smoke-filled quartermaster’s office where Ben claimed he wrote the letter. In any case, Ben suffered the consequences of this smell when Alice scolded him for his obnoxious habit. Or the familiar handwriting would conjure visions of the writer in the reader and elicit feelings of love and importance. For Ann Wallace, it was the intimate traces of fingerprints that helped her feel the closeness of her husband’s spirit. “Oh what a delight it is to see your finger marks & know they were traced [?] with me in your mind. O Will I do thank you for those dear letters.”67 Because letter writing was their only source of communication, it became the most important link between the home and the camp. The power of this medium was not lost on Ann Wallace’s contemporaries. In 1863, the renowned author and moral adviser Gail Hamilton wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “A Call to My Country-Woman,” in which she emphasized the importance of domestic news to the soldiers. She made an impassioned plea to the “thousands upon thousands” of housewives who were at that “moment darning stockings, tending babies, [and] sweeping floors.” In spite of their work in the aid societies, she warned them that stitching alone would not crush the rebellion. The patriotism and enthusiasm that ignited them at the beginning of the war had to be rekindled. Women needed to be consumed by a “soul of fire” that would stimulate them to be “consolers,” “encouragers,” and “sustainers.” Because the world was engulfed in darkness, they had to be the light, counseled Hamilton, by “follow[ing] the soldier to the battlefield with [their] spirit[s].” Hamilton believed that “the great army of letters that marches southward with every morning

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sun is a powerful engine of war.” Women could “hearten,” “enliven,” and “tone” their soldiers to the “true hero-pitch” by packing their correspondence with “the little interests of home.” Hamilton instructed her readers to fill their letters with “kittens and Canaries, with baby’s shoes, and Johnny’s sled, . . . [and] keep him posted in all the village-gossip.”68 Beyond the gossip, she argued that an honorable victory depended on “whether this people shall have virtue to endure to the end.” “We shall fail,” she speculated, “not because of mechanics and mathematics, but because our manhood and womanhood weighed in the balance are found wanting.” We must “measure every man by the standard of manhood . . . [and] our country’s price by our country’s worth, and our country’s worth by [our] country’s integrity.” This was woman’s battle, and Hamilton challenged Northern women to heed her call: “O women,” she cried, “stand here in the breach,—for here you may stand powerful, invincible.” Many mothers, sisters, and female friends unconsciously or consciously responded to Hamilton’s sentiment and used their letters as an instrument for the moral oversight of their men. Throughout their correspondence, they interjected words of caution and advice, hoping to stir their men’s consciences. An army surgeon voiced this possibility when making a call for letters in the Armory Square Hospital Gazette. If civilians could only see, he argued, “how the [men’s] eyes light up at” the reception of a letter “and how eagerly their contents are perused,” they would realize that correspondence provides a good opportunity for “words of counsel and warning” because “every line is carefully read, every thought fondly cherished, and the seed thus sown will produce a rich harvest.” Elvira Aplin needed no urging from outsiders, however. She had counseled, guided, and advised her son since his enlistment. “Make a good use of your bible,” she recommended, “and try to follow its teachings.” She warned, “do not follow the multitude to do evil.” If he lived by her admonitions, she hoped “ever [to] hear a good account of [him].” Six months later she continued to offer moral maxims. After writing a paragraph filled with instructions, she justified her parenting by explaining, “When I give my children advice I do not mean to find fault or offend them”; on the contrary, “I do it because I want them to do well for themselves and others.”69

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Elvira’s motherly advice represented one side of a two-way street; on the other side were fathers, who, as soldiers and civilians, sent similar words of counsel back home. They shared the same kind of moral values as their spouses and directed their children through letters from the battlefield. Some fathers, such as May Trowbridge, were incredibly active in raising their children in spite of the distance that separated them from their families. He lavished his wife, Lebbie, with frequent recommendations on the proper diet, dress, medical care, and discipline of their children. Others, such as Eli A. Griffin expressed his parental concerns by repeatedly querying about his son’s health, by buying the boy gifts, and by sharing sentiments of affection. Soldiers as sons looked to their fathers as “worldly counselors,” economic advisers, and manly role models. As Stephen Frank notes, this discourse between fathers and sons reveals that Civil War fathers continued to play an active role in their children’s lives, thus affirming that nineteenth-century men enjoyed “the emotional richness of their domestic lives.” Likewise, by focusing men’s attention on their familial relationships, the war may have “encouraged not absence but involvement in domestic life.”70 Letters from home also encouraged involvement in domestic life with words of inspiration and images of home. Michigan volunteer Albert Graves asked his daughter to write often. He revealed, “You don’t know how much good it does me to get a letter from home. No matter how tired I may be a letter from home cheers me up and reminds me of the many happy hours I have spent in our pleasant family circle.” Ann Wallace’s brother Cyrus cherished the letters she sent to him. “So for myself dear sister you are a necessity,” he assured her, “you cannot imagine the good just this one letter written to us has done me.” Constant Hanks, a soldier from New York, openly admitted to his mother his craving for correspondence: “Perhaps it may not be manly for me to own it,” he confessed, “but the fact is that my soul yearns for the sympathy of heart and mind.” Letters from home meant so much to him that he offered to deprive himself of “part of . . . [his] rations each day” if he could “obtain a letter from some friend, to remind” him that he was “not alone in the world.” Although he received a weekly letter from his wife and children, he desired correspondence from others in his hometown of Hunter and would be happy “to pay the postage on their letters.” Through this

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medium, he hoped to obtain the “associations of home” and “escape” the disease of homesickness.71 Domestic ideals held such powerful images for the men that letters did not have to come from a family member or even from an acquaintance to stimulate enthusiasm among the troops. After receiving a “bag of comforts” from an anonymous New England woman, a “Western soldier” composed a letter of gratitude and attested that “letters from home full of love, hope, encouragement, confidence and good advice do much, very much, towards keeping up the spirits of men in the army.” But, he warned, the absence of letters had the ability to disillusion and dishearten the soldiers. He had seen “men who never flinched in battle, or faltered when one comrade after another fell by their side” weep “like children because the mail brought them no messages from home.” He guaranteed that “kind true words, helps [sic] to lighten the soldier’s burden, and give him hope.” Will McClain, a soldier hailing from the Buckeye State confided in his feminine benefactor that “the thought of the blessings and prayers coming to us from Northern homes cheers us through the long tedium of camp life, and nerves our weakened arms in the hour of battle.” He continued this theme in another letter. “You cannot imagine how it cheers me—a letter even from one I never saw. It seems almost to say, ‘Fight on, Mac!’ There is something left in the gallant North that is worth defending . . . and it does make me bear hardships I once thought did not exist, with a light spirit.”72 Whether friends and relatives used correspondence to inform, direct, or encourage, it is obvious that letters became a valuable vehicle with which to cheer, nerve, and sustain the soldiers. By sharing the “little incidents of daily life,” women provided, as Hess proposes, “a visual image of something real” for which the soldier could fight. They remembered that the “gallant North” was worth defending and that “true hearts” still beat for them. The concept of home as a safe haven in which to find comfort, refreshment, and protection also reminded the men of the purity and innocence of family life. These ideals helped to shelter them from the savagery of war by offering solace, redemption, and justification for their actions. Maternal counsel and advice kept their mothers’ warning voice ever present in their minds and aided them in maintaining honorable behavior. Likewise, homefront epistles created “visions of home” that brightened camp life,

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“nerved weakened arms,” and permitted the men to “bear hardships,” as the volunteers themselves put it. Letters boosted the men’s morale and gave them energy to fight on. As Ohio captain Marcus Spiegel proclaimed after receiving a letter from his wife, “I feel young, well, cheerful . . . and could have licked a thousand Rebels myself.”73 The “noble women of the North,” using the authority they gained from the domestic sphere, continued their duty to “purify and refine society” even in the midst of war.74 The goods they forwarded to the camps, whether they were nutritious vegetables, delicate cakes, woolen mittens, scraped lint, or a gross of Jew’s harps provided soldiers with sorely needed supplies they were not receiving from the government. By creating an ideological system of physical, emotional, and moral support that accepted that the men could not return to the tangible comforts of home, women were able to provide for their own loved ones, for their neighbors, and for their newly formed kin within the Union family. In this way, they not only saved their men from the grasp of depravation by acting as a moral restraint, but also prevented the “deterioration and corruption” of the Union. NOTES 1. Sallie to “Friend Soldier,” February 3, 1863, emphasis in original, Mary Ann Ball Bickerdyke Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 2. Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1888), 109–11; Jane E. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (winter 1992), 363; Nina Bennett Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War: The Union Army Nurse in the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1981), 11, 14; Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 13–14. 3. A Few Words in Behalf of the Loyal Women of the United States by One of Themselves (New York: Loyal Publication Society, 1863), 22; Livermore, My Story of the War, 110. Jeanie Attie agrees that although the “legal and social codes prevented women” from expressing their patriotism in the same way as men, they joined the cause. Women “creatively” used

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their “domestic arts for political” purposes. See Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 25. 4. George W. Burnap, Lectures on the Sphere and Duties of Woman and Other Subjects (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1841), 48. 5. Ibid., 48–49. 6. Ibid., 49, 56. 7. Ibid., 68, 71. 8. Ibid., 50–51. 9. John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 128–30. 10. For a historiography on separate sphere ideology, see Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988). Elizabeth Leonard studies the effects of the Civil War on the social roles of the sexes. She suggests that the war caused a “social uproar” that made “strict adherence” to gender ideals untenable. Women challenged the notion of female frailty and used their managerial skills in the administration of military hospitals and aid societies far from the protection of home. See Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), xxii–xxiii. 11. Christian Recorder, January 2, 1864. 12. Reid Mitchell argues that soldiers re-created domestic settings in which men played women because they could not conceive of a society without women. For the nineteenth century, there was no “such thing as a purely masculine world.” See The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72–73. Likewise, Julie Roy Jeffrey notes that the scarcity of middle-class women on the frontier resulted in the breakdown of society. Men turned to vice because of the monotony and difficulty of mining life, but also because they believed “morality was a woman’s concern. Without good women, many men simply did not feel obliged to do a woman’s job.” See Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840–1880, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 141. 13. J. F. W. Ware, Home to the Camp: Addressed to the Soldiers of the Union (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1861), 11; Rachel Amanda Bicking to Mary Bicking, September 1, 1863, Mary Bicking Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 14. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 23.

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15. Brobst material from Margaret B. Roth, ed., Well, Mary: Civil War Letters of a Wisconsin Volunteer (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), 15. Stephen M. Frank notes that men experienced divided loyalties outside of the military as well. Nineteenth-century men were torn between “home affections” and the need to get ahead. Men acknowledged that the financial duty was of primary importance, but they also felt bound to fulfill their roles as husband and fathers within the home. Indeed, the competitive nature of the business world made men realize the importance of the family, and they struggled to balance these two duties. See Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Phillip S. Paludan suggests that the reverse occurred when men asked their wives to write to them about the details of home life. He argues that men asked for the incidents of home life to make certain that the women were keeping home as they themselves remembered it. See War and Home: The Civil War Encounter (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), 12. 16. William Wallace to Ann Wallace, June 2, 1861, Ann Wallace to Will Wallace, June 13, 1861, Wallace-Dickey Family Letters, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield. See also James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 134–35; Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era (New York: New Press, 1997), 86–87. 17. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 28–29; Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 12–18; Septima M. Collis, A Woman’s War Record, 1861–1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 12. For other examples of women coaxing their men to join, see Ethel Alice Hurn, Wisconsin in the War Between the States (Madison: Wisconsin History Commission, 1911), 3–4; Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 87–94; Mary Elizabeth Massey, Women in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 30. Gooding quoted in Virginia Matzke Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, Corporal James Henry Gooding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 24. 18. Linderman, Embattled Courage, 84, 85; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 97. 19. Augustus Van Dyke quoted in Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of

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Kansas, 1997), 26, 33. Reid Mitchell contends that “only the justice of the cause . . . and its meaning for civil life . . . could reconcile many volunteers to their new identities as soldiers.” Many accepted the immoralities of war in hopes that their efforts would preserve their homes and country as they were before the war. See Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 57. 20. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993), 104–5. 21. Ibid., 215–17; Jan Lewis, “Motherhood and the Construction of the Male Citizen in the United States, 1750–1850,” in Constructions of the Self, edited by George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 146; Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (autumn 1987), 44, 56, 54. George Forgie argues that in the early republic mothers taught their children to emulate the moral way Washington lived his life. With this development, “society began to concern itself with child nurture as a political matter and to summon models from history.” Children of the new republic may not have been able to attain Washington’s greatness, but they could follow his virtuous example. See Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 18, 28. 22. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 243–24. Quotations from Norton. Norton also argues that this ideological shift brought changes for women in both education and familial relationships. Because of the importance of women’s maternal duties, educational opportunities opened up for them so that they would be better equipped to teach the next generation of citizens. Likewise, the mother-son relationship took precedence, and the mother-daughter relationship became less important. 23. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 92, 104, 115. 24. Ibid., 93; Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 178–79, 153–54. Reid Mitchell agrees that the volunteers of 1861, “who continued to compose the bulk of the Union army throughout the war, were motivated by ideology. . . . Apparently, Republican Mothers had done their job well.” See The Vacant Chair, 154. 25. First Annual Report of the Ladies Soldiers’ Association of Milwaukee (Milwaukee: Starr and Son, 1862), 7; “Resolutions and Pledge of the Loyal League of the Women of Hartford,” Mrs. John Olmsted, USSC Records,

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Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. According to James Marten, the war effort became something of a family affair both in the North and the South. Children worked for the aid societies in a number of ways, but most commonly by scraping lint that would be used to pack into wounds. Youngsters also helped to raise money by selling homemade articles and by performing plays, singing, and reciting. They also picked fruit and packed boxes for the soldiers. Their work for the cause politicized girls and boys from both sections and gave them a “sense of contributing to the larger community.” See The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 177. 26. “Ladies Springfield Soldiers’ Aid Society First Annual Report,” September 11, 1862, Chicago Historical Society, Chicago; Sarah Jane Fuller Hill, “Mama’s Book: Reminiscences of the Civil War,” Sarah Jane Fuller Hill Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 16, 22–24; Livermore, My Story of the War, 109–11; Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital,” 363; Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War,” 11, 14. 27. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 217–19; quotation about the Fifty-fourth from Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom, 12. 28. “Northern Ohio Soldiers’ Aid Society Constitution,” October 2, 1861, USSC Records, Cleveland Branch; Leonard, Yankee Women, 67; Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 75–77; Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War,” 11–12. 29. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 134; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 39–40, 44, 77. Attie notes that although the Women’s Central Relief Association worked with established benevolent societies, the USSC required that new societies be formed for the exclusive purpose of aiding the soldiers by contributing solely to the USSC. Likewise, the male USSC leaders hoped that by using scientific data and a centralized infrastructure directed by professional men, they could more easily gain the government’s sanction and the public’s confidence. 30. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 89, 91, 98, 105. Black soldiers’ aid societies do not appear to have been caught up in this national, state, and local internecine struggle that affected white women’s work. Black women contributed articles, money, and labor to both the USSC and the USCC because these two societies, by all accounts, cared for all troops within their reach irrespective of color. But the women also sent supplies independent of these national organizations directly to their local regiments because the black soldiers needed to know for their own morale that their own people supported them in their cause of freedom and equality. The black soldiers,

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in fact, encouraged those at home to participate in the cause. George Stephens, a writer for The Anglo-African and volunteer for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, explained, “Ladies it would be strong evidence of your patriotism, intelligence and noble-heartedness, did you organize your Sewing Circles in every locality from whence your friends have come to unite their destinies with the 54th.” See Donald Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 236. See also Christian Recorder, October 17 and 24, 1863, January 9, 1864, April 2, 1864, and November 26, 1864. 31. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 46, 94, 126; Priscilla S. Adams to “his Excellency the Governor of Wisconsin,” May 5, 1861, Wisconsin Female Nurses Applications, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison. Similarly, Julie Roy Jeffrey argues that from the power of motherhood, female abolitionists justified their voices in the struggle for emancipation during the war. They sent petitions to Congress stating that they had a right to be heard because they sent their sons to fight for the Union. See The Great Silent Army, 215–16. 32. Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988), 44–46; Rotundo, American Manhood, 24–25; A Few Words in Behalf of the Loyal Women of the United States by One of Themselves (New York: Loyal Publication Society, 1863), 22; Will M. McClain to anonymous, no date, in Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters from Camp, Battle-Field, and Prison (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865), 322. 33. Mrs. George Harris to Mrs. Page, August 22, 1861, USSC Records, Cleveland Branch. 34. Ward Frothingsham to Anonymous, January 1864, in Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, 383; Christian Recorder, August 29, 1863; James J. Gillette to Mother, July 1, 1861, James Gillette Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Harmon quoted in the Christian Recorder, November 7, 1868; J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 92–94; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 32–33. 35. The Ladies’ Aid Society of Cleveland, circular, June 20, 1861, Ellen Matilda Harris Papers, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg; “New England Women’s Auxiliary Association Monthly Report,” Boston Transcript, August 22, 1864. See also Rev. Wm. W. Patton, “A Report of a Visit to the Army of the Potomac; with a discussion of the Relations of the Sanitary and Christian Commissions at the East,” 1864, William W. Patton Papers, Chicago Historical Society. 36. Barry Popchock, ed., Soldier Boy: The Civil War Letters of Charles O. Musser, 29th Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 17, 223,

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18, 21; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 486–87; George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 223. 37. Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War, 92–94; “Report, New Hampshire Soldiers’ Aid Society, by Mary S. Perley,” January 1, 1862, New England Women’s Auxiliary Association Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 38. Caroline Younglove Abbot, “Memoir,” Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio; Philadelphia Ladies Aid Society, Ellen Harris Secretary, “Report of the Societies [sic] activities to date,” no date, Orbison Family Papers, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg; Jeffrey, Frontier Women, 50–51. 39. Elizabeth J. Burt, “Transcript of an Army Wife,” Elizabeth J. Burt Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; James Moore, History of the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon (Philadelphia: Jas. B. Rodgers, 1866), 14, 18, 19; Jeffrey, Frontier Women, 50–51; Christian Recorder, October 10, 1863, February 13, 1864, March 25, 1865. Volunteer Wilbur Fisk of Vermont kept his fellow townspeople appraised of their soldiers by writing to the local newspaper. In July 1863, he wrote, “perhaps all do not know how eager the boys all are when on a long march to get that to eat that will bear some resemblance to a favorite dish they were fond of at home, or how difficult it is to gratify any such eagerness. In some cases it is a mere whim of the soldier, a sort of natural desire to get something different from what is provided, but in many cases it is essential to health, and often to life itself.” See Emil Rosenblatt and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 121–22. 40. David Stetham to “Sister,” January 12 and June 17, 1862, David Stetham Papers, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; Ransom Hawley to “Parents,” June 12 and 27, 1864, Ransom Hawley Papers, Indiana State Historical Library, Indianapolis. 41. Captain E. R. Bload to “Dear Madam,” March 14, 1864, Western Reserve Historical Society; Anne MacDonald, No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 104; Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 81; Hood quoted in The Anglo-African, September 12, 1863. Other white ladies soldiers’ aid societies and individuals also contributed domestic articles to African American regiments. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Colonel Robert Shaw remained faithful to the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts and sent “one thousand small copies of the

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Gospels, neatly bound in morocco of various colors.” See Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865, 3rd ed. (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1990), 134. 42. “Our Flag,” Armory Square Hospital Gazette, February 17, 1864; Appeal for the Sick and Wounded, circular, by Mrs. Charles Spear, September 16, 1862, Western Reserve Historical Society. 43. Alice Grierson to Benjamin Grierson, September 23, 1861, and October 3, 1861, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield; Julia S. Wheelock, The Boys in White; the Experience of a Hospital Agent in and Around Washington (New York: Lange and Hillman, 1870), 128; Mary Faxon to John Faxon, June 4, 1862, John H. Faxon Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 44. Armory Square Hospital Gazette, February 17, 1864; Anna L. Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences: A Record of Mrs. Rebecca R. Pomroy’s Experience in War-Times (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1884), 124–25. 45. Theophilus Parsons, Memoir of Emily Elizabeth Parsons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1880), 105. One of Louisa May Alcott’s patients received a token of his mother’s affection before he left for war. When “John” left home, his mother gave him her consent to enlist and her ring to “keep me steady.” See Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (Boston: J. Redpath, 1863), 54. 46. United States Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 25 (November 1, 1864), 790. Of course, the editors of the United States Sanitary Commission Bulletin also used these hard luck stories to guilt the more well-to-do in the Union into donating their comparable share to the cause. 47. Ibid., January 1, 1865, 910; Edward A. Miller Jr., “Angel of Light: Helen L. Gilson, Army Nurse,” Civil War History 43, no. 1 (1997), 18; Christian Recorder, October 24, 1863, November 14, 1863, December 26, 1863, November 5 and 26, 1864, January 14, 1865. Many historians argue that African Americans and ethnic groups saw the Civil War as an opportunity to show the Anglo-Saxon majority that they deserved citizenship and equal treatment. The men of the various groups enlisted in the army, and their women worked for the cause as nurses, laundresses, and volunteers in soldiers’ aid societies. See William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988); Randall M. Miller, “Catholic Religion, Irish Ethnicity, and the Civil War,” in Religion and the American Civil War, edited by Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stouth, and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); James M. McPherson, Marching Toward Freedom: The Negro in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965).

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48. Edward S. Redington to anonymous, January 24, 1863, Edward S. Redington Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; Alice Grierson to Benjamin Grierson, January 26, 1863, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers. 49. Mattie Blanchard to Caleb Blanchard, March 26, 1863, in Nina Silber and Mary Beth Sievens, eds., Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters Between New England Soldiers and the Home Front (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 115. Stephen M. Frank agrees that there was a “general concern that military service might so corrupt a soldier’s character that he would be unable or unwilling to readjust to civilian life.” Relatives were especially concerned about young, single soldiers who had no one to watch over them. See “‘Rendering Aid and Comfort’: Images of Fatherhood in the Letters of Civil War Soldiers from Massachusetts and Michigan,” Journal of Social History 26 (fall 1992). 50. Mattie to James Scever, May 21, 1864, and Rosaline Scever to James Scever, June 3, 1864, James Scever Papers, Ohio State Historical Society, Columbus; Jane Chambers McKinney to Mary Ellen, February 11, 1863, Jane Chambers McKinney Papers, Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis. 51. “To the Loyal Women of Summit County,” Soldiers’ Aid Society of Akron, Mrs. C. P. Wolcott, 1861(?), Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; Soldiers’ Charity Accounts, boxes sent to St. Louis, 1861–62, Lamb Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston; Worcester Soldiers’ Relief Society Records, March 16, 1862, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.; Ohio Soldiers’ Aid Society, USSC Records, Cleveland Branch; Women’s Central Relief Association, supply books, USSC Records, New York Public Library, New York; “First Annual Report,” October 16, 1861, Richmond Ladies’ Aid Society Records, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg; Circular of the Ladies’ Hospital Relief Association, Rochester, N.Y., October, 16, 1862, USSC Records, New York Branch; Michigan Soldiers’ Aid Society, November 6, 1861, USSC Records, New York Branch; Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from AfricanAmerican Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 24, 147. 52. “First Annual Report,” Ladies’ Springfield Soldiers’ Aid Society, September 11, 1862, Chicago Historical Society. 53. George W. Ellis to Madam, September 26, 1861, USSC Records, Cleveland Branch; O. O. Howard to Soldiers’ Aid Society of Northern Ohio, February 10, 1864, USSC Records, Cleveland Branch; Christian Recorder, January 16, 1864. 54. David Stetham to Phoebe Stetham, November 1, 1862, emphasis in original, David Stetham Papers.

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55. Clara Barton to Mary Norton, January 19, 1863, Mary Norton Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 56. The surgeon in charge and director for Vermont U.S. General Hospital in Brattleboro did not feel as favorable about the kinds of supplies sent to his hospital. He held such a strong opinion that he published a circular informing any would-be suppliers about what he considered were appropriate goods. “The Government supplies us most liberally with liquors of all kinds, but all the so called delicacies, soldiers do not relish. It is only the idea that they come from home, that makes them tolerable.” His abrasive attitude may stem from battles with visiting females or impertinent female nurses. Clashes between surgeons and matronly nurses who believed they knew how to administer to the patient’s needs better than the surgeon are well documented. Circular, by Ed. E. Phelps, January 5, 1863, New England Women’s Auxiliary Association Collection. For more about this topic, see Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital.” 57. Clara Barton to David Barton, August 6, 1863, Clara Barton Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 58. “Thanks,” Camp Kettle, January 25, 1862; Watson Anderson to Louisa H. Anderson, June 2, 1861, Anderson Family Papers, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg; Horace H. Bower to Mary Parsons, February 7, 1865, Manuscript Department, New York Historical Society, New York. Reid Mitchell notes that “as long as soldiers were sure that those they most missed believed in them and the cause for which they fought, their love for home stimulated their support for the Union” (A Vacant Chair, 26). What better way to show that they believed in the cause than to send fortifying home goods. James McPherson also recognizes the value of the home support, arguing that “without a firm base of support in the homes and communities . . . [the soldiers’] morale would have crumbled” (For Cause and Comrades, 131). 59. David Stetham Papers; Benjamin Grierson to Alice Grierson, January 24, 1862, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers; Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom, 9. 60. Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War,” 90. Elizabeth Leonard similarly asserts that Annie Wittenmyer’s establishment of Special Diet Kitchens civilized the men when they were treated to “real food” prepared in the best “homelike” fashion. See Yankee Women, 91. 61. During the Civil War, soldiers and civilians sent as many as 180,000 letters daily. See Marilyn Mayer Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs: Women of the American Civil War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991), 281. 62. H. H. Penniman to anonymous, 1863, in Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, 199.

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63. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 123; McPherson, For Cause and Comrade, 133. 64. Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 18; George Avery to Lizzie Little, April 29, 1861, George Smith Avery Letters, Chicago Historical Society. 65. Eliza Leslie, Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies (Philadelphia: T. B Peterson and Brothers, 1859), 166; George Avery to Lizzie Little, July 2, 1861, George Smith Avery Letters; Alice Grierson to Ben Grierson, July 2, 1861, emphasis in original, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers; John Faxon to Mary Faxon, June 25, 1864, emphasis in original, John H. Faxon Papers; Parsons, Memoir of Emily Elizabeth Parsons, 33; Christian G. Samito, ed., Commanding Boston’s Irish Ninth: The Civil War Letters of Colonel Patrick R. Guiney, Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 68; Ann Wallace to William Wallace, January 11, 1862, emphasis in original, Wallace-Dickey Family Papers. 66. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 21–22. John Faxon to Mary Faxon, June 25, 1864, John H. Faxon Papers; Ann Wallace to William Wallace, May 15, 1861, and William Wallace to Ann Wallace, January 12, 1862, Wallace-Dickey Family Papers; George Avery to Lizzie Smith, January 5, 1862, emphasis in original, George Smith Avery Letters. Soldiers did not always wait to read their letters in total seclusion. William Wallace, for instance, reread one of Ann’s letters before a battle with troops moving around him. Most likely it was Ann’s description of their daughter’s first prayer that bolstered Wallace before battle. See Will Wallace to Ann Wallace, January 12, 1862. 67. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 4, 22–24; Alice Grierson to Benjamin Grierson, January 1, 1862, emphasis in original, Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers; Ann Wallace to William Wallace, May 15, 1861, WallaceDickey Family Papers. 68. Gail Hamilton, “A Call to My Country-Woman,” Atlantic Monthly 11 (1863). 69. Ibid.; “Write to the Soldiers,” Armory Square Hospital Gazette, September 17, 1864; Elvira Aplin to George Aplin, July 22, 1862, and January 10, 1863, Aplin Family Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Mary Channing Higginson, wife of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, did read Hamilton’s article, and even though her letter did not survive, we must take Thomas’s word that she took the article to heart. Thomas thanked her for her letters by writing, “it makes me happy dear, to think of you: you act so well upon Gail’s maxims.” See Christopher

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Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 270. 70. Marten, The Children’s Civil War, 70–98; information about Trowbridge and Griffin from Frank, “Rendering Aid and Comfort,” 5, 31. 71. Albert Graves to Isabella Graves, March 1, 1863, Graves Family Correspondence, Bentley Historical Society, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Cyrus Dickey to Ann Wallace, January 13, 1863, emphasis in original, Wallace-Dickey Family Papers; Constant C. Hanks to Mother, July 27, 1862, Constant C. Hanks Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. 72. “A Western Soldier to a New England Woman,” no date, in Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, 201–4; Will M. McClain to anonymous, November 18, 1863, and no date, in Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, 290, 322. James McPherson notes that the “wrong kind of letter could have the opposite effect.” Letters filled with hardships, especially coming from wives, crushed the recipients’ morale. Army officials, like the lieutenant colonel of the Sixth Wisconsin, pled with relatives not to send such letters. During a furlough in 1863, he told his audience, “If you wish success, write encouraging letters to your soldiers. . . . Do not fill the ears of your soldiers with tales of troubles and privations at home, caused by their absence.” See McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, 134. 73. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 124; Marcus Spiegel to Caroline Spiegel, July 13, 1862, in Frank L. Byrne and Jean Powers Soman, eds., Your True Marcus: The Civil War Letters of a Jewish Colonel (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 129. 74. Burnap, Lectures on the Sphere and Duties of Woman, 50–51.

4 “Listen Ladies One and All” Soldiers Search for the Comforts of Home Through Correspondence Ads TUCKED IN between two advertisements, one for a milk maid and one placed by a nanny seeking employment, was the correspondence request sent by “M. Debray and Monte Cristo,” soldiers stationed in Nashville, Tennessee. “Wanted—Two Young Gents, who sport brass coats and blue buttons [sic] wish to correspond with a couple of young, handsome and respectable ladies, with a view to fun, love or matrimony.” (It appears that advertisers inverted words intentionally for comical effect. For instance, Sgt. B. Stillwagon and Sgt. Harry Brooks described themselves as having “long curling eyes and small piercing black hair.” Victorians apparently found this type of word play humorous.)1 The soldiers paid for the Chicago Tribune ad by sending a “greenback” with their request. This unique mode of communication spread among the soldiers in the western theater, and by the end of May the newspaper had published more than thirty soldiers’ advertisements for correspondence. Newspaper advertisements were a perfect vehicle for communication between home and camp because soldiers received newspapers from home, subscribed to “metropolitan dailies,” and bought them from sutlers and newsboys around the camps. The soldiers shared the newspapers and literally wore them out through use. It is not surprising, then, that this phenomenon repeated itself in several Northern newspapers and periodicals. Volunteers advertised for correspondents to brighten dull days, exchange ideas, and become prospective mates. Their strongest motivation for placing the ads was to establish contact with respectable Northern ladies. Wartime environment allowed few opportunities for the “boys in

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blue” to meet honorable women, and they hoped to remedy their situation through correspondence requests.2 The ads for correspondence initiated by M. Debray and Monte Cristo sparked a “craze,” mostly among Union troops fighting in the West, but New York volunteers also participated, and the ads ignited enthusiasm among women. Although the majority of soldiers did not employ this novel method of meeting women, hundreds of people both in and out of the military did. Thus, the ads reveal important aspects about soldiers and society during the Civil War. As suggested in the previous chapter, correspondence was a crucial link between the soldiers and their relatives. Not only was it the only medium with which to share the daily incidents of their lives, but it acted as an emotional outlet and a means of psychological support for them. Though the phenomenon was nothing new, the importance of this lifeline comes into full relief when considering the correspondence requests. As Timothy Gilfoyle explains in his work on prostitution in New York City, by the 1840s courtship rituals had changed significantly because of the transient nature of the population, the importance of teenage peer groups, and the decrease in regulations by employers and churches. By advertising in the newspapers, many men expressed their frustrations about the difficulty of meeting respectable women. “By the 1860s, ‘personals’ were a regular feature in New York newspapers. In rural towns and villages where the market had less effect on the traditions, men had fewer problems meeting women.”3 Ads may have appeared in New York papers before the war, but the ads placed by soldiers differed in nature and volume. First, both civilians and soldiers sought respectable females, but most soldiers also required their correspondents to be faithful Union girls who appreciated and understood their sacrifices. In other words, they sought women with political views that matched their own. Second, soldiers’ ads tended to be longer and more creative than the antebellum ads. Civilians placed ads that reflected business-style efficiency, citing only the necessary facts. Soldiers described their circumstances and requirements in vivid detail. Some of the soldiers’ ads were humorous or written in the form of poems. This creative spirit could have been a product of the enormous amounts of time soldiers had on their hands, but it also might reflect the competitiveness stimulated between men seeking mates. Soldiers read the ads placed by their

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comrades, and just as they would have competed for a pretty woman’s favor at a social gathering, they vied for the attention of women in the newspaper. Third, a civilian would place an ad for himself alone, whereas soldiers placed ads alone or with as many as six other men. They might have been trying to share costs, or they might have felt less conspicuous in groups, but this practice also shows the unique circumstances created by the war. Men were living communally with hundreds of other men away from the company and influence of women. Unlike the civilians, soldiers had to re-create the social structures of home and hoped to do so by contacting honorable women though the ads. Finally, whereas antebellum ads appeared sporadically, the sheer numbers placed by soldiers between April and August 1863 were enough to make the Chicago Tribune editor take notice. During these five months, two hundred ads flowed into the Tribune office with more than four hundred soldiers participating; the editor declared that he had a “correspondence craze” on his hands.4 Because these advertisements differ so markedly from the civilian ads placed before the war, they make a significant statement about soldiers’ motivations for placing the requests. Before the war, these same men expected to begin a family while in their early twenties. When the hostilities interrupted their domestic lives, they put their familial goals on hold, but their desires to begin families did not disappear. Military life, however, provided few opportunities for soldiers to establish close relationships with women on any level. By placing the ads, they hoped to remedy this paucity of womanly influence and to begin a search for a mate. Not all of the men sought matrimony through the ads, but the soldiers’ participation in the phenomenon denotes their desire for intimate relations and for the stability that surrounded reputable women. Through the ads, volunteers reached out for the images of morality and propriety that women had been projecting throughout the war in their work in the aid societies. Some advertisers humorously described themselves as “seventy-five years old,” with “hair like a porcupine’s, and pug noses,” but the majority of advertisers assured readers of their “unquestionable character and good education,” and they sought those equally endowed. The ads expose not only the humorous and gentle sides of the soldiers, but, more important, their middle-class values and their desire for civility. It is not clear whether

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the soldiers who placed the ads were members of the middle class or working class. What is clear is that they all sought middle-class ideals. As Jan Lewis suggests, the flaw in women’s moral influence over men was that women could be only as powerful as men allowed them to be. Men had to participate willingly in the transformation of their souls. In other words, the ads were significant because they show that the soldiers responded to domestic imagery and that they valued familial relationships.5 On another note, I have not found any evidence of African American soldiers placing ads for correspondence. There are several possible reasons for this. First, African Americans did not start to enlist until mid-1863, and therefore they had not grown weary of the war yet. Similarly, African American soldiers were more focused on their struggle for freedom, equality, and the right of autonomy over their families and probably had little time to devote to correspondence ads. Moreover, the cost of placing ads could have been prohibitive. African American soldiers struggled to earn equal pay from the time they first began to enlist until September 1864. Therefore, correspondence requests were a frivolous expenditure at a time when most of their families were struggling to live. These soldiers did, however, utilize African American newspapers as a form of communication between themselves and their communities. Women’s participation in the ads, as both advertisers and correspondents, suggests an expanded perspective of the image of Victorian women. Certainly not all women viewed these ads as proper, but the women who participated in the craze most likely believed their behavior was altogether respectable. Their involvement in this unorthodox medium encourages us to rethink the Victorian notion of a “true woman” as passive and submissive. More important, though, women were not just symbolically reaching out to men through goods, but were physically reaching out to them through the ads and offering them an opportunity to begin proper relationships and perhaps families. Soldiers placing ads were trying to bring home to the camp. Women responding to the requests were sending home to the camp, and the two met on the ground between home and camp, in the “Wanted” section of the newspaper.6 Soldiers, civilians, and women utilized the correspondence ads to maneuver around Victorian etiquette and the complications of

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courting, which were magnified by the exigencies of war. Victorians formed their courting expectations on advice found in the voluminous etiquette manuals of the period, which declared that men and women typically expected to begin searching for lifelong mates between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. The road to marriage for both men and women consisted of an intricate set of rituals interlaced by prescribed manners and morals, and of a winnowing process based on the prospective mates’ ability to meet their suitors’ social, financial, and religious standards. Prescriptive literature advised the sexes that before the search for a partner could begin, they must turn inward and scrutinize their own suitability. Etiquette writers offered extensive lists for the conscientious person to follow, which included advice on cleanliness, eating, drinking, breathing, exercising, dressing properly, and having the right ornaments and hair and beard styles, as well as advice on “self-culture,” which was defined as moral training, grace, and movement, whether standing, sitting, and walking.7 Although it is difficult to determine how extensively Victorians observed etiquette writers’ advice, historian John F. Kasson suggests that few people slavishly followed every detail of the rules, but rather consulted manuals as a point of reference on how to behave during particular social events. Etiquette became a measuring stick used by those wishing to raise or maintain their social stations. Concerned with the rapidly changing social conditions around them, upper- and middle-class Victorians applied rules to every aspect of life in order to bolster their elite positions in an increasingly mobile society. Some working-class people aped middle-class behavior in hopes of improving their station in life. The middle and upper classes used etiquette as a means of defining class behavior and as a basis for excluding people of lower classes. The middle class especially held tightly to these rules because the vicissitudes of the economy left many of that group perched literally on the brink of financial ruin. By adhering to prescribed manners, “they proved to society that they were successful and polished.” Kasson argues that Victorians were also concerned with the larger issue of societal stability, brought on by “a restless, highly mobile, rapidly urbanizing and industrializing democracy.” The mobile populace disrupted “traditional norms governing face to face conduct,” which were grounded in the social context of the family and community. This disruption “left a vacuum” of moral “guidance on

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how to interact safely with others.” To counter these destabilizing forces, Victorians established rules of etiquette to “teach each individual his social duties” and hoped that these rules would buttress their crumbling social standards.8 Advice appeared in etiquette manuals and domestic novels, guiding both sexes through the rituals, rules, and expectations of society. In her work on nineteenth-century womanhood, Francis Cogan explains the complicated but necessary procedure involved in finding the appropriate mate. Advisers encouraged a middle-class woman to maintain her personal standards and to seek a suitor “who truly was moral, intelligent, hardworking, and compatible.” To find such a man, a woman needed to follow the courtship procedures listed in the advice books. Etiquette writers designated gamblers, drunkards, and philanderers as men to avoid in the initial stages of courting, even on the superficial level of simple acquaintance. “Inappropriate men” also included those who were “extremely different from the young woman in social status, family background, or wealth,” and those who were “unrefined, uneducated, and tasteless.” Authors recommended that women meet prospective mates through reputable friends or by relying on their fathers and brothers to introduce them to coworkers or college acquaintances. Above all, women were advised to use the courting process to “determine the suitability” of their proposed mates.9 Nineteenth-century men were just as conscious of prescriptive literature as the ladies were. Perhaps the most popular author of behavior manuals for men was Lord Chesterfield. In his American Chesterfield, printed in 1857, he imparted his wisdom about the virtues and pitfalls of becoming a successful man. He encouraged gentlemen to maintain modesty and to have a genteel carriage and a pleasing countenance about them; he warned them to choose their company carefully and to employ their time wisely. Even though he believed women were “no more to be trusted than ‘fresh-caught monkeys,’ ” he insisted that marriage was worth the hazards. Within a list of entertaining and somewhat curious advice for gentlemen choosing wives, he suggested that they “avoid fools and philosophers.” Above all, he encouraged them to “know who [they] are marrying” by obtaining references. In her book Confidence Men and Painted Women, historian Karen Halttunen explains Chesterfield’s

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concern for references. She argues that the fluidity of urban America made it more difficult for people to check their new acquaintances’ backgrounds, thus making references necessary. Nineteenth-century novels portrayed the grim results of ignoring advice by presenting plots that overflowed with duplicitous characters (usually male) masquerading as genteel figures who were eventually revealed to be corrupt fortune seekers. Although Chesterfield and other advisers did not mean that written references were required, they stressed the need for both sexes to investigate their suitor’s character, assuring their readers that research would prevent potential catastrophes resulting from improper introductions.10 Once an introduction was made, the newly introduced couple could exchange calling cards or cartes-de-visite, and the gentleman could request “to commence formal addresses” with the woman’s consent, according to Karen Mehaffey.11 If a relationship blossomed, the couple began a period of courtship. Ellen Rothman notes that “the word courtship applied to situations where the intention to marry was explicit (if not formally—and mutually—stated). Courting was the broader term used to describe socializing between unmarried men and women. Courting sometimes but not always led to courtship; few courtships began without a period of courting.” Although parents participated as spectators, definite rules and penalties were applied and enforced in the game of courtship. It was a romantic period filled with emotional thrills, during which couples regulated their own behavior and engaged in “erotic play, both in fantasy and in reality,” with their mates, as Rothman describes it. But couples also used the time to develop romantic attachments and to test the depths of their feelings and commitment for each other, sharing their most personal desires during intimate meetings and through correspondence. Mehaffey notes that “Suitors seeking courtship” and “men and women seeking positions” used letters as a form of introduction. Both sexes expressed their inner needs and thoughts and utilized correspondence as an outlet for creativity.12 Even without the restrictive conditions of war, the courting rituals of the time were time-consuming and cumbersome. Although the rules were designed to aid both sexes in their search for the most appropriate mate, such rules were nonsensical during the war. Soldiers could not leave their posts to meet respectable ladies, and

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respectable ladies, at least not in large numbers, did not visit the field. This is not to suggest that women were not present in the camps or that the women who were there could not be respectable. Thousands of women followed the units as laundresses and general helpers and would have considered themselves altogether respectable. Although prostitutes also followed the troops, few men would consider establishing an intimate relationship with these women beyond the sexual level.13 Likewise, although dances were especially popular during winter quarters, only a minority of soldiers who were either on leave or posted in nearby camps attended them. In her memoirs, Septima Collis, wife of Gen. H. T. Collis, related that she witnessed several such dances, and during the winter of 1863 in a camp near Washington, D.C., Maj. Gen. Warren gave a magnificent ball. The event encompassed several hospital tents and was decorated by a “sea of bunting” with clusters of wax candles and Chinese lanterns. Septima characterized it as “a scene of enchantment.” Numerous bands added to the festive atmosphere, and the guests were treated to a superb supper. Express trains from Washington, contracted for the occasion, transported an “immense number of fashionable people” to the ball. Septima’s experience, however, was an anomaly. Most army wives, according to historian Mary Elizabeth Massey, did not enjoy such elegant parties or camping conditions. In fact, few rank and file had the opportunity to participate in these parties. The wartime environment and the rules of etiquette allowed soldiers few opportunities to meet appropriate women for genteel social interaction.14 The desperation for female companionship motivated other volunteers to seek novel methods to entertain themselves. A group of Massachusetts soldiers posted at Brandy Station, Virginia, in the spring of 1864 re-created a hometown dance. Not wanting to rely on the local Southern ladies because they were too rebellious, the men improvised by dressing up sixty drummer boys as women because they were smaller than the rest of the soldiers. The success of the masquerade was affirmed when one soldier wrote home that “some of the real women went but the boy girls was [sic] so much better looking they left.” In other words, the Northern soldiers excluded Southern women by dancing with female substitutes and thus suggesting they did not consider Southern women worthy companions.

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These stories illustrate not only the soldiers’ ingenuity but also the lengths to which they were willing to go to re-create activities from home. As historian Reid Mitchell notes, the tale also indicates that these men “missed their home; they missed the social entertainment to which they had been accustomed; they missed women.” The ball also shows that soldiers could improvise when physical circumstance did not allow a real ball. They adapted to their restricted social environment without pushing the boundaries of propriety too far.15 Moreover, the ball reveals that the small number of women the soldiers met did not satisfy their needs for intimate relationships. At Brandy Station, the women were “secesh,” but other undesirable women were either nurses (who were usually older and treated by the soldiers in the maternal manner), other soldiers’ mothers and wives, or prostitutes. Appointed as the superintendent of women nurses for the Union army, Dorothea Dix was commissioned “to select and assign women nurses to general or permanent military hospitals.” Dix preferred that her nurses be between the “ages of thirty-five and fifty and of strong health and matronly appearance, and must display good conduct, or superior education . . . maintain habits of neatness, order, sobriety and industry, and present certificates of qualification and good character from two individuals.” Elizabeth Leonard suggests in her study of Northern women’s war work that Dix had such strict requirements because she hoped to head off the public’s concerns. She recognized the impropriety of young, single female nurses working amid large groups of men without the protection of home. Not all the female nurses gained their positions through Dix, so not all of them had to meet these rigorous standards. The majority of women nurses, however, did fit Dix’s qualifications.16 Plain in looks and attire, and predominantly middle-aged, nurses were regarded by their patients as maternal figures. Female nurses comforted and aided the sick and wounded soldiers in the style of mothers, not of wives. Although intimate relationships between the nurses and volunteers were rare, they did occur. Even if all the single female nurses would have begun courting soldiers, however, only a handful of Union soldiers would have enjoyed such relations because they outnumbered the nurses by approximately two hundred to one.17 The prostitutes, on the other hand, represented the repugnant females the Northern soldiers encountered while in service. Cities

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designated as military centers became “mecca[s] for whores.” In Bell Wiley’s thorough study of Yankee soldiers, he describes Washington, Chicago, Cincinnati, Boston, and New York as teeming with lewd women. “In the wake of the invading forces,” states Wiley, “moved an army of harlots, with the result that every occupied city became a haven of vice.” Thousands of soldiers reveled in the sexual wares offered by the “strumpets,” but the fact that these women sold their bodies cheapened them, and gentlemen would not have considered them as potential mates or friends. John Kasson contends that women who welcomed and sought men’s attention were not respectable, but rather objects of scorn. “Indeed, what most distinguished a prostitute was the way she attracted male attention by brightly colored attire, . . . her freedom of movement in public,” and the way in which she “linked easily with strangers.”18 To the Northern “boys in blue,” the Southern, or “secesh,” women appeared as reprehensible as the prostitutes. Historian Stephen Ash argues that civilians in the occupied South, in particular the women, countered the “degradation of enemy occupation” by “flaunting their Confederate patriotism and their loathing of the invaders.” Not only did the women cheer for Jefferson Davis, but they sang “The Bonnie Blue Flag” and “held their noses when passing Federal soldiers on the street.” As long as the women were the offenders, the soldiers saw them as no physical threat and usually ignored them and occasionally goaded them on. Disrespectful behavior by the young or middle-aged men brought quick curtailment by the Federals. As the men “became more circumspect” in their actions, states Ash, the “women grew bolder.” The majority of Southern women were aloof or treated the soldiers with contempt. As a result, “few Northerners recorded their impressions of the Southern people without mentioning the virulence of the women.” Most Union soldiers believed that Southern women encouraged their men to fight the war “past rational calculation,” according to Reid Mitchell, and saw the women as more vicious than the Southern men. Leander Stillwell wrote that “in my entire sojourn in the South during the war, the women were found to be more intensely bitter and malignant against the . . . United States . . . in general, than the men.” Consequently, with the choices of maternal nurses, other soldiers’ wives or mothers, prostitutes, or “secesh” women before them, it is no wonder the soldiers yearned for the company of the “noble women of the North.”19

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Stationed in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, “Brutus” of the Twentyfourth Ohio Regiment lamented about the kind of women he came into contact with during the war when he wrote, “From cross old maids of doubtless age; from fleshy widows; from masculine women; from Southern sympathizers O’ Lord deliver me; . . . of Western girls with waving curls and teeth like pearls O’ Lord, in thy bounty and mercy send me an unlimited supply.”20 “Brutus” and other soldiers yearned for contact with young, good-looking, true women of the great Midwest. “Brutus,” however, was not seeking an exclusive correspondent, but rather “an unlimited supply” of “Western girls” to rescue him from his plight. Soldiers may have been thinking about their mothers just before the battle, as the popular Civil War song suggests, but they desired a taste of home they could not get in letters exchanged with parents, siblings, other relatives, or male friends.21 They longed for the dances, the church meetings, and the activities that presented the opportunities to associate with respectable, single women. Correspondence offered the soldier his best hope of socializing with the “true women of the land.” Most often the soldiers’ female correspondents were their mothers, wives, sisters, or friends, but occasionally they would write to women from hometown soldiers’ aid societies who attached notes to the “delicacies” they sent to the “boys” at the front. The war loosened the rules of etiquette enough that some single ladies who hoped to strike up a correspondence with a lonely soldier included notes boldly stating their age, build, and hair color, along with their names and addresses. While convalescing at Harewood Hospital in Washington, D.C., Edwin Horton received “a work bag full of little trinkets” with a letter from a lady “and a request to write.” He “rote [sic] her” but assured his wife that he “dident [sic] put any love in it.” Cleveland ladies placed their missives in the gloves they knit and sent their hopes in the form of a poem: “Brave Sentry, on your lonely beat / May these blue stockings warm your feet / And when from wars and camps you part / May some fair knitter warm your heart.”22 “J. B.” responded to the “Fair Sex” who pinned a note to the quilt he received from the USSC by heartily thanking her and hoping for a speedy reply to his epistle. A Wisconsin soldier penned a similar letter of gratitude to the “dear little girl” who fashioned a comfort bag for a “boy in blue.” An

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anonymous volunteer recuperating in a Nashville hospital acknowledged the boldness of his letter but believed that his purpose of thanking the “Ladies of Ohio” for socks, slippers, and handkerchiefs pardoned his otherwise discourteous actions.23 From the beginning of the war, bold letters were passing from members of soldiers’ aid societies to volunteers with whom they were unacquainted. This daring correspondence was permitted because it was considered part of the women’s patriotic duty. They wrote to the soldiers in order to boost morale. The breakdown of social niceties during the war also allowed for such familiar letters to pass between the unacquainted correspondents without the taint of vulgarity, which most surely would have blemished the communication during normal circumstances. It is not difficult to believe, then, that soldiers involved in the correspondence craze felt that the exigencies of war that had loosened societal mores also sanctioned similar letters between themselves and correspondents for whom they advertised.24 Perhaps it was a letter like the one attached to the quilt that prompted M. Debray and Monte Cristo to advertise for correspondents in the Chicago Tribune. In the “correspondence craze” that followed their ad in April 1863, the typical ad included five components in no particular order: a request for correspondence, a physical description of the author, a list of qualities he sought in his prospective correspondents, his purpose for advertising, and his name and mailing address. The ads varied according to length and style. For instance, soldier D. H. Jackson must surely have caught the eye of an Indiana girl when he advertised in the form of a poem: Listen Ladies one and all, to the sincere and earnest call. For correspondence to cheer this life, and afterwards to become a wife. I am a Hoosier, when I am at home, but this war has caused me to roam; since July 1st of 1861, I have been engaged in our country’s fun. Now ladies, who will be the first a letter in the office to thrust, and please don’t fail in this kind action to address your letter to D. H. Jackson.25

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By placing correspondence ads in newspapers, soldiers hoped to relive some of the playful moments they enjoyed with women before they enlisted. “A young Artillery man” in Chattanooga solicited “correspondence with one or more of Illinois’ bright eyed, rosy cheeked, free-hearted daughters.” “Two of Abraham’s chosen children” also voiced their “desire to correspond with an indefinite number of our fair cousins.” Sgts. Stillwagon and Brooks of the Forty-fourth Indiana Volunteer Infantry simply missed the feminine touch. We “have been long exiled from female society,” they explained, “and would now look to correspond with some of our fair cousins of the North.”26 But perhaps the best example of the frivolous aims that some of the advertisers desired from the correspondence is revealed in a letter by an anonymous lieutenant who advertised in the periodical Waverly. “Dear Hattie,” wrote the lieutenant, “Pardon the affectionate familiarity but you know its [sic] all in fun.” He admitted in his missive that his advertised personal portrait differed “materially” from his “true” appearance, but he thought “it was all for fun, therefore funningly [sic] gave a fictitious description as well as cognomen.” Hattie apparently responded to his advertisement with similar light-hearted intentions. “Judging from your letter,” the lieutenant noted, “I take you to be of . . . that class know[n] as ‘romps’—a class by the way, which I rather admire.” He enclosed a carte-de-visite of her “incognito” and asked Hattie, “when you answer this which I hope you will do without fail—be kind enough to give a correct description . . . of your own sweet self.”27 Unfortunately, this is the only letter that survived between these two wartime correspondents, so it is unclear whether they continued to exchange missives or if their friendship blossomed into courtship. However, this letter provides tangible evidence that some soldiers advertised with no more than entertainment as their aim, and they did so with the belief that although their letters were silly, there was no impropriety in their participation. Two popular advice books, How to Behave: A Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette and Guide to Correct Personal Habits and Ladies’ Indispensable Assistant, assured their readers that casual acquaintances “last only for the time being. You are not obliged to know them afterwards, however familiar for the time.” With letters, two informally introduced people who wanted no commitment beyond the intimacy of the correspondence participated

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as if they occupied “the same seat in a railway car.” There was “no reason . . . why [they] . . . should remain silent during the whole journey because they . . . [had] not been introduced.” Their familiarity ended upon reaching their destination, and neither was obligated to know the other afterward.28 Other soldiers threw off propriety and desired correspondence with their “fair cousins of the North” because camp life was so dull. The tedious nature of drills and the endless hours of waiting for orders wore on the soldiers’ patience. Charlie Wallace asked for letters because “Camp life is beginning to get tiresome and anything” to assuage the boredom “will be welcomed.” A. J. Franklin in Corinth, Mississippi, likewise desired correspondence “for the purpose of relieving the monotony of camp life, and whiling away some of the dull lonesome hours when off duty.” At the end of the war, Capts. J. C. P. and R. W. R. asked for correspondents to “greatly assist a veteran in passing away the hours which hang heavily upon us, since the rebels have been conquered and there is no more fighting for us to do.” Soldiers convalescing also found the tedium of hospital life unbearable. One of “Uncle Sam’s nephews,” who had “endured the hardships and encountered the dangers of several active campaigns,” found “himself lying in garrison” and “growing tired of inactivity.” In an unusually candid ad, two soldiers who had had their legs amputated suggested that they had been “condemned and must pass the short remaining portion of [their] term of service in hospital.” They boldly stated, “We are too young to be interesting, too poor to marry, and too lame to be elegant, but we do adore the girls, and would sell anything but our scars for long letters from pretty correspondents.” They asked, “Shall we become insane from inactivity and be compelled to curse our wooden legs, or will someone take pity upon us and write to Fred Clayton and George Langford?”29 The letters soldiers received from their wives, prospective mates, and sometimes female friends filled a need for femininity these soldiers sorely felt. They hungered for feminine contact and would accept it in any type of communication from the North. In an anonymous letter to Mrs. Esther Hawkes, a convalescing soldier expressed his need for womanly society and how her presence reified the concept of home for him: “I do wish you would come up and see me . . . you appear something like home to me and to all I guess that I know.”

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A “Western Soldier” similarly confessed in a letter to a “New England Woman,” with whom he was unacquainted, that he had taken the liberty of reading two of her letters to other soldiers and “dared” to write to her in the unusual “circumstances” because he wanted to correspond with a lady from the “land of steady habits.” He explained that correspondence from home “keeps up the spirits of the army,” but they also wanted to “hear from those whom we have never seen—the good, true women of our land, whom we respect and honor.”30 Not all advertisers desired simple friendship or a casual correspondence. Some volunteers undoubtedly resented the war’s intrusion into their lives because it postponed careers and marriage plans. Many soldiers learned from relatives that their girls did not always wait for them to come marching home. Charles Clayton and William Cozen of the Twelfth Iowa Volunteer Infantry referred to themselves as “Two veteran soldiers” who “have lately had the misfortune to lose their sweethearts and to supply their places wish to open correspondence.” Cyrus and Harry Mortimer met with the same misfortune when “their girlfriends” sent “them word that they could not and would not wait for any pesky soldiers.”31 A veteran discharged from the service returned home to find he lost “his lover . . . while fighting his country’s battles.” Five soldiers from the Thirty-sixth Illinois Regiment discovered that civilians had stolen their “Prairie Flowers” and blamed “the ruthless hands of a species of the Home Gents known as stay at Home Braves. Who will die for their country—if . . . they nest up in the loft while Betty kills the Bear.” Other men left for war without girlfriends. The “Gay Cavalier” and “Wild Rover” “were unfortunately called away before they had gained the affections of any of those dear ones whose short and sweet epistles” were “so cheering to a soldier’s life.” Soldiers wanted correspondence to relieve their loneliness and boredom, but, more than that, they wanted to meet someone of the opposite sex to establish a friendship. Like A. B. Franklin of the First Kentucky, many hoped “that a reciprocity of feeling” would “mellow acquaintance into friendship and prepare the way to matrimony.”32 At first, the volunteers requested lady correspondents with a “a view to fun, love, or matrimony.”33 As correspondence ads gained popularity, more soldiers placed advertisements focused on

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courtship and marriage. Mary P. Ryan explains in The Empire of the Mother that three standard social relationships existed between 1830 and 1860: “those of parents and children, husband and wife, and household and society.” All soldiers had experienced the parent-child and household-society relationships. But in a culture that lauded domesticity and its core component the family, it became apparent that unmarried soldiers longed to establish households with wives of their own. By placing ads, they took a step in that direction. A cartoon appearing in Harper’s in June 1863 reflects the expectations of Northern society toward a soldier’s marital status. A mustached volunteer is pictured leaning on his rifle as he converses with his beautiful sweetheart, Clara. With her head tilted down, she asks her soldier shyly, “Don’t you think it an anomaly, Tom, your preparing to fight for your hearth and home, while you have not a wife?” It seems obvious from the number of men advertising “with a view to matrimony” that the women were not the only ones who felt singleness was an “anomaly.”34 A captain from the Fifty-sixth U.S. Infantry explained that “having been long in the service, [I] have but very limited acquaintances in the North, and would make this proposition with a view of selecting a partner for life.” After giving a complete description of himself, a Wisconsin soldier stated that “on the whole [I] wish to quit a life of single blessedness and enter the portals of matrimonial felicity (after this cruel war is over).” Two other soldiers who believed they had “rejoiced in single blessedness long enough” desired “opening a correspondence with a few of Eve’s fair daughters with the object” of changing “their present condition by assuming the vows of marital [sic].”35 The soldiers revealed their earnestness for serious correspondence by requesting that their correspondents meet specific requirements. Victorians admired intelligent, pious, chaste, moral, healthy women whose actions and dress were equally graceful and who commanded their households through efficiency and thrift, unlike “Miss Rattlesnake” and her “secesh” relatives mentioned in chapter 1. As Francis Cogan notes, rosy cheeks, “high chests, plump arms, comely figures, and a graceful and handsome mien” described the ideal womanly form.36 Soldiers requested many of these traits of the ideal woman in their advertisements. Almost all of them specified a woman between the ages sixteen and thirty-five who possessed a

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“fine figure” and a “good share of personal beauty.” Soldiers serious about meeting a lifelong mate frequently noted the state they wanted girls to write from, usually Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, or New York. They also desired a respectable and refined lady with a “pleasant disposition.” Some soldiers were even more specific about what they did and did not want in a correspondent. A soldier stationed at Vicksburg warned that “rouge, slate pencils, bad spelling, and slang phrases, [are] inadmissible.” Two soldiers from the Twentyfourth Ohio Volunteer Infantry were looking for well-rounded women when they asked for “ladies, who are pretty, intelligent, funny, religious, industrious, good singers, good dancers, good cooks, good Union girls and who will make good wives should they ever marry.” Two officers from “Grose’s Brigade” declared that they wanted to correspond with “two young ladies, who can get up early enough in the morning to dictate what shall be gotten up for breakfast and if Bridget be sick, will get it themselves without grumbling or burning their fingers.” Peter Geisel and Joseph Reamer, stationed in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, wanted lady correspondents who “must be submissive but not look so” and who “must be for the Union, horse, foot, and dragoon,” and “not [be] ashamed to be seen at work, and possess all other good qualities that constitute a lady.”37 To ensure that their correspondents were physically attractive, they exchanged photographs and occasionally demanded them before a letter would be answered. Photographs, “shadows,” or “likenesses,” were very popular during the Civil War. Most soldiers carried photographs of family members or their girlfriends into battle, so it was not unusual for these soldiers to petition their correspondents for a “shadow.” In fact, letter writers had more reason to request likenesses because they had never met their correspondents, and they wanted to make sure they were not entering into a serious relationship that they would regret once they returned home. The “Ambrotypes” cost approximately one dollar a piece, so they were not inexpensive. Considering that the average volunteer earned thirteen dollars a month, the financial investment involved in corresponding is evidence of the seriousness of this phenomenon. A soldier “disabled in his country’s service,” taking “this method of making his wants known,” “respectfully requested” cartes-de-visite from the ladies. A veteran on furlough in New York stated “carte-de-visites must be enclosed,” but

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assured the “fairer sex” he would return them “if so desired.” A young soldier in “affluent circumstances” insisted that “all letters must contain carte-de-visites.” Soldiers earnest about their propositions of marriage demanded the same honesty, seriousness, and commitment from the women responding to the ads. By asking for photographs and references, sincere volunteers hoped to maintain the standard of propriety required during typical courting practices.38 Whereas soldiers felt the paucity of the company of respectable females and used newspapers to aid them in their search, the war did not limit the women’s choices of potential mates nearly as much. Enlistment took away the more patriotic men, but it did not end social events. For instance, a young Michigan woman named Helen explained to her brother George Aplin that since the war had begun, the young people of Thetford, Vermont, “get along just about as usual.” Dances, picnics, skating, and outings continued in spite of the war; and the conflict even furnished ladies with new kinds of entertainment in the forms of fairs, amateur theatricals, and “calico balls” all in the name of raising money for the benefit of the troops. The war also produced a marrying craze in all areas of the North and South. Soldiers hurriedly tied the knot before being sent to the front, or volunteers sometimes entered “wedded bliss” while on leave. In general, the North was undermoblized in comparison to the South, but in Northern communities such as Thetford, recruitment had created a scarcity of men. Within the same letter, Helen went on to explain that gatherings continued even though the “boys or young men [of the town] have left, (so many, that it is a great rarity to see one much more to speak to one).” With so few men to compete for the hand of a woman, she saw the implications for her brother. “So you see George,” she suggested, “if you had remained here you would have a real pleasant time no doubt.” Perhaps women in other small Northern towns experienced a drought of men similar to that in Thetford and dreamed of dances with more young men. Whatever the reason for writing, the “noble women of the North” also placed ads.39 The number of women who actually “struck up” a correspondence with soldiers is uncertain, but we have a glimpse of women’s courting preferences because the newspapers do contain ads placed by the “gentler sex.” Victorian women looked for particular traits in men, just as men did in women. The ideal male possessed sensitivity, “gentle”

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personal habits, intellect, moral values, an education, and industriousness. Most women desired men with fair complexions and handsome faces and figures, but they placed more importance on men’s intellect, education, compatibility, economic status, and potential earning ability than on their physical attributes. Although a handsome man could bring a woman aesthetic enjoyment, she was more likely to be concerned with future financial stability because she had limited earning potential. That is not to say that women did not aid their families’ finances, but men were the primary economic providers.40 Undoubtedly some civilian men met the “ideal,” but most women held a patriotic place in their hearts for the volunteers. In the first month of the correspondence craze, Grace Greenwood and Gertie Hamilton of Ottawa, Illinois, placed their own ad. Wishing a correspondence with a “view to matrimony,” they asked for “good-looking, intelligent” gentlemen between the ages of twenty and twenty-six who possessed “an income sufficient for all practical purposes.” In 1863, only a handful of women placed ads, but their numbers tripled in 1864 and 1865. More women, it seems, came around to the opinion that Lina Douglass and Gertrude Atherton of Coldwater, Michigan, expressed in April 1864: “Everybody is advertising for correspondents: why can’t I? Was asked by a friend. So here we come. How many gentlemen will respond? Don’t all come at once.”41 Most of the women, however, hoped to meet prospective spouses, and the majority of the ads reflected this aim. Those who desired marriage were frank in their requests, stating “with a direct view to matrimony” or “object—matrimony.” Other women were more detailed about their reasons for advertising. Annie and Mattie, two young widows of sixteen and twenty, directed their ad toward military men with “a view to matrimony,” but, they noted, “no privates need apply.” Edith and Maude from Chicago considered themselves neither beautiful nor wealthy, but they did have “an amount of common sense” and wished “to form a matrimonial alliance with gentlemen equally endowed.” Nina and Nelly of New York, who were “thinking of launching out on the tempestuous sea of matrimony,” wished “through the medium of the pen to learn more of the traits of the opposite sex.” An unknown correspondent described herself as “an unorthodox lady, who is socially, intellectually, spiritually, and progressively companionable” and who “wants a husband who can meet

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her on the same base.” Eve and Sue, from Beloit, Wisconsin, placed their request in the form of a poem: “By two lovely women, fair as the moon, Wanted—two husbands and that very soon . . . must NOT be enamored, of every new face—in fact, we would like to obtain if we can, what we never yet found, a reliable man.”42 An interesting twist to the ads came in 1864. Because it was a leap year, by tradition women could propose to men. The custom supposedly originated when St. Patrick, hoping to assuage St. Bridget’s complaint that only men had the right to propose, offered to allow women the opportunity to propose once every seven years. Not satisfied, Bridget suggested that because it was leap year, women should be able to propose every four years. St. Patrick agreed.43 Whether the Victorians took this practice literally or not, or whether the increase in the number of ads placed by females was merely a coincidence, almost three times the number of women advertised in 1864 as in 1863. An anonymous woman explained in her ad that this “year women have a right to say what they have a mind to.” Many of the soldiers encouraged lady correspondents to take the initiative because of the custom. Three soldiers from the Thirteenth Illinois Infantry wanted to correspond with young girls with the “view to fun and love and as it is Leap-Year, the girls must decide the rest.” Three soldiers stationed near Athens, Alabama, wanted to “form matrimonial alliances” with the “marriageable daughters of the loyal North,” but suggested, “Ladies take your choice as Leap Year gives you the unquestioned privilege to do so.” Mary E. Massey notes that the war caused rapid changes in conventions and that during 1864 leap year parties were held in which women planned and paid for men’s entertainment. The more conservative citizens, of course, believed it disgraceful behavior for a lady.44 Leap year or not, women’s participation in correspondence ads, regardless of their declared purpose, was contrary to the “true woman” ideals of the period, first described by Barbara Welter in 1973. If women strictly followed the True Womanhood ideal, then it would seem that any woman who participated in the ad craze, whether as a respondent to an ad or as an advertiser herself, would fall short of the ideal because her behavior was neither restricted to the private sphere nor considered submissive. It is true that not all women and men condoned the correspondence craze, but some

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middle-class women’s willing and bold participation in the event seems to suggest not that these women were an anomaly, but that nineteenth-century women had a broader concept of True Womanhood than historians first believed.45 Since Welter first voiced this thesis, it has come increasingly under attack. Scholars attempting to debunk the theory have argued that the True Womanhood ideal is too restrictive to encompass women of all classes and races. For instance, Joan Perkin explains that with the luxury of money, upper-class women usually ignored the tenants of True Womanhood. They had the social power to gain political and business positions for their friends and were economically independent from their husbands. Confident in their own abilities and their own ideas, these women sensed few obligations to live under the constraints of middle-class morality. Working-class women also felt little pressure from the True Womanhood ideal. They were almost wholly beyond the reach of the civil law because they had little or no property to protect, and when they did, they and their husbands had neither the resources nor the know-how to appeal to the courts. As a result, only women on the fringes of the middle class, anxious to attain status, and those firmly established as part of the middle class, eager to preserve their positions, felt any pressures to maintain “true woman” concepts. For most lower-class women, harsh economic realities pushed them out of the home to earn money, leaving them little time to worry about propriety.46 Other historians suggest that women more than likely chose aspects of the ideal rather than submitting to all of the principles. Anne Douglas, for example, disputes “the notion that women pursued this ideal wholeheartedly,” but claims instead that women held on to certain tenants to maintain “influence inside the family, the church, and the social world.” Patricia Okker asserts, in her work on Godey’s editor Sarah J. Hale, that several competing definitions existed and that women chose principles from these definitions to suit their own notions of womanhood. As an illustration, Hale and other editors relied on the tenet that women were morally superior to men and used it as an offensive and defensive weapon both to expand women’s roles in public and to defend bold behavior that crossed gender lines. According to Okker, women formed their own ideals of womanhood with their own understanding of proper and improper

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behavior—within limits, of course. Furthermore, Okker’s study goes beyond simply suggesting that there were opposing views of womanhood by offering an explanation for why women may have felt comfortable about partaking in the correspondence craze.47 Okker submits that Hale cultivated the idea of separate woman’s culture to generate a readership for her magazine and to empower women through the principle of female moral superiority. Hale relied on the ideology of sexual difference, although she continued to argue that women were not intellectually inferior, as a rationale to expand women’s influence beyond the home and into the public realm. One of her techniques to create a different and essentially feminine atmosphere within the magazine was to establish a special relationship between herself and her readers. In what Okker describes as a “sisterly editorial voice,” Hale spoke to her readers as confidential friends and encouraged them to respond with letters and to contribute poems and stories. She and other editors who used this “sisterly editorial voice” established a dialogue with their readers. Through this exchange and through Hale’s editorials and articles on moral superiority, women learned to take pride in their domestic work and to contribute to society outside the home. Moreover, the experience of submitting their writings and opinions, coupled with the intimate dialogue, produced an environment in which women became accustomed to and comfortable with engaging newspaper and magazine editors. Confident about sharing their ideas within the public realm, it seems likely that this experience made participating in the correspondence craze appear less threatening. I am not suggesting that the women who wrote to editors would necessarily place correspondence requests. Those letters do show, however, that women participated in public discourse, and if we combine this participation with the fact that women working in aid societies enclosed notes to soldiers with their goods, it seems plausible that they would not have seen their behavior in the correspondence craze as improper. Some people undoubtedly viewed all women’s involvement in the craze as shocking, but the competing interpretations of womanhood actually afforded women a range of acceptable behavior. With such a broadened definition of the “true woman” and the knowledge that women had been contributing to periodicals and newspapers for decades before the craze, it is likely that some women could have participated in the craze without loss of respectability.48

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In fact, many of the soldiers and women seeking to establish honorable relationships were concerned with propriety and assured prospective correspondents that the “strictest confidence” would be taken and the “strictest discretion” would “be kept.” Louis Vancour and friend, from Springfield, Illinois, promised that they were gentlemen and would “treat all communications with the respect and confidence due from a gentleman to a lady.” Eugene of Pekin, Illinois, pledged that “no deviations from the strict rules of propriety” would be recognized, or any “correspondence continued without the knowledge and consent of parents or guardian.” Willie Howard on the steamer Baltic assured his correspondents that “I will deal strictly honest and confidential with you.” “Two young officers” of the First New Jersey professed to the young ladies that all communications would be “strictly confidential,” but they would take “no notice” of “any communication unless accompanied by a carte-de-visite as proof of sincerity.” Some sincere advertisers declared they were “of good moral character and steady habits” and desired the same qualities from the young ladies. Other correspondents seeking spouses required “Eve’s fair daughters” to give their real names. Aware of the commitment and proprieties that correspondence with “a view to marriage” necessitated, advertisers ensured confidentiality and morality, and they asked for similar steady habits, photographs, references, and real names from prospective mates as “proof of sincerity.” Advertisers understood the novel method of the ads, but pleaded that circumstances compelled them “to resort to this medium.”49 They also realized the novelty of ads, however, did not excuse them from the rules of etiquette. In fact, correspondents seeking matrimony were more likely to pursue and guarantee propriety because of the seriousness of their actions. It was not the act of courting that was anomalous, but their method of acquaintance. Correspondents bent a few rules of introduction, but they maintained the broader precepts of courting to preserve propriety and to assure their correspondents of the sincerity of their missives. In essence, soldiers and civilians were willing to bend the code of propriety in order to maintain the decorum of meeting and courting respectable women. The fact that the correspondents were concerned about the rules of propriety indicates not only sincerity of purpose, but also that the men and women seeking correspondents came from the middle class. Nineteenth-century historians have shown that only members

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of the middle class or those on the fringes attempting to join the middling rank were so anxious to follow the rules of etiquette so conscientiously. Assuring prospective mates of their own status and hoping to attract others of their class, advertisers left several signs of their middle-class identity. For instance, when the two officers from “Grose’s Brigade,” mentioned earlier, asked for women who would not grumble “if Bridget be sick,” they signaled to all that they expected to have servants within their households, a middle-class family ideal. Their expectation that their potential wives would know how to make breakfast also hinted at middle-class feminine ideals that required women to be experts in the domestic art and managers of their households. Similarly, when a forty-six-year-old widower from New York sought a woman “willing to . . . make home pleasant and happy,” he revealed his belief in the idea that women were meant to be the emotional and spiritual nurturers of the family. Indeed, his promise to “endeavor to make her a kind husband” suggested his acceptance of a companionate marriage, which depended on the couple’s mutuality and friendship.50 In turn, women seeking only the “boys in blue” showed they valued patriotism and the ideal of men as protectors of hearth and home. Volunteers who proudly declared their rank, described their injuries, or noted their time of enlistment within their ads certainly identified with this ideal. Likewise, women who required that their correspondents “possess an income for all practical purposes” or a “moderate amount of . . . wealth” echoed society’s belief that men were the economic providers. They also revealed their own concerns about maintaining their middle-class positions. Finally, even advertisers not seeking permanent relationships communicated their middle-class status in their desires to begin a correspondence for the purpose of “mutual improvement.” Middle-class men and women utilized correspondence to exchange information, improve their penmanship and grammar, or expand their knowledge on a given subject, and hoping in the process to sharpen their intellect and strengthen their morals. Moreover, the fact that these men and women had the leisure time to devote to the art of letter writing and did not use letters simply as a means of communication was yet another indication that they were middle class. The irony is that the marks of class not only signaled potential correspondents, but were also signs to more

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conservative middle-class readers who were not as convinced this method was a safe means of introduction, especially for members of their own class.51 Hundreds of men and women placed ads, but the paucity of evidence makes it difficult to gauge the public reaction to this novel form of social interaction. Unfortunately, the only trace left of the public’s opinion concerning the correspondence craze are the editorials of the Chicago Tribune. The editors first responded to the ads on August 12, 1863, at the height of their popularity. In an article entitled “Correspondence on the Brain,” the editors reported the phenomenon without commenting on its nature. They informed their readers that, “a few months ago, an advertisement from a soldier, soliciting correspondence with young ladies was a curiosity. But the ailment has proved contagious in the army, and now this class of advertisements are [sic] inserted daily.” The tone of the article was one of amusement with this new craze. In fact, it appears the editors believed these ads were harmless because they stated that the “result will be a considerable increase in the revenue of the Post Office Department, and a brisk demand for marriage licenses when this cruel war is over.”52 Two weeks later the editors gave a less favorable report. When the ads continued to stream into the paper, they no longer saw them as amusing. The participants no longer appeared innocent, but most probably were “young, indiscreet girls, and callow boarding school misses.” The editors claimed that “boys, young men, and females of questionable character” targeted the soldiers to “dupe” them. The soldiers did not receive missives from “respectable ladies” but from a “club of clerks . . . seated upon stools in a wholesale house counting room.” Pretending to be women, these clerks supposedly sent letters to the soldiers and enclosed photographs purchased from local photographers for twenty-five cents a piece. In their closing comments, the editors expressed their disdain for the indiscreet civilians and women who placed ads. They noted that the “folly” was no longer “confined to the boys in the army,” but there were “many of this class of advertisement inserted by persons of either sex in the city.” They admitted that a “few perhaps [were] in sober earnest,” but the “great majority of them [were] from impure motives, by persons of questionable character.”53

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Although there is no evidence of a “club of clerks” conspiring to fool the soldiers in this manner, it is interesting to note the different tones of the two editorials. The editors initially viewed the correspondence as an innocent pastime that they believed would fade away. Soldiers continued to send in ads, however, and the editors continued to publish the advertisements. By publishing the ads, the editors became the third party necessary for a proper introduction, and the outcome of any relationship begun through the correspondence was thus the editors’ responsibility. When the requests did not cease, the editors felt it necessary to voice their concerns in a second, more direct article, wherein they attempted to discourage any more people, in or out of the army, from participating in this “folly.” It was the ads’ anonymity that the editors seemed most concerned with when they suggested that the correspondents were not the “young, indiscreet girls” they professed to be. Indeed, how would the soldiers know if their correspondents were propriety-conscious women, a club of clerks, or, worse, duplicitous women with vicious intentions? These women were obviously not the kind with whom to build a home or a life. The editors believed the soldiers would not know until they were totally ensnared and powerless. By revealing that deceitful characters hid behind false names and identities to mislead their correspondents intentionally, the editors hoped to deter more innocent people from becoming involved. The suggestion that men sat around forging signatures and buying fake photographs to fool soldiers seems a bit far-fetched. First, it is difficult to believe grown men would have nothing better to do than write hundreds of letters to unsuspecting soldiers merely as a joke. Second, if men or disreputable women were involved, surely they had more profitable ends in mind than simply “duping” unwary soldiers into an exchange of letters. Confidence men did devise elaborate ruses with which to inveigle soldiers and swindle them out of their money. Agents for the USSC reported that such widespread and systematic corruption thrived in all the major cities of the North, where “sick, disabled, discharged or furloughed soldiers” passed through on their journey home. Deception certainly occurred on both sides of the correspondence, with some soldiers and women using the ads simply for amusement and not revealing their true identities, but their motivations were not malicious, as the editors suggested.54

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Antebellum urbanites, however, were susceptible to the games of the confidence man, so the editors probably believed that the unceasing flow of correspondence requests was just another elaborate racket. Karen Halttunen explains that “the proliferation of moveable wealth . . . and the growing confusion and anonymity of urban living, had made possible for the first time swindles . . . and other confidence games.” Perhaps the deceptive correspondents hoped eventually to arrange a meeting, at which point they would swindle their new confidant. Such a seducer advertised as “Favorite” in January 1864. Although the “handsome young lady of” eighteen clearly announced her intentions of matrimony, one has to wonder what devious designs prompted “Favorite” to ask for “the receipt of $1” to “secure an unlimited correspondence and if mutually agreeable a meeting.”55 “Favorite” may have been a swindler, but her purpose seems a bit clearer than the correspondence practices of Hattie Burleigh. The true picture of what occurred between Hattie and her five soldier correspondents is ambiguous because the few surviving soldiers’ letters reveal only fragments of their relationships. Martie, Willie, Charles, Albert, and Harvey corresponded with Hattie between 1864 and 1865. How Hattie’s correspondence with the soldiers began or, indeed, how she acquired their names and addresses remains a mystery. Hattie wrote to a couple of the men seemingly under the pretense of collecting “war stories” that she intended to compile after the hostilities ended. Charles Field of the 108th New York thanked Hattie “for the kindness you would do me in giving me a place in your War Story, . . . but I would respectfully decline as my adventures in the army are as naught.” Lt. Harvey Lloyd asked Hattie, “as far as sketches of camp life, adventures, skirmishes &c . . . are you going to write a book?” Martie, Willie, and Albert were simply happy to have a female correspondent. Martie believed himself “highly honored at securing” her as “a correspondent,” and Willie assured Hattie he took “great pleasure in receiving” her “letters, as well as answering them.” Albert found it “refreshing to unbend the mind from the affairs of war and read a kindly letter though it” was “from one” he “never knew and perhaps never” would “except through the medium of the pen.”56 What is clear is that Hattie was not entirely honest with her soldiers, especially when it came to her true identity. Although all her

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new friends eventually knew her as Hattie, she began her correspondence with Albert under the assumed name of “Miss Lizzie,” and as “Iva May” with Harvey. When Charles asked Hattie about a correspondent of hers named “Willie,” she “positively assert[ed]” she “had not a correspondent by the name, fictitious or otherwise.” She asked Willie “never” to “reveal” her “Secret.” He replied, “you speak as though you would be afraid that a certain friend should know of our correspondence. May I be so bold as to ask if that friend has a right to object?” Interestingly, she sent Martie, Willie, and Albert photographs of herself, but did not favor Charles or Harvey with such items, even though Charles begged for a “photo” in every one of his letters. As the other men discovered, receiving a visite was no guarantee that it was a “true” likeness of their correspondent. Martie wrote discouragingly, “I’m at a loss to know if you have sent me your true picture and name. Sometimes I think you have and other times something whispers that you have not.” Willie apologized for his concerns “in regards to the picture. . . . I am convinced tis of yourself. Pardon my doubts. . . . I will entertain them no more.” Albert, too, was uncertain about the authenticity of the photo. “Miss Lizzie . . . you assure me your name is incog. [sic] are you sure it is not the case with your visite, or the visite you sent me?”57 Although fictitious names and fake photographs may have been harmless between two people “sharing a seat on a railway journey,” as the advice books indicated, the dangers became real when deeper feelings were exchanged between the two. As Martie mentioned at one point in the correspondence, it did not matter if Hattie’s picture was true because he wanted “a correspondence with some one who” would “write letters to cheer and enliven” him “in those dark and dreary hours.” Therefore, “it matters not whether I ever see the person” (although he became more serious later on). Even though Albert initially “likened” their friendship to “the house that was built upon the sands,” he hoped an “unwavering friendship” would be the result of their correspondence. With the exception of Harvey (perhaps only because other letters by him did not survive), all of Hattie’s correspondents eventually expressed feelings for her beyond friendship and desired to meet her. Willie shared his hopes when he asked, “Hattie do [you] suppose you and I will ever meet, do you think from my picture you would know me, or care to meet me?” Hattie encouraged her

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correspondents in their feelings. Charles quoted her letter: “I too wish that Charlie were where you could ‘look into his eyes,’ for then I should have the satisfaction and pleasure of seeing . . . my ‘authoress’ correspondent.” As a token of endearment, he promised to “select a few” of his “brown hairs” if in her next letter Hattie would “enclose a lock of [her] bonny brown and a piece of white or blue ribbon with which to tie [his].” He signed his letters “devotedly Charlie.” When Albert informed Hattie he would be going home on leave, he suggested stopping to see her in New Hampshire. “But to give you a call, as I would on a friend in ordinary circumstances would be perhaps considered by you inadmissible. With me I am in favor of romance or any thing you are; therefore with regard to the affair I will allow you to dictate. I would ask you to be as lenient as your views of etiquette will allow.” Perhaps the soldier most smitten with Hattie was Martie. Within a year of writing about friendship, Martie became “jealous of having any other person correspond” with her and began closing his letters with “a kiss” and “goodby my darling.” He fantasized about spending the evening with Hattie in which they would “sail in” a “yacht,” and “you say you would let me kiss you just as much as I please.” He confided that if they did meet, “this individual would be apt to fall in l—— with ‘somebody.’ ”58 The correspondence between Hattie and her soldiers ended abruptly without a hint of how or if the relationships continued. Whether Hattie intentionally lied to the men is uncertain; perhaps she wrote because it was her “duty,” as she explained to Harvey, or to pass some of her own dreary days, to seek a mate, or even to be engaged in a “wicked” yet harmless adventure. What is clear is that this type of correspondence, grounded in ill-placed confidence, represented to the Chicago Tribune editors and to middle-class moralists a formula for disaster. Victorians understood that young men and women were “seldom tempted to outright wickedness,” as Halttunen puts it, but that it was a seducer’s facade of wealth and fashion and a mild and courteous manner that enticed them. Unlike “Favorite’s” more obvious approach, Hattie’s coy behavior with each of her correspondents was “gradual and unperceived,” and therefore she represented to the editors the more dangerous of the two inappropriate women.59 Confident that proper people could become victims only through such unguarded behavior, the editors took on

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the responsibility of uncovering a potential hoax. Overall, their reaction confirms the unusual nature of the correspondence, but their admonitions did not deter or slow down the stream of ads. These ads are important to the historian for several reasons. First, they reveal that not all single people during the Civil War, whether soldiers or women, were willing to wait until the “cruel war” was over to find a mate. By using newspaper editors as the mutually known third party, as dictated by etiquette, soldiers bent social conventions to meet their needs for feminine contact and to reestablish home. The editors did not know the prospective correspondents, but the advertisers and correspondents knew the editors. By publishing the soldiers’ ads, the editors “introduced” them to women and created a “buffer” between the two parties that lessened the vulgarity that a face-to-face introduction would have produced. Desperate for communication with the opposite sex, soldiers and women improvised during a wartime situation that allowed neither the time nor the opportunity to follow all the rules of etiquette. By using the editors as a “third party,” and by meeting on the middle ground provided in the “Want” ads, however, they maintained at least a semblance of respectability. Second, the ads present a new perspective on the women who lived during the Civil War and after. Women who participated in placing and answering ads most probably did not consider themselves to be anything but “respectable.” A minority of women, such as “Favorite,” may have had less virtuous motives than simply finding a “true” friend or mate, but, overall, the women who placed ads did so with the confidence that they were doing nothing wrong. Whether women composed these advertisements or answered requests in order to pass dreary days, to express their patriotism, to meet prospective mates, or even to have a wicked adventure, their participation suggests that they were more aggressive than modern conceptions of the “true woman” construct implies. Moreover, their participation in the correspondence craze and Okker’s argument that women carried on a dialogue between editors and readers broadens our understanding of women’s seemingly bold actions during the war. Women may have been stretching the gender boundaries, or, as Okker suggests, they may have been operating well within their province of influence. The ads, therefore, establish a less restricted

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view of Victorian women, one that shows them acting more assertively in their relations with men.60 Third, and most important perhaps, these ads allowed the soldiers to avoid sinking irreparably into the military world. Volunteers placed and answered ads because they yearned for the middle-class values they left behind in their communities. They respected the family and the responsibilities of the home, viewing them as benefits of manhood. The ads show that the soldiers were receptive to the domestic images the aid societies were sending them and that the family model was important enough to them that they sought it on their own. The ads requesting “the companionship of a kind friend and a loving heart” or “gentlemen equally endowed” express the ideal of a companionate marriage. Advertisers obviously meant to catch someone’s eye, so some ads appear a bit boastful. But the men advertising for ladies of “a good reputation” and “unblemished characters” or the women wishing for “intelligent” and “affectionate” men listed traits they honestly looked for in prospective mates. Through the ads, soldiers were reaching out for the images of morality and propriety that females had been projecting throughout the war in their work in the aid societies.61 M. Debray and Monte Cristo most assuredly did not understand the ramifications of their actions when they placed their ad in the Chicago Tribune on April 27, 1863. The correspondence craze their ad sparked sent a message to the people of that era and ours that men and women will not be contained by conditions or by society’s restrictions when it comes to courting. The war that caused these two soldiers to be in Nashville, Tennessee, kept them from the “handsome and respectable ladies” of the North. By 1863, they were willing to use correspondence to aid them in their search for “fun, love, or matrimony.” Like M. Debray and Monte Cristo, many Northerners sought and found innovative methods to replace social structures destroyed by the exigencies of war. NOTES 1. M. Debray and Monte Cristo, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1863; Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1865.

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2. Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 153. 3. Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 102, 114. 4. Soldiers’ ads continued to appear through the duration of the war, but the high mark was reached in August 1863 with eighty-six ads and 138 advertisers for the month. See the Chicago Tribune, April to August 1863. 5. Jan Lewis, “Motherhood and the Construction of the Male Citizen in the United States, 1750–1850,” in Constructions of the Self, edited by George Levine (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 148. 6. Bob Wilson, Frank White, Charley Lang, and Harry Case, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1865; “Sergeant A.,” “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, February 12, 1864; Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 122–24. On nineteenth-century feminine ideals, see Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981). 7. Degler, At Odds, 6–8; How to Behave: A Pocket Manual of Republican Etiquette, and Guide to Correct Personal Habits (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1856), 15, 42, 48, 81. 8. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in NineteenthCentury Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 43, 53, 60, 258; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of MiddleClass Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 193. 9. Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 137–41. 10. Lord Chesterfield, The American Chesterfield (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857), 203–5, 211–13; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 51, 35; see also Cogan, All-American Girl, 155. Advisers usually

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classified an introduction by someone less than a good friend as improper. They viewed a meeting between two people with no introduction by a third party as even more harmful because neither had “honest” information they could have obtained from a mutual friend and thus nothing with which to measure the other. 11. Karen Rae Mehaffey, Victorian American Women, 1840–1880: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1992), 67–68. Calling and visits were done on certain days of the week and for brief periods, usually lasting only fifteen to forty-five minutes. Calling cards gave the unique opportunity of allowing one to express interest in someone without, according to Mehaffey, “putting the pursued party in a precarious position.” 12. Ellen Rothman, Hands and Heart: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic, 1984), 23, 119–22; Lystra, Searching the Heart, 158; Mehaffey, Victorian American Women, 66–67. Lystra explains that as marriage began to be based on “privatized experience of emotional openness and personal satisfaction with another . . . parents bowed out . . . because acceptance of the ideas and values of love and the self gave them little to act upon” (29). Likewise, Rothman explains that parents who tried to “impose their will” found “their children subverting or resisting their control” (66–67). 13. See Jane E. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (winter 1992), for more information about the type of women who followed the men to camp. 14. Septima M. Collis, A Woman’s War Record, 1861–1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889), 34–36; Mary Elizabeth Massey, Women in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 70–71. 15. Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 71–72. E. Anthony Rotundo notes that individuals involved in young men’s organizations during the mid–nineteenth century also engaged in this “gender blurring” by playing the female roles in their dramatic performances. He explains that this practice occurred during a time in their lives “when young men were living without maternal nurture and had to supply each other with some form of substitute,” and when they were “most separate from female company” and nervous about romantic intimacy, so “they used the stage to practice on each other.” See American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 67. 16. Elizabeth Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 7, 14–16.

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17. Schultz estimates that thirty-two hundred women worked as nurses and as many as twenty thousand worked as “hospital workers.” See “The Inhospitable Hospital,” 363. 18. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, 257–58; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 130–31. 19. Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 42, 220; George C. Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 166. Leander Stillwell quoted in Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 90–91, 96–97. Ash notes that in garrisoned towns the civilians and soldiers eventually established friendly relations. In fact, romance blossomed between some of the Federals and the Southern belles. However, Ash warns that “amity between citizens and soldiers . . . should not be exaggerated. Many of the citizens continued to resent or even hate the occupiers” (166). 20. “Brutus,” “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, June 13, 1863. 21. The songs “Just Before the Battle, Mother” and “Who Will Care for Mother Now?” were extremely popular among the troops during the war. See Irwin Silver, ed., Songs of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 153, 157. 22. Marilyn M. Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs: Women of the American Civil War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991), 250; Horton quotations from Nina Silber and Mary Beth Stevens, eds., Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters Between New England Soldiers and the Home Front (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 50; Anne L. Macdonald, No Idle Hands: The Social History of American Knitting (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 105. 23. Anonymous to Ohio Ladies’ Aid Society, October 8, 1863, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio; “Touching Letters from a Wisconsin Soldier,” United States Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 39 (July 1, 1865), 1253. 24. In a similar fashion, historian Kristie Ross believes that “lady volunteers” working on the hospital transports for the USSC began to gain independence and autonomy through confidence in their work, and as a result they desired greater freedom and power. Not only did their work broaden their views on women’s subordinate roles, but, Ross argues, “the intimacy of life on the transports . . . forced the female volunteers to reconsider the everyday forms and behavior of both men and women.” The spartan conditions on the boats, the exposure to wounded and dying men, and the cramped living quarters “highlighted the artificially and socially contrived nature of the symbols and assigned attributes of gender.” See “Arranging a

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Doll’s House: Refined Women as Union Nurses,” in Divided Houses: Gender in the Civil War, edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 109. 25. “Correspondence on the Brain,” Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1863; D. H. Jackson, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1864. 26. “Two Artillery Men,” Chicago Tribune, January 8, 1864; “Two of Abraham’s,” Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1863; B. Stillwagon and Harry Brooks, Chicago Tribune, January 9, 1865. 27. “Anonymous” to Hattie, February 9, 1864, Virginia Polytechnic Library, Special Collections, Blacksburg. 28. How to Behave, 68–70; Ladies’ Indispensable Assistant (New York: Nassau Street, 1852), 127. 29. Charlie Wallace, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, June 7, 1863. “Wanted,” Chicago Tribune: A. J. Franklin, June 18, 1863; J. C. P. and R. W. R., April 26, 1865; Fred Clayton and George Langford, April 4, 1864. 30. “Anonymous” to Esther H. Hawkes, December 24, 1863, Esther Hill Hawkes Papers, Library of Congress; “western soldier” from Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters from Camp, Battle-Field, and Prison (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865), 201–4. 31. Charles Clayton and William Cozens, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1864; Cyrus and Harry Mortimer, Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1863. 32. “Veteran,” “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1865; Harry St. Clair, Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1863; “Gay Cavalier” and “Wild Rover,” “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1863; A. B. Franklin, Chicago Tribune, May 4, 1863. 33. M. Debray and Monte Cristo, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1863. 34. Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830–1860 (New York: Institute for Research in History, with Haworth Press, 1982), 144–45; Harper’s Weekly, June 27, 1863. 35. Captain C. S., “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 1864; H. Clinton, Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1864; Charles Kelly and George Manning, Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1864. 36. Nineteenth-century women commanded the domestic circle in managing household duties and raising their children. They were educated to fulfill this role and to be companions to their husbands. However, they were not expected or encouraged to become educated for careers outside of the home. Cogan, All-American Girl, 41. Judging from his description, Percy Van Dyke desired an ideal woman. He advertised for “a young healthy, educated, and refined wife of an impassioned decided disposition; great beauty

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not absolutely essential, but a fine, well-developed figure indispensable.” See Percy Van Dyke, “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, February 7, 1864. 37. Charles Lynch, John S. Dayle, and Jones M. Clarry, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1863. “R. H. B.,” August 27, 1863; John W. and Willie M., August 12, 1863; Osborn L. and Horace G., May 4, 1863; Peter Geisel and Joseph Reamer, May 25, 1863: all in Chicago Tribune. 38. Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs, 286; Van Dyke, “Matrimonial”; “Frank,” “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, January 22, 1864; John Gephard, “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, January 30, 1864. 39. Massey, Women in the Civil War, 254–56; Helen to George Aplin, July 20, 1862, George Aplin Papers, Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For more information about the undermobilization of men in the North, see Thomas R. Kemp, “Community and War: The Civil War Experience of Two New Hampshire Towns,” in Toward a Social History of the American Civil War, edited by Maris A. Vinovskis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 40. Cogan, All-American Girl, 143; see Lystra’s Searching the Heart for more about women’s concerns with their prospective mates’ earning potential. 41. Grace Greenwood and Gertie Hamilton, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1863; Lina Douglass and Gertrude Atherton, Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1864. 42. Annie and Mattie, Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1864; Edith and Maude Wellington, Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1863; Nina and Nelly Marston, “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, February 12, 1864; “Anonymous,” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1865; Eve and Sue, Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1863. 43. Over the years, to guard themselves against female pursuers, men insisted that women wanting to propose had to indicate “their intention by wearing a scarlet petticoat with a clearly visible hem.” This signal gave the bachelors a warning and a sporting chance to get away. See R. Brasch, How Did It Begin? Customs and Superstitions and Their Romantic Origins (New York: David McKay, 1966), 31–32. 44. Mrs. C. R. N., “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1864; Henry Harmless, Sergeant Williams, and W. M. Napier, Chicago Tribune, April 25, 1864; Ralph Bangcliffe, Edward Mortimer, and John J. Louce, Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1864; Massey, Women in the Civil War, 259. 45. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” in The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, edited by Michael Gordon (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), and Welter, Dimity Convictions, 27–28.

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46. Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: Lyceum, 1989), 101, 115. 47. Anne Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977), 7; Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 15, 17, 27. See also Lystra, Searching the Heart, 123–24, and Cogan, All-American Girl, 4, 75, 121–22, 133, 159. 48. Okker, Our Sister Editors, 15, 23–24, 31, 60–63. 49. Louis Vancour, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, December 10, 1863; Eugene, Chicago Tribune, February 27, 1864; Willie Howard, Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1864; Harry Clarke and Edgar Effingham, “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, February 12, 1864; Charles Kelly or George Manning, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1864; see also Chicago Tribune, August 25, 1863, May 2, 4, 5, 6, 1863, and June 16, 1863; Willie Roberts and Eugene Curtis, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1863; Edgar Effingham, Nina and Nelly Marston, “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, February 12, 1864; C. Hamilton, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, September 5, 1863. According to Rothman, men and women actively courting prized sincerity as a gauge by which to measure each other’s intentions and used it to uncover deceptive mates early enough in the courtship and thus avoid disaster. See Hands and Hearts, 42. 50. Cogan, All-American Girl, 79–80; Rotundo, American Manhood, 132–33; Stephen M. Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 24–25; Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1863; New York Herald, January 19, 1864. 51. Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1863, and July 16, 1864; Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991), xx. 52. “Correspondence on the Brain,” Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1863. 53. “The Army Correspondence Mania,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1863. 54. United States Sanitary Commission, Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 2 vols. (New York: USSC, 1886) (hereafter, “USSC Doc.”), USSC Doc. 26, June 28, 1861, 11; Vincent Colyer, Report of Vincent Colyer on the Reception and Care of the Soldiers Returning from the War (New York: G. A. Whitehorne, 1865), 10. 55. Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 6–7; “Favorite,” “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, January 20, 1864. Halttunen’s study provides answers to why the editors may have been suspicious of the correspondents from the newspapers. In a survey conducted by the New York police

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in 1860, it was estimated that of twenty-five hundred criminals in the city, one hundred were “‘damper sneaks,’ men who posed as businessmen and engaged in elaborate negotiations or simply loitered around places of business to steal unguarded bonds of cash; and twenty-five were forgers.” Police estimated that nearly one out of ten professional criminals in New York in the 1860s was a confidence man. Halttunen also notes that targets of the confidence men were just as easily men as women. 56. Charles Field to Hattie Burleigh, August 27, 1864; Harvey Lloyd to “Iva May,” June 1, 1864; Martie R. Connally to Hattie Burleigh, July 2, 1864; “Willie” to Hattie Burleigh, June 23, 1864; Albert Jones to Hattie Burleigh, September 11, 1864. All in the Hattie Burleigh Papers, United States Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa. It is clear that there are letters missing between Hattie and her soldier correspondents because of references made to other letters. Unfortunately, the only letters that survived are five from Martie, one from Willie, six from Charles, four from Albert, and two from Harvey. (I am not certain, but I do not believe Hattie Burleigh to be the same “Hattie” mentioned previously in this chapter. See note 27.) 57. Charles Field to Hattie Burleigh, August 27, 1864; “Willie” to Hattie Burleigh, June 23, 1864; Martie R. Connally to Hattie Burleigh, September 18, 1864; “Willie” to Hattie Burleigh, June 23, 1864; Albert Jones to Hattie Burleigh, October 6, 1864, emphasis in original. Hattie Burleigh Papers. 58. Martie R. Connally to Hattie Burleigh, September 18, 1864; Albert Jones to Hattie Burleigh, September 11, 1864; “Willie” to Hattie Burleigh, June 23, 1864; Charles Field to Hattie Burleigh, September 11 and September 16, 1864; Albert Jones to Hattie Burleigh, October 6, 1864, emphasis in original; Martie R. Connally to Hattie Burleigh, October 26, 1865, November 27, 1865, and “From Fort McHenry,” no date, emphasis in original. Hattie Burleigh Papers. 59. Harvey Lloyd to Hattie Burleigh, June 1, 1864, Hattie Burleigh Papers; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women, 5. 60. Okker, Our Sister Editors. Indeed, Lystra argues that women were quite aggressive in their courting relationships, and men were more submissive than first believed. Although the nineteenth century was defined by its separate spheres, Lystra believes “Victorians skillfully used their sex roles rather than slavishly followed them.” In actuality, the “gender lines” were more flexible “than the static view of separate spheres has allowed.” See Searching the Heart, 124. 61. “Montague,” “Matrimonial,” New York Herald, March 2, 1864; Edith and Maude Wellington, “Wanted Correspondence,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1863; J. C. Field, Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1863; “Minnie and Grace,” Chicago Tribune, April 6, 1864.

5 The Communal Contract Northern Women Care for the Union Family Through Aid Societies WHEN SARAH GALLOP GREGG left for Mound City Hospital in late December 1862, she unwittingly began a nursing career that would last until the cessation of hostilities in 1865. Her experiences demonstrate the communal relationship that bound the “home” to the Union war effort. Men and women responded to the call to arms in terms of responsibility to their families. Gregg, for example, traveled to Mound City to nurse her soldier-husband and took up the work of assisting other wounded and sick volunteers as a service to her community. She and her Northern sisters also contributed to the war effort because they realized the government was incapable of caring for the soldiers without support from “home.” It was the small-town families, after all, who offered their men as soldiers to fight the war, and it was the small-town aid societies who sewed and cooked to supply these “hometown boys.” Finally, Gregg’s encounters with wartime bureaucracies shows that women bristled against the impersonal government structures that they believed cut them off from the men they were trying to aid. The mammoth army and USSC bureaucracies undermined the intimate social relations that had defined men’s and women’s lives before the war and endangered the communal contract that bound the townspeople to their local regiments. To counter the detached and often cold treatment men experienced in the service, women projected the comforting imagery of the home through their supplies and their care of the soldiers.1 Sarah Gregg, like many other women who arrived at military hospitals to nurse their relatives, came to Mound City with the sole intention of attending to her husband, David, who was injured in battle.

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Once she witnessed the unbearable suffering of the sick, wounded, and dying soldiers, however, she felt she could not return home without also comforting them. Over the next two weeks, she familiarized herself with the hospital by examining the facilities and noting the conditions of the sick and wounded. She concluded that she could best serve the men by procuring desperately needed supplies.2 On January 14, 1863, Gregg penned a letter to her hometown Ottawa Ladies’ Aid Society in Illinois and requested hospital goods. The Ottawa ladies immediately referred her to Mrs. Mary Livermore because the society had donated its supplies to the NWSC in Chicago, and its agent Livermore ultimately determined who would receive the precious goods so necessary to the soldiers’ survival.3 While waiting for a response from Livermore, Gregg busied herself with visits to the wards. Her daily rounds convinced her that the “sick in the hospital [were doing] no better” than when she had first arrived. She grew frustrated from watching the “distress of sick, wounded, and dyeing [sic]” and felt utterly powerless to comfort them. Her feelings of helplessness increased the following day when she learned she would not get the requested items because she was not a “detailed nurse.” In her diary, she vented her anger toward Livermore and bureaucrats in general. Accusing Livermore and the Ottawa ladies of creating “too much red tape about this matter,” she left to God their absolution for such callous behavior, for she was certain no one else would forgive them. These bureaucratic obstacles did not thwart her efforts, however. She continued to consider the “great need of delicacies for the sick.” But lacking help from aid societies and being unfamiliar with Mound City, she wondered, “[H]ow am I to get them?”4 Gregg sought help from her hometown society because she assumed her relationship with Mrs. Henshaw and Mrs. Magill (a friend and aid society member) would garner special consideration for her petition. Not only did Gregg visit Mrs. Henshaw socially, but she was also intimate enough with Mrs. Magill to enjoy stays with her for two and three days at a time. Furthermore, Gregg was a successful milliner in Ottawa and more than likely knew many of the aid society ladies on a business level. Whether she was a contributor to the society at the time of her request or not did not seem to concern her. The fact that she was a citizen of Ottawa and that she was

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appealing to the Ottawa society in the name of Ottawa men should have made her claim on the supplies legitimate. The realization that her hometown society was part of a larger entity with whom she had no familiarity or status left her feeling cut off from her own community. Her emotions developed into anger and frustration when she considered her aid society’s refusal. Gregg could not explain why Mrs. Livermore and not the officers of the Ottawa society determined the placement of the Ottawa ladies’ goods, unless the system had been corrupted by political power. Although she did not agree with the arrangement or fully understand it, she realized that, for the time being, if she wanted supplies for the Mound City boys, she would have to work within the established system.5 Before Gregg had an opportunity to solve her supply problem, Mrs. Henshaw, on behalf of the Ottawa Ladies’ Aid Society, asked her to take charge of Camp Stebbins Hospital at Ottawa. She accepted on the condition that she “be detailed by proper authority” (hoping, it seems, that official status would end her supply problems) and included in her requests a pass from Cairo to Ottawa. While Gregg waited to hear from Mrs. Henshaw about whether her terms would be approved or not, she continued her hospital visits. The following day, her feelings of impotence increased because of the arrival of a “fresh lot of sick and wounded” to Mound City. Transported from the battlefield aboard a steamer, the soldiers had been “without any comforts whatsoever, laying on the decks without cots or beds” for several days. Gregg believed she had never seen “a more pitiable sight.” Exposure to the elements on board the boats and delayed medical treatment were too much for one of the men, who died while his wounds were being cleaned and dressed. It is unlikely that this was the first casualty Gregg witnessed at Mound City, and yet she took the time to record his death in her diary. “One man died,” she wrote, “and still I had no power to help them.” By this notation, she reveals her understanding of the very real cost of the bureaucratic lines of authority that withheld the supplies from her. She knew that even if these men had arrived at the hospital immediately after the battle, her ability to help them was limited because the hospital lacked many essential medical goods. Surely Gregg realized that the man probably would have died even if she had supplies, but without such materials she was utterly powerless.6

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Gregg’s sense of uselessness also stemmed from the fact that she was not an authorized nurse. This reality hampered her efforts at gaining “delicacies” from Ottawa and undoubtedly discouraged her from assisting other patients at Mound City. The day after the fresh lot of wounded arrived, however, she received a letter from Mrs. Henshaw announcing Gregg’s appointment as matron of Camp Stebbins and informing her that Mrs. Livermore would contact her with the necessary details.7 It took ten days for Livermore to approve Gregg’s appointment and to complete the governmental paperwork. She then directed Gregg to report to her at the NWSC rooms in Chicago. Convinced that her husband’s eyes were “much improved” and that he did not need her assistance any longer, Gregg readied herself for “another field of duty.” With her authorization and instructions from Livermore secured, she left her husband and boarded a train for Chicago on February 5, 1863.8 Gregg’s experience with the USSC bureaucracy was only the first of many clashes she would have with army and commission bureaucrats. Like many women who went to the front to labor for the boys, she expected divisive competition to dissolve as men and women worked together in a communal effort to relieve the wants of the Union family. When experience proved otherwise, she learned she would have to sidestep the recalcitrant societies and gather supplies on her own “begging expeditions.” Her resourcefulness characterizes the female nurses who maneuvered their way through the labyrinth of red tape created by both homefront relief societies and military structures.9 Gregg hoped Livermore’s stamp of approval might empower her to override the “Political Ascendancy” that blocked her from supplies and characterized her efforts as unauthorized. Whether she understood that the bureaucratic infrastructure was necessary to mobilize the North effectively is uncertain, but it is important to recognize that she, like most nineteenth-century Americans, was unaccustomed to such a mammoth federal government and an association as large as the USSC and that her interaction with these organizations would have been daunting at the very least. Soldiers felt the same frustrations with the paperwork that slowed the military processes. In a pamphlet extolling the USCC, the Christian counterpart to the USSC, the editors proclaimed their personal interactions with the

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soldiers cut through the red tape and therefore kept the connection between the home and the camp alive. The pamphlet describes how when a “brave young man’s” wounds are dressed and he is given “a drink of ice-cold lemonade just prepared,” he responds by saying, “‘Ah! There’s no red tape process here! You men of the Christian Commission give a fellow what he needs, when he needs it, without a tedious process of waiting for orders, and then waiting for them to be filled.’ ” Most civilian war workers, like Gregg, tolerated the red tape created by the bureaucracies, even if they did not wholly agree with it. But they also manipulated the system and at times ignored army and USSC regulations when they did not believe the bureaus operated in the best interest of the troops. They did this for a couple of reasons.10 First, men and women involved in the war effort identified with the soldiers as members of a community. Most civilians knew friends and neighbors who enlisted, and they viewed the war in very personal terms. Phillip S. Paludan explains that midcentury Americans viewed their world through the context of the village. They saw themselves and their families as an integral part of their towns and believed that the prosperity of all relied on a symbiotic relationship. It was a resident’s duty to have respect for and to participate in the town’s government. Indeed, reverence for democratic ideology began at a very young age. Mothers imbued the responsibilities of citizenship and self-government in their sons and daughters as soon as they could walk, and schoolteachers reinforced the republican lessons. Boys and girls were taught a civil religion that required them to memorize a type of “federal catechism” contained in Noah Webster’s spellers and readers. Boys learned the rules and advantages of selfgovernment, the wonders of the Constitution, and the benefits of emulating the Founding Fathers and Mothers, especially George Washington. As boys, they practiced the democratic ideals through their numerous school activities; as men, they participated in their local governments “by writing laws, serving on juries, and if need be by forming posses.” Local political offices rotated frequently, and as a consequence most men had the opportunity to serve as a member of the town council, commissioner of roads, or even mayor. Their democratic ideals were reflected in their governmental participation. A greater percentage of citizens voted during the mid–nineteenth

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century than ever before or since. Men were involved in the political process at the local, state, and federal levels and thoroughly understood and cared about the issues of the day.11 According to Lori Ginzberg, women also exercised their political wings, so to speak, in their participation in antebellum benevolent societies. Through electing officers, taking minutes, and voting, they, too, were submerged in a political culture. They may not have been able to vote in public elections, but that did not diminish their understanding of or participation in the democratic process. Furthermore, their political roles within the societies gave them an outlet with which to express their patriotism. In her study The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, Julie Roy Jeffrey claims that both white and black female abolitionists prior to the war had become accustomed to public involvement. They had “created and circulated propaganda, raised thousands of dollars for the cause, made speeches, petitioned the government, assisted fugitives, taught blacks how to read and write, opposed segregation, and lobbied their churches to take a public stand against slavery.” With the onset of the Civil War, women continued this political participation with even more enthusiasm.12 Men and women’s immersion in the political culture, then, shaped the ways in which they responded to the “battle cry of freedom.” The cause of the country had an intimate meaning for every citizen because each had to decide what was worth fighting for. Paludan argues that because men tied the political and economic fortunes of the country to their own personal prosperity, they believed that the destruction of the federal government would destroy their economic welfare and civil liberties. They pledged their allegiance to the preservation of the Union because this preservation ensured the protection of their local body politic. Paludan notes that civic participation at the local level shaped the average citizen’s concept of the national government. Indeed, the federal government’s powers rarely directly touched a citizen’s life. The only federal representative that people regularly came into contact with was their local postmaster. Yet in spite of the weakness of the federal government, argues Paludan, the republican catechism and the local nature of the political system had inspired unity and devotion to the country. This devotion was played out at the communal level, where men and women viewed their responsibilities to

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their country through their obligations to their townspeople and to their families. The home, therefore, had multiple roles. It provided the military with its soldiers, it stood as an ideal, and it offered to guide the soldiers morally. Consequently, during the war, when paperwork slowed or halted supplies and resulted in men’s deaths, female nurses and women society workers believed they had a duty to the soldiers of their communities to override such a costly system.13 Second, civilians intervened as it became clear that the government could not handle all of the logistics or provide enough supplies. After the Battle of Gettysburg, for instance, women and men from surrounding towns and from as far away as Washington, D.C., and New York flocked to Pennsylvania to care for the wounded. According to USSC representative Georgeanna Woolsey, the outpouring of civilian benevolence answered the enormous needs after the battle. “As usual, just where the Government had left off the Commission had come in,” explained Woolsey. As the healthy army retreated from the field, they left behind the injured, the sick, and the dead. Army surgeons, attendants, and nurses set up impromptu “Corps hospitals” with whatever materials they had available and began ministering to the wounded soldiers. The work was overwhelming in most cases. Surgeons lacked proper hospital equipment, sufficient medical stores, and enough staff to care for the wounded in an efficient manner. Once the surgeon had attended to a soldier’s wounds, the soldier, if he was able, was usually given permission to make his “way for the cars.” The problem arose, noted Woolsey, when the soldiers arrived too late and the trains had already left, or when the cars were full and the soldiers were denied a ride. When this happened, “these poor fellows belong[ed] to no one”; with the “[field] hospital at one end, [and] the railroad at the other, the soldiers fell between the two.” For these men and the men who could not “make their way” to the trains, the USSC, USCC, and independent civilian workers became the difference between life and death.14 Woolsey realized the important role that home played in caring for the troops. When she wrote to the ladies who supported the USSC, she noted their part in the battle against the real enemy—death. “You fed and you sheltered them [the soldiers] just when no one else could have done so; and out of the boxes and barrels of good and nourishing things, which you people at home had supplied, we took

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all that was needed.” From these “boxes and barrels” of supplies, the USSC was able to care for all of the men “under their immediate and particular attention.” “Some of you sent a stove (that is, the money to get it),” noted Woolsey, “some of you, the beef stock, some of you the milk and fresh bread.” In other barrels, she found blackberry and black currant syrups, tea, coffee, soft crackers, tamarinds, cherry brandy, and supplies of shirts, drawers, dressing gowns, socks, and slippers. The goods forwarded from home enabled Woolsey and the hundreds of civilian workers to attend to the soldiers. “How lucky we felt ourselves in having the immense satisfaction of distributing these things,” Woolsey graciously wrote, “which all of you, hard at work in villages and cities, were getting ready and sending off, in faith.”15 Woolsey’s characterization of the government’s inability to account for the delays of the trains as an unfortunate, but unavoidable fact glossed over the more obvious inadequacies of the army’s policies in caring for its wounded. As Woolsey related the effectiveness of the USSC and of the other civilians at Gettysburg by citing the number of men served, it became blatantly clear that the army left so many men to their own devices that without outside support many of them would have died. She calculated, for instance, that she and her coworkers provided food for sixteen thousand men over three weeks. They kept hundreds of men comfortable, fed, and refreshed during the day and sheltered twelve hundred at night with “their wounds dressed, [and] their supper and breakfast secured.” Woolsey’s lack of criticism toward the government probably had more to do with the fact that her report appeared in a published pamphlet directly after the battle to persuade potential donors of the efficacy of the USSC than with her complicity in covering up the military’s shortcomings. In a letter to her mother during the Peninsular Campaign, when she worked on the sanitary transport ships, she more openly expressed her anger toward the government’s neglect. The “Commission” provided the soup, tea, and soft bread as well as the stimulants, lint, bandages, and splits. “We fed from our kitchen 600 men for two days on two of these Government ‘all ready’ boats,” wrote Woolsey sarcastically.16 The importance of civilian aid was most conspicuous by its absence. The men of the Twenty-ninth Iowa, for instance, suffered from heatstroke as they chased the Confederates across Arkansas in the summer of 1863. So many of the men fell during the march that

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there were not enough ambulances to accommodate all of them. The historian of the Twenty-ninth Iowa noted that it became necessary “to fill the ambulances to their capacity, send them ahead of the marching column as far as it was deemed safe to go, leave them by the road-side and return to others.” Although logistical problems like this were common, army officials and surgeons did not necessarily appreciate all the civilian aid that they received. They did realize, however, that without civilian supplies and assistance, more of the sick and wounded would have perished. They were thus often forced to tolerate civilian assistance in the chaotic aftermath of battle.17 Furthermore, women chose occasionally to sidestep army and USSC regulations because the remote structures of both agencies cut women off from personal interaction with these agencies and with the soldiers who benefited from their gifts. Before the war, benevolence leaders were able to motivate the ladies of the community by working with them face to face. Females contributing to a society felt connected to the process of the organization because they could see the needs of the poor in their community and could determine whether society officers properly applied their gifts. Likewise, women personally distributed their goods and believed that through individual contact they could morally encourage the destitute. Of course, during the war soldiers usually fought away from home, and the sick and wounded languished in field hospitals located on a far off battlefront, so it was impossible for women to account for the use of their contributions. But the reciprocal relationship between a soldier and his community demanded that women know whether their men were being cared for. Women’s familial and patriotic duties required them to ensure that their men received physical and spiritual succor.18 When the USSC attempted to revamp the whole benevolence system of the country at the beginning of the war by asking women to channel their supplies through a national agency, it threatened the very essence of communally based benevolence. The first communication with the numerous societies across the North came from Frederick Law Olmstead, the USSC corresponding secretary. In the circular addressed to the “Loyal Women of America,” Olmstead set the tone of aloofness that would become characteristic of women’s perception of the sanitary elite. He introduced the agency as “a volunteer and unpaid bureau of the War Department” and asked for

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women’s “gift-offerings of their own handiwork.” He emphasized that their benevolence must be “administered in a disciplined fashion.” Thus, not only did he suggest that women had no experience in benevolent work, but he implied, notes Jeanie Attie, that the “organized precedents set by women’s groups were inadequate to carry on the work of national importance.” The exigencies of war apparently required a national infrastructure supervised by men. The USSC thus undercut the kind of interplay women had experienced in their own societies, which allowed suggestions and questions from all its members, and by placing benevolence under the direction of men it usurped the power women had gained through their local societies.19 Finally, by sending their “gifts” through a central agency, women not only would lose control over the destination of their goods, but also would have no way of knowing if their supplies were being received by the soldiers who most needed them. This loss of authority over their gifts also created a gulf between the hometown society and the soldiers. Women could not be certain that their handiwork was having the physical and emotional impact they had intended; moreover, the USSC made unending demands for more and more supplies and accused the women of being selfish if they gave their time and efforts to the needy in their own communities. The USSC came to be known as the “soulless” society because the leaders seemed to be concerned only with numbers and bureaucratic efficiency and appeared to have little interest in the soldiers or the women making the supplies.20 The USSC leaders’ expectations were based on the contemporary philosophy about sex-based behavior. The motivation behind women’s wartime labors, explained an anonymous author in the soldiers’ newspaper the Armory Square Hospital Gazette, did not stem from political purposes but from an innate duty to serve the sick. The author claimed that not only were a woman’s sympathies heightened by “the voice of affliction,” but she would lose a sense “of danger and assume preternatural courage” that knew neither fears nor consequences. A biologically formed “undaunted spirit” over which she presumably had no control would direct her body and soul. From this perspective, then, Sarah Gregg’s motivation to help the sick and wounded at Mound City sprang from the natural designs of her sex and was not voluntary at all.21

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Attie also notes that Dr. Henry Bellows, the USSC president, and other USSC leaders likewise theorized that women’s labor emanated from their natural moral purity instead of from “human exertion and skill.” Their gifts and contributions came from their need to fulfill their wifely and womanly duties. As a result, Bellows viewed women’s contributions as limitless because he assumed women could not control their urge to help. When the women felt that the USSC undervalued their goods, however, they retaliated by sending their supplies either directly to the soldiers through state agencies or, worse still, to the rival USCC. It was true that women did respond to the needs of their family members by offering supplies, but they did so with the knowledge that they were helping the country while they were aiding their own men. By tying women’s work to their sex roles, USSC leaders failed to recognize that women responded to their country’s call as patriotic citizens, just as men played their civic roles when they enlisted.22 The duties of citizens to their communities reflected the separate sphere precept and gender ideology that assigned men to the public realm and women to the private world. Men governed the town in the capacity of mayor, lawmaker, lawman, and judge, just as they acted as the patriarchs of their own families. As an extension of their duty to defend their homes and protect their family members, they guarded the town and its citizens from physical danger. Women fed and clothed their families and through their benevolent societies provided the same services to the soldiers of local regiments. They acted as the moralizing agents of their families by comforting and guiding their relatives emotionally and spiritually. In a larger sense, however, they hoped to generate and regenerate society through their benevolent work and virtuous influences. During the war, they used their moralizing power as a stabilizing agent. They tethered men to the ameliorating powers of the home by sending supplies and letters. When a man enlisted, he responded to his patriotic duty as a citizen and to his familial responsibility as a father, son, or brother. In a like manner, women claimed that they, too, were enlisting for the duration of the war by providing for those who could fight, and thus were responding patriotically within the boundaries of their duties as mothers, wives, and daughters.23

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Wisconsin governor Alexander Randall’s proclamation to the women of the state in 1861 reflected these gender-based obligations to family and community. Although he addressed the appeal to “patriotic women,” his first petition was not to their sense of patriotism, but instead to their sense of duty defined in terms of their sex. So certain was Randall that women would willingly apply themselves to the work of making hospital goods that he stated that he knew they would “respond cheerfully” to his request for lint and bandages. But he was not so certain that they would encourage their men to fight, so within the second paragraph he attempted to raise their patriotic conscience by first characterizing men’s nationalistic duties. Husbands, brothers, and sons were called on to “aid in subduing rebellion, in punishing treason, in the maintenance of Government and in the execution of the laws,” exclaimed Randall. The nation’s call, however, was not to men alone, but to women, too. “It is your country and your government as well as theirs that is now in danger,” he noted. Women’s role was not in the physical defense of the nation, but through emotional and spiritual support they could “give strength and courage . . . to those who go to do battle for all that is dear to us here.” He concluded confidently that when “the occasion calls, many, very many Florence Nightingales will be found in our goodly land.”24 Randall utilized the ideal of the communal contract most likely because it was a common way for people to understand their duties. The bond between the community and the soldier was based on a reciprocal relationship that placed responsibilities on both. On the soldiers rested the defense of the community’s political liberties and the protection of the physical boundaries of the town. If they did their jobs successfully, martial glory would bring honor to the family, to the town, and to the state. In turn, the community assumed the physical, emotional, and spiritual support of the men. As part and parcel of this support, the soldiers assumed that the townspeople would also care for the soldiers’ families in return for the sacrifices they themselves were making on the battlefield. This mutual relationship forged an unspoken contract between the two: success on the battlefield depended on both parties’ performing their obligations. If the soldiers failed in their duties, the result could be the loss of a battle. Several losses could add up to ultimate defeat. Similarly,

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the lack of physical, emotional, or spiritual community support could demoralize the troops badly enough to affect their will to fight or, worse, make them desert.25 Reid Mitchell suggests that the duality of the communal contract could be a blessing as well as a burden. He explains that communities never really relinquished their hold on soldiers. Through letters, townspeople extended the domestic arm to inform the men about local news, to render advice about personal matters, to give admonitions against immoral behavior, and to comfort with words of love and support. Community ties, too, were ever present within the regiments themselves because the units were composed of citizens from a soldier’s own town. The townspeople could monitor the men’s behavior because their comrades in arms would write their families about the activities of all the men in the unit. Because soldiers were aware that their comrades reported their bravery in battle and their comportment in camp and town, they tried to behave according to their families’ expectations. Ira Dodd described the monitoring power of home. “We fought with the feeling that we were under the straining eyes of those who loved us and had sent us forth.” Others, such as a soldier at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, felt the corrective voice of his mother through her letters. The Union lad had been sent to the guardhouse for drinking, fighting, and swearing, but by that evening he was “taking a good repenting cry between the blankets.” His commanding officer explained that the transformation had begun about the time the soldier received a letter from his mother that afternoon. “I have no doubt that she spoke of the Sabbathschool, the church, and the prayer he used to say when a little fellow at home.”26 Letters passing from home to the camp and from camp to the home became a form of moral oversight that both officers and family members used for their own purposes. For instance, officers hoped to create dedicated soldiers by capitalizing on their sense of responsibility to their families and communities as dictated by the constructs of gender ideology. A true man was a brave man who willingly and courageously defended his family and country. Or, as Mitchell puts it, “to be a good son, a good brother, a good husband and father, and to be a good citizen meant trying to be a good soldier.” To maintain these ideals, a commander did not hesitate to

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invoke the moral power of a recruit’s wife or mother when he was attempting to curb that recruit’s drunken or illicit behavior. Capt. James Wren tied Dye Davis to a board to sober him up. When Davis pleaded with Wren to release him, Wren refused. Instead of promising to reform or complaining about the harsh treatment, Davis felt the shame of his situation and cried out, “O what would my Mary say if she saw me here?” Wren capitalized on Davis’s love for Mary, “the great cord to be touched,” and replied, “What would your Mary— your Mary would be just like me. When she married you, she thought she had a man and when I enlisted [you] I thought I had a man, but we were both mistaken.” The humiliation reformed Davis. From then on, he behaved manly. He was wounded three times and died at the Wilderness. Whether Mary would have approved of using her love to reform her husband is uncertain, but most family members utilized communication from the war front to keep informed about their relatives’ actions, and they sent letters to the camp either to correct destructive conduct or to praise Christian behavior.27 Letters from home could also be harmful, however. According to Mitchell, the duty men felt for their country was based on their responsibilities to their families. A man could perform on the battlefield only if he believed “things were all right at home. Otherwise, the claims of home threatened his devotion to the army.” Letters filled with financial woes placed the soldier in a position in which he had to decide between the duty to provide for his family and his responsibilities to the Union. Mitchell explains that a society expected the true man to provide for his family, but also to serve his country. Because men joined the service as an extension of their duties to their families, they expected the military to support those families financially. When the federal government failed to pay in a timely fashion, thus not honoring the communal contract, it directly affected a soldier’s ability to sustain his family’s solvency. Therefore, his morale declined most when he received letters from his wife about the family’s suffering for want of food and other necessities because he felt he could do nothing to end their woes.28 Pay was perhaps the most destructive issue for African American soldiers and their families. When Northern blacks enlisted, they were promised pay equal to what white soldiers received. But when the first paymaster came around, blacks soldiers received only ten dollars

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out of thirteen, and then an additional three were deducted for uniform expenses, a deduction that white soldiers did not have to pay. Most black soldiers refused to accept the pay unless it was equal. By doing this, they believed they were serving the cause of freedom and equality for their people. George Stephens, a member of the Fiftyfourth Massachusetts, explained, “we did not enlist for money but we feel the men who enlisted us and who accepted our service never intended that we should be treated different from other Massachusetts men.” Unfortunately, this noble gesture was at the expense of their families’ comfort. Many black soldiers received “suffering letters from home.” Wives and children were starving and freezing. Others were sent to the poor house. Perhaps most frustrating for these men was the fact that they could provide more for their families as civilians. As a soldier of the Sixth USCT explained, “when I was at home I could make a living for her and my two little ones; but now that I am a soldier they must do the best they can or starve.”29 Letters filled with the miseries being endured at home questioned a man’s ability as a breadwinner. Historian Michael Kimmel explains that around the turn of the nineteenth century, America experienced a market revolution. As the economy became more commercial, the two types of manhood ideals prominent in the eighteenth century— the Hero Artisan and the Genteel Patriarch—could not keep up with a faster-paced economy or with a society that began to prize merit over inheritance. The Self-Made Man emerged to compete in the market. The primary function of the husband was as the sole breadwinner of the family. Men whose incomes did not allow their wives the luxury of being a household manager somehow did not measure up to the ideal. Husbands were supposed to provide their families with a protective home, clothes, and food. Jeanne Boydston argues that with the shift to a commercially based economy, a new culture of gender developed in which “‘labor’ would become synonymous with wages, and wages synonymous with manhood.” Therefore, when a soldier received letters about the inadequacy of goods or services that were his responsibility, he became frustrated because he was caught between two equally important duties.30 The USSC was aware of the morale-building importance of a soldier’s maintaining his financial responsibilities to his family. After one of its inspections of the army in the fall of 1861, it suggested that the

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soldier “should be encouraged to send money home” as a way to improve “[his] moral tone . . . by keeping up his sense of continuing relation with his family.” It reasoned that the soldier “scarcely needs money” because the government took care of all of his wants. By sending the money home, the soldier fulfilled his breadwinning obligation to the home and prevented himself from misusing his money on “unwholesome food (pies and the like) and unwholesome drink.” Living up to a man’s financial responsibility preserved a soldier “from vices in the camp” and made him “a better citizen when he return[ed] to civil life.”31 Domestic pressures touched married and single volunteers alike. Charles O. Musser joined the Twenty-ninth Iowa in December 1862, and by the following summer his father was sending letters about the increased workload on the family farm. Charles did not allow his father’s hardships to persuade him to return home because he believed it was his “duty to enlist in my country’s cause.” Charles understood the “ties that bind a man’s mind to home,” but told his father that “my country’s ties are stronger.” He did note, however, that men that have families who depend on them for protection and support had stronger ties to home. Many soldiers, like Charles, felt that their military duties prohibited them from solving domestic problems. Some soldiers told their loved ones that they did not want to hear the troubles; the women would have to manage household concerns on their own. If the letters and complaints became too frequent, soldiers deserted because they felt that their primary duties belonged to their families. Mitchell suggests that the men “believed they had to go home and look after those whose claims were more immediate than those of the Union.” The communal contact could be a tie that bound the man to his country, but it also could pull the man home. Civilians understood the kind of hold familial duties had over a soldier. Some families exploited the ideals and begged their men to return. Other families utilized the familial cords to further the Union cause. The wives and mothers who used the communal ties to support the troops performed much of their work in the societies.32 As members of families and communities, women answered Lincoln’s call immediately. The nineteenth-century communal mentality influenced their decisions about the structure of their aid societies, the choice of their supplies, and their methods of caring for the

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volunteers. Within the voluntary networks they had established before the war, they gathered food and clothing for the soldiers of their hometowns. Most women did not enlist their “services for their Soldiers” in the organized manner of the ladies of Philadelphia, who met and formed an association just weeks following the attack upon Fort Sumter. Rather, they met the immediate needs of their men without giving much thought to equipping them beyond their threemonth enlistment. They attended their town’s war meetings and became an intricate part of the rush to equip and muster the men of their communities. They collected the food, blankets, clothing, and other necessities that soldiers would need to see them safely to the field. They assumed that from that point the government would provide the essentials for their men.33 African American men and women also held war meetings. The Bethel Church in Boston did so within thirty-six hours of Lincoln’s call for troops. The men proclaimed, “we are ready to stand by and defend the Government with ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’ ” They also suggested that “the colored women could go as nurses, seamstresses, and warriors if need be.” While Lincoln still hoped to return the seceded states to the union without any change to the “peculiar institution,” these African Americans were denied a role in the war, but after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, and the Enrollment Act of March 1, 1863, which allowed African American men to be drafted into the military, African American men and women again rose in patriotic fervor. The Louisville Ladies’ Colored Soldiers’ Aid Society, for instance, proclaimed it was their mission to administer to the “brave colored soldier [who] has forsaken the home of his childhood—his dear playmates, his loving wife and affectionate children” to answer “his country’s call, to assist in putting down this wicked rebellion.”34 In some communities, women established societies specifically aimed at relief for the soldiers within the first few months of the war, but most women did not organize until after the disastrous and bloody Battle of Bull Run, when it became apparent to citizens both North and South that the war would not be short. The townspeople of Mansfield, Pennsylvania, for instance, held a meeting at the close of religious services on the National Fast Day (September 26, 1861) “to consider the appeal of the Quartermaster of the state for stockings &

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blankets for our Penna. Volunteers.” They formed a society, elected officers, appointed committees, and immediately solicited the women in neighboring townships “to co-operate with the ladies of Richmond & Mansfield in responding to the call of the state Quarter Master General.” Without delay, the society sent “circulars to all the Post offices, and the ministers of different churches” and invited the women of the county to form similar societies. Having enlisted the help of women in the surrounding area, they earnestly began to collect the requested items.35 But the ladies did not devote themselves exclusively to filling the quartermaster’s box; a week later Capt. J. S. Hoard of the Tioga Mountaineers asked the women to make a “suitable flag” for his regiment. Not only were the women sidetracked into sewing a flag, but they also pledged their time to planning a supper for the volunteers on the “eve of their departure for the war.” Along with their commitment to the quartermaster and their promise to the Tioga men, the ladies also, by “suggestion” from one of the members, prepared a box of “jellies, domestic wines & pickles” to fill a request made by Miss Dorothea Dix, the newly appointed director of the Women’s Army Nursing Corps. Because of these numerous obligations, it would take the society until December 28, almost three months after their inauguration, to pack their first “dry goods box.” The contents included much more than the socks and blankets for which the quartermaster had asked. They had collected “16 quilts, 13 Blankets, 13 Pillows, 28 Pillowcases, 96 handkerchiefs, 6 sheets, 14 towels 8 Rolls of old linen & cotton for dressings & a large number of books, magazines and newspapers.” Satisfied that they had contributed their “mite towards the grand total provided by the loyal people,” the ladies sealed the box and shipped it to the Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society.36 The first three months of the Richmond association’s existence provides an instructive look at the numerous pulls on a soldiers’ aid society. Before the end of its first week in operation, the women had pledged themselves to provide supplies for a local, a state, and a national soldiers’ organization. Although the women divided the work among individual committees and labored on all of the commitments simultaneously, they concentrated on the request by the Tioga men. Its loyalty to the local company seems rational for two reasons. First, the ladies of the society personally knew the men of the company, who

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more than likely were either their relatives or their neighbors. In fact, the Tioga men had shown their regard for the women earlier in the week by asking them to help name the company. By sewing a flag and giving a dinner to the volunteers, the ladies were playing a vital part in a ritual being performed in numerous towns and cities across the North. The society was not simply supplying the company, but they were sanctioning the men’s participation in the war and essentially sealing the communal contract. Therefore, local needs took precedence over state and national petitions because the local volunteers were asking for something that only their community could give them. The contract between the two guaranteed that the men fought to protect their homes and that the women, in return, pledged their support. The society did eventually meet the quartermaster’s and Dix’s requests, but not to the detriment of their own men.37 As noted, the Richmond ladies bestowed a regimental flag upon the volunteers during a ceremony that quickly evolved into a ritual in both the North and the South. According to Mitchell, the festivities “became stereotyped early in the war—a speech given by a leading citizen, a reply by the company commander, and perhaps a picnic or banquet.” Both the ritual and the flag came to represent the ties that bound the townspeople to their regiments. The ceremony was the formal acknowledgement by both civilians and soldiers that the regiment now represented the interests of the community. According to Mitchell, the flag itself symbolized the “community that sent companies and regiments into the field.” Not only did it stand for the family and friends the men left behind, but it also reminded them of their pledge to defend their homes. The fact that the flag was made by the women of the community and given to the troops reified, for the men, the protection that they would have bestowed upon their mothers, sisters, and wives.38 The meaning and the “importance of advancing one’s flag and defending it from capture—and conversely, capturing enemy flags, “as Mitchell puts it, was not lost on the Civil War recruit. Although the “ladies of Chicago” sent the Nineteenth Illinois Zouaves a pair of guide flags instead of a regimental banner, their sentiments concerning the treatment of their patriotic gifts echoes the symbolism and importance of defending a unit’s flag. “We are profoundly impressed with the belief,” wrote the women from Chicago, “that those little

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flags will never be suffered to trail in the dust of defeat, but will rather flutter on the field, the rallying point for the formation of ranks that will never falter.” Col. J. B. Turchin’s reply confirmed that he understood that the guide flags represented their safety. He promised “that wherever those guide-flags will appear, the ground will belong to the 19th Regiment . . . and never will be ingloriously abandoned.” The flag, then, became the physical connection between camp and community.39 In a similar fashion, when African American regiments were raised in 1863 and 1864, the citizens of their communities presented their men with flags in ceremonies that pledged the commitment between home and soldiers. As historian William Gladstone notes, the flag ceremony for the white regiments served the same purpose for African American regiments. The flag symbolized “the link between the home and community and the obligation to perform with honor and the men in the field.” The banners usually carried the regiment’s name, a motto, and the battles the regiment fought in; some also proudly wore the name of the givers. Many of the mottoes reflected the special interest these men had in the war. For instance, the Third USCT flag read “Rather die Freemen than live to be a slave”; the Sixth USCT flag read “Freedom for all, presented by the Colored Ladies of Philadelphia”; and the First South Carolina Volunteers flag read “flag presented to the First South Volunteers by the mothers, wives, sisters, and children, January 1863.” Ethnic regiments also had their distinctive regimental flags that connected them to their communities and created a unique bond between the soldiers of the regiment. Their flags bore mottoes, respectively, in German and Irish, and, as William Burton points out, “every unit got its flags in formula ceremonies with formula speeches.”40 This type of personal connection between home and camp was repeated in the way women organized their aid societies. As women across the North responded to the army’s needs, they either reworked their antebellum aid societies or, like the Richmond ladies, created new associations. But both old and new societies were characterized by the kinds of interpersonal networks that women had established in their benevolence work before the war. Experienced benevolent workers knew that personal contact with the ladies of the communities and appeals for goods to aid their family members and

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friends would gain the society the greatest number of supplies. Likewise, when societies were confronted with numerous obligations, as were the ladies of Richmond, the women usually supplied the local or state requests first because the communal contract required loyalty to the local men. Similarly, by sending their gifts through state agencies or by way of independent agents, women believed they could more directly influence the volunteers from their own communities, maintaining a kind of personal oversight over their men and simultaneously sustaining allegiance to their hometown and to the cause. In a like manner, the black women from Indiana formed a “committee” to ensure that the Indiana boys who joined the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts (another black regiment) would not be forgotten. According to the Christian Recorder, they vowed to support their “noble and gallant Volunteers, who are far from home, battling for the rights of their brethren and the cause of freedom.” Within a few days, the ladies filled a box “with such things as will make the hearts of the boys glad to know that they are thought of at home.” For ethnic regiments, Burton claims, the ethnic identity made it “easier to solicit contributions from businessmen and organizations to support the unit, to organize charitable activities, and to involve families and churches in the life of the regiment.”41 Northern women were concerned about these soldiers because the men were not mercenaries, but their own husbands, brothers, sons, and neighbors, whom the ladies hoped would survive the war and return home to resume their civic roles. They did not send the men off to become brutes, but to defend the liberty of the nation. In addition to the basic supplies, women equipped the new recruits with domestic items that would enable them to maintain a sense of civility, which in turn would remind them of their own family circles. Among the shirts, drawers, stockings, quilts, soaps, and combs, women included “bags containing pin cushions needle cases thread & buttons” along with books, hymnals, and Bibles. It was not a coincidence that civilians and soldiers called these bags “housewives.” The contents were clearly domestic items and usually used by females. Likewise, the books and Bibles were attached to the rituals of home. Black soldiers’ aid societies also sent domestic items such as toothbrushes, clothing, books, papers, handkerchiefs, and towels. A few black soldiers such as George Stephens informed the women

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that the government did not provide all of the “essentials to the soldier’s toilet.” He advised them that the soldier would find indispensable any “coarse towels, needles, pins and buttons.”42 With these items, women sent a message to the volunteers about the importance of retaining their domestic habits. A Wisconsin volunteer shared with his benefactor both his gratitude and information about his proficiency in the domestic art of sewing since becoming a soldier. Duntun Hasseltine wrote that the “pins and needles, linen thread and yarn, were cordially welcomed.” Although these items would “comfort” a “number of complaining toes” because he “count[ed] . . . [himself] pretty good at plain-sewing,” he did not believe he could “master a thimble.” The war may have pulled Hasseltine and other Northern men from their homes, but by sending domestic items women kept the civilizing habits of the hearth ever present. Sewing conjured up visions of women with needles and thread in hand while seated in the family parlor, and thoughts of the parlor brought to mind stimulating conversations with friends and family, games played, and books read.43 Indeed, reading was one of the most prevalent pastimes in the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1850s, hardback books, illustrated weeklies, serialized novels, and newspapers became more widely available and cheaper than ever before. According to Louise L. Stevenson, by 1860 almost all native-born American whites could read. Although reading was a prominent parlor activity, it was considered “serious entertainment.” Victorians read to improve themselves morally and intellectually and to utilize their time. Families gathered in their parlors at night and read. Sometimes a reader would share information from his book or read aloud while other family members sewed, knitted, or simply sat and listened. It makes sense, then, that the most popular pastime for the soldiers was reading. Bell Wiley asserts that soldiers were voracious readers and would consume anything they could get their hands on. The literacy rate of the black population lagged far behind that of the white population. James McPherson estimates that although 90 percent of Southern blacks were illiterate, black soldiers, like their white comrades in arms, craved reading material. As Sgt. H. S. H. described when he received a Christian Recorder “for the first time in many months,” “It seemed like an old friend.” He continued, “I tore it into two parts, and

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allowed the one-half to one part of the company while I read my part to the balance.” Many of those black soldiers who entered the service illiterate made special pains to learn how to read and write. Sgt. H. S. H. reported that the soldiers “are making considerable progress in reading, writing, and mathematics, and many, who, when they entered the service, could not read, are now writing their own letters to their families.” Indeed, black soldiers took advantage of the resources available to them in the Union army and “joined together to build schools, hire teachers, and form literary and debating societies,” according to Ira Berlin, Joseph Reidy, and Leslie Rowland.44 Although the cheapest books were trashy dime novels and penny newspapers, women chose wisely and sent books and magazines that aimed to edify. They forwarded weekly magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, as well as “wholesome” novels, histories, biographies (especially about George Washington), and religious tracts and Bibles. Although the New England Woman’s Auxiliary Association admitted that books were “not of absolute necessity in saving or supporting life,” they believed books had an “important place—aiding in recovery, distracting thoughts from weariness and suffering, filling profitably time [that] otherwise might be wasted in folly and dissipation.” They solicited the public for books but were particular that donations include only “good books, such as histories, books of travel, poetry, etc.”45 Stevenson suggests that during peacetime people had to leave their homes to hear sermons and lectures, but “books brought learning home.” During wartime, books brought home to the camp. As the men sat in camp or hospital and read to themselves, they replicated one of the most prominent diversions of home. Likewise, by reading their newspapers aloud to a large audience of comrades, they imitated an evening spent in the family parlor. The newspapers also kept the soldiers in touch with hometown events and helped them feel connected to their communities. Civilian hospital visitors, such as Walt Whitman, also read to the sick and wounded. “In Washington, in camp and everywhere, I was in the habit of reading to the men,” Whitman told his mother. “They were very fond of it, and like declamatory, poetical pieces.” Both the USSC and the USCC also set up reading rooms in tents or, as in Vicksburg, in the “basement of one of the churches” and reproduced the reading rooms men found at the

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YMCAs in large cities. Soldiers formed literary associations and reading groups within their companies and regiments. The men of the Fourteenth Wisconsin met on Tuesdays while stationed in Vicksburg and launched a reading group that produced their own “magazine.” A Connecticut soldier reported that his regiment boasted a library and elected “Chaplain Welsch librarian.”46 Chaplains were often the “moving spirit” in such projects, with good reason. “Twenty-five cent thrillers” and Beadle’s dime novels flooded Union camps through the sutlers and news venders. Chaplains and USCC agents feared that these sensational and provocative books would poison the men’s minds. Some chaplains traded tracts and other “clean literature” for the trashy novels. Hymnals had a dual purpose as a form of entertainment and as a weapon against spiritual backsliding. Singing familiar hymns could carry a soldier back to his own church and remind him of sermons and of the religious lessons he learned surrounded by his family. Nurse Susan Wallace felt the familial pull every evening when “last thing before lights are out our sentinel sings a little Sunday School Chorus, ‘O sing to me of heaven,’ which makes me cry to hear.” She was not alone in her sentimentality; she believed the soldier, too, “is thinking of home and mother.” And, of course, women sent their men off with Bibles as a statement that their relationship with God should be their source of strength and moral guidance. All of these household items were gentle reminders that their families and communities were not relinquishing the hold they had on the men. Their pledge of commitment to the soldiers took the form of farewell ceremonies. Some communities simply gave the provisions to the volunteers with little fanfare, but usually the local citizens would gather together for a town dinner, during which the ladies of the community would present their gifts to the soldiers. For instance, before departing Claremont, New Hampshire, each volunteer received “a revolver, dirk knife, a ‘handsomely bound pocket Testament,’ and clothing ranging from flannel shirts to wool socks” during a special presentation.47 The Claremont women were thorough in their choice of provisions. They essentially equipped their men with an array of weapons with which to defeat the numerous types of enemies they would encounter on the battlefield and in camp. The gun and knife would drive off the Rebel, the testament would steel him against the Devil,

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and clothing protected him against Mother Nature. These women fulfilled their part in the reciprocal relationship between the volunteers and their communities by protecting their men from physical and spiritual danger. Each woman acted as the familial caregiver, as a mother, as a sister, and as a wife, not as a soulless member of a society. Three ladies of Beekmantown, New York, echoed this communal concern when they explained that the “delicate ladies” of their town “worked unwavedly” to make their articles because they had great incentive to do so. “Our husbands, sons, and brothers, the very flower and pride of our Land, have gone out to fight for their homes and our glorious Union.” By sending their “little store of comforts,” these women wanted “the poor, wounded, sick and suffering soldier” to remember that “his services are appreciated” by his “Country Women.” Because women attached so much metaphorical power to their handiwork, they had to be certain that their goods were making the physical and emotional impact that they had intended.48 In an attempt to direct the societies’ use of their supplies, women affixed notes to their packages explaining their rationale for making the items, describing the physical or spiritual purpose of the gifts, and suggesting how the supplies should be used. Some ladies included letters to explain the circumstances and the importance they attached to the items. Mrs. Edward Stoddard sent a letter along with her box of knitted goods because she wanted Mrs. George Schuyler, an executive committee member of the WCRA (the New York branch of the USSC), to understand how important the gifts were to the giver. Stoddard had convinced a group of young ladies in her home town of Ithaca, New York, to use their winter evenings—which they normally would have spent dancing, singing and playing—to knit for the “boys.” She admitted that the donation would be small, but to her that made the articles all the more precious. She sent the parcel to Mrs. Schuyler because “we wish it to go where there will be no mistake about the value of it.” Similarly, as part of their itemized list sent to the WCRA offices, the ladies of Blawenburgh added their reasoning for sending such articles. They believed that when their New Jersey Volunteers “received the woolen blankets, mittens, flannel shirts, drawers and double gowns,” the clothing would be useful in protecting them against the “inclement season approaching.” Some societies hoped to control the use of their gifts by enclosing

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directions about the distribution of the contents. Priscilla Wilson Lee of the Soldier’s Friend Society noted that the ladies of her village cheerfully answered the call for supplies. All they asked in return was that “if any of the 2nd Regiment of NJ Volunteers should be sick . . . that some of the comforts sent, may be given to them.” Some ladies were more specific about the appropriation of their supplies. Writing from a hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, T. E. Hall vouched to Mrs. Schuyler that he had “divided the articles to be appropriated strictly as you have indicated.”49 The misadventures of one box of goods sent by the Ladies’ Colored Soldiers’ Aid Society of Bridgeport, Connecticut, to the members of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts regiment illustrates the value the ladies placed on their gifts and suggests why so many society presidents asked for proof that their boxes had arrived. The ladies sent a box worth $250 in goods to the Fifty-fourth at Hilton Head, South Carolina, in November 1863. When the box arrived, George Stephens, its addressee, was at home on furlough and did not return until late December. The society’s corresponding secretary Mrs. Jane Johnson initially sent a list of contents separately to Stephens. When she did not hear from Stephens, she sent another letter inquiring about the supplies. The box, in the meantime, was then sent to Jacksonville, Florida, another camp of the Fifty-fourth. But the regiment was engaged at the Battle of Olustee, so the box was given to the sutler of the Second South Carolina Volunteers for safekeeping. When the Fifty-fourth returned to Jacksonville on February 23, “footsore, weary, . . . hungry,” and light-handed, having lost all of their equipment on the battlefield, the box seemed a fortuitous gift from home. The next morning Stephens sent six men to retrieve the package, only to discover that members of the Forty-seventh New York Volunteers had broken open the box and stolen the contents. Stephens proclaimed the Forty-seventh’s communal violation in the pages of The Anglo-African. The brandy peaches, jellies, and fruits that the ladies of Bridgeport sent “might have alleviated . . . many a poor fellow’s suffering,” Stephens lamented. And the clothes would have comforted the wounded who were “without a change of clothing” after the battle. Instead, the men were left destitute, and the ladies, he believed, would be “furious in their indignation and regret” because their work was for naught. Despite their best efforts, the ladies of Bridgeport were unable to fulfill their communal contract.50

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On a more practical level, women were concerned about the placement and use of their gifts because the exigencies of war had put even more demands on their time. Attie reveals that with their husbands gone, women had more household chores, so any work they performed for the societies was in addition to their own housework. They also had obligations to the needy in their own towns. In other words, they were being called on from all directions to work, so they wanted the aid societies to value their time and labor. If the USSC or other groups who received their wares deemed their work for the soldiers useless, if their labor was unappreciated, or if they believed the provisions were wasted, women would redirect their supplies to a more grateful and reliable agency. Or some would simply quit the society. By tracing the allocation and reception of their gifts, some society leaders hoped to assure their members that their work was important to the cause and to encourage women to continue in their efforts. This was the kind of affirmation that Harriet Sumner was looking for when she attached a letter to her homemade items. As president of her aid society, she felt obliged to gain certainty directly from the soldiers, for the sake of boosting her members’ morale. “I should be glad to hear from you,” she wrote, because “it is quite incouraging [sic] to us as a society to know that our goods reach you and are doing good.” Similarly, Mary M. Chapin of South Hadley, Massachusetts, explained to Mrs. John Harris that the “young ladies have been much interested in preparing the box,” and if the contents should give “aid and comfort,” the ladies would feel “amply repaid” for their sacrifices. But she seemed especially concerned that Harris write back with details about her hospital visits. “It would be a gratification to us & might do much good,” Chapin suggested. Because “we are so far away from the scene of action . . . it is well [?] for us to hear the testimony of those who have visited the hospitals & know just what is needed & can testify to the proper disposal of what is given.”51 Women knew that the force of their supplies would be felt only if they were being delivered and applied properly. Like Harriet Sumner and Mary Chapin, women asked for return letters not because they wanted thanks for the sake of being thanked, but because gratification meant their labors were appreciated and helpful. With so much significance attributed to their provisions by the

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USSC, the USCC, and the local aid societies, it is not surprising that women wanted assurance from the numerous agencies to whom they donated supplies that the volunteers were receiving the goods. The kinds of responses they received about their goods, in turn, influenced their decisions about donating supplies in the future.52 Some societies simply asked for acknowledgement from the USSC that the boxes had been received intact. On top of their packages, they attached a list of contents and an introductory note from their society. In a letter sent separately, they notified the receiving agency to expect a package and to inform them when it arrived. Louisa Lee Schuyler was exceptional as the WCRA corresponding secretary and promptly replied to the societies donating to the WCRA. In fact, she went a step further by establishing personal correspondence with the local relief societies within her region. She found that one-to-one contact with her “female constituents,” although taxing, sustained their dedication to the USSC and kept her apprised of the state of the home front. As part of a continuing effort to meet the local aid societies’ needs for more accountability, Schuyler instituted a system of female associate managers at the beginning of 1863. The system furthered the tie between the numerous associations and the WCRA because the female managers went from village to village visiting and inspecting the auxiliaries. Through these visits, the associate managers established the kinds of intimate relationships women on the home front appreciated and depended on in their benevolence work. Schuyler hoped to become a confidant with the ladies in her region. Attie notes that the male elite of the USSC did not ask Schuyler to correspond with women directly, nor did they ask her to institute the associate manager system. In fact, they failed to recognize women’s need to have personal contact with the national society. According to Attie, the USSC was unable to convince women to contribute consistently to the commission because its male leaders did not recognize the women’s attachment to the interpersonal dynamic with which they ran their societies.53 In spite of Schuyler’s efforts to make the USSC more responsive to the home front, other agencies duplicated the USSC’s efficiency and offered the personal care for the soldiers that the women so desperately craved. With so many avenues open to the women, the USSC found itself vying for their supplies and loyalty. Throughout

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the war, USSC members tried to convince the public that channeling goods through the national agency was more efficient and effective than donating supplies to state or independent agencies, or, worse still, to its greatest rival—the USCC. The YMCAs across the North initially worked independently to “meet all the forms of need, bodily and spiritual among the soldiers.” By November 1861, the YMCA of New York had established the USCC to tend to the “Spiritual Good of the Soldiers in our Army” and to organize their efforts nationally. The USCC officers included leaders from religious organizations such as the Bible Society, the Temperance Union, and the American Tract Society. The USCC could have worked in conjunction with the USSC because it aligned itself with the chaplain service of the military, whereas the USSC attended to medical needs only. But it did not take long before the two agencies saw each other as rivals competing for the ladies’ homemade goods. The USSC accused the USCC of honing in on its territory by offering medical and food supplies along with tracts and Bibles. By 1863, the two groups, notes Attie, “began to exploit each other’s weaknesses and established a pattern of confrontation that lasted for the duration of the war.”54 The USCC, however, could not have been a serious threat to the USSC without the ladies’ support. The Christian association quickly gained the notice of the female home front for several reasons. First, it appealed to the women’s religious sensibilities by stating that along with medical stores it distributed moral and religious tracts. Its directors, in fact, proposed that all monetary contributions be used to furnish “religious reading and teaching to the soldiers.” Likewise, USCC agents appeared more pious because the USCC did not pay them to deliver their goods, but instead gathered their “Christian Delegates” from among the group of professional men and merchants willing to volunteer their time. This approach became a serious weapon for the USCC because it could point to USSC salaries and charge that USSC agents were less virtuous because they worked for money and not out of Christian duty. Attie claims that, in fact, the real differences between the rival commissions were their methods of “cash payments.” The USSC paid all of its agents, “including the hundreds distributing goods to army hospitals,” and although the USCC resorted to paying some of its agents, it predominantly maintained a “volunteer

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force in the field.” Furthermore, Attie notes, the USSC paid its officers “distinctly upper-class incomes” ranging from $1,500 to $4,000 annually at a time when the average soldier earned $156 a year and a manufacturing worker made $297 a year. The USCC, on the other hand, depended on ministers who were supported by their local churches, and it paid its “general field agents,” who managed volunteer delegates, between $480 and $840 annually.55 Finally, women identified with the USCC’s religious doctrines because rumors circulated that the group associated itself with the more conservative Congregationalists and Presbyterians. Although the executive committee of the USSC represented numerous religions, the perception was that USSC elite aligned themselves with the more liberal Unitarian Church. In fact, this belief among the homefront women never disappeared over the course of the war. As late as January 1865, USSC leaders found themselves accused of using its funds to buy Unitarian tracts and to distribute them to the troops. Noting the implications, a USSC executive defended the commission against the slander in an article published in the United States Sanitary Commission Bulletin. He assured the public that the USSC did not expend money for “party purposes” but instead “spent thousands in purely Christian literature . . . without reference to denominational interest or choice.” These assertions of doctrinal impartiality seem to have had little impact on the lady officers of aid societies. The rumors flew unabated, and the supplies continued to flow into the arms of USCC agents.56 Attie does point out that when the USCC eventually resorted to paid agents, women did not seem to care or did not accuse it of any motives beyond Christian duty. She argues that for this reason and the fact that the USCC became popular about the same time the USSC was being accused of fraud, women may have donated their goods to the USCC as a way to punish the USSC for improperly using their goods. Accusations of fraud began in 1861 and multiplied with each year of the war. Beginning in 1862, Northern citizens with incomes greater than $600 were obliged to pay income taxes, thus affecting the relationship between the citizen and the federal government. Because of the new tax, women felt that they should not have to send supplies, believing that the tax would buy supplies. At the same time, rumors spread that USSC agents were selling the

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women’s homemade articles. Attie suggests this belief stemmed from the suspicions of confidence men that were prevalent in antebellum America. These suspicions—added to the expansion of the federal government, taxes, and conscription—made people wary of bureaucracy. The result was that Northern citizens quickly believed charges of fraud against the USSC.57 Just as compelling to the women as denominational disputes and charges of fraud was the assurance they received from the USCC that its delegates personally delivered the goods to the soldiers. Within the Delegates Handbook, the new USCC volunteer found that he was to address the soldiers personally and to “encourage every right and discourage every vice.” Furthermore, the USCC charged its delegates to give the recruits information “from the people and from home” and above all to reconcile the men to God. The USCC proposed to be a medium between the army and home, conveying “articles for the comfort of the soldiers as friends may desire to send.” They denied that they provided this service “gratuitously,” but instead “to see that such articles quickly and surely reach those for whom they are intended.” It became so proficient at personal attentiveness that even a disgruntled USSC corresponding secretary, Alfred Bloor, confirmed the fact in a letter to fellow USSC officer Frederick Knapp. Bloor witnessed that well-stocked USCC wagons accompanied the troops “every step of the way” and provided a “refreshing lemon for the half-sick who could not drink.” Through their individualized attention to the volunteers, the USCC achieved the kind of communal and familial care that women most desired. Society ladies eagerly sought agents and agencies that would handle their gifts with their community’s concerns in mind.58 The USSC tried to counter the USCC with personal appeals to the women, but the corresponding secretary of the New England Women’s Auxiliary Association, Abby May, discovered that in some cases no amount of personal contact would convince women to support the USSC. Through correspondence, May attempted to persuade women in her area that supplying the USSC meant provisions for all the men of the Union. In spite of her efforts, though, she had to contend with attitudes similar to those of the women from Maine, who refused to forward their goods through Boston because they believed the USSC failed to supply Maine recruits properly. They

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could not “grasp the idea that working for the Sanitary Commission was working for Maine Soldiers,” wearily noted a sanitary agent in a letter to May. They chose, instead, to send their supplies to a depot in Washington controlled by Maine people.59 In 1863, the women of the WCRA decided to attack the problem head on and published a pamphlet entitled How Can We Best Help Our Camps and Hospitals? The ladies sent letters to thirty-two surgeons and officers in the army asking them to respond to the question, “Through what established channel can supplies best be conveyed to the soldiers? The doubt of the people seems to be between—1st. State Agencies, 2d. The U. S. Sanitary Commission, 3d. Individual Visitors and Dispensers.” According to the results, twenty-four surgeons asserted that the USSC was the best channel, five were undecided, and three condemned the USSC as a failure. The WCRA ladies argued that the army officials supported the USSC because it had a central office in Washington, D.C., and was kept informed day to day “not only on the actual but of the relative necessities of every camp and hospital.” Individual and state agencies did not have this advantage, insisted the USSC, and it claimed that as a result more than “one-half of the People’s voluntary contributions” had been wasted because they were not systematically distributed by a central organization. It assured the homefront women that the USSC worked in harmony with the army and the navy, and therefore all men of the Union benefited because it distributed supplies “without regard to state lines or sectional prejudices.”60 Many of the USSC claims of impartiality toward the soldiers were true, but this truth does not change the facts that civilians continued to question the credibility of the USSC and that the commission never fully convinced women to centralize their efforts. Attie suggests that midcentury Americans were used to a society with a weak federal government and with “traditions of local political and economic networks.” Therefore, with regard to their gifts, they were unwilling to relinquish control to a federal bureaucracy with which they had no personal contacts. So a tug of war over the ladies’ contributions began with the onset of hostilities and continued until cessation of the war. The ladies did contribute to the USSC but never to the satisfaction of the sanitary officers, and usually only after they had already sent supplies to their state agencies.61

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Women’s preference to donate their goods to the state agencies indicates the importance that communal and local ties played in benevolence. The intimate dynamic based on the village context that women had used in their antebellum aid societies carried over to their wartime work. Firsthand information about the prosecution of the war and personal associations with agents on and near the battlefield seemed the most efficient and effective methods to operate their societies. Ellen Harris, as the corresponding secretary of the Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society, traveled to Washington, D.C., in July 1861 with the sole purpose of visiting the camps and hospitals around the city to determine the army’s needs. With the “assistance of Col. Scott & Mr. Lesley of the War Department,” she established a depository in the city to “ensure the prompt & judicious appropriation of stores entrusted to us for our Soldiers.” She further assured her coworkers that she placed the stores “under the care of excellent ladies of Washington” and that the women would cooperate in the distribution of the goods. Finally, she “opened a correspondence by letter with surgeons, chaplains, [and] matrons,” who through visits “will be made acquainted with the wants of the different camps & hospitals.” Harris’s actions reflect the concerns women had about the effectiveness of their war work and about the placement of their goods. She was convinced that “in no other way” than by close contact “can we do so large amount of good.” With such direct channels, the Philadelphia ladies felt confident that they were meeting the needs of Pennsylvania soldiers.62 This intimate network of benevolence manifested itself throughout the Union as most Northern states established supply depots in the nation’s capital. The widespread practice of state depositories reflects the fact that individual regiments were identified as state troops. The federal government initially asked for seventy-five thousand men and called on each state to meet a quota based on population. Throughout the war, Lincoln continued to call on state governors to provide a designated number of troops. The regiments took on state identities and were not considered units of the regular army. Hence, the regiments, for example, were called the Seventh New York Volunteer Infantry, the First Wisconsin, and so forth. These volunteers took pride in their regiments as representative of their state effort and looked to their fellow statesmen at home to

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work for the Union, too. The locally mustered regiments, then, were cared for by state agencies. The Philadelphia ladies and women from Maine to Iowa responded first to the needs of their state citizens, thus fulfilling their communal contract, and then to the needs of regiments from other states.63 But there were also societies that felt that only through independent action could they best meet the needs of their men. Organized immediately after the fall of Fort Sumter, the ladies of the New Bedford Soldiers’ Relief Society remained independent throughout the war, “though often urged to become auxiliary to other societies.” They explained that by maintaining their independence, they could have direct communication with Miss Dix and “the nurses and surgeons who have gone from New Bedford” and thereby “accomplish our purpose of doing good to the soldier.” Proof of the effectiveness of their independent status came in the fact that “every package, save one, sent out by the Society, has been acknowledged and hearty thanks expressed, the work praised, and the assortment pronounced ‘just what we wanted most.’ ”64 In other words, independence afforded the women of New Bedford the luxury of guiding their homemade goods to people with whom they were acquainted and who they believed had Massachusetts soldiers’ best interests at heart. Through direct communication with the nurses and surgeons, they received frequent medical reports about their men, they were informed about the state of the hospital stores, and they learned about the soldiers’ specific wants. It was not enough for Northern women that they made the materials and shipped them off; they required confirmation that the nurses, surgeons, and soldiers valued their efforts. This kind of personal contact assured them that through their goods they were vicariously caring for their husbands and sons and fulfilling their communal duties.65 There was no better example of the importance of this kind of confirmation than the correspondence between Clara Barton and her suppliers. Clara Barton followed the troops from battlefield to battlefield to supply and nurse the men. Using her own money and depending on the supplies of soldiers’ aid societies, she worked independently of the Women’s Army Nursing Corps and of any of the state agencies. She clearly understood the importance of women’s

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homefront efforts in allowing her to position herself where the men needed her womanly touch and supplies the most—at the front immediately following a battle. She, like many other battlefront workers, realized that medical stores and food were most crucial to men’s survival right after they were wounded. Yet she had no delusions about who supplied her with the essential goods and how much she depended on their continuous efforts to do her part for the volunteers. She recognized the symbiotic relationship that developed between the home and the camp. She knew that without the marmalades, the broth, the pillows, and the blankets, she could not comfort the “hundreds of the worst wounded men” she found “lying on a little hay on floors or in tents” after the Battle of Fredericksburg. The “dear ladies” at home believed that for their gifts to be the most helpful, an agent such as Clara Barton had to distribute them personally.66 The success of this homefront and battlefront alliance depended on constant communication between the hearth and the camp. At home, the ladies needed to know that their work was not in vain, and battlefront workers relied on a continuous shipment of goods to meet the soldiers’ needs. For these reasons, Barton never failed to let her supporters know of the force of their goods. Although she rarely ended her day’s work with the soldiers before midnight, she always made time to respond to the mountain of correspondence from the women who supplied her. Her speedy replies, filled with heartfelt gratitude and specific descriptions about the condition and use of the packages, gained her loyal suppliers and convinced women of the value of their labors. Let her missive to Mrs. Capt. Lamb in the spring of 1863 represent the kind of letters that were typical between her and the aid society women. Barton quickly relieved Mrs. Lamb’s anxiety about her noble box by acknowledging its receipt and informing her from “personal observation” that the contents “arrived in perfect order.” She assured her that the items were not only “wisely selected and well packed,” but that they “kept life in men until they [the men] could . . . [be] taken from the field and saved to their families and friends.” Then, with characteristic humility, Barton explained that she did not want to wear any “undeserved honors” that she knew belonged to the “noble women of the North.” She acknowledged the sacrifices that these women had already made by giving their husbands, brothers,

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and sons to the service of their country and who “remain at home to labour, wait, watch, weep and pray.” She promised that she would “strive to be faithful, but must not be praised for attempting to do my duty.” As part of her correspondence with homefront women, Barton also made a point to tell the ladies about any encounters she may have had with their male relatives on the field and in the hospitals. She recounted in her letter, for instance, her recent visit with Mrs. Lamb’s brother Major Flag. She comforted the lady with the knowledge that her brother was “gaining rapidly,” and although he was in a hospital, he “really looked comfortable.” He appeared cheerful and dreamed of going home, “The mere thought of which I know is worth more to him than all the whole department could do for him here.”67 Perhaps what made Barton’s writing so special and endearing to the ladies at home was the way in which she made them feel a part of the Northern war effort. Beginning with her warm salutations, she created the feeling that a special friend had arrived in the reader’s parlor to talk about the recent events of the war. In one letter, she walked the recipient through the encounters of her day; in another she invited the reader into her tent to hear of her visit with the reader’s friend or relative. She also introduced correspondents to the generals, to state politicians, and to army surgeons in her area. In other words, she shared the daily events of war with women who too often felt their work made little difference and who had few ideas about what occurred at the front. She imparted warfront news that homefront women rarely received from their contact with the USSC and the USCC. Society ladies cherished their correspondence with Barton because through her letters she included them in the fight for freedom and her information connected them to their dear soldiers. Taken as a whole, her letters represented more than polite responses required by the rules of etiquette and much more than chatty news about the weather. Rather, they strengthened her own work by gaining the aid societies’ support and confidence and simultaneously fortified the women in their efforts by confirming the utility of their goods. Unfortunately, Barton’s letters do not represent the typical dynamic between home and the camp. Most homefront societies were not fortunate enough to receive such bedside reports and gracious letters regularly, especially at the beginning of the war. But

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Barton’s type of personal and sisterly care struck a chord among many civilians. They wanted the soldiers to receive their homemade items from the hands of an agent who could transmit the kind of love and attention that went into gathering and making the gifts. Likewise, the lady society workers wanted to convey their appreciation for and support of the volunteers, who may have been far from home spatially, but not emotionally. This became such an important issue for citizens across the North that several communities, motivated by familial concerns, sent local townspeople as their agents to distribute their supplies properly and thus to care for their volunteers. This was the rationale behind Rev. Edward Beecher’s call to his congregation at Galesburg, Illinois, in 1861.68 Rev. Beecher read a letter to his congregation one May morning from Galesburg physician Dr. Benjamin Woodward, who had enlisted with Lincoln’s call and who was then writing from his camp at Cairo at the southern tip of Illinois. Instead of offering uplifting words of their sons’ patriotic conduct, Woodward’s letter astonished and angered the members of the Brick Congregational Church. They learned that their Galesburg boys, along with recruits from other Illinois towns, were dying of dysentery, of pneumonia, and of typhoid in appallingly filthy tents. They could accept the news that their boys had fallen gloriously on the field of battle as they courageously defended their country, but they could not bear to hear that their boys were dying of “civilian diseases.” Woodward’s implications were clear. If the sick volunteers had sufficient supplies, they would survive. The minister and the congregation resolved to send $500 worth of hospital materials immediately. Woodward had also noted, however, that the boys died not simply because they lacked medical stores, but because they had no one to attend to them. Their corps of nurses consisted of convalescing soldiers. The women of the congregation suggested that several of the mothers of the community should travel to Cairo to minister to their boys. But Rev. Beecher reminded them that the army would not relish the idea of a “passel of women” moving into the post. They decided instead to send a “level-headed” person with the provisions to ensure that their contributions were properly distributed and used. After all, they reasoned, “our position as donors of five hundred dollars’ worth of supplies gives us some rights.” They decided that their

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fellow church member, Mary Ann Bickerdyke, was the only person who possessed the combined attributes of medical knowledge, moral character, Christian charity, and neighborly goodwill. Not known for her long speeches, she accepted the job as part of her work for the Lord and vowed to go to Cairo and “clean things up down there.”69 Bickerdyke did “clean things up” in Cairo, in short order. In one day, she accomplished the cleaning of the camp and the care of the soldiers. While she personally scraped the filth-covered floors of the tents, the healthy soldiers stripped the sick men and bathed and dressed them. In return for their cooperation, she rewarded the volunteers with a home-cooked meal of “fried chicken and lightbread with blackberry jam.” By evening, she had accomplished all that the Galesburg people had asked of her. She had safely delivered the supplies and administered to the dying soldiers. More important, she had done it with the efficiency of a household manager and the kindness of a mother. Dr. Woodward, the Galesburg physician who had petitioned the townspeople for help, was amazed at her capabilities, but pleased that she could now return home.70 But Bickerdyke did not believe that her responsibility to the townspeople and their sons had ended that day. Instead, before retiring for the evening, she penned a letter to her church and informed them that much work still needed to be done. She directed the congregation on how best to supply the troops by providing a detailed list of goods with an emphasis on utility and durability. She asked for “stout ticking for mattresses,” muslin pillow slips, blankets, cotton quilts, underwear, soap, “sal soda,” and zinc chamber pots, not the fancy china ones that would break. Furthermore, she explained that the situation required her to stay and get the camp into shape. To do this, she would need a room for herself, a cookstove, and cookware. In addition, she requested the congregation to send her ten dollars a week for expenses. In a couple of days, she had found herself a kitchen that doubled as her room by placing a cot in the corner, and the congregation had approved her weekly allowance. Within a few weeks of leaving Galesburg, Bickerdyke had found a new home with the army and had established herself as a mother to all of the enlisted soldiers within her vicinity.71 The events that carried Bickerdyke into the war serve as an example of how communities entrusted agents to represent the town’s

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interests in their work for the soldiers. The agents were supposed to maintain the “affectional ties” between the families at home and the volunteers in camp. They were not asked to act as doctors or healers, but to be nurturers at those times when the soldiers needed comfort the most. Agents were there to tend to a man’s soul as much as to offer physical succor in the form of food and clothing. Bickerdyke’s response to her community’s call came in the form of a mother’s care. Townspeople believed that the mammoth USSC could not possibly represent their interests so well, and they asserted that their “position as donors” granted them rights to intervene. One could argue that because the townspeople had offered their sons, they were justified in their intervention in the war effort. Likewise, Bickerdyke’s experience also reveals how she used communal sanction to defend her presence in Cairo and eventually to enfold all of the soldiers into her work. When she journeyed to the sick volunteers in southern Illinois, she extended the communal boundaries of Galesburg. By expanding the town’s borders, her actions at Cairo were warranted by her duty to her fellow church members. As the representative mother of Galesburg, she believed she was responsible for protecting the volunteers. When the Galesburg troops moved on to Fort Donnelson in Tennessee, Bickerdyke accompanied them. As her travels pushed far beyond the state lines of Illinois, she constantly stretched her community’s boundaries and with it her commitment to the community’s well-being. Her duty to the Galesburg boys eventually would include all Union soldiers.72 Sarah Gregg, like Bickerdyke, began her nursing career at the Cairo hospital. She hastened south because of familial duties to her husband, but she, too, would expand her maternal care to include all the “boys in blue.” Both women were essentially fulfilling the civilian portion of the communal contract, which required the townspeople to support their troops. In so doing, they utilized their greatest asset—their womanhood—to administer to the volunteers. They projected powerful influences of domesticity by setting up a makeshift home wherever their duties carried them. In the image of the household manager, they established order, enforced cleanliness, and brought a stabilizing and comforting routine to the hospitals. As mothers, they promoted the feeling of home through their gentle touch, their attentiveness, and their insistence on moral behavior

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among the boys. With the sanctions of home and the community, women were able to carry their gifts to the men and to administer to their needs. It would be as nurses and visiting agents that they would have their greatest influence on the men as they re-created the home in the hospitals and produced a semblance of civility. NOTES 1. Sarah G. Gregg Diary, January 1 and 5, 1863, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield. 2. Ibid. 3. See Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1888); Sarah Edwards Henshaw, Our Branch and Its Tributaries; Being a History of the Work of the Northwestern Sanitary Commission and Its Auxiliaries During the War of the Rebellion (Chicago: Alfred L. Sewell, 1868). Mary Livermore, with the help of Jane Hoge and several other Chicago women, established the Northwestern Sanitary Commission (NWSC) in 1861. It later became an official branch of the USSC. Although the NWSC worked in conjunction with the eastern organization, it had autonomy and therefore worked mostly for the benefit of western troops. 4. Sarah G. Gregg Diary, January 14, 15, and 18, 1863. 5. Ibid., January 26 and 27, 1863, February 6, 1863, March 10–12, 1863, and August 28, 1863. Jeanie Attie notes that although the officers and creators of the USSC expected women to “conform to the bureaucratic ideal,” they themselves were “contemptuous” of it and felt trapped by the cumbersome structure. Louisa Lee Schuyler, the corresponding secretary of the Women’s Central Relief Association of New York (the main arm of the USSC), realized that the bureaucracy made women feel cut off from the war effort and as if their labor were a waste. The remedy was to “reduce women’s isolation from the central organization and the war.” See Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 179, 83. 6. Sarah G. Gregg Diary, January 20, 21, 22, 1863. 7. Ibid., January 22 and 23, 1863. Secretary of War Simon Cameron appointed Dorothea Dix as the Union army’s first superintendent of women nurses on June 10, 1861. Dix had the authority to “select and assign women nurses to general or permanent military hospitals.” By 1862, however, it was becoming apparent to all the officials within the Union sanitary field that this job was too enormous for one person to handle. By mid-1862, Mrs.

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Mary Livermore was appointed as a deputy to Dix and given the authority to certify any nurses recruited in the Chicago area. See Elizabeth D. Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 7; and Nina Brown Baker, Cyclone in Calico: The Story of Mary Ann Bickerdyke (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), 107, 108. 8. Sarah G. Gregg Diary, January 27, 29, 30, 1863. 9. Jane E. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (winter 1992); United States Christian Commission: Facts, Principles, and Progress (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, Son, 1863), 30. 10. United States Christian Commission, 147–48. Attie argues that these nineteenth-century women were accustomed to a government in which power flowed from the margins into the center. When the USSC men attempted to create a centralized benevolent system, they unwittingly changed the government’s relationship to the people and in turn the meaning of voluntarism. Women did not believe that they owed the government any supplies because that was what taxes were for. If the government could not properly supply the troops, then there had to be fraud somewhere in the system. Women retaliated by ignoring USSC messages and regulations and by sending their gifts where they pleased. 11. Phillip Shaw Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and the Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 10, 11, 12. Most soldiers, in fact, continued to stay up-to-date on their local political news. For instance, Charles O. Musser of the Twenty-ninth Iowa Volunteers consistently asked his father about the political happenings of his hometown. He wanted to know whether the local Copperheads had managed to get reelected. When he heard the returns, he exclaimed, “Bully for Iowa . . . Copperheadism is about played out in our State.” See Barry Popchock, ed., Soldier Boy: The Civil War Letters of Charles O. Musser, 29th Iowa (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1995), 92. 12. Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 67–97; Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 212. 13. Paludan, “A People’s Contest,” 12–13. 14. Georgeanna Woolsey, Three Weeks at Gettysburg (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1863), 4–5. 15. Ibid., 4–7, 11. 16. Ibid., 22–23; Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon and Eliza Woolsey Howland, Letters of a Family During the War for the Union, 1861–1865 (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1899), 383.

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17. Popchock, ed., Soldier Boy, 78. Some of the tension between army and civilian workers had much to do with gender relations. Surgeons and other men of greater or lesser authority in the medical establishment felt threatened by the presence of women because of women’s “inherent right” to care for the sick. Women did not always ease the tension, either. Some believed they knew better than the surgeons about caring for the sick and wounded and thus would interfere with surgeons’ orders concerning diets and treatment. See Leonard, Yankee Women, 30–41. 18. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 25, 30, 33, 35, 93. 19. Ibid., 91–92. 20. Ibid., 89–92, 95, 104, 112,125, 140. 21. Armory Square Hospital Gazette, October 1, 1864. 22. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 5, 31, 45. 23. Ibid., 25–27; Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 96–97. 24. Milwaukee Sentinel, April 22, 1861. 25. Paludan, “A People’s Contest,” 16. Thomas P. Kemp examines the recruiting patterns of two New Hampshire towns and the subsequent relationship between the volunteers and the civilians throughout the war. He found that when the town recruited men who were nonresidents, there was a higher desertion rate. He suggests that these nonresidents were more likely to desert because they did not have ties to the community and therefore felt they were breaking no communal contract. See “Community and War: The Civil War Experience of Two New Hampshire Towns,” in Toward a Social History of the American Civil War, edited by Maris A. Vinovskis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 26. Dye Davis story from Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25–27; Ira Dodd quotation and the repentant soldier story from Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 93–94. 27. Paludan, “A People’s Contest,” 26–28; Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 13. 28. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 28. 29. Edwin S. Redkey, ed., A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 237. Some men were also promised a bounty. The men enlisting in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, for instance, were guaranteed a one-hundred-dollar bounty “at expiration of term of service” and state aid for their families. See Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865, 3rd ed. (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1990), 9;

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Donald Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 280. 30. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 13–42; Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 31. 31. United States Sanitary Commission, Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 2 vols. (New York: USSC, 1886), USSC Doc. 40, “Report of the General Secretary to the Secretary of War of the Operations of the Sanitary Commission,” December 9, 1861, 31, 32. 32. Popchock, ed., Soldier Boy, 70; Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 30; Paludan, “A People’s Contest,” 29, 30. 33. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 90; “First Report of the Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society, Founded April 26, 1861,” Ellen Harris, Corresponding Secretary, Orbison Family Papers, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg. 34. Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 26–27; Christian Recorder, February 15, 1865. 35. “Richmond Ladies’ Aid Society Constitution,” October 16, 1861, and “Invitation sent to each township,” Richmond Ladies’ Aid Society Records, Pennsylvania State Archives. 36. “First Report of the Mansfield Soldiers’ Aid Society,” October 28, 1863, Richmond Ladies’ Aid Society Records. On July 12, 1862, the ladies of the society agreed to change the name of the society from “Richmond” to “Mansfield Soldiers’ Aid” “for greater convenience.” 37. “Richmond Ladies’ Aid Society Minutes,” October 16, 1861, Richmond Ladies’ Aid Society Records; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 104. 38. Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 19–20. 39. Zouave Gazette of the Nineteenth Regiment Illinois Volunteers, November 23, 1861; Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 19–20. 40. William A. Gladstone, Men of Color (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas, 1993), 156, 158–162; William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988), 56. 41. Mary Elizabeth Massey, Women in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 33–34; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 35, 90–93; Christian Recorder, December 12, 1863; Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers, 56. 42. Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society Constitution, April 26, 1861, Orbison Family Papers; Christian Recorder, January 16, 1864, and April 1, 1865; Republican Standard (New Bedford, Mass.), July 23, 1863; Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder, 235–36. 43. Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters from Camp, Battle-Field, and Prison (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865), 292–93.

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44. Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991), 23, 30; Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 153–55; Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, 318–19; H. S. H. quoted in the Christian Recorder, December 10, 1864; James McPherson, Marching Toward Freedom: The Negro in the Civil War, 1861–1865 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 149; Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom’s Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 40. The editor of the Christian Recorder, Elisha Weaver, solicited his readers to donate any amount from fifty cents to a dollar so that the black soldiers would “have more direct news from their own people.” A similar call coincidentally appeared in The Anglo-African on the same day, December 26, 1863. 45. Newspaper clipping, unknown paper, February 9, 1864, New England Woman’s Auxiliary Association Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 46. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront, 23; Walt Whitman, The Wound Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington During the War of the Rebellion, edited by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D. (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898), 42; Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters, 392–93; Connecticut soldier in Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, 157. 47. Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank, 155–56; Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society Constitution, April 26, 1861, Orbison Family Papers; Susan Wallace to Mother, December 18, 1861, Mrs. Susan Wallace Letters, Indiana State Library, Indianapolis; Kemp, “Community and War,” 37. 48. L. L. McFadden, Mary A. Downing, M. G. Warford to F. L. Olmstead, December 3, 1861, USSC Records, New York Public Library, New York. 49. Mrs. Edward Stoddard to Mrs. Schuyler, December 21, 1861; “Ladies of Blawenburgh, NJ” to WCRA, November 29, 1861; Priscilla Wilson Lee to WCRA, November 18, 1861; and T. E. Hall to Mrs. Schuyler, January 11, 1862. All in USSC Records, New York Branch. 50. Yacovone, ed., A Voice of Thunder, 293–94. 51. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 89, 106–7; Harriet Sumner to “Kind Soldier,” no date, USSC Records, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio; Mary M. Chapin to Mrs. John Harris, February 18, 1862, Ellen Matilda Harris Papers, Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg. Attie notes that Bellows and company placed so much emphasis on women’s labors that local society leaders began to realize that their homemade wares had market value. As women gradually came to realize the power of their goods, they began to claim their labor as their own. They would decide who would receive their supplies.

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52. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 89, 94. 53. Ibid., 113, 153–54. 54. Lemuel Moss, Annals of the United States Christian Commission (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1868), 79, 104–5; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 157–59. 55. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 161–63; Moss, Annals, 107. In the pamphlet United States Christian Commission, the USCC explained its frugality in a paragraph entitled “Economy.” They laid before the home front the facts: “work in the field by delegates without salary. Collections at home by committees and delegates without pay . . . [s]tores in vast quantities made up and sent in freely by the ladies . . . [t]he chief executive work almost everywhere done by men of business without pecuniary reward. These are the unparalleled economic advantages enjoyed by the Christian Commission for the prosecution of its work” (11–12). The USCC did not contrast its work with that of the USSC, but civilians could hardly miss the comparison within this work. 56. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 162–63, 130; “Unitarian Tracts,” United States Sanitary Commission Bulletin 1, no. 30 (January 15, 1865), 945. 57. Attie, Patriotic Toil,137–38. 58. United States Christian Commission Delegates Handbook (New York: USCC, 1861), 8; Moss, Annals, 107; Alfred Bloor quoted in Attie, Patriotic Toil, 165. The USCC also argued that through the use of delegates, it gave “assurance to the generous donors, that the stores they contribute will safely reach the men for whom they are designed.” They reasoned that the ladies could be certain of the proper use of their gifts because the delegates were “chosen representatives of the people themselves who give them.” See United States Christian Commission, 9. 59. P. G. Bowman to Abby May, December 14, 1862, New England Woman’s Auxiliary Association Collection. 60. How Can We Best Help Our Camps and Hospitals? (New York: Wm. C. Bryant, 1863), 3–5. 61. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 105, 108. Black ladies’ aid societies seemed to have steered clear of this battle for goods between the USSC and USCC. Black women did donate their labor during the sanitary fairs, and at least one group, the St. Thomas Colored Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, was an auxiliary to the USSC. It appears that both the USSC and the USCC contributed fairly to the black soldiers. The Christian Recorder thanked both groups for their generosity. The newspaper did seem, however, to have a stronger relationship with the USCC, as evidenced by the numerous articles about that organization’s progress, gift donations, and propaganda. See the Christian Recorder, November 21, 1863, April 2, 1864, November 26, 1864, December 31, 1864, and February 11, 1865.

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62. Mrs. Ellen M. Orbison Harris, “Report of the Ladies’ Aid Society, Referring to the Six Weeks Spent in Visiting the Camps and Hospitals Around Washington,” no date, and Mrs. George Harris to Mrs. Page, August 22, 1861, Orbison Family Papers. Although the states established depots in Washington, D.C., to best meet their own needs, this did not mean that they were unwilling to help soldiers from other states. Mrs. L. L. Kleem visited Ohio men in Washington and explained to her society that she was amply supplied. “I do not know how well the Ohio store room is supplied but I have full liberty to use the Penn & New York stores at my discretion and what I do not get among Ohio’s stores I will take from the others.” See Mrs. L. L. Kleem to Mrs. Rouse, August 21, 1861, USSC Records, Cleveland Branch. Societies kept tight reign of their goods because they felt accountable to the women who produced the supplies. However, most societies, but not all, realized their work was national in scope and willingly supplied all Northern soldiers. 63. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 153–55; James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Ballantine, 1988), 322–23. 64. Mrs. Edward Ferrno to Abby May, November 23, 1862, and P. G. Bowman to Abby May, December 14, 1862, New England Woman’s Auxiliary Association Collection; New Bedford Daily Mercury, January 21, 1863. 65. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 106–7. 66. Stephen B. Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1994), 128–29. Oates claims that many of the women who supplied Barton knew her only by reputation, and it was only through her “assiduously cultivated” letters that she was able to maintain their support. Her letters were so effective because, as Oates puts it, “they weren’t just written; they were inhabited” (116, emphasis in original). 67. Clara Barton to Mrs. Lamb, April 1863, Clara Barton Correspondence, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 68. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 106. Attie claims that the women who personally carried boxes of supplies directly to the troops were enacting a “sense of personal responsibility and accountability.” Most women were looking for this personal accountability when they traced the path of their gifts. 69. Baker, Cyclone in Calico, 3–11. 70. Ibid., 37–45. 71. Ibid., 46–47. 72. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 79–80. Mitchell agrees that women utilized the maternal role to claim authority as nurses. In return, the soldiers “granted these ‘mothers’ authority out of proportion to their military authority” (79–80).

6 “The Kind Attentions of Woman” Female Nurses Bring Home to the Hospital FROM THE “boom of the first cannon” over the waters in Charleston harbor, in April 1861, Sophronia Bucklin made it her constant study to get into the military service of her country. Because she could not “don the uniform of the soldier and follow the beat of the stirring drums,” she chose a journey into the hospitals. She inquired among her friends and family and perused public journals, but instead of finding encouragement and support for her plan she was told that “It is no place for a woman.” Hospitals were known as houses of death in the “minds of the respectable and virtuous communities,” friends advised Bucklin. A year and a half passed with no leads in her search, but the desire to volunteer as a nurse continued to burn in her soul. Then one day as she sat at the Orphans’ Asylum of Auburn, New York, and looked out the window toward the local encampment of soldiers, she had a providential meeting with the asylum’s matron, Mrs. Reed. Bucklin looked longingly toward the camp and said, “I wish I knew of some way to get into the military service to take care of just such boys as those, when they shall need it.” Mrs. Reed responded with a description of the hardships of such a life, but it did not dissuade Bucklin’s desire to serve. Bucklin convinced Mrs. Reed of her sincerity, and finally Mrs. Reed told her to apply to the board of managers of the soldiers’ aid society, for they had a military pass to the front for one nurse.1 The board accepted her and soon after the Battle of Antietam, September 1862, Bucklin embarked on a journey to Washington, D.C., to begin a career as a volunteer for the Women’s Army Nursing Corps. On her trip from New York to Washington, she would experience the first step in her transformation from a civilian to a nurse.

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Her military service offers an example of how female nurses experienced the emotional hardships and the physical privations that the soldiers endured. Bucklin ate the same rude fare, lived under the same “unsubstantial tents,” marched to new hospital grounds, starved for lack of food, and became sick from exposure to the sun and dews. She experienced all these things “save the wild, deadly charges of battle,” but otherwise she was “A True Soldier of the Union.” Not only did she suffer from the same privations, but she was also exposed to the same psychological fears of confronting battle for the first time. Her sensibilities were strained by having to tolerate the rudeness of the male hospital staff, by having to touch “putrifying [sic] flesh,” and by having to face death on a daily basis. She gave three years of uninterrupted work for her country and her countrymen and was initiated into the service by going through a hardening process similar to the “baptism by fire” that the men experienced as they gradually evolved from civilians into soldiers. Bucklin and other female nurses thus had a special bond with the soldiers who became their patients. The men felt a connection to them because the nurses lived in the same degrading environment.2 Nurses’ experiences of bandaging wounds and attending amputations in the hospitals certainly did not compare to the carnage men experienced on the battlefield, but most soldiers considered hospitals just as appalling. Rufus Meade believed he “never saw half the suffering before in one day” as he had at a field hospital after the Battle of Peach Tree Creek. He witnessed doctors “busy cutting off limbs which were piled up in heaps to be carried off and buried, while the stench even then was horrible. Flies were flying around in swarms and maggots were crawling in wounds before the doctors could get time to dress them.” Historian Earl Hess notes that surgeons, themselves numbed by the “stream of torn bodies flowing toward their hospitals,” also recognized the gulf of experience that had grown between soldiers and civilians. “The horrors of this war can never be half told,” wrote the Kentucky surgeon Claiborne J. Walton. “Citizens at home can never know one fourth part of the misery brought about by this terrible rebellion.” Walton may not have carried a musket like the men he cared for, but this did not lessen his understanding of the misery and horrors of war. Similarly, women nurses gained a glimpse of the soldiers’ world through their work in the hospitals. Through this

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special relationship, they, as representatives of the home, were the psychological liaisons between the home front and the hospital. They became the personal confidantes, the spiritual guides, and the emotional comforters for all of the men in their wards.3 The gulf that emerged between the recruits and their families had widened gradually as the soldiers slowly shed their civilian lifestyles for military habits and hardships. Men learned to obey orders, to forego home cooking and clean sheets, to tolerate dirty and torn clothes, to endure long and hard marches, to become hardened to the bloodshed of the battlefield, and to accept the profanity, alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes that seemed to be a necessary evil of soldiering. As they became immersed in army life, they began to identify more with their comrades and military ideals, but less with their families and civilian lives. As discussed in chapter 2, the military lifestyle threatened to degrade the troops and make them unfit to return to their civilian lives after the war. Mightily aware of the corrupting influences in a soldier’s life, family members tried to maintain ties between home and the camp. Wives, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, and sons and daughters sent letters, hometown newspapers, and domestic items to provide, as Phillip Paludan puts it, “links to, and memories of, loved ones” and home. Civilian men and women also visited the soldiers as aid society agents, hospital visitors, and volunteer nurses to represent in a tangible way their patriotism and support of the troops. Their physical presence, especially the presence of women, had an immeasurable impact on the volunteers. One soldier referred to the female nurses as “self sacrificing ladies.” He wrote, “None save those who went forth to do Battle for Freedom who left Home and Friends know how to appreciate the true Patriotism of the Noble Ladies, who came to aid, comfort and care for those whom Disease, or wounds, had laid upon beds of pain.”4 The noble ladies did go to the warfront to aid and comfort the soldiers, but they also went to reclaim the recruits for their families at home. The need for reclamation was both physical and moral. Within the first few months of the war, civilian and military authorities realized soldiers were dying as a result of inadequate medical attention. During Mary Livermore’s first trip to the soldiers’ hospitals in St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois, she noticed a sharp contrast between the regimental hospitals that engaged convalescent soldiers as nurses and the general

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hospitals that employed the Sisters of the Holy Cross. As the primary agent of the NWSC in Chicago, Livermore traveled to the warfront to familiarize herself with the needs of the soldiers and to ensure that the NWSC gifts were being used properly. When she arrived at the regimental hospitals, there were no “signs of woman’s presence, save in one instance, where a poor fellow, . . . told me that ‘his wife had come that morning, and now he believed he should get well.’ ” Livermore characterized these hospitals as having “more filth and discomfort, neglect and suffering, than would have sufficed to defile and demoralize ten times as much space.” Fetid odors from the wounds mingled with the nauseating smells of the “unclean beds and unwashed bodies,” while the stench of boiling meat and coffee emanating from the kitchen befouled the air even more. The surgeons visited every couple of days, and in the meantime men who were “wan, thin, weak, and requiring nursing themselves” were left to take care of their worse-off comrades. The general hospital, on the other hand, had one sister or more to each ward and the result was “order, comfort, cleanliness, and good nursing.” The food was cooked in a separate building, so the sick men did not have to endure the smells of the kitchen. Surgeons visited every ward twice daily and more if necessary. The storerooms possessed an abundance of clothing and delicacies for the sick.5 The fact that the regimental hospitals were meant to act as temporary facilities surely had as much to do with the inadequate care as the style of administration. Regimental hospitals were not designed for durability or comfort, and the number of physicians was kept at a minimum. The medical staff at these hospitals usually included a surgeon, an assistant surgeon, and a handful of untrained medical orderlies. Most of the regimental hospitals consisted of several tents where the men recovered on straw strewn on the ground or on cots if they were lucky. In any case, the facilities were primitive at best and lacked an orderly system. Livermore, however, did not measure the success of the hospitals according to their permanency or administrative style, which is what makes her assessment so striking. For her, female nurses symbolized all that was right about a hospital, and their absence contributed to all that was wrong. She seems to imply that hospitals without women were dirty, disorderly, and detrimental to the men’s recovery. Hospitals with women combined homelike environments, familial care, and comforting supplies for the sick and

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wounded. But Livermore also noted that women did more than simply bring order out of chaos. Their presence psychologically comforted the men and gave the convalescents confidence that they would recover. The poor fellow whose wife had just arrived to nurse him, for instance, “believed he should get well.” Another soldier sent to Rebecca Pomroy’s hospital resigned himself to death because hospitals were dreadful places. His health quickly improved, however, once he had the luxury of a female nurse to “[bid] him ‘good-night’ as mother used to.” Dr. Esther Hill Hawks nursed the men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts and noted in her diary that she “endeavored . . . to make this dreary hospital life, as home-like as possible.” As one of her patients, Burrill Smith, testified, her efforts paid off. Smith wrote a friend that Dr. Hawks’s care for him was magical. “While I was at Beaufort,” Smith recounted, “and had a Headache,” Dr. Hawks would “put her magic hand on my Forehead and it leaves me directly.” The attention men received as a result of these domestic tactics contrasted with the indifferent care of the male nurses and showed the soldiers that they were still valued, although they could not fight. This treatment gave them a reason to get better.6 Physical recovery was only half of the battle, however. Women also set the moral tone of the hospitals and fought the soldiers’ uncivilized appearance in sloppy and dirty clothing, their poor manners and irreverent and bawdy behavior, and the dehumanizing factors of combat. On the most basic level, they reclaimed the men through homecooked meals and clean clothes. Although this regeneration was only temporary, it could have lasting psychological effects. Women’s presence and cooking reminded the soldiers of the goodness of home and made them feel appreciated. On a deeper level, women rescued the soldiers from the pitfalls of military life. Through personal and attentive care, by involving the men in sewing, games, and singing, by establishing Sunday church services, by turning their rooms into parlors, and by celebrating the holidays in familial style, the female nurses created a semblance of family life and brought stability to the men’s chaotic existence. The fact that these women came to the warfront to tend to the soldiers made their work all the more powerful. Women’s physical and emotional sacrifices were not lost on the soldiers. In a postwar letter to Frank Moore, who was compiling a history of women’s war work, J. B. Albert, a patient at the Adams Hospital in

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Memphis, Tennessee, acknowledged, “hospital life is almost intolerable to anyone and more especially for Ladies.” Therefore, the “good they accomplished will never be forgotten by us ‘Private Soldiers.’ ” George Brown agreed in a letter to Moore, saying, “I tell you the boys think a heap of a woman that will come and suffer.”7 OBSTACLES CONFRONTING FEMALE NURSES Women’s sacrifices and hardships began not in the hospitals, but in the homes. Unlike Sophronia Bucklin, most Northern women remained on the home front, maintaining familial ties with soldiers by sending letters filled with guidance and advice and by shipping care packages with homemade goods. Although these two methods of regeneration and sustenance were the foundation of women’s work in the Northern war effort for the healthy soldiers, it became clear to mothers and wives that the sick and wounded required personal attention and ideally the gentle care of a woman. As noted earlier, more than twenty thousand women left their hearths to administer to the soldiers as nurses, as laundresses, and as cooks.8 Whether the women went to the front or stayed at home, much of their influence stemmed from the gender ideology of the day. Most men believed that women wielded a moralizing power, and they desperately depended on women for psychological and emotional succor. Combined with the fact that nineteenth-century women played nursemaid to all the members of the family, this ideology clearly indicates why sick and wounded men yearned for women’s ministrations. Many women felt that their husbands and sons would not receive proper care in army hospitals and believed that their loved ones would recover more quickly by maternal vigilance and touch. Consequently, thousands of women traveled hundreds of miles to military hospitals to administer to their husbands’ and sons’ needs. Most women did not remain at the front after their men recovered, however. Either they could not afford the cost of living away from their families, or they had domestic duties that called them home. For the women who stayed to care for the other soldiers, their rationale and experience was much like that of Sarah Gregg, who traveled the length of Illinois to care for her wounded husband. Gregg committed herself to ministering to her husband and to

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assisting the hospital nurses if she could, after which she planned to return to Ottawa to resume her millinery business. Once at Cairo, however, she was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the sick and wounded (she estimated that the hospital had almost seven hundred patients) and assumed a personal mission to end their suffering. When Mrs. Henshaw, the president of the Ottawa Ladies’ Aid Society, offered Gregg the matron’s position at Camp Stebbins, Gregg believed it was an opportunity to serve God and country. Like her, many other women found a “field of labor” awaiting them at the front.9 Although the army needed nurses, army surgeons initially did not seek the aid of women. The army traditionally relied on what historian Holly Mayer describes as the “military community” to perform the mundane tasks of camp. Men and women, not hired by the army but bound by its regulations, served as washerwomen, cooks, common laborers, and nurses. In the Continental army during the American Revolution, American leaders followed the example of the British army, which had a hospital department that hired women as nurses. In 1802, the United States Army created a position of “laundress,” which would remain part of the army for most of the nineteenth century. The washerwomen were first and foremost responsible for washing the soldiers’ uniforms, but they also cooked and performed some nursing duties for their relatives. By the Civil War, convalescent soldiers had entirely replaced hired female nurses, and in many camp hospitals soldiers acted as the only medical attendants. These recruits had no medical training and little experience with ministering to the sick or wounded. Add to this the fact that they were recovering from injuries or illness themselves, and it was obvious that their ability to care properly for the recovering soldiers was limited.10 The army’s views on women nurses did not change until Florence Nightingale dared to go to the Crimean War front to minister to the sick and wounded British soldiers. Not only did Nightingale prove that through proper care many more men could be saved, but she also demonstrated that a woman could nurse at the front and remain a lady. Five years later, with the outbreak of the Civil War, American women and men responded to the nation’s call with offers to work as nurses in the fashion of Nightingale. “Several good ladies” from Janesville, Wisconsin, for instance, volunteered to “go with the Medical department of the regiments in the imitation of the glorious example of Florence Nightingale.”11

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But even with Nightingale as a model to emulate and the army’s obvious need for nurses, the debate over the propriety of women administering to the soldiers continued. On the one hand, because women were the caregivers of their families, it seemed only natural for them to continue their work during such a desperate time. Throughout the short history of the country, women had attended their families at home and were intensely involved in “colonial-era health care, especially in midwifery,” according to James Cassedy. During the antebellum period, women “bore the traditional burden of caring for the bedridden, administering medication to the ill, supervising the diet of the well, [and] instructing the children in good hygienic practices.” The medical profession of the nineteenth century, however, was becoming more organized. As medical care moved into the public sphere and developed into a profession, women were gradually pushed out of the world of doctoring. Cassedy argues that society began to identify the public care of the sick and the “stature of the physician with maleness.”12 Regardless of the general exclusion of women from the medical profession, some women persevered and became doctors. The first licensed female physician in the United States, in fact, answered Lincoln’s call by founding a program to select and train women as nurses. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell collaborated with the ladies of the WCRA in New York, whose association was designed to complement Blackwell’s nursing efforts by furnishing the hospitals with stores and the soldiers with provisions. But Blackwell’s training program was overshadowed and, indeed, rendered useless with the appointment of the more conservative and more socially acceptable Massachusetts reformer Dorothea Dix as the Union army’s superintendent of women nurses. Several historians suggest that Blackwell’s training and status as a professional doctor may have threatened the surgeons and leaders of the USSC, so they did not endorse her program.13 To the political and military elite, the conventional Dix seemed more suited for the position of head of army nurses. Although her prewar benevolence work was within the medical field, her efforts were administrative and seemed to be an extension of a household manager. Her benevolent actions did not usurp or challenge men’s leadership, but stemmed from the accepted public role of women as nurturers and caregivers. Men felt comfortable supporting her as the

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administrator of female nurses because she reinforced the feminine ideal of women as helpmates. Likewise, because she had labored for years for more humane treatment of the insane, she had many influential connections in the nation’s capital. Jeanie Attie contends that this background certainly influenced Secretary of War Simon Cameron’s decision to appoint Dix to the newly created position. On April 23, 1861, Cameron signed the formal document accepting Dix’s offer to organize female nurses for military hospitals. By June 10, he awarded Dix a military commission and the authority to “select and assign women nurses to general or permanent military hospitals.” Women were “not to be employed in such hospitals without her sanction and approval, except in cases of urgent need.”14 Whereas the responsibilities delegated to Dix clearly stated that she would have the only government-sanctioned power to appoint female nurses, many states and local soldiers’ aid societies ignored the federal channels and sent their own male and female nurses to hospitals and camps across the battlefront. These civilians rationalized their efforts by stating in letters and society records that they had the authority to interfere with the government’s work because this was the “people’s war.” Reid Mitchell concurs that communities “never entirely relinquished” their “power to oversee” their men at war. Hattie Dalton expressed this kind of societal motivation in a letter to Wisconsin governor Alexander Randall. She applied as a nurse to alleviate the suffering of “our brothers and friends,” whom she knew would be denied kindly attention when hundreds of the sick and wounded were crowded together. Dalton, it appeared, was willing to go through state channels. Miss Henrietta Rayden and her sister Amelia sought assistance from the governor so they could accompany their “dear and only Brother” and his regiment, but they threatened to seek other avenues if the governor failed to help them secure nursing positions. “For we are bound to go,” proclaimed Henrietta, “and go we must and shall stand firm till our Country is once again free yes free from all Traitors[.] Death be Tharre [sic] Doom.”15 The maverick volunteers further complicated the issue of women serving as nurses because many of them were young, middle-class women. Nightingale proved that middle-class women could maintain their propriety and showed women how to overcome the corruption at the front. In a recent study on the images of Victorian nurses,

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Catherine Judd shows that Nightingale set a standard that convinced the military elite that women were valuable as army nurses. During the Crimean War, she demonstrated that soldiers could be saved through hygienic care. After the war, British politicians awarded her efforts by putting her in charge of revamping the country’s nursing system. Within her grand scheme, which included rearranging hospital floor plans, establishing a nurses’ training school, and setting new hygienic standards, she also attacked the traditional type of nurse. Nightingale believed that much of the inefficiency of nursing stemmed from the “old-style” nurse, who she described as “elderly, corpulent, disrespectful and predisposed to drunkenness.” By replacing an “incompetent hag,” with a younger female worker between the ages of twenty-five and forty, she avoided women with dissipated habits and molded the young ladies into her own image.16 Judd suggests that this reform created a whole new set of problems. The “new-style” nurse was corruptible because she was being exposed to corrupting male workers and male patients who could, presumably, take advantage of her naïveté if precautions were not taken. Judd explains that Nightingale proposed solving this dilemma by staffing the hospitals with either “morally groomed pauper girls or ‘naturally’ asexual, indigent gentlewomen.” This new nurse was different precisely because she was the “embodiment of chastity and asexuality.” Not only was this a way to curb sexual misconduct, which was Nightingale’s main concern, but it also relieved “middle-class fears of working-class revolution.” Judd notes that Nightingale purposely designed her hospitals with few “holes and corners” to eliminate areas where men and women could congregate and thus denied them privacy. Moreover, hospital supervisors policed every corridor of the hospital and thereby kept the lower classes under the watchful eye of the middle class and forced the female nurses to abide by middle-class standards of behavior. Nightingale herself suggested “giv[ing] the Nurse plenty to do so that mischief will not tempt her.” Through these reforms, she shaped what would become the standard image of the nurse and launched nursing as one of most respected professions for women.17 Although Nightingale’s philosophy heavily influenced American attitudes toward women nurses, many men were still not convinced that they wanted their mothers, wives, and lovers in military hospitals. When Lizzie Little told her beau George Avery that she wished to do

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something for her country by volunteering as a nurse, he gently persuaded her to stay at home. As a recent recruit of the Twelfth Illinois Regiment, he was living in Camp Yates with what he estimated to be approximately five thousand other men, and he witnessed firsthand the soldiers’ corrupt behavior. He wanted to keep Lizzie from the “perils and dangers” of the hospital. He replied to Lizzie’s queries by saying, “If you feel it your duty . . . go & God speed; but if you do not, remain at home by all means.” George explained to her that he had reservations “because of the privations you will have to endure.” He then confessed that it was not simply privations, but that his “affection” for her was of “that character” that he could not see her suffer. Lizzie was flattered by his “generous kindness” and acquiesced, agreeing that she did not think the hospital “a desirable place for many reasons aside from privations.” But she assured him that she would break her promise to him if he should fall “victim to some fool disease.” If it was necessary for her to go, she told George that she could endure because she loved her country “enough to smooth the pillows and minister to the wants of her sick and weary soldiers.”18 The ease with which George persuaded Lizzie to forget her notion of “doing important work” seems to say as much about Lizzie’s convictions as it does about the concerns both men and women had about the war zone as a place for women. Perhaps Lizzie’s suggestion was nothing more than a symptom of the patriotic fever that swept through her town of Aurora, Illinois, early in the war. To George, the sacrifice of his lover’s innocence was not worth the aid she might offer the soldiers. He believed, in fact, that because she could not “carry the Musket,” her services were less important than his, and therefore he begged her to stay home. But their exchange also reveals the dynamic between husbands and wives—or, in this case, the dynamic between lovers—and the way men manipulated women’s behavior. The desire in Lizzie to serve did not die so quickly as these two letters suggest. Time after time, she revealed her love for her country. When George asked her what she felt about the war, she wrote, “I love America aye I love her. I could not bear to see our banner torn down in disgrace, that beacon that Guide star of all the oppressed on Earth.” This was not the sentiment of a woman simply carried along with the fervor of her countrymen. But as strong as her patriotism was, she allowed George to deny her the part she wanted to play. “I

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have begged the privilege of doing something for my Country,” asserted Lizzie, but “you will not grant me an opportunity.” In the end, she accepted her homebound position but placed the responsibility of her inaction wholly on George: “I would have done something for my country, if you would have encouraged me,” explained Lizzie, “but your letters stopped my endeavors. The sin be on thy head.”19 As the war dragged on, however, men and women began to believe that women’s presence in the hospitals was necessary. Walt Whitman’s attitude, for instance, changed gradually as he devoted himself to visiting the hospitals in and around Washington, D.C., during the war. He fashioned himself “an independent missionary, in my own style.” The term hospital visitor was used to describe a variety of civilians who went to the field and the general hospitals in the North to assist and comfort the wounded and sick. They would fan the men, read to them, feed them, talk to them, pray with them, and write letters for them. The visitors, especially women, would usually bring homemade delicacies, books, stationery, or whatever the soldiers fancied.20 Whitman would have classified some women visitors a nuisance, however, and professed that the work of the army hospital visitor was “indeed a trade, an art, requiring both experience and natural gifts, and the greatest judgement.” Visitors, whether male or female, according to Whitman, did harm unless they willingly made “conscientious personal investigation of cases.” The wounded were not charity cases, he argued, but “American young men, of pride and independence,” and therefore bestowing gifts required a discriminating manner for the peculiar nature of each man’s condition. His insistence on a visitor’s intimate relations with the soldiers also colored his views about the characteristics of the most appropriate nurse. The kinds of people Whitman saw around the soldiers were “cold and ceremonious” and afraid to touch the men. He believed that a woman’s presence was superior to a man’s, but he did not believe that “young ladies, however refined, educated and benevolent” could succeed as army nurses, presumably because the work was arduous and the hospital environment degrading. Nor could Catholic nuns properly care for these “home-born American young men” because, according to nineteenth-century prejudices, Catholics did not have solitary allegiance to the United States, so their motives

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were always suspect. Middle-aged women and mothers of families, wrote Whitman, were the best candidates for nurses. He also conceded that “there are plenty of excellent clean old black women that would make tip-top nurses.” Older women, he argued, were full of motherly feeling and brought “reminiscences of home.” Their “magnetic touch of hands” could comfort the men like no one else.21 Other people who warned the “weaker sex” against nursing were afraid of exposing women not just to the shocking sights and sounds of the wounded, but also to the unprotected advances from the men in the hospitals. Hannah Ropes, a nurse herself at Union Hospital in Washington, D.C., denied her daughter Alice’s request to nurse because, as she told Alice, “it is no place for young girls.” “The surgeons are young,” she explained, “and look upon nurses as their natural prey.” Furthermore, she did not like the tone of behavior in the hospital because “refinement is not the order of society.” Perhaps what concerned Ropes more than the men’s coarse conduct, however, was that the wounded soldiers were “exposed from head to foot before the nurses.” Not only did she not want to subject her twentyone-year-old, single daughter to such indelicate sights, but the men themselves, according to Ropes, “object[ed] to anybody but an ‘old mother’ ” tending to them while they were undressed. Ropes’s concerns for her daughter represented the fears many of her contemporaries had. Female nurses, out of necessity, would see the men naked and would have to touch them to tend their wounds. Both of these actions were wholly against the mores of the day, which directed both men and women toward self-control.22 Nineteenth-century Americans were inundated with prescriptive literature that preached control of one’s emotions and conduct. John Kasson notes that on the physical level, Victorians “stifle[d] all activities that might draw attention to the internal workings of the body.” In practice, this meant that a person controlled coughing, sneezing, yawning, scratching, tooth picking, throat clearing, and nose blowing. On a deeper level, body management meant suppressing one’s sexual appetite. Displays of affection, both verbal and physical, were considered sacred; therefore, Victorians hid their emotions in public and expressed them in private. Women were expected to maintain the highest standard of purity, and men were taught to contain their sexual urges. By the 1830s and 1840s, these mores had infiltrated the

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world of medicine. James Cassedy claims that it was “immodest and improper for male physicians” to treat female patients. Both doctors and patients were so embarrassed by the examination process that surgeons encouraged stoicism in their female patients, and female patients endured pain rather than “permit doctors to examine” them. Conversely, until the Civil War, few men were subjected to a woman’s medical care, save by their female relatives. Therefore, when the “lady volunteers” ventured to wash the soldiers freshly arrived from the battlefield, both nurses and patients felt the impropriety of the situation. To soften the vulgar interaction, women considered themselves surrogate mothers or sisters and acted in either a maternal or a sisterly manner toward the sick and wounded.23 To ensure that the women would be looked upon as surrogate mothers, Dix and the heads of other benevolent groups sending nurses required their volunteers to be at least thirty-five years old and plain in looks and attire. Because these women were older than most of the soldiers and had a maternal appearance, it seemed natural that the men likened them to their own dear mothers. The women, for their part, referred to the men as “their boys” no matter the recruits’ age and treated them in the manner with which they would have interacted with their own sons. The ladies spoke soothingly to the men, listened patiently to their complaints, catered to their special requests, cheered them when they were blue, and even admonished them when they misbehaved. Reid Mitchell believes an explanation for the mother-son relationship was that men were enfeebled by their wounds and illnesses and became infantile in the women’s eyes. Mary Livermore, the head of the NWSC, visited hospitals near the front and observed that the men were “heartily petted in motherly fashion, as if they were children, which most sick men become.” Rebecca Pomroy described the ghastly scene in her hospital as men arrived fresh from the battlefield. “Such horrid sights I cannot describe. Men with both eyes put out, others with arms hanging as the ball went through them, others with legs shot off or hanging helpless. They seemed like children waiting for their mother’s care.” Within her diary, Hannah Ropes referred to the men under her care as “my special children for the present.” She not only treated them with kindness, but also protected their interests with motherly might against callous stewards and surgeons. Emily Parsons

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wrote home that “I told some of my men to-night, when I was giving them their supper, that I had more children than the old woman in the shoe, and they were diverted at the idea.”24 The soldiers called the nurses “Mother” and looked to them for spiritual guidance and emotional and psychological comfort. Rebecca Pomroy, for instance, served as a nurse at Columbia Hospital in Washington, D.C., and in the first few days of 1862 her youngest patient summoned her. When Pomroy arrived at his bedside, he asked her to take one of his hands in hers and to place her other hand upon his heart. With his dying breath, he said, “Tell my other mother when you write, that you felt my last heart throb.” Pomroy’s experience reveals much about the maternal role women played as nurses. First, it shows that this volunteer did view the female nurse as his surrogate mother. This bond developed because Pomroy spent time with the soldier, listening to his stories about his sister Lucy and his mother. She showed him motherly attention and affection by reading the Bible to him and leading him in prayer. Likewise, the soldier’s desire to have his real mother know that another woman felt his last heartbeat demonstrated that the nurse had literally stepped in for the mother. Pomroy performed the death ritual reserved for this soldier’s mother. Feeling his last heartbeat connected the mother physically and spiritually with her son for the very last time. Furthermore, touching a man’s chest would have been a very intimate gesture. The two participants softened the vulgarity of the personal scene by referring to each other in familial terms. Pomroy’s response to his death reveals that she felt the loss as if she were indeed his mother. “It was Saturday evening,” she confided in a letter to her sister, “and my sweet-faced little soldier was carried from my sight to the home for the dead. I returned to my chamber and wept.”25 If a female nurse was not looked upon as a motherly figure, like Pomroy, than men usually likened her to a sister. This siblinglike relationship usually developed when the nurse was younger, or appeared so, or because she was attractive. The bond evolved in a similar fashion to the mother-son relationship, but in this association the two people treated each other more as equals. The men still looked to the women for emotional and psychological comforts, but their camaraderie had more of a playful and mutual tone. But it did not lack the

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element of respect one had for the other. For instance, Julia Wheelock traveled from her home in Michigan to a battlefront hospital in Alexandria, Virginia, after hearing that her brother lay injured in one of the town’s hospitals. Although she did not arrive in time to save her own sibling, she pledged that she would work for her other Union “brothers.” She did not fear there would be improper relations between her and the soldiers because she felt that “every noble boy in blue was my brother and protector.” Louisa May Alcott cherished each of her “brave boys” like a brother when confronted with having to taking off socks, coats, and shirts and ordered to scrub the soldiers. Likewise, Sophronia Bucklin was younger than the required age of thirty-five when she volunteered for the Union Army Woman Nurses Corps (another name for the Women’s Army Nursing Corps). Because she was so young, she developed sisterly feelings for the soldiers, as she “watched and bent pityingly over them as over a tenderly loved brother.”26 These familial-styled relationships crossed race, class, and ethnic lines as well. Working-class women who followed their husbands and brothers into the camps worked as laundresses, cooks, and even nurses. Officers allowed the women to stay because of their familial relation with one of the soldiers and because they were providing a needed service for the regiment. As historian Jane Schultz argues, it was the fact that black and working-class women lacked respectability that “gave them the freedom to live in camp without social stigmatization.” These women were welcomed, respected, and appreciated by the soldiers they served. Catherine Oliphant, an immigrant from Germany, for instance, accompanied her husband, Benjamin, and the Third Maryland Cavalry as a laundress. But she “served, in fact, as an Army nurse.” “Her constant and faithful ministrations” wrote Maj. Junius Turner, “in such capacity endeared her to the heart of every member (officers and Men) of the 3rd Maryland Volunteer Cavalry.” Black women, both free and former slaves, were also permitted in the camps as laundresses, cooks, and nurses. As black soldiers reported to The Anglo-African, female slaves who freed themselves by escaping to Union lines were “obliged to support themselves and children” even if their husbands were Union soldiers. They did so by washing for the officers and selling cakes and pies to white soldiers. Some of these women, such

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as Susie King Taylor, also nursed black soldiers. Taylor escaped from her owner in Georgia with her uncle and cousins and secured her freedom by joining Union troops in South Carolina. There she married a man in Company E of the First South Carolina Volunteers and became camp laundress. Her familial tie to this regiment was perhaps stronger than most women’s because her uncle and cousins also enrolled. Some black women from the North also followed their husbands to camp. Martha Bush Gray of New Bedford, Massachusetts, received permission from the adjutant general of the United States to join her husband’s unit in South Carolina, “to aid in the relief of the sick men of the 54th and 55th [Massachusetts] regiments.” The men so valued her work that she was “lovingly known as ‘mother of the regiment.’ ”27 Female nurses, white and black, understood that being physically close to men who were strangers made them vulnerable, especially because they were without the protection of a male relative. But they also realized that the familiar nature of their work provided numerous opportunities for the nurses to influence soldiers. Through the family dynamic of mother-son and sister-brother, they manipulated the Victorian gender system to create a socially acceptable relationship that was also personally conscionable. This kind of sex-role tampering is a good example of the “fluidity” that Karen Lystra considers to be an essential element of nineteenth-century male-female interaction. Lystra contends that sex roles were “based upon a learned set of values, beliefs, images, and rules,” but were not “static essences to be possessed.” Men and women blurred the gender lines but stayed within their “culture’s prescriptions.” Because of its malleability, the gender system could survive the numerous scenarios of everyday life. It was within this understanding of the gender system that women nurses carved out for themselves the familial roles that enabled them to negotiate the intimate quarters and harsh experiences of the hospitals and influence the soldiers personally during the war. Their contact with the men offered them the chance to re-create a homelike setting in which they could share familial love and shelter the volunteers from the destructive forces of war. By reproducing a parlor environment in their wards, they utilized the power of domestic imagery and reclaimed the men by involving them in family activities.28

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HOME TO THE HOSPITAL Women nurses’ first opportunity to influence the soldiers was when the wounded arrived at the hospitals. In the role of familial caregiver, they first immediately administered to the men’s physical needs. The soldiers usually arrived at the hospitals with mud-spattered and bloodstained clothes, and many of them were near delirium for lack of food. Cleaning their wounds and feeding these tainted soldiers were in essence the first steps in recivilizing them. Being returned to a state of physical cleanliness and given sustenance, they felt human again and presumably would act civilized. Reid Mitchell agrees that the soldiers saw their dirty bodies and sloppy clothes as an indication of incivility and barbarism. Their lives were deplorable because they lost autonomy over their bodies. While on the march, soldiers had few opportunities to bathe properly, and, to add to their misery, the camps became breeding grounds for lice. As one soldier put it, “I well remember the feeling of humiliation with which we made the discovery we were inhabited.” Mitchell explains that because “infestation [was] associated with sloth and poverty” in the soldier’s mind, he became “dehumanized.”29 Soap, clean clothes, and nourishing food formed the arsenal with which women combated the filth and infestations that became routine conditions of war. When the Daniel Webster took on two hundred men at Williamsburg, Virginia, Harriet Whetten and Eliza Howland, the only women on board, began the process of reclamation as the ship steered for Fortress Monroe. While Howland prepared the soup and tea, Whetten washed the hands and faces of every soldier. Whetten confided to her friend Hetty that these men had been “lying in filth and blood in a state you cannot conceive . . . for two days or more in the open field in mud and rain.” Georgeanna Woolsey and her fellow workers at Gettysburg went beyond simply cleaning hands and faces and feeding the men. They began regenerating the soldiers who staggered into the USSC tent by dressing or redressing their wounds, which, according to Woolsey, “were often in a most shocking state.” She observed that “Often the men would say, ‘That feels good. I haven’t had my wound so well dressed since I was hurt.” Then they provided the men with the supplies sent by the women of the hometown aid societies and became a human conduit

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for channeling love and materials between home and camp. Woolsey offered wash basins with soap and towels, and followed them with “socks, slippers, shirts, drawers, and those coveted dressing-gowns.” Once the women had the men washed and comfortably dressed, they fed them warmed milk with just a touch of whiskey and sugar and bread with butter and jelly, foods that were usually difficult to come by in the army. They furthered the men’s reformation by sprinkling cologne on the handkerchiefs and squares of cotton they distributed to the volunteers. The cologne had the effect of going “right to the noses and hearts of the men.”30 Woolsey obviously had more supplies on hand than Whetten, but, beyond this difference, the thoroughness of the USSC operation offers an example of the power of home to domesticate and reclaim the soldier at the front, if only temporarily. The interaction consisted of a series of exchanges in which the soldier would trade filthy and war-tainted articles for clean and pure home goods, renew their outer bodies, and be fed the foods from home. First, the home (represented by the USSC) furnished the men soap, water, and towels with which to restore their dirty bodies to cleanliness. Then the women swapped clean socks, shirts, and drawers for the men’s soiled uniforms, slippers for boots, and bestowed “coveted dressing-gowns” upon the men for their sleeping comfort. The smell of the cologne stimulated their memories of their families, and, as Woolsey witnessed, the fragrance touched their hearts. Once the outer body was renewed, the men were offered warm milk and buttered bread. The importance of this meal lay in the fact that these were the products of home; both the workers and the soldiers recognized the significance. Freshly baked bread, warm milk, and butter were hard to come by in the army, so the soldiers identified these foods as part of their prewar civilian lives. They were also being served and attended by civilians, not by army personnel, not by sutlers, but by men and women from Northern communities. Taken as a whole, then, the services provided by the USSC were effective in temporarily rescuing the volunteer from degrading military habits. A similar incident of communal duty occurred among the freed people of Beaufort, South Carolina, after their gallant, but unsuccessful attack on Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863. One hundred and fifty of the brave boys of the Fifty-fourth arrived in Beaufort thirty-six

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hours after the battle, but “nothing had been done for them.” Dr. Esther Hawks was not sure she could do anything for them, either. “We had no beds, and no means even of building a fire.” But then “the colored people came promptly to our aid and almost before we knew what we needed they brought us buckets full of nice broth and gruels, pitchers of lemonade, fruits, cakes, vegetables indeed everything needed for the immediate wants of the men was furnished— not for one day but for many.”31 A woman’s power to redeem the soldier also rested in her innate superior morality. As noted previously, both women and men believed that women were the more moral of the two sexes, and for this reason one of a female nurse’s central duties was to restore the moral character of the troops. Moralizing took many shapes. Victorians believed that the mere presence of a woman was enough to comfort men and to bring thoughts of home, which had a moralizing effect. The head surgeon at an army hospital in Gallatin, Indiana, told Jane Merril Ketcham that he could not believe “the difference between a woman’s nursing and a man’s.” He asked her to comfort the men in other parts of the hospital who did not have female nurses in hopes that one peep of her would improve their disposition and affect their health. The doctors who worked with Emily Parsons at Benton Barracks Hospital felt a similar affinity for the “lady nurses.” In a letter home, Parsons noted that the “Doctors find the wards where there are lady nurses get along so nicely that they are all anxious to have them. They keep asking me when they too shall have ladies in their wards.” In January 1864, Col. Birney asked Dorothea Dix to find “several well-taught colored women, who are competent” to join him at Camp Stanton, Maryland, to nurse black soldiers. Birney told Dix that “of all his regular soldiers not one is able to act as an effective nurse,” so the “sick are really suffering.” The soldiers also enjoyed the presence of women because the women conjured up thoughts of home. Orra Bailey admitted that army life “makes men rougher” because it took “them from the restraints of society and of the fair secx [sic]. We of course admit that the wimmen [sic] have great influence in sofetenning [sic] our rougher natures.” Both Emily Parsons and Sophronia Bucklin cared for patients who found comfort in their presence because, as the soldiers noted, seeing women in the hospital made the surroundings

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“seem so much like home.” Many of the female nurses recorded that soldiers simply enjoyed looking at the women. A soldier told Sarah Brandegee that he had not seen a lady for nearly nine months, and so “we let them gaze as they please.” When one of Emily Parsons’s coworkers bent over a sick man, he caught her hand and pressed it to his lips. Parsons explained that the men “all had some way of showing how gladly they felt the womanly sphere around them.”32 As another element of regenerating the soldiers, women fought the dehumanizing nature of combat and of the permanent hospital. On the battlefield, men felt like cogs in a machine as they watched their comrades fall and another fellow fill the gap in the line. Earl J. Hess explains that artillery fire turned human limbs into projectiles. This battlefield experience was particularly dehumanizing because a soldier was literally broken into parts and became “just another physical obstacle for his brothers-in-arms to sidestep or clean up.” After the battle, the wounded might lie on the field for days without medical attention. When they were finally carried to a field hospital, the feeling of being a part of a machine continued because of the abundance of amputations. After visiting the battlefield hospital at Fredericksburg, Walt Whitman told his mother that one of the “first things that met my eyes in camp was a heap of feet, arms, legs, . . . under a tree in front of the hospital.” Soldiers could not help noticing the indelicate manner with which the limbs and the dead were disposed of, nor were they unaware of the military army corps’ incompetence in providing immediate and proper care after a battle. In fact, an anonymous USSC camp inspector did not publicize his findings because he believed if “the people were honestly told all the facts about the sufferings of the soldier in transportation and in the hospitals immediately after battles,” few men would enlist. James Gooding and the men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts actually watched a sea gull attack the body of a recently fallen comrade. “It was only by repeated efforts that the guard was able to keep the voracious bird away. The lesson taught by the scene will no doubt be a lasting one to all who witnessed it.” Thomas Key explained his fears by saying, “it is dreadful to contemplate being killed on the field of battle without a kind hand to hide one’s remains from the eye of the world or the gnawing of animals and buzzards.” The inefficient system represented neglect by the government.33

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Ironically, for some it was not the ineptness of the hospital staff that made them feel inhuman, but the bureaucratic efficiency of the permanent hospitals. As a hospital visitor for the USSC, George Carter reported that the hospital workers’ efficiency “exercise[d] a most depressing influence upon the sick.” He explained that “a man sees another on the next bed, receiving the same care & attention as himself to-day & to-morrow dying, covered up & removed with all dispatch.” Within a day or two, another man takes the dead man’s place and is attended to “with all the cheerfulness, by the same nurse & he feels as if they were all part of a great machine.” Carter suggested that male and female visitors and nurses who earnestly learned the soldiers’ wants and desires and acted as “a personal friend from home” could overcome the bureaucratic atmosphere of the hospital.34 Women unknowingly followed George’s proposal by personalizing their care. Katherine Wormeley described the work of the female nurses on the transport ships as “succoring men just off the battlefield, and making them easy, clean, and comfortable before we turn them over into other hands.” In spite of the short time that the transport nurses had to administer to these men, Georgeanna Woolsey never failed to amaze Wormeley with her ingenious strategies for individualizing the soldiers’ care. One of her many methods was to tie a small, blank book to her belt and record each of her patients’ particular needs as she came upon them. Sometimes the notations could be as impersonal as “Whiskey for 10, brandy for 4.” Or she would include the name of the soldier, the nature of his wound, and the necessary supplies with which to soothe him. She would interrupt her note taking to write a letter for a soldier, which she would later copy onto stationary and then post. Another of Woolsey’s schemes prevented men from being buried as anonymous soldiers. All too often, the women on the transport ships received men who were too sick to speak and who consequently died nameless. Although the women could do nothing about the men who arrived nameless and mute, Woolsey submitted that they could ensure that no man who could identify himself would ever suffer an anonymous fate as they passed into someone else’s care. Her remedy consisted of “writ[ing] the names and regiments of the bad cases and fasten[ing] them” to the men’s clothing. By this “practical tenderness,” the women were able to provide these seriously wounded men with a humane burial

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and make sure that they would not “remain forever ‘missing’ to their friends” and relatives. Woolsey, literally reclaimed the men’s identities from the anonymity of what would have been unmarked graves. She preserved the memory of their service for generations to come and showed the living soldiers that their sacrifices were not in vain. Such concern and care were of utmost importance to the soldiers. Gerald Linderman notes that the soldiers feared an impersonal and anonymous death, worrying that “the manner of death, and perhaps even the fact of death, would go unreported to those they loved and that their remains would be desecrated.”35 Furthermore, Woolsey’s resourceful ideas show that in the hustle and bustle of loading hundreds and occasionally thousands of soldiers onto the ships, she took the time for “practical tenderness.” Undoubtedly, many of her techniques were labor saving, but her desire to cater to the men’s special needs demonstrates that her ingenuity was inspired by concern for her patients. Woolsey was not the only female nurse to take such interest in the sick and wounded. According to Jane Schultz, women wrote and spoke about their patients with “a singular degree of material specificity, and they resisted surgeons’ tendency to blur patients’ individual characteristics.” Doctors, on the other hand, viewed their patients as cases and were more likely to refer to the “clinical details of a particular treatment without mentioning the soldier’s name.”36 Female nurses took a genuine interest in their patients and quickly learned their names, their personal histories, their culinary tastes, and other distinguishing traits. For instance, Hannah Ropes allowed Louisa May Alcott to divide her ward into three rooms in which she sorted her patients according to their needs. In her “duty room,” Alcott placed the wounded men who would require “a dressing tray full of rollers, plasters, and pins.” In her “pleasure room” rested the convalescent men to whom she took “books, flowers, games” and who were well enough to gossip. Finally, the sickest and most seriously wounded soldiers occupied her “pathetic room.” In this room, she carried teapots, sang lullabies, consoled, and sometimes provided a shroud. Alcott made light of her organization, but, like Woolsey’s solutions, Alcott’s system suggests thoughtfulness. The men who were the sickest most likely appreciated the comforting tones of Alcott’s lullabies and hushed words, just as the more active and alert

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convalescing soldiers enjoyed her diversions and familial attentions. Alcott admitted that nothing was more flattering than to have “rows of faces . . . lighting up, with smiles of welcome as I come among them.” The men were happy to see her because she regarded them with a “motherly affection.” Similarly, Susie King Taylor gave such attentive care to all of the soldiers of the Thirty-third USCT that they would sometimes ask, “Mrs. King why is it you are so kind to us? . . . You treat us just as you do the boys in your own company.” “Well,” replied King, “you know all the boys in other companies are the same to me as those in my company E; you are all doing the same duty, and I will do just the same for you.” They thanked her by saying, “we are very grateful for all you do for us.”37 The nurses also enjoyed discovering their patients’ particular desires in order to make them more comfortable. Each soldier usually had a special request, whether he craved a particular food or desired a book or simply wanted to talk about his family. By questioning the men about their peculiarities, the women showed that they took an interest in their “boys.” Sophronia Bucklin became so concerned for her soldiers that she refused to accept defeat when she received a patient who would not eat. She “studied every available article of luxury which might be procured to stimulate the appetite, and induce the return of strength.” With a young man named Galagher, she tried every kind of food she had at her disposal and finally succeeded with oyster soup. He cried, “more! more!” until he rallied from his illness. Emily Parsons provided motherly care by going around every night to tuck the men into their beds. As she made her rounds one evening, she came to one poor boy who was badly wounded and sick. As she pulled the blankets over him, “he half opened his eyes to see who it was.” When he saw that it was Parsons, “he gave such a pleasant smile” and then “laid his head down again as if entirely satisfied.” Most of the nurses became so attached to the men that they had their own favorites. Hannah Ropes received a shirt made by her own mother and wrote home to confirm the arrival of the package. “I have shown the shirt to several nurses,” confided Ropes, “but not yet have I seen the man I am willing to honor by dressing him in it.” She was confident that he would “appear in due time.”38 The idea that Ropes would honor a soldier with the homemade shirt has interesting connotations. She obviously prized the shirt

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because her mother made it for her. By withholding the shirt from the patients in the hospital, she was sending a silent message that a soldier had to gain her respect to earn the privilege of wearing the garment. Her special treatment of well-behaved men could not have gone unnoticed and most likely encouraged other patients to better behavior. In a similar way, the soldiers of the Armory Square Hospital cherished the “flag quilt” they received from the ladies of Portland, Maine. The quilt resembled the U.S. flag with “patriotic sentences and lines of poetry” sewed onto the white stripes, “which make the whole a very interesting study to the sick soldier, who has the fortune to lie under it.” The soldiers reported that “when a soldier is thought by his attendants to be particularly patriotic and meritorious, the quilt is called for and spread upon his bed!” The Armory Square patients understood the significance of the unique gift and probably tried to meet the expectations of showing courage and bearing their sufferings with a “cheerful, merry heart.”39 Along with discovering the soldier’s individual needs, female nurses provided civilizing activities, showing the men that they cared for their moral fortitude. Since the time the men had left home, much of their entertainment was tainted by gambling and coarse songs and the neglect of the Sabbath. Female nurses hoped to restore the family atmosphere of the parlor. The men appreciated this domesticity because they yearned for home and its inherent comforts. They, in fact, turned their own camps into homes and looked for any material means to improve their surroundings. For instance, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, was astonished at “what rapid progress soldiers make in the art of comfort.” He believed, “if my men were removed to some wholly new place with only tents & equipments, they wd. make themselves more comfortable in three weeks than they were all last winter.”40 Female nurses likewise made their surroundings comfortable. Rebecca Pomroy, for instance, re-created a parlor to regenerate the men physically and spiritually by utilizing the psychological power of domestic ideals. Pomroy decorated her room to draw the boys in and to provide a comforting atmosphere. In the center of the room stood a table that held “mother’s work box,” thirty pictures adorned the walls, and the large bay windows were filled with house plants. The room was big enough to accommodate thirty people, and there the

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boys gathered to play dominoes and to learn how “to sew and mend their stockings.” Pomroy’s re-created parlor is significant for several reasons. First, as historian Louis Stevenson notes, all Victorian homes had a parlor, which was the focal point of the household. It was in the parlor that “families assembled, met their guests, and entertained themselves and others through conversation, playing games, putting on plays, viewing stereographs, singing and enjoying music, writing letters, and engaging in the paramount parlor activity, reading.” Stevenson argues that Victorians could not have been Victorians without their parlors. Pomroy created a typical parlorlike setting by placing a table in the center of the room, around which she arranged chairs and couches to accommodate the numerous activities of the room, from the individual pleasure of reading to group games. The pictures on the walls also represented the Victorian desire to use decorations both to beautify and to instruct. Among Pomroy’s wall hangings, a “favorite one for study and reflection [by the men] was a fine one of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ” Furthermore, the soldiers added their own handmade “evergreen mottoes” to the walls, much like women “converted natural objects into household decorations.” Their mottoes were patriotic sentiments that included “Our Boys in Blue,” “Gettysburg,” and “We honor the Brave.” The men both added to the familial setting and participated in a domestic hobby.41 In a study of frontier women, historian Angel Kwolek-Folland further illustrates the significance of Pomroy’s parlor. Victorian women, she explains, were the “vital soul” of the household and were responsible not only for succoring their families, but also for “transforming an architectural shell into a Home.” They did this by carefully arranging furniture in a decorative yet organized manner. Because women were the “vital soul” of a home, the material they used to create a home became linked with femininity and domesticity and defined what it meant to be civilized. Without these domestic items, a Victorian felt primitive; therefore, wherever women went, they usually carried their objects of “woman culture” with them. As Americans continued their move westward after the Civil War, women took domestic articles to reverse the demoralizing effects of frontier life. The belief that the physical home could transform an individual was so powerful, Kwolek-Folland claims, that the “frontier was not so much conquered as it was domesticated.” More important, by

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acknowledging the significance of such materials, “Americans attested to the essentially mobile nature of the physical and spiritual home.” Women used these “cultural symbols” to transform the frontier into communities similar to the ones they had left behind. Likewise, women who lived in dugouts or in rented rooms on the Kansas prairies did not consider them temporary living arrangements and thus not worth improving. Instead, they established a “stable home by attention to the domestic interior and the objects which filled it.”42 Many parallels existed between the degrading environment of the frontier and the corrupting forces of the warfront. Women nurses initially found themselves uprooted and out of their element, without the domestic objects to which they were accustomed. Much like the frontier women who left behind the civilized world of the East for the untamed prairies, they arrived at the hospitals feeling overwhelmed by the crudeness of the hospital interiors, the filth of the wards, and the lack of supplies. But, also like the frontier women, they viewed these new quarters as their homes, so they countered the chaotic nature of hospitals by putting their wards in order. In doing so, they hoped to begin a daily routine and to create a stable environment for the men who had been battered by the vicissitudes of war. Mary Ann Bickerdyke was famous for her ability to transform a kitchen, a ward, or a camp into a model of cleanliness and organization. “Georgy” Woolsey quickly systematized the places where she served—the transport ships, the hospital tents at Gettysburg, and eventually her own ward. Nurses such as Bickerdyke and Woolsey established order out of confusion, incorporated routines that resembled home life, and provided the soldiers with a sense of security and constancy. Hospital life could become monotonous for the sick and wounded, which led to boredom and depression, so women fought that dullness by physically transforming the wards. Female nurses, like the frontier ladies, wanted to alter the hospital interiors with the domesticating presence of material culture. No matter how brief their stay at a hospital, they applied their talents to re-creating a homelike atmosphere in their wards. With domestic objects, they were able to turn their wards into “parlors” and provide a comforting, intellectually stimulating, and spiritually soothing environment. Mrs. C. E. McKay believed that her ornaments gave the barracks at the Cavalry Corps Hospital at City Point a cheerful and “sometimes

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even beautiful appearance.” “Pictures cut from magazines and weeklies, neatly framed,” hung on the walls. The ceilings were “festooned with tissue paper of various colors,” and chandeliers were made by “stringing together . . . several hoops of different sizes conically.” The chandeliers were then wound with strips of red, blue, and yellow paper and “ornamented with paper flowers and leaves.” McKay’s testimony that the wall hangings cheered the men suggests that she believed that they were more than simple decorations. Stevenson agrees that Victorian women believed that window hangings, paintings, portraits, and reproductions were more than just visually stimulating. Instead, household decorations had the power to influence the “moral development of the residents.” Women thus shaped intellectual and moral “life in the ways they decorated their parlors.” Charlotte Forten (an African American teacher from Philadelphia), who camped near Beaufort, South Carolina, did not decorate the hospital, but she decorated her own room and welcomed guests. She brightened her “sitting room” with a print of Eva (from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin), ivy, autumn leaves and berries, and a clock. The clock brought civility to the otherwise primitive room, as Forten noted it “is quite a treasure here. It is like the face of an old friend.” To this setting she welcomed a private from the Eighth Maine for dinner. “The poor fellow seemed glad to get into a comfortable house,” observed Forten. The homey surroundings put him at ease, and he “talked about his home and his family quite confidently.”43 Women nurses continued to use this moralizing method by adorning their wards with an abundance of hangings. Sarah Blunt began a three-month-long project to give her ward the look of home by enlisting the help of friends from Brooklyn, New York. “Send anything that will make my room look pleasant or that will give comfort to the soldiers.”44 Blunt explained her need for the articles by saying, “you see I am up to my old tricks.” One of her tricks included dressing one of the corners of the dining room with “blue wrapping paper” to bring a cheerful look to the hall. Her efforts continued into her own ward. After having the walls in the ward whitewashed, she planned to use pictures and papers on the walls, believing it would look pretty. The soldier-nurses became “interested in fixing the rooms” and eagerly joined Blunt in her domestication. By April, she was pleased with her accomplishments and bragged that she had “the

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best looking ward,” even though she admitted that the Sisters wards were in perfect order and were decorated “with flags, bright papers and greens.”45 The kind of pride that Blunt took in her ward’s appearance shows that she outfitted her rooms with a dual purpose in mind. Like Melcenia Elliott, who dressed up her area with evergreens so that it would “look as well as other places,” the women engaged in a bit of friendly rivalry and “play time.” By competing with fellow nurses to produce the most beautiful wards, they showed that they had respect for themselves and for their men. As Emily Parsons explained, it was not as if female nurses did not have plenty to do. But the time women devoted in turning these rooms into “makeshift” homes showed the soldiers that the women cared for their emotional and psychological state as well as for their physical recuperation. Likewise, the women sincerely believed in the ameliorating effects of the domestic items on the soldiers. The evergreen, the flags, and the magazine pictures were all visible symbols of home and were an important part of the Victorian notion of what it meant to be civilized. Therefore, the physical artifacts conjured up personal memories for each man of his own household treasures and the world he had left behind. For instance, C. P. Parker expressed his identification with these domestic ideals when he wrote that “everything around us in the hospital reminds us of our friends at home, and how kindly they remember all the needs of their sick and wounded sons, brothers, and friends.” Thus, women transmitted the love and sincerity of homefront civilians through the domestic objects they arranged in their wards.46 Sarah Blunt and Rebecca Pomroy were equally inventive when arranging parlor activities in their hospitals. At the Island Hospital at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, Blunt and the other female nurses were expected to keep the ideals of propriety and therefore could not “receive company in [their] own rooms.” Blunt resourcefully planned their “first reception in the ladies dining room,” believing it would “be a pleasant thing for the soldiers.” Three days later she wrote to her mother about the successful event. “Our reception on Wednesday evening went off grandly,” she bragged. “The boys enjoyed it ever so much. We played Whist, Eucha, & Cat a chasing with them. The invitation was from seven till half past nine—and the instant seven o’clock struck the ‘reception rooms’—a room half of the

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size of the dining room—was filled with boys.” The games were so popular that she planned on having “a larger room the next time.” She even anticipated entertaining company on the porch once the weather warmed. She thought, “won’t that be pleasant.”47 Pomroy arranged a variety of wholesome activities for her patients. She offered games such as dominoes and checkers and crafts in which the men made bead collars or carved bones or whittled chains out of laurel wood. She was most proud, however, of her weekly sewing circle. “I wish you could look in and see my sewing circle, which meets at three o’clock (genteel hour) in our large room,” she wrote a friend. Pomroy and the soldiers gathered to mend the week’s socks. “To see twelve or fourteen men sitting around the bed with scissors and balls of yarn, you would think,” she suggested, that “we were a happy family.”48 Indeed, female nurses tried to forge “happy families” through their activities. Aid societies assisted by keeping the hospitals supplied with dominoes, checkers, and backgammon boards in hopes of luring the men from the evils of cards and gambling. Nurses used the games, books, and crafts to help pass the dull hours of the hospital, but they also realized the importance these activities could have if employed properly. For instance, Blunt did not simply provide the games and then leave the men or stand by and watch them play. She and her fellow nurses joined them in whist, eucher, and other games, thereby truly re-creating an “evening in the parlor” complete with female companionship. The familial setting and the women’s presence also demanded a more gentlemanly comportment, so the men regained civility. Indeed, Pomroy realized the power a woman’s presence had over the men when she wrote that the soldiers “will do most anything, if I will only sit down with them and sew.” The games, the social hour, and the sewing all meant more to these soldiers because women were sharing their time with the men. In hospitals where the nurse had little time to herself, these moments had to have been even more precious to the men, assuring them that even in war they had a home away from home, with a mother figure by their sides.49 Another form of domestic entertainment for the men was music, a very powerful medium during the nineteenth century because it was both a public and a private form of entertainment. According to Kenneth Olson, bands had become a traditional part of civil, social,

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and community celebrations long before the Civil War. With the call for troops, soldiers and government officials expected musicians to enlist. Field musicians were essential to the smooth performance of the troops. Buglers regulated the daily life of the army. They would wake the camp with morning reveille, call the men to meals, announce mail call, and end the evening with taps. Buglers directed the troops on the field of battle, and the drummers kept the soldiers in step during a march. Military bands played during official ceremonies and at army dances, and they often serenaded the officers at night. Music on the field could inspire patriotic fervor and, according to Earl Hess, could “steady the nerves” before and after a battle. Bands played patriotic songs such as “Yankee Doodle” and “The Star Spangled Banner” to calm the men during a retreat. The night before the Battle of Fredericksburg, the two enemy armies were camped so close to one another that they could hear each other’s band. An impromptu contest ensued with the Rebels playing “Dixie” and “Bonnie Blue Flag” and the Yankees responding with “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia.” The contest ended in a draw when a Federal band began playing “Home Sweet Home” and the Confederates joined in. The fact that the song “Home Sweet Home” ended the melodious feud suggests the importance of that particular tune to all of the men, Confederate and Yankee. Few songs had the power to carry the men’s minds homeward like that melody. As both sides remembered their families at home, the image of the enemy softened in the other’s sight. Or, as Hess suggests, the neutral song was able to “bridge the gap” between the two enemies, and they were able to join “in an unusual example of emotional reinforcement.”50 During the less anxious moments of camp, music helped to quiet the soldiers by turning their thoughts to the comforting influences of home. Familiar melodies aroused the memories of home and loved ones, “of incidents past, and of pleasant civilian pursuits.” Robert Patrick, a Confederate soldier encamped south of the Chattahoochee River, was emotionally carried back to his family when the brass band that accompanied the supply train played “Shells of Ocean.” Reflecting on the significance of the song, he wrote, “numberless visions of home in happier hours and sweet reminiscences of the past crowds [sic] thickly upon my soul.” “[N]othing in the world” reminded him more of home “than those old familiar airs.” The men of the

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Fifty-fourth Massachusetts loved their band. As F. S. reported in the Christian Recorder, “‘Music hath charms’ of a very superior kind in a place like this, and in a business like this.” The importance was that music “seems to link us with home recalling to mind its pleasant associations, thereby going far towards ennobling and refining the character of the soldier.” In hospitals, music had an equal power to console the sick and wounded. At Benton Barracks in St. Louis, Mary Livermore encouraged a chaplain to sing to a dying man because she felt that “in his last hour of life, [he] needed soothing more than argument or entreaty.” The rich, full, clear tenor floated through the ward and “charmed every groan and wail into silence.” The familiar tunes comforted the dying patient enough for him to believe God would forgive him. He told the chaplain that he was ready to die. The music touched not only the dying man, but, as Livermore witnessed, the other patients, the attendants, and the surgeons in the ward “glowed under the soaring melody.”51 At the “Hurly-burly House,” Louisa May Alcott found that the musical portion of Sunday services were more advantageous than the “dull sermons.” She reported that the patients were “listless at the beginning, and listless at the end; but the instant some stirring old hymn was given out, sleepy eyes brightened, lounging figures sat erect, and many a poor lad rose up in his bed.” During those magical hymns, Alcott believed the hospital “seemed a homelike and happy spot.” Although the services were not wholly satisfying to Alcott and the day was not a true day of rest, she still felt that Sunday “was never like the other six.” In fact, for most of the people who worked around a military schedule, the days seemed to blend together with one day hardly distinguishing itself from the other. On Emily Quiner’s first Sabbath at her hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, she spent the day cleaning the ward for inspection. She lamented in her diary that the day did not “seem like Sunday at home. I should not know it by any such action here.” The arrival of wounded soldiers on one occasion immersed Sarah Brandegee in her work from morning until eleven o’clock that evening, when she retired to her “state-room.” In the excitement, she had quite forgotten that it was the Sabbath.52 In the hospitals, Sundays were reserved for the weekly cleaning and inspection of the wards by the surgeons, but usually the female nurses tried to encourage the sanctity of the Sabbath. With Alcott’s

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help, the men on her ward observed the holy day in their own manner, or, as Alcott put it, the “boys did their best to make it what it should be.” There was much reading of Testaments, humming of hymns, and looking at books. The men retired their hats for the day, “read no novels, swore less,” and “were more silent, orderly, and cheerful as if the Lord were an invisible Wardmaster.” During these pious moments, Alcott put down her sponge and teapot and “preached a little sermon then and there, while homesickness and pain made these natures soft.” At Columbia College Hospital in Washington, D.C., Rebecca Pomroy created an atmosphere that her editor Anna Boyden described as a “Sabbath benediction.” She turned the Sunday cleaning on its head by preparing her men and wards for the Sabbath on Saturday evenings. The purifying process included bathing the men, dressing them in clean linen, trimming their hair and beards, anointing them with cologne, and supplying their beds with fresh sheets and white spreads. After cleansing their bodies on Saturday, she tended to their souls on Sunday. Pomroy combined reading the Bible with “many tender applications, [and] much motherly advice and comfort.” By her own admission, all these Sunday activities “went straight to the hearts of her soldier boys.”53 The fact that Alcott, Quiner, and Brandegee noted that the Sabbath was not honored in the hospitals suggests these ladies’ religiosity. Most of the women who volunteered for nursing duties, in fact, rationalized their roles in religious terms. Rebecca Pomroy believed that the Lord had work for her among the sick soldiers, and she eventually joined the corps of army nurses. Julia Wheelock remained in Virginia, with “God being my helper, to do for others as I fain would have done for my dear brother.” Sarah Brandegee felt that her work among the soldiers permitted her to lead souls into Christ’s kingdom. She confessed that she spent months “preaching the gospel to my suffering and dying countrymen.” Sister Lydia Penny, a former slave, “felt it her duty to go along with husband” and his regiment, the Fifth USCT, because of her love for him and her country. She believed it was “her Christian duty to do all she could for the liberty of her afflicted and down-trodden race.” Women nurses spoke of their work in religious terms because most nineteenthcentury middle-class women were actively involved in their community churches and, as noted earlier, saw themselves as the

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spiritual and moral guides of their families. By wrapping themselves in religious piety, they protected themselves from critics who might attack their nursing as inappropriate. Likewise, they entered the male world of health care by justifying their labor for the soldiers in terms of the “Lord’s work.” Fulfilling their Christian duty supported the ideal of female moral superiority, and female moral superiority made women’s nursing efforts even more important in the eyes of the soldiers and their family members. In fact, Brandegee argued that “a woman who was not afraid to go out at ten o’clock at night with strange men, to see and pray with a dying man, must be a good woman.” She was rewarded for her spiritual efforts in a letter from a soldier’s mother who felt grateful that a lady nurse devoted “her time and talents to bringing souls to Jesus.” The female nurses did not feel that it was enough to be present in the hospitals and represent civility; they also felt called to witness to the men. They considered that part of their duty to the men was to administer “beyond their temporal wants,” as Brandegee put it, and to ease the conscience and comfort the tormented soul.54 Women met the spiritual needs of the sick and wounded by distributing tracts, by reading the Bible out loud to them, by leading them in prayer, and by listening to their spiritual shortcomings. Whenever they could, they tried to establish some kind of religious service. At Cairo, Illinois, Mary Safford arranged Sunday services by providing sacred music and inviting individual clergy as guest preachers. Mary Ann Bickerdyke was also impressed by the prayer meetings headed by Chaplain Patook in her field hospital near Marrietta, Georgia. She wished that her son, James, could “help sing in the Soldiers prayer meeting.” “It is very affecting,” she wrote to him, “to hear men speak and pray in feeble broken tones who have just escaped death in the battlefield or just come up from typhoid fever.” While services brought a regularity to the soldiers’ lives that they had lost in camp, female nurses also acted as spiritual confidantes for the men, listening to confessions and offering solace by encouraging them to accept God into their lives.55 Women worked to keep the Lord ever present in the men’s minds in hopes of reclaiming their souls from dissipated habits and the psychological horrors of war. Most of them understood that soldiering imperiled man’s soul, so they ministered to the heart as much as to

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the body. When a convalescing New York volunteer named George returned to Hannah Ropes’s hospital after a day of drinking, she treated him kindly instead of punishing him. She gave him cider vinegar to cure his hangover and suggested that he say his prayers with his eyes closed to help him fall asleep. The next day she went to him with a cup of coffee in her hand and with “no allusion to the previous night in my looks or words.” Over the course of the day, he declared his remorse and humiliation and thanked her for the “overpowering sense of kindness he received.” He ended his confession with a “solemn vow never to so dishonor his manhood again.” By relieving the intoxicating effects of the alcohol and applying subtle piety, Ropes gently persuaded George if not to improve his behavior, at least to reflect upon it. The recruit responded to her kindness because it more than likely awakened in him his own mother’s “warning voice” and reminded him of the characteristics of “true manhood.” Ropes’s indirect moralizing was typical of Victorian women. Mothers, sisters, and wives were taught that they set the moral tone of the home by their own example; by gentle nudges and moral lessons, they could coax the men to behave piously. Sophronia Bucklin realized that the war in some ways made women’s moral mission easier. She noted that men were “aroused to a sense of . . . danger” on the battlefield, so when they reached the hospitals, they eagerly embraced the teachings of Christ, hoping to save themselves. She assured wives that their husbands repented of their wrongs while in her hospital and that she listened to their supplications and relieved their burdened hearts.56 Although spiritual steadfastness was foremost in women’s minds, the women’s cooking often occupied men’s thoughts. Female nurses who had access to the kitchens in their hospitals baked and cooked meals and delicacies that men associated with home. Writing to Frank Moore after the war to aid him in compiling his book on women nurses and sanitary workers, George Tannicliff related the miraculous change in the Adams Hospital menu when “Aunt” Lizzie Aiken and “Mother” Mary Sturgiss arrived. “After they came,” wrote Tannicliff, “we had nice Toast, Tea, crackers, Wine & in fact every thing we needed.” A hospital mate of Tannicliff, named Mathew J. Fowler, told Moore that the ladies established a “Special Diet Kitchen,” where they prepared “dainties craved by delicate

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appetites” and then took them to the “bed-sides of the sufferers, to make it seem as home-like as possible.” In the more remote setting of the field hospitals, women had to be resourceful. When the Thirtythird USCT was ordered with others to take Fort Gregg, South Carolina, Susie King Taylor waited at the landing for the return of the wounded. After the battle, as the doctor worked on the most critically wounded, Taylor asked the other patients what they would like to eat. Soup, they replied, but she had none. Instead, she combined condensed milk and turtle eggs to produce a custard. Taylor was pleased with her own ingenuity and noted that the “boys enjoyed it very much.” While convalescing at Adams Hospital, J. B. Albert was in charge of part of the wards and had an “opportunity of seeing what the ladies were doing to alleviate the suffering of our ‘brave boys.’ ” If particular foods could not be procured from the USSC, the ladies would buy them with their own money and then prepare the requested delicacies for the men. The nurses’ ability to provide special food and their individualized care for the men, Albert believed, did “more good than medicine.” In fact, he was certain that “in the ward where the patients were taken care of as they should have been there were the least number of deaths.” He defined proper care as allowing the ladies “to do as they like[d].” If more doctors would have “admitted” ladies to “pursue certain things,” he asserted, “much good might have been accomplished.”57 All doctors did not allow women free reign within the hospitals. Jane Schultz notes that although most head surgeons and female nurses established a working relationship, “conflicts over bureaucratic inhumanity, morality, and corruption were pervasive.” Precisely because women garnered power through their knowledge of cooking, food often became the source of conflict between female nurses and head surgeons. Some doctors feared that the women would disobey their orders and feed the men harmful delicacies such as baked goods and home-preserved fruits and vegetables. Some surgeons responded either by not allowing women into the kitchens or by withdrawing cooking privileges. Other surgeons closely monitored the distribution of the home goods that flowed in from the soldiers’ aid societies, and still other doctors were concerned that the women’s control of such supplies subverted their own authority. It was not clear what motivated the surgeons to change their policies at Jackson

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Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. A week after Emily Quiner arrived there, the ward matron brought an order from the surgeon in charge to the effect that the ladies could not enter the kitchen, “as they have here [been] accustomed to for the purpose of cooking for the sick men.” The news “created quite an excitement,” but the policies appear to have returned to normal a month later, as evidenced by the fact that Emily went into the kitchen to make lemonade for her patients. Women, for their part, felt superior to the surgeons in their knowledge of the restorative powers of food. As the self-appointed mothers for the sick and wounded, the nurses felt an obligation to cater to the men’s needs and wants. Therefore, when orders denied them the liberty to dispense food, many of them felt that they had been stripped of the domestic authority that imbued them with moral superiority, which rendered them the same as the male nurses and thus ineffective.58 Some women refused to capitulate, however. At Judiciary Square Hospital, although the staff gave the women nurses stringent orders not to go into the kitchen for “articles of any kind,” Sophronia Bucklin willfully disobeyed. She refused to deny her patients the “countless little comforts which a sick fancy craves.” Bucklin and her fellow lady nurses devised ways to gain luxuries, including begging from the USSC and the USCC. She admitted that she then would stealthily prepare the foods for the men in hospital bowls, which would have “the appearance of official ordering, if a surgeon or the officer of the day chanced to pass through the ward.” Some of the delicacies undoubtedly affected the men adversely, but for the most part women were able to improve the fare at the hospitals.59 As an agent for the Iowa Sanitary Commission, Annie Wittenmyer visited hundreds of military hospitals. During her visits, she discovered that the sick and wounded were being served meals that she described as “disgusting and injurious.” Upon investigation, she found that the cooks were usually untrained convalescent soldiers. Wittenmyer sprang into action. Early in 1864, she approached the USCC with the idea of underwriting a project of “Special Diet Kitchens” and appointing her as the supervisory agent. She gained their support, and over the next eighteen months she appointed more than two hundred “lady managers” and installed hundreds of these kitchens in military hospitals in the departments of the Cumberland,

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Mississippi, and Potomac. The installation of the “Special Diet Kitchens” required finesse. Wittenmyer first had to convince a head surgeon that his hospital needed such a kitchen, and then she had to oversee the installation of proper cooking ranges, hire two to three lady managers, and get the kitchen running. Minor problems between the lady managers and their cooking staffs usually arose during the preparations, but once the kitchens were specially fitted and the cooks and women in place, the rewards were worth the work. According to Wittenmyer’s memoirs, when the first meals were issued from the “well-regulated kitchen,” the sick men were so thankful that they “cried and kissed the dishes,” saying “it seemed most like getting home.” Instead of “slop” received out of “swill-buckets,” good food was taken to the bedside of the very sick and severely wounded. These men received “baked potatoes, baked apples, beef-tea, broiled beefsteak, . . . and everything in the best home-like preparation.”60 For Wittenmyer, serving the men and using new dishes made as much of a difference to the men’s recovery as the improved menu. She realized that when the men were being served indigestible food in “black and battered” tin cups and “rusty and greasy” platters, the message was one of indifference on the part of the hospital staff. This apathy originated with the army incompetence in not removing the wounded from the field efficiently. The sick and wounded felt that because their service had ended, the army did not value them anymore. This perceived attitude not only affected the recovery of the sick and wounded, but also influenced the morale of the able-bodied soldiers who were concerned about the treatment of their comrades. Wittenmyer’s insistence on serving food on “nice white dishes and bright tinware” showed the men that the army and the civilians, represented by the lady managers, prized the men enough to treat them civilly. Wittenmyer set a higher standard not only for the hospital, but also for the patients. Proper dishes, arranged tables, and manners reminded the men of the behavior expected when dining. Civil treatment led to civil comportment. This was yet another step toward true manhood and the bosom of the family.61 Like Wittenmyer, other female nurses realized the salutary effect of the homelike dishes and carried the idea to extraordinary lengths to make the holidays special for the forgotten soldiers. Just as domesticity could be spread through the material culture of curtains,

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decorations, and dishes, the celebration of the holidays held a restorative magic all their own. In the hospitals, female nurses and women visitors used Christmas and the New Year as opportunities to exercise the regenerative powers of domesticity. During the first Christmas of the war, Eliza Howland and her sister Georgeanna Woolsey visited the hospitals around Alexandria, Virginia, and delivered “some goodies and little traps [sic]” to the men before joining Eliza’s husband at his camp. When they arrived at the first hospital, they found that “nice arrangements had been made by Madame M,” who had asked members of the Sixteenth New York to “bring her Christmas greens, and had dressed all the wards with festoons and garlands, little flags, [and] mottoes.” She also arranged a “grand Christmas dinner for her ‘boys.’ ” They continued their gift-giving mission with their next stop at the Mansion House Hospital. This hospital was also “resplendent with bright tissue papers and evergreens.” A Christmas feast was being prepared. The men would dine on fifty roast turkeys, “sixteen large loaf-cakes iced to perfection and decorated with the most approved filigree work, pies without number, cream puffs, cranberry sauce, puddings of all sorts, etc.” Howland declared that this was the “most Christmas-like scene we have looked upon.” She and Woolsey distributed socks knitted by their mother and sister Jane to the men “likely to go back soon to their regiments.”62 These preparations transformed the wards into a place of hospitality that encircled the men in the imitation of a holiday. Within the festively decorated walls, the men were treated to special food and to a spirit of conviviality. The commotion of activities and the feelings of anticipation combined to re-create the kinds of preparations they would have experienced at home. Howland and Woolsey’s visit continued the homelike atmosphere of the holiday because they represented surrogate relatives dropping in to spread Christmas cheer on their way to their own family celebrations. Their gift of socks resembled the domestic ritual of exchanging presents with friends and family and emphasized women’s nurturing and supportive role. The socks would physically protect the men’s feet from the cold and at the same time would remind the men of the ladies’ support of the Union cause.63 Another holiday that had become a family-oriented gathering was Thanksgiving. Sarah Josepha Hale took up a personal crusade to make the day a national holiday because, according to Glenna

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Matthews, Hale believed it would politically benefit the country during the war to participate all at once in a celebration of Thanksgiving. President Lincoln rewarded her efforts by declaring it a national holiday in 1863. Hale’s accomplishment not only reflected on her own political influence, but also on the “political ramifications” of domesticity. Female nurses employed the domestic ideals of the day appropriately by re-creating familial feasts. The Ladies’ Colored Soldiers’ Aid Society of Louisville, Kentucky, gave the sick and wounded soldiers of Hospital Number 5 of New Albany a Thanksgiving dinner described as “the most splendid dinner that I had ever seen for abundance and variety, taste, and style.” According to the Christian Recorder, the ladies served a total of 222 black soldiers, along with their white officers and ladies who “enjoyed themselves in having the privilege of partaking so luxurious a Thanksgiving with colored soldiers.” Although no letter survives of what these soldiers thought of this dinner, it was probably similar to T. M. Chester’s views of the Fifty-fourth’s Thanksgiving. When the “good people of the North” sent Thanksgiving dinner to his regiment, he wrote, “such tangible rememberances [sic] serve to cheer the spirits and nerve the hearts of the nation’s defenders.”64 Another soldier, writing to his hometown newspaper, reported on his Vicksburg Thanksgiving. When Mary Newcomb held a formal dinner for all of the staff and patients at Hospital Number 3 in the city, she emphasized the importance of celebrating the holiday in a respectful and genteel manner. “Mother Newcomb” presided as hostess as she received men from all ranks and stature into her home to share the bounty in a spirit of thanksgiving to the “Supreme Ruler for mercies shown to our nation.” The invitations, the china, the flowers, the elaborate food, and the formality of Major French serving as host—all contributed to a refined dining experience. The implications would not have been lost on the soldiers because by midcentury Americans had transformed the conduct of dining. Historian John Kasson notes that Victorians reformed table manners, established standards for table settings, and essentially turned an everyday occurrence into another indicator of comportment. He suggests, “from infancy onward, in the manner in which one ate, one gradually imbibed the lessons of modern civilization: to discipline the cravings of the stomach and the ‘lower’ body by force of intellect, will, and

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habit.” Dining, then, became yet another lesson in self-restraint and an important indication of a person’s civility. It was presumed that if a man had command over his eating habits, then he most likely could control his emotions, his drinking, and his sexual appetites. The soldier from Company G understood the social significance of the dinner, and that was why he reported the occasion in such detail. He wanted to convince the people of his community that in the midst of the war’s destruction and chaos he and several hundred other men were reminded of the importance of self-control. “Mother” Newcomb had re-created a family dinner, but, more important, she had forged a civil environment where her guests were treated to the trappings of polite society and were expected to behave appropriately.65 COMRADES IN WAR Soldiers who experienced the special efforts of the female nurses in reproducing comforts of home believed, as Charlie Hopkins did of “Mother” Newcomb, that these women were “little less than Angels.” Their work had the impact it did because the men did not expect women to expose themselves to the privations and dangers of the warfront. Sophronia Bucklin encountered such a soldier during her first days in a hospital. The man had been brought in with both of his eyes shot out. He lay on his bed silently as Bucklin washed him and made him comfortable. She thought he had also lost his speech, but several days later when she passed his bed, he said to her, “Did you notice that I never talked to you, as the other patients did, when you first came to take care of us?” She replied yes. He explained that it was because “I was so thankful, that I had no words for speech—to think the women of the North should come down here, and do so much for us, being exposed to all kinds of disease, and to so much work and hard fare, all to take care of us poor soldiers.” This soldier was touched by Bucklin’s sacrifice because he knew firsthand the kinds of deprivations she would encounter at the front, and at the same time he was emotionally relieved to have a representative from the symbolic home comprehend his own battlefront hardships.66 Reid Mitchell argues that in the Civil War the army volunteers “underwent a psychological transformation” that wrenched them from their prewar identities as civilians and wedded them to a new

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identity as soldiers. The conditions of war required them to be killers, often made them feel helpless, and exposed them to horrific scenes of bloodshed and death. Because war was so radically different from their prewar lives, Mitchell contends, soldiering “demanded changes in men’s psyches, simply in order for them to survive.” The transformation from civilian to soldier happened gradually for most of the men as they went through a hardening process that carried them further away from their prewar lives. Men formed these new identities, Mitchell explains, because they felt isolated from the American public. As they moved away from their old lives, they clung to their new identities and to the people who experienced the war with them— their comrades in arms. In a similar way, women who volunteered as nurses encountered some of the same hardships that men endured. Women had to adjust their psyches to cope with the disturbing sights of mangled bodies, amputated limbs, and rotting wounds; to withstand the putrid smells of the hospital; and to tolerate the groans of the wounded. Because they lived in the hospitals and faced the same privations that the soldiers withstood, they began to identify with the soldiers, and the soldiers with them. Female nurses were able to bridge the gap between the soldiers and the home front by using their similar wartime experiences as yet another way to reclaim them.67 Sophronia Bucklin understood the ravages of war. Indeed, her wartime service offers a convenient framework to examine the similarities between the soldiers’ and the female nurses’ battlefront experiences. Bucklin began her nursing career after the Battle of Antietam, when she applied to her town’s soldiers’ aid society and was appointed to become an army nurse under the direction of Dorothea Dix, subject to certain qualifications. Bucklin first had to meet physical requirements, just as the male volunteer had to be examined by a doctor and be declared fit. Female nurses had to be of “strong health—not subjects of chronic diseases, nor liable to sudden illnesses.” They were supposed to be neat, orderly, and industrious. Unlike the men, however, female recruits also had to have “certificates of qualification and good character from at least two persons of trust, testifying to morality, integrity, seriousness, and capacity for the care of the sick.” Because women were going to influence the men morally, they themselves had to be of the highest moral character. If they failed to provide satisfactory references, then it was assumed that, rather than saviors, they would be a source of degradation.68

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Dix approved Bucklin’s appointment and ordered Bucklin to report to her in Washington, D.C. Her ride from Auburn, New York, to Washington illustrates that women experienced the same kind of gradual transformation that men went through as they began their war careers. Bucklin left Auburn on a lovely September day softened with a blue sky and “fleeting summer breezes.” The trip consumed about a day and a half, and as she sat in her car the images of home and peace passed by her train window. She rode throughout the day and into the night without so much as a “word of cheer, nor the kindly questions that relieve the monotony of silence and fatigue.” She was on the train by herself, and just as the soldier left the comforting familiarity of his family, she too found herself alone and surrounded by silent strangers. The train had stopped for a while, and as the night turned to morning Bucklin awoke to her first sights of war. Before her lay an encampment of soldiers, most of whom, to her shock, slept with one blanket over them, on the bare ground with knapsacks for pillows. As she watched the men involved in their morning ablutions, a cavalryman rushed onto the train shouting, “Have you any papers for a poor soldier?” This first close interaction with a soldier stayed with her for days. She thought about his “heavy eyelids, which seemed to droop for long want of refreshing sleep,” and she was struck by the “frost glittering on his coat and cap.”69 Bucklin’s train ride continued past pleasant and tidy farms, where the soldiers and their crude life seemed distant. The locomotive slowly rolled into the “cavernous Washington train depot,” and as it came to a stop, Bucklin felt that the domestic comforts of home were very far away. The air outside the cars hung heavy with smoke, and coal dust “from a thousand grim throated furnaces” coated the walls. The cold and inhospitable depot, which lacked a “civilized convenience of any kind,” seemed to forebode the degrading environment to come. Her escort, Col. Belger, never arrived, and she was left to locate Dix’s office on her own. Thus, she met one of her first trials of braving an unknown city without a chaperon.70 Bucklin left the depot and took in the sights of the capital as she made her way to Dix. The dust flew thickly about her, and everyone and everything seemed to be in a commotion of “bustle and excitement”: “The bright new uniforms of the officers—the glitter of military trappings were all new sights to my wondering eyes.” But what

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most caught her attention was the “moving panorama of war” that passed before her in the form of wounded men. She saw them everywhere she went. Men lying on blood-stained stretchers and under fly tents, with every building being used as a hospital. The numerous sights began to press upon her, and she felt a “strange sense of suffocation” as if the air she breathed was “filled with poisonous vapors.” She overcame her anxiety, located Dix’s office, and was sent to the Judiciary Square Hospital to report for duty.71 When Bucklin reached the hospital, her courage sagged once again. She felt her heart sink as she looked at the “low unpainted buildings” and thought about the scenes inside. She confessed that when she volunteered her services, she had been “eager to lend [herself] to the glorious cause of Freedom,” but now she had “weak flesh” and a “timid heart.” Beyond the threshold of the hospital, “gaping wounds” and “thirsting lips awaited me telling their ghastly tales of the bloody battle.” The threshold represented the line that divided the comforting sphere of home from the chaotic and destructive forces of war. But war had rearranged the lines between public and private and between the rules defining masculine and feminine behavior. Bucklin stood outside the doorway as a representative of the home, and inside the building lay victims of disease and battle injuries. As she stepped through the doorway, like the soldier engaged in a battle for the first time, she experienced a mix of exhilaration and fear. “A strong will” pushed her into the battle, and with that step she began her transition from civilian to volunteer nurse.72 The initial shocks for most women were the sights, sounds, and smells of the hospital. Like the soldiers, who according to Hess experienced battle through the senses, women were often overwhelmed by the foreign environment of the hospital. Belle Robison, serving as a nurse at the Indiana Hospital in Washington, D.C., described her new situation and her immediate apprehensions in a letter to her mother. “Oh I wish you could see some of the sad sad sights[.] I went to work soon as I arrived yesterday dressed some terrible wounds.” At the Battle of Fort Henry, Mary Newcomb “saw the first killed soldier I had ever seen, and it sent a shock through me that I cannot describe.” Georgeanna Woolsey had the good fortune of training for a month at Elizabeth Blackwell’s hospital, but her first encounters with the wounded were no less shocking. On her first day, a doctor

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asked her for a basin. Woolsey recalled that “I presented the basin promptly, and as promptly tumbled over in a faint at seeing a probe used for the first time.” Even after many encounters with the wounded, Julia Wheelock was startled by the sight that met her eyes when she entered a building that housed soldiers fresh from the battlefield. It was nine o’clock in the evening, and “a small piece of candle was burning upon the counter,” which dimly lit the room and made the bloody scene all the more horrifying. “There lay the wounded, stretched upon the floor side by side, . . . weltering in blood and filth.” Wheelock did not falter, but nerved herself and began cleaning and dressing their wounds.73 For Katherine Wormeley, it was not the sights of the wounded that bothered her, but the sounds. During her first day on board the transport ship with Harriet Whetten, Wormeley could not bear the groans. As the surgeons “open[ed] the wounds, [applied] remedies, and replace[d] the bandages,” Wormeley sat with her fingers in her ears. She explained, “I do not suffer under the sights; but oh! the sounds, the screams of the men.” She believed that she could bear anything with “calmness and, in one sense, indifference” as long as she was engaged with it. But one day she stayed on board to rest and was subjected to the “groans of men undergoing operations on the gangway of the ‘Louisiana.’ ” She was certain that “no tongue can tell what I suffered.” Louisa May Alcott felt as much apprehension about the foul smells. She remembered that “the first thing I met was a regiment of the vilest odors that ever assaulted the human nose.” Everyone assured her that “it was a chronic weakness of all hospitals and I must bear it.” She chose instead to combat the offensive odors by “besprinkling” herself and the premises with lavender water. Rebecca Pomroy’s first duty was on a ward with fifty typhoid patients, and it was both the “odors and the moans of the dying” that seemed unbearable to her. The whole experience was so overwhelming that she almost fainted and had to retire to her room. Pomroy “struggled with this dreadful weakness” by gathering strength from within and from a reliance on God.74 Pomroy eventually became “familiar with death” and the indelicate scenes of the wards. The initial encounters with the dead and dying, the mangled bodies, and the horrible smells were the first steps toward hardening the ladies’ sensibilities. The fires of war

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baptized women nurses, as they did the soldiers. Men saw “the Elephant” as they engaged in combat; women saw “the Elephant” as they dressed the wounds and fought the illnesses that resulted from war. Men became accustomed to being shot at and to watching their comrades being wounded and killed. Women became used to cleaning and touching wounds, tolerating vile odors, and accepting the death of their patients. For both men and women, the period of adjustment did not take long because the exigencies of war demanded immediate psychological and physical discipline for survival.75 Susie King Taylor recalled in her memoirs that she and the men of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts had a debate about whether the skulls lying outside the walls of Fort Wagner were those of the enemy or their own boys. “They were a gruesome sight, those fleshless heads and grinning jaws, but by this time I had become accustomed to worse things and did not feel as I might have earlier in my camp life.” She thought it strange that one could overcome the aversion to suffering in war. “How we are able to see the most sickening sights, such as men with their limbs blown off and mangled by the deadly shells, without a shudder.”76 Sophronia Bucklin had to overcome her squeamishness when the steward called for the nurses to “turn out to dress the wounds.” Until then, she had not taken care of men “fresh from the gory field,” and so “with a quaking at my heart” she went out with the hospital force to dress wounds. She busied herself with everything “save touching the dreadful wounds till I could evade it no longer.” “With resolution,” Bucklin combed the matted hair, washed the “hideous mask of blood and grime” from the men’s faces, cleaned “the gaping wounds of the gore and filth,” and bound the limbs. By the Battle of Gettysburg, she not only had become expert at dressing wounds, but by her own admission “had grown familiar of death in every shape.” One day at the Gettysburg field hospitals, Bucklin and several other women took a constitutional on the battlefield. The leaves covered the ground, and as Bucklin walked, she unconsciously stepped on dead bodies that had been “completely wrapped up by the fallen leaves.” “The quivering of the loose flesh” sent her away “with no little amount of nervous terror.” Yet this experience did not end her souvenir hunt, as she gathered “fragments of shell, battered bullets,” and pieces of blood-stained moss, as mementos of the battle.77

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Harriet Whetten recognized the change in her own comportment after only two weeks on board the USSC transport ships. She wrote a friend that Henry Bennett had asked her to write a letter to his wife. So Harriet “crouched down between him, and a man shot through the chest, gathering up my petticoats lest they should touch either of them, . . . while the stump of Andrew Tyan’s leg was being dressed about 2 feet behind me.” “A fortnight ago I never could have believed that I could do these things,” she wrote with astonishment, “but the sense, the blessed sense, of doing good to these brave and patient men overpowers every thing.” Whetten embraced the excitement and fulfillment of her work and even the oddities of army life. She philosophized that “every thing [in the army] is strange that nothing is strange, and it seems quite natural to me to be near the front lines of the grand army.” For both Bucklin and Whetten, as for countless other female nurses, the soldiers’ immediate needs did not allow them to follow ladylike decorum, just as successful soldiering required men to subdue their fears and sensitivities to death and fight when they wanted to run.78 Women nurses were also transformed by the hardships they had to endure in the austere quarters of the hospitals. Like the soldiers, they had to tolerate sleeping on the ground, on boards, or, in Louisa May Alcott’s case, in drafty rooms infested with rats. They suffered from the quantity and the quality of their food. Sophronia Bucklin literally starved herself in order to feed her hungry patients because she claimed someone “was living off the rations.” She would give her food to the men and go for an entire day with “wretched hunger gnawing at my healthy stomach.” At Columbia College Hospital, Rebecca Pomroy and other nurses received twenty cents a day for rations, but were not allowed into the kitchens, so the male nurses cooked their meals, to the ladies’ disappointment. The nurses’ work was never ending, and the cries of the sick and wounded made them rise from their beds at all hours of the night. Katherine Wormeley admitted that her life on the hospital transports, although exhilarating, was wearing because she had “no proper place to eat, sit or sleep.” Likewise, most women nurses had little ability to keep up their appearance, especially at the field hospitals. Nurses had little time to sew for themselves, and sometimes the opportunity to mend did not matter because no amount of sewing would take away the

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bloodstains. Sometimes these ladies would work for days in the same blood-spattered dresses. The novelty of nursing quickly faded, and many nurses felt the same as Sarah Gregg when she wrote, “oh, I am so tired of this continual routine of war, war, war.” After years of service, Pomroy believed that her hospital was becoming a “hard place,” and she yearned for “good, pure society.”79 Although the ladies became hardened to the harsh experiences and environment of the hospitals, they did not become indifferent to their patients or adopt an attitude of cold professionalism. If nothing else, the austerity of their new lives made them all the more appreciative of the soldiers’ sacrifices. At Gettysburg, Bucklin learned “how few are nature’s real wants.” She discovered “how much, which at home we call necessary, can be lopped off, and we still be satisfied; how sleep can visit our eyelids, and cold be driven away with the fewest comforts around us.” Even her familiarity with death did not turn her into an automaton. When one of her patient’s died, she suffered from a “sickness of heart.” It was not the “professional regret, which filled the heart of the nurse at the loss of her patient,” insisted Bucklin, but “the sorrow of a sister over the fallen remains of a brave and true brother.”80 Along with becoming accustomed to the spartan conditions of war, female nurses also had to learn to live a regimented life. They bristled against regulations just as much as the soldiers did. Reid Mitchell suggests that the regimentation of the military was difficult for the average man to accept because his prewar life was characterized by independence. Most Civil War soldiers had been farmers or farmers’ sons, and they had lived a life controlled only by Mother Nature. Each man was his own boss, and if he had someone to answer to, that person was most likely a relative. The freedom he experienced in his occupation would have been coupled with a political autonomy he exercised within the democratic society. What these men discovered, however, was that the army was not based on democratic principles. The numerous rules of the military, the expectation that a soldier will follow orders, and the demand for discipline contrasted sharply with the men’s civilian lives. Some soldiers likened their condition in the army to slavery, whereas others compared their military work to that of a machine. A Northern officer explained his loss of patriotic enthusiasm to his mother: “The interest I once took

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in Military is almost gone. I do my duty like a machine that has so much in a day to do anyway.” A man’s ability to forego his independence was a step in his transformation from civilian to soldier.81 Just as the male volunteers lost autonomy over their persons when they enlisted, the female nurses were also given orders and expected to obey. Harriet Whetten understood the feeling of submitting to the commands of the army brass when her boat was ordered to “wait for the expected engagement before Richmond.” The wait could last as long as two weeks, Whetten guessed, and because the ladies had already readied the ship, there was nothing to do. She hated the dreadful waiting. Sarah Blunt had difficulty complying with the restrictions that the surgeons and the head nurse placed on the nurses’ movements. She was happy to move into her new quarters, but regretted that Dr. Hager shared the same cottage because “it brings us more under his eye and of course that is not quite so agreeable.” With the matron, Mrs. Gibbons, watching over the ladies on one side and Hager watching on the other, Blunt felt that “our souls can hardly be called our own.”82 Similarly, when Dorothea Dix asked Rebecca Pomroy if she knew of any ladies from Massachusetts who would like to nurse, Pomroy replied that most of the women she knew could not tolerate the conditions. Dix believed that the rules were “plain and easy,” but Pomroy did not agree and related the conversation in a letter to a friend. To show that nursing required discipline, she listed the hospital regulations that controlled the women’s every movement. Nurses, she stated, “must be in their own room at taps, or nine o’clock, unless obliged to be with the sick; must not go to any place of amusement in the evening; must not walk out with any private or officer; must not allow a private or officer in their own room except on business; must be willing to take the forty cents per day that is allowed by government, to assist them in supplying what the rations (or eighteen cents per day) will not furnish in food; [and] pay for their own washing, shoes and clothing.” Sophronia Bucklin, too, felt the imposition of military law when she was transferred from Judiciary Square Hospital to Thirteenth Street Hospital. The news came “like a blow upon” her. She had become so interested in her patients at Judiciary Square that she could not leave without feeling “pangs of regret.” She hesitated about having to start over in a new hospital, but “as I

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was under military control, nothing remained for me but to obey without a murmur.” She accepted that her wishes were not important in the overall plan of the war and likened her situation to the soldier. “The soldier may not say under whose generalship he will be led out to battle; he is only one little part of the giant machine which is to crush out wrong by its resistless might.” How could Bucklin then believe that she was “better than our boys in blue?”83 Bucklin had the fortune—or misfortune, depending on one’s viewpoint—of being transferred to several different types of hospitals during her service. As the previous paragraph suggests, leaving her patients was heartwrenching, and having to become acquainted with a new environment was trying. But Bucklin’s numerous postings also made her savvy to the politics of hospital administration, and she voiced her understanding in her memoirs. She made it clear that the nurses’ lives could be tolerable or intolerable according to the ward surgeon’s wishes. She wrote, “Perhaps it may be well for the reader to understand that on this surgeon depended also, in a great measure, the quiet or discomfort of our situations.” Just as an officer could coldly rule his men, the surgeon wielded the power to make a nurse’s “path smooth, or to throw disagreeable things in the way.” And just as the soldier had to obey orders or face charges for insubordination, a female nurse had to comply, explained Bucklin, with “no murmur or complaint . . . for disgrace and dismissal only awaited the beck of his [the surgeon’s] authoritative hand.” Fairness was not necessarily a part of the military world, and whether the volunteers were soldiers or nurses, both learned that acquiescing to official power took them another step away from their autonomous civilian lives.84 Another aspect of war that some female nurses experienced was working near the enemy. Although most women nurses served in general hospitals that stood a safe distance from the battlefields, a number of them also cared for the soldiers during combat. At the Battle of Deep Bottom (also known as New Market), Virginia, Sister Lydia Penny administered to the wounded of the Fifth USCT who “lay weltering in their blood, on the banks of the James.” Even more perilous for Susie King Taylor was the possibility of capture. As the men of the Thirty-third USCT protected against a rebel attack, Colonel Trowbridge told Taylor to go to the landing, and “if they were obliged to retreat,” she “could go aboard one of” their gunboats.

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The seriousness of this situation cannot be overstated. Had Taylor been captured, as a black woman she more than likely would have been raped by Confederate soldiers or, at the very least, injured. Annie Wittenmyer nursed the men as they came off the field at Vicksburg. After hours of ministering to the men who had fallen from heat exhaustion, she, too, needed some refreshment, so she sat down in a medical tent to rest. While relaxing, she noticed that the weeds near the tent were “shaking as though partridges were running through them.” She asked the surgeon about the cause, and he casually replied that incoming bullets were shaking the weeds. Astonished that battlefield fire could reach so far, she wondered if he considered the tent safe. Unconcerned, he answered that their position was “very safe” because the bullets fell “a little short” of them. His rationale did not offer Wittenmyer much security. She noted that three days later an officer was killed while sitting in the “same chair on the same spot where I had sat.”85 At the Battle of Fredericksburg, Clara Barton put herself in harm’s way to care for the soldiers as they fell. At first, she viewed the fighting from the veranda of the Lacy House, which sat on the opposite side of the Rappahannock River across from the town of Fredericksburg. As she watched the battle unfold before her, bullets struck the windows and doors of the mansion, and she was so mesmerized by the battle that her biographer Stephen Oates believes she was “unaware of the bullets whizzing around her.” By the afternoon, the Federal troops had successfully crossed the river and were engaging the Confederates in the town. In the meantime, a dressing station had been established on the first floor of the Lacy House. While Barton bandaged the wounded men, a courier arrived with a message from surgeon J. Calvin Cutter. He had gone into the town to set up dressing stations and asked her to join him. She was thrilled to be a part of the battle and grabbed her supplies, ready to journey into the heart of combat. As she and her officer escort crossed over the river on the pontoon bridge, the enemy fired on them, and the artillery came so close that an “exploding shell fragment tore away part of her skirt and his coattail.” Barton continued on, a bit shaken, but determined to serve the men in whatever capacity the surgeon asked of her. She proceeded into the town and initially set up a huge soup kitchen for the wounded. As the battle raged, she seemed a “ubiquitous presence,” as Oates puts it, “now in a church, now a

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home, now the courthouse, holding some battered boy to her chest, wiping the brow of another.” She had become so accustomed to the roar of the cannons and enemy fire that when a shell struck the door of a room where she was working, her assistant, Cornelius Welles, reported that “she did not flinch, but continued her duties.”86 Few women had Barton’s drive or the nerves to bandage gruesome wounds produced by minié balls, shrapnel, and cannon in the midst of battle, as bullets whizzed all around. But the fact that few women risked their lives to care for the men made the heroic efforts of those few all the more special. Women such as Barton, Taylor, Penny, and Wittenmyer, who ventured beyond the safety of the general hospitals to care for the sick and wounded, garnered respect and praise from the men they nursed. These women could fathom, like no homebound civilian, the deprivations the soldiers faced because they, too, were there in the heat of battle. They witnessed firsthand the blood-soaked field, the legs and heads without trunks, the decapitated bodies, the maggot-filled wounds; smelled the stench of rotting flesh; and heard the groans and cries of the wounded. They were on the battlefield, and yet they did not falter. True, many of these women would suffer from nightmares, but this psychological torment intensified their understanding and their compassion for the men. Even thirty years after the war, Wittenmyer admitted that the moans of the wounded men “still ring through my soul.” And she could not write about the “darkest scenes” because even at “this distance [they] make me shudder.” Katherine Wormeley believed that “to think or speak of the things we see would be fatal.” To endure the psychological impact of the bloody scenes, she “put away all feeling. Do all you can, and be a machine—that’s the way to act; the only way.” For Clara Barton, having to watch the suffering on the battlefield made it difficult for her to stay. Oates notes that she drew on reserves of energy that she did not even know she had, and at dawn “she would suppress her tears, tie her hair up, and go forth again to nurse her ‘dear’ soldiers.” Nina Bennett Smith argues that in spite of the dangerous experiences, these women enjoyed what they were doing. They enjoyed the freedom and relative independence that war brought to female nurses. “They bloomed because they were needed, because they had the right to work at what suited them, and the right to be strong, rather than dependent and passive, in the service

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of their country.” Instead of ruining the women’s morality, the battlefront experience made their words of encouragement and consolation all the more potent.87 While the women who went to the battlefield exposed themselves to the very real danger of gunfire, those who remained in the hospitals imperiled their lives with less apparent, but equally lethal threats. Most of the women nurses damaged their health in ways that were very similar to the soldiers’ complaints. They exhausted themselves; in some general hospitals and most field hospitals, they had to withstand harsh weather; many times they suffered from lack of food; and, the worst threat of all, they exposed themselves to contagious diseases. Nursing, just like soldiering, was no easy job, and hundreds of women could not tolerate the hardships. Those women who persevered and accepted the burdens of nursing paid the price of their devotion with their health and sometimes with their lives. Mary Ann Bickerdyke’s assistant Mary Safford had suffered from illness since the Battle of Fort Donelson, yet she traveled to Shiloh to help care for the wounded aboard the transport ships. Bickerdyke tried to spare her the heaviest duties, but in the end Safford succumbed and was sent home in a “pitiable state of collapse.” Safford sidestepped disaster because she was fortunate enough to have a brother who thereafter sent her to Europe for rest.88 Equally lucky to have escaped death was Louisa May Alcott, who contracted typhoid after only three months of service at the “Hurlyburly House.” Her matron ordered her to bed. Alcott at first resisted but came to the conclusion that if she “didn’t make a masterly retreat very soon, I should tumble down somewhere, and have to be borne ignominiously from the field.” As she lay there, she reflected on her illness and discovered that she now had more in common with her soldiers than ever before. Bed rest taught her that “one of the best methods of fitting oneself to be a nurse . . . is to be a patient.” Only through this vulnerable and needy position could one “wholly realize what the men suffer and sigh for; how acts of kindness touch and win; and how much . . . we are to those about us.” Indeed, her illness made her aware that in volunteering as a nurse, she, too, had taken her life into her own hands and could “pay dearly for a brief experience.” Alcott suffered for weeks until she finally yielded to doctors, nurses, and friends and family who pleaded for her to “come home.”89

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Alcott’s matron, Hannah Ropes, did not fair as well. Shortly after Alcott left the hospital bound for Concord, Ropes’s “typhoid pneumonia” took a turn for the worse. At first, her condition did not seem to concern her daughter Alice, who came to care for her personally because so many of the hospital’s nurses were sick, nor did her illness alarm the surgeons attending to her. Even her son Edward did not feel a sense of urgency when he obtained a pass to journey to Washington, D.C., to see his mother. His furlough did not begin until January 28, but by then it was too late, for on the evening of Tuesday, January 20, 1863, Hannah Ropes died.90 Mary Safford and Louisa May Alcott’s illnesses and Hannah Ropes’s death show that women were equally devoted to the Union cause, willingly sacrificing their lives for their country in the same way that men were ready to die in battle The anonymous “S. L. C.” wrote that Sophronia Bucklin’s patriotism was of that “obdurate nature which could have crowned the offering with her own life, if, in yielding it, her country’s cause might be the better served.” Ropes’s surgeon thought it fitting that she died “at her post of duty surrounded by the associations endeared to her,” as if to say in doing so she died working for the cause just as a soldier killed in battle died for his country. Illness transformed the nurse, just as battle wounds transformed the soldier. Brushes with death not only made these two types of recruits reconsider their own mortality, but also caused them to reevaluate the meaning of their work as soldiers and nurses. Most women, like Alcott, volunteered believing that their patriotism somehow paled in comparison to that of the men who had the opportunity to shed blood, but once these same women braved the emotional, psychological, and physical hardships of nursing, they considered their work as important to the war effort as the men’s. After serving as matron of Camp Stebbins Hospital, Sarah Gregg was bold enough to ask for fifty dollars a month when the Springfield ladies approached her about serving as matron at Camp Butler. The ladies “seemed to think it was high,” confided Gregg in her diary. “I told them I thought I could do as much good in the army as a colonel and I ought to have as good wages.”91 When female nurses fell ill or became injured doing their duty, most but not all soldiers under their care viewed the nurses’ sacrifices as being similar to their own. J. B. Albert understood the value of women’s

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work. As a patient at Adams Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1863, he had the pleasure of their care. When author Frank Moore inquired about the role these women played during the war, Albert was happy to commend them. “Many of them,” wrote Albert, “ deserve as much praise as can be given them.” He based his opinion on the fact that “many of them have lost their health in trying to restore ours, [and] . . . several of them are dead.” Although they would never be remembered by history, he himself would not forget the “good they accomplished,” nor would the rest of the “Private Soldiers.”92 The soldiers’ testimonies to Moore are an indication of the sentiments of the “boys in blue.” As Charles Kendall explained, “I tell you every one of those noble women are remembered and spoken of every day in every loyal state by those whose hearts are bounding [?] with gratitude.” J. B. Albert cherished these “noble and generous” ladies because they comforted him when he felt that all had forgotten him. When he first arrived at the hospital, “Aunt Lizzie” came to him, saying, “my dear boy what can I do for you?” Albert melted. He wrote about the importance of that moment years later. “Only those who have been in Hospitals far away from home know how much these few words meant, how much joy and comfort there was in them, and how pleasantly they sounded to all.” He was right. Only those who suffered with the sufferers could understand. Or, as Alcott astutely noted, a nurse could best appreciate the needs of her patients by being a patient herself. Wormeley realized, after serving on the hospital transports, that “no one knows what war is until they see this black side of it. We may sentimentalize over its possibilities . . . but it is as far from the reality as to read of pain is far from feeling it.” Hospital experiences connected the female nurses with the soldiers because they, too, had faced the privations of warfare. The men gained a peace of mind from the fact that a representative of home could grasp the horrors of combat and truly sympathize. With such firsthand experience, the nurses acted as psychological liaisons between hospitals and home and bridged the gulf that men had crossed during their transformation from civilians to soldiers.93 The relationship between soldier and female nurse resembled a familial bond of either mother to son or sister to brother, just like the soldiers shared a brotherly love for the men in their units and maintained respect for their commanding officers as if for a father. Once the

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soldier entered a hospital that employed a female nurse, he became a member of a new military family, one with the benefits of femininity, and one that much more closely paralleled his own family. Likewise, women nurses, because of their presence at the war front, earned a respect that soldiers normally reserved for their comrades. The women were not comrades in arms with the soldiers, but rather comrades in war. As Kristie Ross notes, they were “comrades sharing the goals and sacrifices of a patriotic struggle.” They would never share a camaraderie with the men that soldiers reserved only for their male companions, but they were able to win a place in their patients’ hearts that allowed them respect and garnered them influence. Finally, women personified home, so their very presence reminded men of their families, of morality, and of civility. For these reasons, female nurses were able both to ease the return of some soldiers to civilian life and to regenerate others so that they could go back to their units as true men.94 NOTES 1. Sophronia E. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp: A Woman’s Record of Thrilling Incidents among the Wounded in the Late War (Philadelphia: John E. Potter, 1869), 33–36. Some women served in the army disguised as men. They followed relatives into camps, volunteered for the income, or simply wanted to fight for the Union. See Elizabeth D. Leonard, All the Daring of a Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), and Lauren Cook Burgess, ed., An Uncommon Soldier: The Civil War Letters of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, alias Pvt. Lyons Wakeman, 153rd Regiment, New York State Volunteers, 1862–1864 (Pasadena, Md.: Minerva Center, 1994). 2. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 21–22, 37–38; Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 56. Mitchell argues that the volunteers underwent a psychological transformation to help themselves survive in a wartime distinctively different from peacetime. 3. Meade and Walton quoted in Earl J. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997), 33–36; Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), 130. 4. J. B. Albert to Frank Moore, March 10, 1866, Frank Moore Papers, Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C.; Phillip Shaw Paludan, War and Home: The Civil War Encounter (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), 7, emphasis in original.

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5. Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience (Hartford, Conn.: A. D. Worthington, 1888), 203–5, emphasis in original. 6. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 33; Anna L. Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences: A Record of Mrs. Rebecca R. Pomroy’s Experience in WarTimes (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1884), 41–42; Gerald Schwartz, ed., A Woman Doctor’s Civil War: Esther Hill Hawk’s Diary (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1984), 54–55. 7. J. B. Albert to Frank Moore, March 10, 1866, and George Brown to Frank E. Moore, January 31, 1866, Frank Moore Papers. 8. Jane E. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 17 (winter 1992). 9. Elizabeth Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), xxi–xxii; Sarah G. Gregg Diary, January 20, 1863, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield. Mrs. L. Meachan visited a hospital in Cumberland, Maryland, and not only stayed to nurse the men, but gained a new enthusiasm for her work. “I think,” she explained to Mrs. Rouse of the soldiers’ aid society of northern Ohio, “when I return, I shall engage more earnestly than ever in furnishing supplies for the comfort of the poor soldiers. I have found some of our boys very sick here, and I shall stay until they get better.” See Mrs. L. Meachan to Mrs. Rouse, February 27, 1863, USSC Records, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio. 10. Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community During the American Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), 5, 6, 17; Mayer notes that by 1750 almost all of the British army’s nurses were female. See also United States Army Regulations 1802; Leonard, All the Daring of a Soldier, 101–5; Jane Swisshelm, “From Family Nursing to Volunteer Nursing in the Civil War,” in The Female Experiences: An American Documentary, edited by Gerda Lerner (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977), 180–81; Jane E. Schultz, “Women at the Front: Gender and Genre in Literature of the American Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1988), 75–76; Nina Bennett Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War: The Union Army Nurse in the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1981), 7. 11. Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 8–10. Mrs. F. R. Harris Reid, “Wisconsin Florence Nightingale Union,” Circular Letter, May 1861, Berlin, Wisconsin, Harris Reid Papers, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison. Nightingale’s name quickly became synonymous with nursing and the middle-class feminine ideal. It is not surprising, then, that women wanted their war work to be identified with such an icon.

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12. Leonard, Yankee Women, 107–8; James H. Cassedy, Medicine and American Growth, 1800–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 172. 13. Leonard, Yankee Women, 106; Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 42–44; Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital,” 371. In the South, women also responded to the war by offering their nursing services to the military. Although the Confederacy eventually ran twenty general hospitals in Richmond and several hospitals in Georgia, on the whole it lacked any “formal nursing arrangements.” As Schultz notes, because the battlefront moved into their hometowns, many Southern women had the opportunity to nurse, though “without official notice or pay.” Consequently, the main difference between Northern and Southern women’s nursing experiences was that Northern women went to the battlefront to nurse, whereas the battlefront came to the Southern women and required them to nurse whether they wanted to or not. Likewise, many a Southern household became a makeshift hospital, and several slave owners “loaned out” slave women to help out in hospitals. See Schultz, “Women at the Front,” 69–71. 14. Quotations from official documents giving Dix her position are from Leonard, Yankee Women, 7; Attie, Patriotic Toil, 43. 15. Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25. Hattie Dalton to “His Excellency Gov. Randall,” September 10, 1861; Henrietta Rayden to Mr. Randall, April 24, 1861, Wisconsin Female Nurses Applications, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison. 16. Judd, Bedside Seductions, 34–37. 17. Ibid., 38–39. 18. George Avery to “My Dear Lizzie,” May 6, 1861, Lizzie Little to George Avery, May 10, 1861, George Smith Avery Letters, 1861–65, Chicago Historical Society. 19. George Avery to “My Dear Lizzie,” May 6, 1861, and Lizzie Little to George Avery, May 10 and May 28, 1861, emphasis in original, George Smith Avery Letters. 20. Walt Whitman, The Wound Dresser: A Series of Letters Written from the Hospitals in Washington During the War of the Rebellion, edited by Richard Maurice Bucke, M.D. (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1898), 38, 33. Hospital visitors were not always a blessing. Entire families descended on the hospitals with little consideration for the patients or the people caring for them. Some families stayed for months and expected to be fed and housed. Other hospital visitors became sick themselves and required nursing. Sarah Gregg recounted the story of a visiting wife who gave birth while

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in the hospital and died several days later, leaving Gregg with the burden of caring for the baby. Gregg noted, “Had two soldiers[’] sick wives to take care of, a Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Shrum.” “The latter was in her confinement, a female child born, a very pretty little girl.” Two days later Mrs. Shrum died. “She left two children, the baby and a little boy two years old.” A month later, Mrs. Kellogg, a fellow nurse, took the baby to Springfield to one of the soldiers’ aid society women. No other reference was made to the children. See Sarah G. Gregg Diary, February 26, 27, 28, and March 21, 1864; and Mary Elizabeth Massey, Women in the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 57–59. 21. Whitman, The Wound Dresser, 38, 33, 155, 42; see also Kristie R. Ross, “‘Women Are Needed Here’: Northern Protestant Women as Nurses During the Civil War, 1861–1865” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1993), 153. 22. John R. Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 61; Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War,” 87–90. 23. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in NineteenthCentury Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990), 124–26; Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,1989), 124–25; Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic, 1984), 187–88; Cassedy, Medicine and American Growth, 170. 24. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 77–78; Livermore, My Story of the War, 169; Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 112; Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse, 74; Theophilus Parsons, Memoir of Emily Elizabeth Parsons (Boston: Little, Brown, 1880), 52. 25. Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 32–34, emphasis in original. See also John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 69–72, and Lystra, Searching the Heart, 107–9. 26. Julia S. Wheelock, The Boys in White; the Experience of a Hospital Agent in and Around Washington (New York: Lange and Hillman, 1870), vi; Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches (Boston: J. Redpath, 1863), 28–29; Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 31. See also E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic, 1993), 93–96. Rotundo argues that the “brother-sister tie” served as an ideal as well as an important bridge between the worlds of males and females. For most boys and girls, the relationship was the first peer relationship with the opposite sex. Boys learned to protect

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their sisters, and sisters learned to lean on a male for advice and shelter. Likewise, the brother-sister dynamic became a way in which men and women could interact without the stress of an intimate relationship. “They had a chance to test their feelings and their personal skills in an intense relationship with a peer of the opposite sex, in a circumstance where expectations were safely limited and the chances of rejection were minimal” (93). Few nurses and soldiers would have utilized the relationship for intimate purposes, but rather it was a familiar, comfortable, and acceptable dynamic with which to interact with the opposite sex. 27. Schultz, “Women at the Front,” 21; Junius T. Turner, Official Letter of Recognition, August 22, 1916, Benjamin and Catherine Oliphant Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; The Anglo-African, August 22, 1863; Patricia W. Romero and Willie Lee Rose, eds., Reminiscences of My Life: A Black Woman’s Civil War Memoirs, 7th ed. (New York: Mark Wiener, 1999), 33, 41, 42; pamphlet, The 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Plaza (New Bedford, Mass.: New Bedford Historical Society, 1999). 28. Lystra, Searching the Heart, 128–29. As Phillip Paludan argues, “no concept was of greater importance to these people . . . than the idea of ‘home.’ It was the ‘home’ that sheltered them and their families as the nation fought its greatest war.” See War and Home, 8. 29. Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 59. In her study of women’s role in the Victorian-era army, Myna Trustam also notes that the “unsanitary nature of barracks influenced moral as well as physical health.” See Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 24–25. 30. Harriet D. Whetten to “Hexie,” May 11, 1862, Harriet Douglas Whetten Papers, 1855–65, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; Georgeanna Woolsey, Three Weeks at Gettysburg (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1863), 10–11. 31. Schwartz, ed., A Woman Doctor’s Civil War, 50. 32. Jane Merrill Ketcham to “Bettie & Sue,” December 21, 1862, Ketcham Family Correspondence, 1862–63, Indiana Historical Society Library, Indianapolis; Parsons, Memoir, 83, 26; Orra Bailey quoted in Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 74; Birney quoted in the Christian Recorder, January 16, 1864; Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 235; Sarah Kip Brandegee, The Bugle Call: A Summons to Work in Christ’s Army (New York: American Tract Society, 1871), 26. Julia Wheelock believed the “presence of women . . . brought forth ‘the better angel’ of the soldier’s nature. A kind, cheerful look, a smile of recognition, one word of encouragement, enables him to bear his suffering more bravely” (The Boys in White, vi).

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There is evidence that black people felt similarly about the moral superiority of black women. Reporting on the flag ceremony of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts regiment, a writer for The Anglo-African suggested that whatever the ladies are interested in, “their sanction is always an assurance of its worthiness, and their influence guarantees its success, virtuous impulses and noble resolutions will ever receive the highest admiration from the gentler sex” (April 4, 1863). 33. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 28, 32; Whitman, The Wound Dresser, 48; Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 61–62; Keys quoted in Linderman, Embattled Courage, 248; Ross, “‘Women Are Needed Here,’ ” 201; Virginia Matzke Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front, Corporal James Henry Gooding (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 93. 34. George G. Carter to “My dear Miss Terry,” March 11, 1865, USSC Records, Cleveland Branch. 35. Katherine Prescott Wormeley, The Other Side of War: On the Hospital Transports with the Army of the Potomac (Boston: Ticknor, 1889), 115, 145; Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon and Eliza Woolsey Howland, Letters of a Family During the War for the Union, 1861–1865 (New Haven, Conn.: Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor, 1899), 384; Linderman, Embattled Courage, 248. After seeing an unknown soldier die, Wilbur Fisk wrote of the anguish and frustration that the soldier’s parents surely felt: “What would his mother give now to drop a tear by his rude grave—a sacred spot that she may never be able to find? And thus have perished thousands since this war began.” See Emil Rosenblatt and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 257. 36. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital,” 378–79. Doctors were not necessarily more callous, but Schultz attributes their fascination with the wounds and illnesses as a reflection of their medical training. 37. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 41; Romero and Rose, eds., Reminiscences of My Life, 64, 67. 38. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 159; Parsons, Memoir, 27; Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse, 67. 39. Armory Square Hospital Gazette, February 17, 1864. 40. Christopher Looby, ed., The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 182. 41. Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 37–38; Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991), 1–4.

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42. Angel Kwolek-Folland, “The Elegant Dugout: Domesticity and Moveable Culture in the United States, 1870–1900,” American Studies 25 (fall 1984), 21–23. 43. C. E. McKay, Stories of Hospital and Camp (Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1971), 102–3; L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront, xviii; Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 422. 44. Sarah Blunt most likely was referring to her ward and not to her personal room. In most of the hospitals, the female nurses were not allowed to entertain the soldiers in their own rooms. 45. Sarah Blunt to “Mother,” February 25, March 19 and 26, and April 7, 1863, Sarah R. Blunt Letters, New York Historical Society, New York. 46. Elliot story from Parsons, Memoir, 102–3; C. P. Parker’s letter given in Lydia Minturn Post, ed., Soldiers’ Letters from Camp, Battle-Field, and Prison (New York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865), 417. 47. Sarah R. Blunt to “Mother,” March 26, April 15 and 18, 1863, Sarah R. Blunt Letters. 48. Sarah R. Blunt Letters; Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 123. 49. Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 124. The power of gentle activities to influence the soldiers’ behavior had a parallel in the mining camps. According to Julie Roy Jeffrey, when middle-class women arrived in a mining town, the men willingly “conformed to female views to spend time with them.” Middle-class women were so scarce that their homes became the “centers of a select social life as men lonely for female company dropped by to spend a few hours during the day or evening.” Such a slice of home life made the men careful not to lose visiting privileges by inappropriate behavior. See Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840–1880, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 159–60. 50. Kenneth E. Olsen, Music and Musket: Bands and Bandsmen of the American Civil War (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 33, 34; Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 112–13. 51. Patrick quoted in Olsen, Music and Musket, 263; Christian Recorder, November 12, 1864; Livermore, My Story of the War, 193–94. 52. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 82–84; Emily Quiner Diary, July 12, 1863, Wisconsin State Historical Society, Madison; Brandegee, The Bugle Call, 32. 53. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 83–84; Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 36–37. 54. Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 14–16; Wheelock, The Boys in White, vi; Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War,” 103; Christian Recorder, January 7, 1865; Brandegee, The Bugle Call, 152, 101, 106. In her work Bedside Seductions, Catherine Judd notes the connection between

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health care and a religious calling. During the “‘age of reform,’ medical reforms held a special place,” argues Judd, because the topic seemed nonsectarian. Likewise, “for Christian reformers, the parable of Dives and Lazarus, the example of the Good Samaritan, and the healing activities of Christ pointed to a Christian mandate to assuage the suffering of the sick and poor” (8–10). It was not a far stretch for Protestant women to consider caring for the sick and wounded soldiers as part of their Christian duty. To understand the Catholic nuns’ role in the war, see Sister Mary Denis Maher, To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989). 55. Sarah G. Gregg Diary, May 29, June 5, 12, and 19, 1864; Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse, 68; Mary Ann Bickerdyke to “James,” August 23, 1864, Mary Ann Ball Bickerdyke Collection, Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C. 56. Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse, 97–98; Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 307, 89. E. Anthony Rotundo notes that mothers relied less on physical punishment and more on “tenderness, guilt, and moral suasion—tactics that seemed to disarm the youthful opposition more effectively than a simple show of power.” See “Boy Culture: Middle-Class Boyhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, edited by M. Carnes and C. Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 27–28. 57. George Tannicliff to Frank Moore, February 11, 1866, Mathew J. Fowler to Frank Moore, February 16, 1866, and J. B. Albert to Frank Moore, March 10, 1866, Frank Moore Papers; Romero and Rose, eds., Reminiscences of My Life, 90–91. 58. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital,” 382–83; Emily Quiner Diary, July 22, 1863; George Worthington Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War, 3rd ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 182. This is not to suggest that there were no caring surgeons in the hospitals or that the women always knew best. However, we cannot discount the fact that women measured their effectiveness by their ability to feed the men according to their own nutritional wisdom. 59. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 59–60. 60. Leonard, Yankee Women, 88–91; Annie Wittenmyer, Under the Guns: A Woman’s Reminiscences of the Civil War (Boston: E. B. Stillings, 1895), 210–12. 61. Wittenmyer, Under the Guns, 210–12. 62. Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family, 232–33.

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63. For information about Victorian Christmas traditions, see Stephen Nissenbaum, The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America’s Most Cherished Holiday (New York: Vintage, 1997). 64. Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43–44; Christian Recorder, December 10, 1864; R. J. M. Blackett, ed., Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Virginia Front (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 193. 65. Mary Newcomb, Four Years of Personal Reminiscences of the War (Chicago: H. S. Mills, 1893), 119; Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 186–87, 194–95. Although all of the soldiers seemed to have celebrated the Fourth of July, African American and other ethnic soldiers enjoyed days uniquely sacred to themselves. For example, African American soldiers commemorated January 1 as Emancipation Proclamation Day, and Irish regiments held festivities for St. Patrick’s Day. See William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988), and Luis F. Emilio, A Brave Black Regiment: History of the Fiftyfourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865, 3rd ed. (Salem, N.H.: Ayer, 1990). 66. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 53–54; Hopkins quoted in Bucklin. 67. Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 56–57. Likewise, Earl J. Hess argues that “When the soldier had seen, smelled, and touched death, he had completed his rite of passage across the experiential gulf that separated the civilian from the veteran volunteer.” Once the tainted soldier made this transition, he could not return to innocence, and it was for this very reason that the female nurses’ understanding was so important to him. See The Union Soldier in Battle, 5–7, 43. 68. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 39, 40; Leonard, Yankee Women, 16–18. 69. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 40–42. Louisa May Alcott felt a similar solitude as she rode the train from Concord, Massachusetts, to Washington, D.C., to begin her nursing. She “comforted” this first loneliness by “munch[ing] gingerbread, and Mrs. C’s fine pear” and thus had “pleasant recollections of both kindly sender and bearer.” See Hospital Sketches, 15. 70. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 43. 71. Ibid., 44–45. Bucklin’s feelings of suffocation while in a city were common for nineteenth-century Americans. John Kasson explains that agoraphobia emerged as a neurosis in the nineteenth century because of the “sharp discontinuities between public and private life. . . . Agoraphobia represented in extreme form the emotional repression, segmentation, and inse-

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curity of identity . . . that urban-industrial capitalist society demanded.” Structural changes in society contributed to changes in individual personality and created “a built-in identity crisis.” Both men and women were overwhelmed by the constant movement of people around them and literally felt swallowed up by the crowd. See Rudeness and Civility, 113–14. 72. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 47–48. Women who disguised themselves as men to enlist as soldiers certainly understood the life of a soldier much better than female nurses did. Interestingly, Elizabeth Leonard suggests that female soldiers had much in common with the male soldiers. They enlisted to demonstrate their patriotism, to assuage economic concerns, to follow relatives into battle, and to fulfill a sense of adventure. But because they had to keep their sex a secret, they could not influence the men as women in their society normally did. Thus, men interacted with the female soldiers as if these women were males. Leonard, All the Daring of a Soldier, 227–72. 73. Hess, The Union Soldier in Battle, 21; Bell Robison to “Mother,” May 12, 1864, Pardee-Robinson Papers, United States Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pa.; “Nurse’s Album,” anonymous letter, May 28, 1864, United States Military History Institute; Newcomb, Four Years of Personal Reminiscences, 26; Bacon and Howland, Letters of a Family, 82, 89; Wheelock, The Boys in White, 197. 74. Wormeley, The Other Side of War, 27, 108, 114; Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 27; Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 21. 75. Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 8–10; James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 31, 33; Bell Irvin Wiley, The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952), 69. 76. Romero and Rose, eds., Reminiscences of My Life, 87–88. 77. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 87–88, 188. 78. Harriet Whetten to Hexie, May 19, 1862, Harriet Douglas Whetten Papers; Linderman, Embattled Courage, 21. 79. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 62; Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 93; Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 25, 191; Wormeley, The Other Side of War, 83; Sarah G. Gregg Diary, April 20, 1864. Kristie R. Ross notes that Georgeanna Woolsey and other middle-class women on the hospital transports actually enjoyed the freedom from propriety. They disposed of their hoops and donned loose-fitting flannel shirts. See “Arranging a Doll’s House: Refined Women as Union Nurses,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, edited by Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 108.

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80. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 145, 110, emphasis in original. 81. Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers, 57–58. Mitchell argues that men valued personal and political autonomy so much that they went to war for it. 82. Harriet Whetten to Hexie, June 14, 1862, Harriet Douglas Whetten Papers; Sarah Blunt to Mother, May 3, 1863, Sarah R. Blunt Letters. 83. Boyden, ed., War Reminiscences, 160–62; Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 65. 84. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 91; Ross, “‘Women Are Needed Here,’ ” 144–45. 85. Christian Recorder, January 7, 1865; Romero and Rose, eds., Reminiscences of My Life, 91; Wittenmyer, Under the Guns, 126–27. Slave women, unfortunately, were victimized by both Confederate and Union soldiers. Union soldiers may have freed the female slaves from bondage, but they also stole from them and raped them. See Noralee Frankel, Freedom’s Women: Black Women and Families in Civil War Era Mississippi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 23–24. 86. Stephen Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (New York: Free Press,1994), 106–14. 87. Wittenmyer, Under the Guns, 63; Wormeley, The Other Side of War, 102; Oates, A Woman of Valor, 118; Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War,” 120, emphasis in original. 88. Nina Brown Baker, Cyclone in Calico: The Story of Mary Ann Bickerdyke (Boston: Little, Brown, 1952), 103–4. 89. Alcott, Hospital Sketches, 61, 77–78. It is amazing that Alcott, although ill, withstood three months of grueling work; according to Hannah Ropes, her matron, Alcott began coughing as soon as she arrived at the hospital. See Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse, 121. 90. Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse, 122–26. 91. Bucklin, In Hospital and Camp, 26; Brumgardt, ed., Civil War Nurse, 126; Sarah G. Gregg Diary, January 5, 1864. 92. J. B. Albert to Frank Moore, emphasis in original, Frank Moore Papers. Nina Bennett Smith argues that not all the soldiers viewed their nurse’s death as a sacrifice like theirs. See “The Women Who Went to the War,” 94. 93. Charles M. Kendall to Frank Moore, March 27, 1866, and J. B. Albert to Frank Moore, Frank Moore Papers; Wormeley, The Other Side of War, 77–78. Elizabeth Leonard concurs with the idea that nurses acted as psychological liaisons, arguing that women had a sense of being soldiers themselves because they were aware that they had “sacrificed the comforts of home to contribute powerfully to the Union cause.” See Yankee Women, 46–47. 94. Ross, “‘Women Are Needed Here,’ ” 222.

7 The Soldiers’ Home and the Journey Homeward THE “snug, clean, home-like house” standing immediately opposite the railroad depot in Buffalo, New York, wore on its “brow” the words, “The Soldiers’ Rest.”1 Through its doors walked, tottered, and hobbled the “moneyless and friendless sons of Uncle Samuel.” There they benefited from a bed, a meal, or rest—all without cost. In its comfortable parlor, the soldiers encountered carpets and chairs, lounges, books, and fires, “which greet[ed] them with the genial smile of home.” A “warm-hearted lady” welcomed them and “coax[ed]” them to step onto the carpets, which the soldiers felt they had no right to stand on. The lady then “coax[ed]” them to sit on the chairs, to lie on the lounges, to enjoy the “steaming dishes,” and eventually to sleep on the white pillows and sheets.2 Within this description of the “Rest” lies a story of transformation. The recruits symbolized the savagery of war in need of reclamation; the Rest became the ameliorating environment in which to tame the soldiers’ now unrestrained natures. The ladies represented both the moral agents of the home and the community, orchestrating the regenerative process and guiding the volunteers back to civil behavior. It was a lesson, of sorts, in acclimation. The course began when the ladies welcomed the men into the building as if they were receiving guests into their homes. They acted as hostesses and offered relaxation and refreshment, and, as the description suggests, they literally entertained the men. The soldiers were timid and ill at ease in such luxurious surroundings, so the ladies reacquainted them with the domestic comforts of home, from which they had been absent for months at a time, and reminded them of the comportment expected in such a refined environment. Around the familial table, the men, ever conscious of their table manners, feasted on steaming dishes of vegetables and meat and on fresh-baked

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bread and apple butter. Finally, if they needed to stay the night, they were treated to an evening’s rest in the loving embrace of a bed with white sheets. In such a blissful repose, they could “woo sleep to smooth all the wrinkles [and, one would presume, battlefield worries] out of the tired faces.”3 This regeneration process had started with the steady stream of home goods and letters from the homefront women. Redemption had proceeded with the hospital and camp visits by the lady sanitary agents and volunteers. And female nurses had carried on the reclamation in the field and general hospitals. The final task in the process was to ease the transformation of the volunteers from soldier back to civilian, and this portion of the operation occurred at a Soldiers’ Home. The “Saloon” staff represented the last friend to the soldier on his way home and became the final opportunity for the soldiers’ aid societies to influence the soldiers. To reform the volunteers at these stops, women used the familiar methods that the societies had established during the war. The Homes transformed the men’s appearance with ablutions and clean clothes, their behavior with material culture and moral suasion, and their morale with familial attentiveness. During the war, the Rests became way stations, serving the soldiers who were coming and going between camps or on leave. At the end of the war, as the soldiers were discharged, the Homes took them by the hand, invited them in, and cared for their physical needs. To be sure, the transition to civilian life could not be accomplished by one trip to a Home. But just as the ladies had cared for the men through the continuous sending of home goods and letters, the Soldiers’ Lodges were also part and parcel of this regeneration by increments. The Rests were not meant to undo all that a soldier experienced on the battlefield, for surely this task would have been too large for any one organization. Instead, they became an intricate part of the overall homefront effort to save the soldier from the corrupting environment of the war. They combined the many supplications of the aid societies into one building. Here the soldier received food, clothes, medical attention, moral protection, guidance, and rest, and once all of his wants were attended to, he would have the “strength to carry on [his] journey” homeward.4 For these reasons, the Soldiers’ Homes were the embodiment of the women’s Northern war effort in name, in structure, and in function.

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The names “Soldiers’ Home,” “Soldiers’ Rest,” and “Refreshment Saloon” conveyed the idea that the aid societies were providing familial hospitality for friends rather than giving assistance to indigents. The leaders of the sanitary agencies purposefully used domestic language to “preserve the self-respect, and the homely graces and virtues of the People” receiving their services. The buildings chosen for the Rests looked like homes from within and without. They contained parlors, kitchens, dining rooms, and bedrooms, and were “made attractive to soldiers” by being “papered and carpeted and presenting quite a homelike appearance.” The lodges were managed by paternal figures; a superintendent acted as a father, and a matron played the part of mother, both of them welcoming the traveling soldiers as if they were inviting guests into their own homes. Or, as superintendent Isaac Brayton described, the hospitality of the Homes in the West “received them almost with the tenderness and warmth which it is supposed only a mother’s heart could give to long lost children.” The soldiers’ aid societies sponsored and supplied the Homes, and their members either served as or hired the superintendents, matrons, and miscellaneous employees. The soldiers dined on wholesome, home-cooked meals from food collected and prepared by the ladies of the societies. Though the lodges were not ubiquitous, twenty-four Homes affiliated with the USSC dotted the highways and byways between camp and the soldiers’ real homes in both the North and the South. The Soldiers’ Rests figuratively and literally functioned as domestic ropes strung out from the soldiers’ communities as part of the Northern effort to assist the soldiers and guide them home.5 Soldiers’ Homes also became national homes, figuratively speaking, because the matrons welcomed soldiers from all loyal states, all classes, and all races. The managers believed that all Union soldiers were part of the Union family, so they all could come through their doors. For example, the Sixth USCT was the first black unit to be served at the Union Refreshment Saloon in Philadelphia, which set the standard for equal treatment of black soldiers. As historian James Paradis notes, “this ground-breaking event caused no opposition, and donations to the saloon did not suffer. A Philadelphian observed that on that day ‘prejudices vanished and ever since that day, black men have been fed the same as white.’ ”6

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The role of the Rest was as important to the aid societies’ goals as any other part of the redemptive enterprise throughout the war because the soldiers faced many challenges on their trek home. Some soldiers lacked sufficient money to travel. Others were physically weakened by their service and became ill on their way home. And still others were disoriented and became lost in connecting cities. Worst of all, ruthless men preyed on the volunteers by robbing them or luring them into saloons. The Homes, therefore, both regenerated and protected the soldiers. The journey began once a regiment or individual was ordered to muster out of the army and the officers completed the necessary paperwork. The men usually had to march to a train station to ride to Washington, D.C., and from there they boarded a boat or another train destined for cities farther north or west. Before leaving their camp, the men of the Thirteenth Massachusetts encountered their first hazard when the commissary captain treated the whole regiment to a ration of whiskey. This was not a difficulty for most of the men, but Al Sanborn “could never smell . . . Whiskey but . . . he wanted to fight with some one.” Captain Kimball made it Austin Stearns’s responsibility to look after Al because Kimball wanted Sanborn to arrive home a sergeant. Sanborn was fortunate to have a caring officer and comrade to look after him. Other soldiers were not as lucky. The soldiers’ troubles usually began once they arrived in a city and stopped to transfer trains, collect their pay, or receive orders that sent them homeward. They were most vulnerable at this time because they were in a strange town and did not always have their officers to direct them or, as with Al Sanborn, to look out for their interests. The layover could last for hours or days, and in between their arrival and departure the soldiers were left to fend for themselves. How they spent the intervening time could mean the difference between arriving home with body, soul, and money intact or not.7 Austin Stearns and friends spent their time in the capital at the Senate Chamber (where they sat in the vice president’s chair) and visited the “Mass soldiers Relief Association rooms.” During their stopover in Baltimore, they arrived at one o’clock in the morning, enjoyed breakfast at the Soldiers’ Home at three o’clock in the morning and then “laid down on the sidewalk and slept till morning.” For the rest of the day, they “laid around” in the streets and did not

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march for the depot until dark. Stearns did not note whether any of his regiment wandered off to other parts of Baltimore, but these waiting periods were of concern to the superintendents of the Soldiers’ Homes. Thieves and con men who prowled around the train depots to victimize the soldiers easily inveigled curious and bored volunteers, robbing them of their pay either through direct pilfering or indirect trickery.8 The volunteers required “protection and care,” acknowledged Frederick N. Knapp, superintendent of the Home in Washington, D.C., because the government would not aid them, arguing that the soldiers had “no claim upon any provision for such special assistance.” In other words, because the men going home were not wounded or sick, and because they were in transit between duties, they did not warrant government food or lodging. During stopovers, numerous recruits met with trouble. In Washington, D.C., for instance, Knapp told his superiors that his assistants picked up soldiers “wandering the streets” or found some of the men in the guardhouse. He suggested that without the intervention of the Soldiers’ Home, these volunteers would have fallen victim to deadly depravity and may never have reached their final destinations.9 “J. R., a large athletic man, 35 years old,” narrowly escaped such a trap set by confidence men, but only with the help of a Soldiers’ Rest. On June 14, 1865, J. R. received his pay and discharge and soon after had been “enticed into a genteel rum-den and drugged with poisoned liquor.” W. H. Hadley, the superintendent of the Harrisburg Sick Soldiers’ Rest, did not detail the prevention of the “intended robbery, and the utter stupefacation [sic] or death” of J. R., but he did report that one of his agents brought the man to the Soldiers’ Rest, and within a couple of days a “special attendant” accompanied J. R. to his home west of Harrisburg. J. R. represented one of many soldiers who were deceived in Harrisburg while waiting for their connections. Hadley conceded that even at his “little Rest” a volume could have been written about the hundreds of such victims saved by Rest agents. More important, though, was the suggestion that all soldiers in transit were vulnerable. J. R. was a mere 150 miles from his hometown by the time he had arrived at Harrisburg, and yet he still was not out of harm’s way. Harrisburg represented a friendless and unfamiliar town to J. R., so he relied on the generosity and kindness of strangers and

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unwisely accepted the companionship of a scoundrel. This scenario was straight out of the temperance pamphlets of the period, which aroused people’s fears about the ploys of confidence men. Victorians relied on mothers to inculcate the steadfast morals necessary for their children to withstand such a depraved onslaught. Failing that, young men were supposed to rely on the guidance of friends and family. The Soldiers’ Homes were thus invaluable because they provided surrogate relatives for the soldiers.10 For black soldiers, the Homes became a safe haven from the prejudice they routinely encountered no matter the city. White-owned establishments would not have permitted black soldiers to lodge or eat on their premises, and there were too few black-owned businesses across the North, or South for that matter, to accommodate the large numbers of black soldiers in transit. As a letter from Sgt. William McCoslin of the Twenty-ninth USCT testifies, travel without the hospitality of the soldiers’ homes would have been much different for his regiment. “We arrived in the city of Chicago, when we were marched to the Soldiers’ Rest, where a fine breakfast was in waiting for us.” McCoslin explained, “we rested here all day, and then started for the cars on route for Pittsburgh.” “On our arrival in the Iron City, we were marched to the Soldiers’ Rest, where we were served up with a splendid supper.” He reported that “every kindness was shown us that could be shown on so short a notice.” His regiment then started for the East, “tolerably well rested, and in good spirits, feeling proud of the treatment we have received, being the same if not better than [what] . . . the white soldiers received.”11 Friendless cities loomed as a danger for all soldiers, but the soldiers also suffered from the arduous nature of the trek itself. After marching for miles, they usually boarded a cramped boat or freight car, where they were required to stand, sit, or lie on the bare floor for hours. On these transports, they were exposed to inclement weather and were rarely fed until they arrived at a town, where they would eat at a Soldiers’ Lodge. Sometimes the boats and trains did not stop long enough for the men to receive a meal at a Lodge, and they either went without food or relied on the hospitality of the locals. The boat taking Theodore Upson back to Indiana stopped at a little town for only an hour, so he took the opportunity to run into town to buy food. As he rounded a corner, he almost “ran into a motherly

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woman [who was] nearly out of breath.” She was running to the landing to feed the troops. She thrust into Upson’s hands a “great loaf of home made bread.” He thanked her and had just enough time to return to the boat. “I called the boys,” Upson remembered, “and my! Oh my! That bread and butter did taste good.”12 For the relatively healthy men who had to do without the thoughtfulness of “motherly” women, the spartan transportation and lack of food were trying, but for the sick or wounded soldiers the experience could be life threatening. The Homes rescued these weakened men from certain death or at the very least from damaged constitutions. By offering the men sustenance and medical attention, the caretakers of the Homes not only protected their health, but preserved their self-respect. They treated the men as family members and saved them the disgrace of begging for help. As one soldier observed, if the Soldiers’ Lodges had not cared for the weakened men, “they would have been thrown helpless among strangers.” By feeding and nursing the soldiers, the ladies and their compatriots across the nation not only shared a part in the redemptive process, but ensured that women’s wartime work was not in vain.13 Although the Soldiers’ Rest in Buffalo had been in operation only since June 1864, other cities had established Homes at the very beginning of the war. The need for a soldiers’ hotel arose quickly after the initial call for troops. As units rushed to Washington, D.C., to assume battlefront duty, many soldiers discovered that their new military family was ill equipped to feed, clothe, and house them during the lengthy journey. Hundreds of men en route to the front arrived in strange cities hungry, thirsty, tired, and sick from exposure. In communities where the soldiers changed trains, townspeople opened their hearts and their larders to the men. In Washington, D.C., the USSC had become a government-sanctioned organization in June 1861, and its leaders had entrusted Frederick Knapp with the initial duty of supervising the care of soldiers in transit in the capital city. In his first report to the commission’s board, he explained that he had not established “in any sense a hospital,” but rather a place where the weak could rest and the sick could remain until “otherwise provided for.” His intention, he reasoned, was to shelter the soldier who was returning to home or to camp and who did not have a “claim upon hospital or station-house.”

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The “Soldier’s Home,” as he called it, was one of the most valuable methods to aid and comfort the soldiers because by the “expression of sympathy, . . . by the word of good cheer, by the assurance that some one is waiting to help them on,” the soldiers were strengthened. By 1862, Knapp realized that his office required him not only to shelter the soldiers from the cold, from hunger, and from illness, but also to guard them from “the imposition of men who were ready to take advantage” of their vulnerabilities. Attempting to make train connections or to have their “papers” authorized for their discharge, the soldiers were easily disoriented and lost in the capital. Delays caused by bureaucratic red tape forced them to wait in Washington, sometimes for days, while their orders were arranged. In the interim, they would pawn their blankets or clothes to pay for their lodging. To outsmart the con men, Knapp assigned a representative from the Home to meet the soldiers at the trains, to give them any “information in regard to their papers and their journey home,” and to furnish the men with flannels and blankets “for their better protection.” Along with providing the essentials of food and lodging, the Home represented a “pleasant and secure asylum” to shield the soldiers against “the vile arts and designs of professional rogues,” and, in its “best sense to the weary soldier,” it was “a home.”14 Knapp and many other representatives of the Soldiers’ Homes, in fact, used domestic language to describe their work because they understood and believed that their hospitality was very different from services rendered for a price. In these way stations, which they intentionally named Homes, the citizens of the various Northern communities extended loving hands to the traveling soldiers much in the same way that they would have opened their own homes to friends and relatives. They purposely decorated the interiors as parlors in order to provide a surrounding that would remind the soldiers of visiting a friend’s home. They greeted the soldiers with the congeniality of companions, listened to their stories, and offered them food and drink. This kind of hospitality grew out of the aid society workers’ desire to bolster the soldiers with personal care that resonated with familial generosity. The Buffalo ladies noted that the “Rest was provided not so much for soldiers in aggregate and concrete, as for themselves individually and personally.”15

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In the same vein, in her work House and Home Papers Harriet Beecher Stowe described an “easy hospitality” that seems very similar to the reception that the Homes offered the soldiers. She explained that the “highest object” of home was education, “in its widest sense,” of parents and children. But “home-education” was “incomplete unless it include[d] the idea of hospitality and charity.” Hospitality did not mean the same as having company because, as Stowe indicated, that was an expense that was always felt. “Easy daily hospitality,” however, had a “plate always on the table for a friend” and was a cost that never appeared on an account book. This kind of hospitality was not pretentious, but provided “average home-life” that included “a seat at any time” at one’s board and fire. A traveler, argued Stowe, “values a genuine, little bit of home more than anything else you can give him.” A true home, however not only welcomed friends, but extended hospitality to all as a mission of charity. “When a mother has sent her son to the temptations of a distant city,” Stowe asked, “what news is so glad to her heart as that he has found some quiet family where he visits often and is made to feel AT HOME?” She thus appealed to women’s love for their own relatives and reminded them that the mother and the hearth were powerful, regenerative tools. “How many young men have good women saved from temptation and shipwreck,” she prodded her readers, “by drawing them often to the sheltered corner by the fireside!” Therefore, concluded Stowe, women must “not seek to bolt the doors and draw the curtains,” but instead provide the light of a true home fire and welcome a traveler to “warm [his] stiffened limbs,” so he might “go forth stronger to his pilgrimage.”16 Echoing Stowe’s ideals of hospitality, the Buffalo ladies stated that the “Rest is but an express of the Good Master’s command, ‘Love one another.’ ” As an integral part of the notion of agape love, the superintendents not just of the Buffalo Rest, but of many of the Homes, reported that their doors were never closed to a soldier in need.17 The importance of the sentiments expressed in House and Home Papers comes more fully into view when we consider that Stowe published this work in 1865, believing that Northerners needed stories about home during such a destructive war. She had suggested the book to her publisher, James Fields, the previous year: “I need to write in these days to keep from thinking of things that make me dizzy & blind & fill my eyes with tears so that I cant [sic] see the

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paper[;] I mean such things as are being done where our heroes are dying.” She proposed writing about “little gentle household merriment & talk of common things.” The “talk of common things” would help people to concentrate on the good in the society. Philip Paludan submits that “in the midst of war these domestic tales” and familyoriented works by other authors “reassured anxious Americans” that the home promised “continuity, safety, and ultimately restoration.”18 Whether society workers read Stowe’s book is not the point. The point is, rather, that Stowe and numerous other writers, as well as other Northerners in general, recognized the home as the source of hope and redemption. They hoped that the fathers, sons, and brothers who streamed from the home’s firesides would succeed in battle. These men would redeem the country in their struggle against the sins of slavery that had produced the war. On another level, the home—represented by the mothers, daughters, and sisters—would reclaim the soldiers from their harrowing duty. As men and women worked together, it would rescue the country and the soldier simultaneously. Writers such as Stowe utilized its power to bolster the public. On the other hand, society workers established Homes with the same rationale that shaped many of their decisions during the war: to deliver the soldier back to the loving embrace of his family, with body and soul intact. They fought the dirt, the disease, and the barbaric nature of war by reacquainting the soldiers with domesticity, using the Homes as the final link in their work of restoration.19 The reclamation in the Homes began on a very basic level of cleanliness, much as it had in the hospitals. As the men journeyed homeward from the hospitals or after being discharged from their units, they arrived at the Homes usually in need of soap and water. The most prevalent disease that W. H. Hadley had to report at the Harrisburg Sick Soldiers’ Rest was “chronic hydrophobia.” He conceded to Knapp that their remedy was only soap and water, but that they had attained entire success with such tactics. The Cooper Shop volunteer historian, James Moore, described the situation best: when the soldier presented himself at the Saloon “wearing the stained and perhaps tattered garments that had not known ablution for weeks,” Anna M. Ross, the matron, greeted him with a “hearty welcome.” She then took her guest to the “lavatory, where a thorough cleansing awaited him, and . . . a change of clothing was presented to him.”20

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Soap, water, and a change of clothes had an amazing effect on the soldiers’ countenances and attitude. The men relished the opportunity to partake in domestic luxuries. After stopping at Philadelphia’s Refreshment Saloon, Wilbur Fisk noted the importance of soap and water to the soldiers. “Besides the table spread for us,” reported Fisk, “there is a glorious place for the men, sweating and dirty as they have become riding in those close, dusty cars, to wash themselves, which is of itself a treat of no small consequence to a soldier.” A scrub down, some clean clothes, and the opportunity to lie on white sheets usually elicited the utterance from the men that it was “just like home.”21 The vicissitudes of war had caused a “social disruption” in the soldiers’ lives, permitting them carefree behavior and “frank acceptance of vice.”22 The clean clothes and bath suggested the stability of home and society and thus put the world back into order. Orderliness required and encouraged decorum. Once the recruit looked the part of a civilized man, he was more likely to act the part. The superintendents of the Homes did not leave that to chance, however. Most of the Homes had rules of comportment that they required the soldiers to obey; “any man who refused to obey them” was not allowed to remain in the Home. For instance, at the Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C., visiting soldiers were “required to be quiet, orderly, and respectful.” They were supposed to have “strict regard to personal cleanliness” and were asked to take off their clothes before going to bed. The men who were staying the night were to be in the house before six o’clock in the evening (no doubt to keep them out of the saloons), and any man who was “intoxicated or under the influence of liquor” was refused admission.23 The superintendents were not asking any more of the soldiers than would have been expected of them if they had been visiting friends. Few hosts would allow their guests to stay if the visitor acted ungraciously, immodestly, or impolitely. The regulations most assuredly were designed to forestall any rowdy behavior by the soldiers that could end in destruction of property or bodily injury. But, on a deeper level, they also reminded the men of the behavior of the civilized world—or, more to the point, of the civilian world. Asking the men to follow manners that they would eventually encounter in their own homes was yet another preparation for civilian life. The men seemed to respond to the generosity with appropriately gracious behavior.

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Knapp happily reported that among the eighteen hundred men received at the Washington Home, “there has not been a single case where rudeness or disrespect has been shown.” This claim was more than likely pure hyperbole on Knapp’s part, a result of his eagerness to send a good report to his superiors. Although the soldiers curbed their wild behavior within the walls of the Lodges, it is difficult to believe that all of them acted respectfully all of the time.24 But most soldiers followed the rules of propriety because the Homes embodied the essence of domesticity in the physical trappings of their parlors. Just as the soap and water and clean clothes helped transform the soldiers’ looks, so, too, the atmosphere transformed their attitudes and behavior. A Union officer testified to the comforting effect that the Columbus Soldiers’ Home in Ohio had on the men. Upon entering the Home, the officer stepped into a “large sitting-room” where sixty soldiers were comfortably seated around a glowing stove reciting their thrilling stories as they waited for the wholesome food being prepared. The officer peered into the dining hall and saw “long cleanly-spread tables” loaded with an abundance of food. He admitted, in his letter to the USSC, that in this cozy Home there was “a quiet feeling of happiness” brought on by “kind hands and hundreds of comforts.” For black soldiers, civil or equal treatment by the matrons signified respect and begot civil behavior by the soldiers. As Mr. W. M. Cooper, president of the Cooper Shop Saloon, reportedly said of the black regiments, “they behaved just as well as any troops that he had ever fed there.” These men’s behavior, noted a Christian Recorder reporter, “speaks volumes for the character of colored soldiers and their race.” At the Union Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, a similar scene occurred. The white “ladies and gentlemen . . . proved themselves to be so, by waiting on those colored soldiers with interest and politeness.” The kind behavior was a sign of appreciation, as if to say, “you have left your homes and your families, and all that was near and dear, and have given yourself to the government . . . for freedom and liberty to all men,” as the Christian Recorder put it.25 Just as the nurses re-created parlors in their own wards, the Home matrons purposefully intended to shape the soldiers’ behavior by providing a homelike atmosphere. By arranging the rooms with couches and lounges, paintings and vases, books and writing materials, they

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remade the Victorian parlor and created an inviting environment that quickly put the men at ease and helped them to feel comfortable. Again, Stowe’s book House and Home Papers seems instructive. In the chapter entitled “What Is a Home?” Stowe defined the ideal home as a “retreat, where we shall be free to act out personal and individual tastes and peculiarities.” In the home, “our favorite haunts are to be here or there,” noted Stowe, “our pictures and books so disposed as seems to us good, and our whole arrangements the expression . . . of our own personal ideas of what is pleasant and desirable in life.” The idea was to arrange an area of the house that would allow for liberty and produce the feeling of “Here I can do as I please.” This ideal was to be accomplished with items that were not too refined and to be directed by a matron who was not too orderly that one feared upsetting the system. But, Stowe cautioned, liberty did not mean license. “We do not mean that Master Johnny be allowed to handle elegant volumes with bread-and-butter fingers, or that little Miss be suffered to drum on the piano, or practise [sic] line-drawing with a pin on varnished furniture.” On the contrary, one could feel at ease while still behaving responsibly.26 The use of a parlor setting in the Homes was the perfect solution to the dilemma the societies faced. “How do we offer the soldiers food, supplies, and rest and simultaneously civilize them?” society women pondered. The answer was a depot transformed into a parlor by the thoughtful arrangement of furniture and furnishings. Sitting near a glowing stove, soldiers expressed happiness, as the Union officer observed in the Columbus Soldiers’ Home, because the environment encouraged restfulness and ease. They felt the liberty that Stowe viewed as one of the most important principles of a “true home.” These Homes were obviously not the soldiers’ own homes, where they had their own pictures and books arranged as they wished, but the power of the setting was manifest in its suggestiveness. As a soldier noted while in Poughkeepsie, New York, after putting down the draft riots in New York City, camp never “seemed so cheerful and pleasant as this one. So many neatly dressed ladies and gentlemen, so courteous and civil, mingling constantly with us, it makes the soldier forget his roughness, and the wholesome restraints of civil society are strongly felt.” The soldiers appreciated the hospitality of the Homes even more for the reminder that they themselves were civilians who

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had protected the hearth and who had come home. As one of the recipients of the Homes’ kindness voiced in a toast, “Ladies, kind friends!” he intoned, “it is worth the little we have suffered for our country to meet such a warm reception at home.”27 The warm reception continued during the most anticipated time of day at the Homes—mealtime. The Homes reacquainted the soldiers with the cleanliness and order of a dining room and the table manners that such a setting required of its diners. In Harrisburg, Hadley reported that “Our table has always been laid with clean, snow-white cloths, clean dishes, and well-scoured knives and forks.” At Buffalo, the soldiers received “hot toothsome meals” furnished in a “quiet and unpretending way.” The St. Louis ladies furnished “good, substantial meals.” And the Cleveland ladies presented the men with a “bountiful table.”28 It is significant that the superintendents described their dining services with such words as clean, white, and even unpretending. By using this language, they juxtaposed their accommodations and meals with, as the Cleveland superintendent expressed it, the “salt beef and hard tack” to which the “men [were] so long consigned.” The kind of food and the presentation of the meals at the Homes certainly differed from the soldiers’ camp fare. The matrons offered menus that included ham, corned beef, bologna sausage, bread, cheese, beets, pickles, cookies, and pies. The variety of food rivaled anything the men had seen since they had left their homes. (Unless, of course, they had been fortunate enough to have enjoyed a holiday meal arranged by a female nurse at a hospital.) Likewise, the food was displayed on “snow-white cloths,” served on “clean dishes,” and eaten with “wellscoured knives and forks.” In doing so, the Homes reintroduced the soldiers to a genteel setting in which civilized behavior was expected from them. The ladies, of course, believed that the soldiers’ decorum had lapsed during their days in the field as they became accustomed to sitting on logs, with plate in hand, around their campfires. Moreover, as the ladies stood by to fill coffee cups and replenish plates, their presence lent a homey atmosphere to the dining room because the two sexes were reunited in a familial setting. These small gestures meant volumes to soldiers who had learned to cook their own meals and tend to their own wants. Being able to sit at a table and be served put the world back into order. They had returned to a world of

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separate spheres, where the women cooked and acted as hostesses, and the men enjoyed the fruits of their own labor. Thus, they took another important step in their transition from military life to civilian life. They did not miss the domestic significance as they issued a compliment such as “Well, this looks like home!” or “I hav’nt [sic] seen anything like this since I left home!”29 After the meal or the next morning, the soldiers resumed their trip homeward, and the Northern ladies’ war effort—to care for and protect the soldiers—came full circle. The protection began when the society workers presented their local regiments with flags and treated them to farewell dinners. Familial guidance and guardianship followed the men into the camps in the form of letters and goods sent by the aid societies. In field and general hospitals, female nurses acted as surrogate mothers and sisters. And the Soldiers’ Homes welcomed the volunteers on their road home as if they were relatives who had been absent for a while. As Nina Smith suggests, most of the soldiers returned home uncorrupted because they had never wholly left the protection of the home.30 The domestic rope that maintained the tie between home and the camp, although frayed, now guided the soldiers from the camp to the home. NOTES 1. The name “Rest” was used by the Buffalo Aid Society to denote a building that offered food and lodging to traveling soldiers. Ladies in other Northern towns used the names “Retreat,” “Home,” “Refreshment Saloon,” and “Lodge” to describe the same type of service. Frederick N. Knapp, the superintendent of special relief services for the USSC, used these names interchangeably in his reports to the commission to describe the numerous homes across the North. Throughout this chapter, I also interchange these names for the sake of variety, but each name is meant to represent the same ideal as the Buffalo Rest. At the same time, these “Soldiers’ Homes” are not to be confused with the national soldiers’ homes, which were established after the war and provided permanent housing for destitute veterans. By the early 1870s, the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers had four branches and by the turn of the century had grown to eight branches serving nearly one hundred thousand Union soldiers. See Patrick J. Kelly, Creating a National Home: Building the Veterans’ Welfare State, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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2. United States Sanitary Commission, Documents of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, 2 vols. (New York: USSC, 1886) (hereafter, “USSC Doc.”), USSC Doc. 94, “Report Concerning the Aid and Comfort Given by the Sanitary Commission to Sick and Invalid Soldiers, for the Quarter Ending June 30, 1865,” July 1, 1865, 42. 3. Ibid., 40–42. 4. Ibid., 41. 5. Isaac Brayton quoted in USSC Doc. 94, 31, and 35; Kelly, Creating a National Home, 6–7. The twenty-four soldiers’ homes affiliated with the USSC were in Alexandria, Virginia; Annapolis and Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; Buffalo and New York City, New York; Cairo, Illinois; Camp Nelson, Paducah, and Louisville, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Cleveland, and Columbus, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Harrisburg and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Hartford, Connecticut; Jeffersonville, Indiana; Memphis and Nashville, Tennessee; New Orleans, Louisiana; Washington, D.C.; and Wilmington, North Carolina. This list obviously does not include the numerous independent soldiers’ homes that served the soldiers just as devotedly as those connected to the USSC. 6. James M. Paradis, Strike the Blow for Freedom: The 6th United Sates Colored Infantry in the Civil War (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane, 1998), 29–31. 7. Arthur A. Kent, ed., Three Years with Company K: Sergt. Austin C. Stearns, Company K, 13th Mass. Infantry (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1976), 304–5. 8. Ibid., 306–7; USSC Doc. 94, 4. 9. USSC Doc. 39, 1–2, 4, 6. In July 1865, in his final report to the USSC board, Knapp noted the importance of his work and of the work of “Homes” in other cities when he stated that “if the Sanitary Commission does not care for these men no one will.” He calculated that “for every $100,000 paid out to soldiers going home, there rise up at least one hundred sharpers, unseen before, to waylay these men, and to induce them foolishly to spend their money; and happy for the soldier if it end in nothing worse.” 10. Details of J. R.’s story from USSC Doc. 94, 33; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982). Most of the Homes had a company of men who would meet the trains to help soldiers in whatever capacity was necessary. Some soldiers needed help buying tickets, others required food and medical care, and others assistance gaining their papers and pay. Likewise, the Rests had men who patrolled the local saloons and brothels in order to rescue soldiers who had slipped past them at the depot.

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11. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 16; McCoslin quoted in the Christian Recorder, August 27, 1864. William Fray of the Forty-first USCT related a similar experience when his regiment left Pennsylvania for the field (Christian Recorder, March 25, 1865). 12. USSC Doc. 94; Emil Rosenblatt and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 340; Theodore F. Upson, With Sherman to the Sea: The Civil War Letters, Diaries, and Reminiscences of Theodore F. Upson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 42. This familial protection did not always work smoothly, though. W. H. Hadley did not openly receive all soldiers in Harrisburg as the ideal of hospitality prescribed. He, it seems, believed that soldiers also practiced the art of deception, so he would “cross-examine” those applying for services at his Home before he would help them. He proudly claimed in his report to Knapp that he could tell whether a soldier lied or told the truth. “And contrary to some notions of true benevolence,” Hadley explained, “I fancy that it is almost as good a deed to detect and expose an imposter and prevent his success as to relieve a case of real suffering” (USCC Doc. 94, 33). 13. USSC Doc. 94, 33. 14. Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998), 80; USSC Doc. 35, “Aid and Comfort Given by Sanitary Commission to Sick Soldiers Passing Through Washington, 1st and 2nd Reports,” September 23 and October 21, 1861, 6, 15; USSC Doc. 39, “Third Report Concerning Aid and Comfort Given by the Sanitary Commission to Sick Soldiers Passing Through Washington,” March 21, 1862, 3–5, emphasis in original. 15. USSC Doc. 94, “The Soldier’s Rest, Buffalo, N.Y.,” 42. 16. Harriet Beecher Stowe, House and Home Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1865), 70, 72,74, 75, 76. 17. Buffalo ladies from USSC Doc. 94, 43; James Moore, History of the Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon (Philadelphia: Jas. B. Rodgers, 1866), 27. 18. Stowe to James Fields in Phillip Shaw Paludan, War and Home: The Civil War Encounter (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1998), 13–14. Paludan sees the idea of home as shaping the lives of soldiers. As fathers, they were supposed to protect hearth and home, which their role as soldiers allowed them to do. As the duty pulled them away from home, the home responded by maintaining the tie. Wives visited their husbands in

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camp and wrote sustaining letters. I agree, but would add that the home also shaped the soldiers’ experience by attempting to soften the hardening experience of war. 19. In 1861, Unitarian minister J. F. W. Ware addressed the soldiers after the Battle of Bull Run with these very sentiments in mind. He noted that the home had made her first sacrifice by sending her loved ones to fight for the nation’s cause. The home’s work continued, however, in the form of supporting the troops. Ware assured the soldiers that the “home you would defend, in turn, would help to shield you from that which has power to cast the soul into hell.” See Home to the Camp: Addressed to the Soldiers of the Union (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1861). Reid Mitchell recognizes that the familial ideal was central to men’s understanding of their role in the war. Soldiers used familial terms in speaking of their fighting; their units were set up in the hierarchy of a family (i.e., officers were the fathers, and the soldiers were the children); and the soldiers maintained a connection to their communities as the home sustained them through constant contact and material support. See The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Kelly also notes that the women who established these homes “naturally” described their work in domestic language because the family ideal pervaded society. See Creating a National Home, 32. Finally, Lori D. Ginzberg agrees that the “use of the rhetoric of ‘hominess’ pervades the literature” of the period. The female nurses attempted to “[create,] according to popular rhetoric, . . . a semblance of home amid the horrors of war.” See Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 144. 20. Hadley quoted in USSC Doc. 94, 29; Moore, History of the Cooper Shop, 29, 37. 21. Rosenblatt and Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day, 340. 22. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840–1880, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 141. 23. USSC Doc. 39, “Third Report,” 22; USSC Doc. 35, “First and Second Reports,” 6. 24. USSC Doc. 35, 6. 25. USSC Doc. 94, 38; Cooper quotations from the Christian Recorder, October 10, 1863. Louise L. Stevenson suggests that the materials of the parlor influenced the behavior of its users. From the wall hangings to the gewgaws to the arrangement of the furniture, all of the furnishings of the home were supposed to educate, edify, and encourage moral behavior. See The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991). Angel Kwolek-Folland similarly suggests that objects

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that women used to decorate their homes communicated “culture” and “refinement.” Women hoped to communicate these lofty ideals to transform “individual character.” See “The Elegant Dugout: Domesticity and Moveable Culture in the United States, 1870–1900,” American Studies 25 (fall 1984). 26. Stowe, House and Home Papers, 60, 61, 67. 27. USSC Doc. 94, 38; Rosenblatt and Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day, 148. 28. USSC Doc. 94, 31, 42, 38, 40, 25. 29. USSC Doc. 94, 31, and 41. Kwolek-Folland argues that table arrangement was a domestic art that would have displayed the homemaker’s talents. In other words, the placement of the food, the addition of decorations, and the use of flowers represented a link to civilization that the soldiers would not have experienced in camp. By exposing the soldiers to these domestic rituals once again, the ladies were reacquainting them with the art of domesticity. See “The Elegant Dugout,” 29. 30. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 104–6; Nina Bennett Smith, “The Women Who Went to the War: The Union Army Nurse in the Civil War” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1981), 15; Mitchell, The Vacant Chair, 24–25.

BIBLIOGRAPHY MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS American Antiquarian Society Worcester, Mass. Clara Barton Papers Worcester Soldiers’ Relief Society Records Chicago Historical Society Chicago, Ill. George Smith Avery Letters William Hertzog Papers William W. Patton Papers Duke University, Perkins Library, Manuscript Division Durham, N.C. Constant C. Hanks Papers Frank Moore Papers William H. Noble Papers Mary Norton Papers William Righter and Mary Wager Fisher Papers Illinois State Historical Library Springfield, Ill. Sarah G. Gregg Diary Benjamin H. Grierson Family Papers Ladies Springfield Soldiers’ Aid Society Papers Wallace-Dickey Family Letters Indiana Historical Society Library Indianapolis, Ind. Ransom Hawley Papers Ketchem Family Correspondence Jane Chambers McKinney Papers

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INDEX Abbot, Caroline Younglove, 106 Adams Hospital, 226–27, 256, 257, 276 Adelaide (steamer), 55 African Americans; families, 23–25; female nurses, 234, 237–38, 241, 245, 249, 257, 267, 272; and gender roles, 92–93; and moral suasion, 62, 282n; and morality, 82n; and religion, 25; and patriotism, 192, 240–41; soldiers and alcohol, 62; soldiers and correspondence ads, 141; soldiers and corruption 55; soldiers and disease, 51, 81n; soldiers and flags, 195; soldiers and gambling 57, 83n; soldiers and holidays, 285n; soldiers and morale, 130–31n; soldiers and pay, 94, 189–90, 217n; soldiers and profanity, 55; soldiers and rations, 103, 107, 108; soldiers and reading, 197–98, 219n; soldiers and religion, 60, 254; soldier’s aid societies, 8–9, 84n, 100, 109, 111–12, 114, 115, 118, 130–31n, 133n, 192, 196–97, 201, 220n, 249, 261; soldiers and soldiers’ homes, 291, 294, 300; and Supervisory Committee on Colored Camps, 103; women, 2, 5, 7, 11n, 26, 70–71, 181, 272, 282n. See also slavery

African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 109 Aiken, Lizzie, 256, 276 Albert, J. B., 257, 275–76 Alcott, Louisa May, 133n, 237, 244, 253–54, 266, 268, 274, 275, 276 Alexandria (Va.), 237 Alpin, Elvira, 1, 9, 123–24 Alpin, George, 1, 9, 155 American Revolution, 15, 17, 31, 97 American Tract Society, 53–54, 204 Anglo-African, 114, 131n, 201, 219n, 237, 282n Antietam, Battle of, 222, 263 Armory Square Hospital (Washington, D.C.), 7, 110, 246 Armory Square Hospital Gazette, 30, 33, 61, 123, 185 army hospitals. See military hospitals Army Nursing Corps, 6. See also United States Army Nursing Corps Ash, Stephen, 147, 171n Athens (Ala.), 157 Atlantic Monthly, 114, 122 Attie, Jeanie, 10n, 95, 100, 101, 102, 126n, 130n, 185, 186, 202, 204–6, 207, 215n, 216n, 219n, 230 Auburn (N.Y.), 222, 264 Aurora (Ill.), 232 Austin, Judson, 58, 69 Avery, George, 120, 121, 231–33

326

INDEX

Bailey, Milton, 59–60 Baltic (steamer), 160 Baltimore (Md.), 292–93 Barton, Clara, 116, 117, 118, 209–12, 221n, 272–73 Beaufort (S.C.), 240, 249 Beecher, Catherine, 32 Beecher, Rev. Edward, 212 Beecher, James, 51 Beekmantown (N.Y.), 200 Beloit (Wis.), 157 Bellows, Henry Whitney, 7, 42–45, 47–48, 49, 52, 73, 78n, 79n, 101, 186, 219n Benton Barracks Hospital (St. Louis), 110, 241, 253 Berlin, Ira, 81n, 198 Bethel Church (Boston), 192 Bible Society, 204 Bickerdyke, Mary Ann, 13, 213–14, 248, 255, 274 Blacks. See African Americans Blackwell, Elizabeth, 229, 265 Blanchard, Caleb, 112–13 Blanchard, Mattie, 112–13 Bloch, Ruth, 97 Bloor, Alfred Janson, 206 Blunt, Sarah, 56, 249–51, 270 Boston (Mass.), 46, 147, 206 Boydston, Jeanne, 14–15, 34n, 190 Brandegee, Sarah, 242, 253, 254 Brandy Station (Va.), 145, 146 Brayton, Issac, 291 Brick Congregational Church (Galesburg, Ill.), 212 Brooklyn (N.Y.), 249 Bucklin, Sophronia, 222, 241, 245, 256, 258, 262, 263–65, 267, 268, 269, 270, 275 Buffalo (N.Y.), 289, 295, 297

Bull Run (First Battle of), 102, 192, 306n Burleigh, Hattie, 164–66, 175n Burnap, Rev. George, 89–92, 93 Burton, Orville V., 24 Butler, Anne, 67 Cairo (Ill.), 49, 178, 212, 213, 214, 224, 228, 255 California, 77 Cameron, Simon, 215n, 230 Camp Butler, 64, 275 Camp Defiance, 40 camp followers, 65–66 Camp Kettle, 117 Camp Meigs, 100 Camp Stanton, 241 Camp Stebbins Hospital, 178, 179, 228, 275 Camp William Penn, 62, 103, 107 Camp Yates, 58, 232 carte-de-visite, 150, 154–55, 160, 165 Catholic priests, 79n Cavalry Corps Hospital, 248 Charleston (S.C.), 222 Chattanooga (Tenn.), 49 Chester, T. M., 261 Chesterfield, Lord, 143, 144 Chicago, 46, 70, 147, 156, 179, 194–95, 294. See also Northwestern Sanitary Commission Chicago Tribune, 4, 138, 140, 162, 166 Child, Lydia Maria, 32 children, and rearing, 15, 16, 39n Christian Commission. See United States Christian Commission

INDEX

Christian Recorder, 44, 73, 92, 103, 107, 114, 196, 197, 219n, 220n, 253, 261, 300 Christmas, 260 Cincinnati, 147 Claremont (N.H.), 199–200 Cleveland (Ohio), 115, 148, 302 Cleveland Ladies’ Aid Society, 104, 108, 115 Cogan, Frances B., 36n, 143, 153 Coldwater (Mich.), 156 Collis, Septima, 145 Colored Ladies of Philadelphia, 195 Columbia College Hospital, 236, 254, 268 Columbus (Ohio), 300–301 Colyer, Vincent, 64–65 “communal contract,” 4, 176, 181–82, 184, 186–88, 191, 193–94, 195–96, 199, 206, 208, 209–12, 214–15, 217n, 221n companionate marriage, 15, 161, 168 Contagious Disease Acts, 66 “Contraband,” 100 Coontz, Stephanie, 22, 23 Cooper Shop Volunteer Refreshment Saloon, 107, 298, 300 Copperheads, 30, 31, 33, 38n, 216n Corinth (Miss.), 115, 151 correspondence ads; for female companionship, 150, 151, 165–66, 168; and Leap Year, 157, 172n; to pass time, 138, 151, 148, 164, 165; to meet prospective mates, 138, 148, 140, 152–55; and middle-class ideals, 140–41, 160–62, 167; public response to ads, 162–63, 166–67; and requirements for correspondents, 153–54, 155–56; typical ad, 149; women’s participation 141, 155–57

327

“correspondence craze,” 4, 138, 140, 159, 162 Cott, Nancy, 16, 20, 34n Crimean War, 228, 231 cross-dressed; men; 145–46, 170n; women, 286n “cult of domesticity,” 19, 100 “cult of true womanhood,” 19. See also True womanhood Daniel Webster (steamer), 239 Davis, Jefferson, 147 Deep Bottom (Battle of), 271 Delegates Handbook, 206 Dix, Dorothea, 6, 146, 193, 194, 209, 215–16n, 229–30, 241, 263–65, 270 domesticity; ideology of, 14, 19, 102, 261; female patriotism and, 102; power of, 27, 28, 119, 125; women’s prerogatives under, 100, 126 “domestic imagery,” 4, 27, 31, 102, 107, 108, 114–15, 116, 117–18, 141, 196, 197, 214, 238, 250–51, 260, 261–62 Douglas, Anne, 158 Emancipation Proclamation, 8, 192 Emerson, Rev. Alfred, 44–45, 49, 73–74 Emilio, Luis F., 13, 55 Enrollment Act, 192 etiquette. See manuals “familial images,” 2, 13, 30, 33, 102, 200, 226, 238, 251–52 family; forces that shaped, 14–16; responsibilities of, 16–17, 45; as a societal model, 32

328

INDEX

fathers; and responsibilities, 15–16, 18, 38n, 76, 186; as soldiers, 124 Faxon, John, 120–21 Faxon, Mary, 109–10, 120 female soldiers, 286n field hospitals. See military hospitals Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts Regiment, 196, 238 Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, 13, 55, 94, 100, 118, 131n, 132n, 190, 201, 217n, 226, 238, 240–41, 242, 253, 261, 267, 282n First South Carolina Volunteers, 53, 60, 195, 238, 246 Fisk, Wilber, 132n, 299n Forgie, George, 31, 33, 129n Fort Donnelson, 214, 274 Fort Gregg, 257 Fort Henry (Battle of), 265 Fort Monroe, 188, 239 Fort Sumter, 106, 209 Fort Schuyler, 56, 121 Fort Tillinghast, 55 Fort Wagner, 240, 267 Forten, Charlotte, 7, 249 Forty-Fourth Indiana Volunteer Infantry, 150 Fourteenth Wisconsin, 199 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspapers, 198 Frank, Stephen, 15, 16, 124, 128n, 134n Frankel, Noralee, 24, 70–71 Fredericksburg, Battle of, 210, 242, 252, 272 Galesburg (Ill.), 212, 213, 214 gender relations, 2, 3, 87 gender roles, 17–18, 20–21, 25–26, 28, 89–91, 127n, 175n, 185,

186–87, 227, 229–30, 234, 238, 265 Georgetown Hospital, 110 German: families, 111; flags, 195 Gettysburg (Battle of), 56, 182, 239, 247, 248, 267, 269 Gilfoyle, Timothy J., 67–69, 70, 139 Gillette, James T., 103 Gilson, Helen, 111 Ginzberg, Lori, 100, 181, 306n Gladstone, William, 195 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 158–59 Gooding, James H., 13, 95, 242 Grand Army of the Republic, 106 Graves, Albert, 57, 124 Graves, Mrs. A. J., 73, 75 Gray, Martha Bush, 238 Gregg, Sarah Gallop, 176–79, 180, 185, 214, 227–28, 269, 275 Grierson, Alice, 40–42, 45, 49, 56, 58–59, 69, 74–75, 79n, 109, 111, 120, 122 Grierson, Benjamin H., 40–42, 56–57, 58–59, 60, 69, 74, 75, 78n, 109, 118, 120, 122 Grossberg, Michael, 18 Guiney, Patrick, 59, 121 Hacker, Barton C., 65–66 Hadley, W. H., 293, 298, 302, 305n Hale, Sarah J., 158–59, 260–61 Halleck, Henry, 63 Halttunen, Karen, 41, 46, 95, 143–44, 164, 174–75n Hamilton, Gail, 122–23, 136n Hanks, Constant, 50–51, 124 Harpers Ferry (Va.), 250 Harper’s Weekly, 153, 198 Harris, Ellen, 102–3, 104, 208 Harris, Mrs. John, 202 Harrisburg (Pa.), 293

INDEX

Hartford (Conn.), 99 Harwood Hospital, 148 Hasseltine, Duntun, 197 Hawkes, Esther, 151–52, 226, 241 Helena (Ark.), 105 Hess, Earl J., 38n, 48, 119, 125, 223, 242, 252, 265, 285n Higginson, Mary Channing, 136n Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 53, 60, 62, 136n, 246 Hill, Sarah Fuller, 99 Hilton Head (S.C.), 201 Hoard, J. S., 193 Hoge, Jane C., 215n Holland, Sarah, 8 “home”; ideals of 20, 73, 114–15, 116, 125, 182, 246, 281n, 303 importance of the parlor, 246, 247–48, 306; psychological link with, through letters, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 152, 168 Howard, O. O., 115 Howland, Eliza Woolsey, 81n, 239, 260 Illinois, 154, 227 Income tax, 205–6 Indiana, 154, 294 Indiana Hospital, 265 Industrial Revolution, 15 Iowa, 209 Iowa Sanitary Commission, 258 Island Hospital, 250 Jackson Hospital, 257–58 Jackson, Thomas (Stonewall), 42 Janesville (Wis.), 228 Jefferson, Thomas, 96 Jeffrey, Julie Roy, 106–7, 127n, 181 Jones Jr., James Boyd, 72 Judd, Catherine, 231, 283–84n

329

Judiciary Square Hospital, 258, 265, 270 Kansas, 248 Kasson, John, 91, 142, 147, 234, 261–62, 285n Kimmel, Michael, 190 Knapp, Frederick Newman, 64, 206, 293 295–96, 300, 304n, 305n Kelly, Patrick J., 78n, 79n Kemp, Thomas P., 217n Kerber, Linda K., 35n, 97 Keyes, Annie, 7 Kleem, Mrs. L. L., 221n Kwolek-Folland, Angel, 247–48, 307 Ladies’ Colored Soldiers’ Aid Society of Bridgeport, Connecticut, 201 Ladies’ Colored Soldiers’ Aid Society of Louisville, Kentucky, 261 laundress, 7, 145, 228 Leonard, Elizabeth, 127n, 146, 286n, 287n letters; to anonymous recipients, 87, 118, 148, 149; as confirmation for aid societies that goods arrived, 202–3, 209–12; from soldiers to aid societies, 108, 115, 117, 118, 125, 149, 152; as harmful, 189–91; “love letters,” 120, 122; as moral oversight of soldiers, 188–89; as moral support for soldiers, 102, 119–24, 126, 136n, 137n, 152; rules of, 119–20, 149, 150–51, 160 Lewis, Jan, 97, 141 Lincoln, Abraham, 47, 94, 105, 191, 192, 208, 212

330

INDEX

Linderman, Gerald, 95 Little, Lizzie, 231–32 Livermore, Mary, 9, 50, 177, 178, 179, 215–16n, 224, 225–26, 235, 253 Lookout Point (Md.), 56 Louisville Ladies’ Colored Soldiers’ Aid Society, 192 Lystra, Karen, 36n, 92, 120, 122, 170n, 175n, 238 Maine, 206, 209 Malone, Ann Paton, 25 Mansfield (Pa.), 192 manuals, behavioral and etiquette, 47, 142–44, 150–51, 234 Mansion House Hospital, 260 market economy, 14–15, 46, 68 Marrietta (Ga.), 255 Marten, James, 130n Massey, Mary Elizabeth, 145, 157 May, Abby, 206–7 Mayer, Holly, 228 McClain, William, 102, 125 McClellan, George B., 42 McDougal Hospital, 56 McKay, Mrs. C. E., 248 McKinney, Jane Chambers, 113 McPherson, James, 38n, 98, 135n, 137n, 197 medical personnel. See nurses; physicians Medical and Surgical History of the War, 66 Mehaffey, Karen, 144 Meigs, Montgomery C., 105–6 Memphis (Tenn.), 70, 72, 253 Michigan, 154, 155, 237 military hospitals; as corrupting force on women, 76–77, 222, 230–31, 232, 234; and diet

kitchens, 256, 258–59; domestication of, 247–57; household manufacture for, 240; management of, 225; nurses for, 225, 233–34; and visitors, 224, 233, 279–80n; as unhygienic, 51–52, 225, 259 Milwaukee (Wis.), 70, 99 Milwaukee Sentinel, 61, 63, 71 Milwaukee Soldiers’ Aid Society, 98 Minnville (Tenn.), 58 Mintz, Steven, 16, 35n, 39n, 47, 78n Mitchell, Reid, 33, 38n, 39n, 48, 66, 69, 80n, 127n, 129n, 135n, 146, 147, 188, 189, 191, 194–95, 221n, 230, 235, 239, 262–63, 269, 277n, 306n Moore, James, 298 Moore, Frank, 226–27, 256, 276 moral suasion, 1, 2, 4, 42, 62, 256, 284n morality; and republican ideals, 17–18, 44, 88, 96–98; and women’s war work, 30, 41, 77, 112, 115, 199, 241, 249 mother; and authority of, 102, 131n, 221n; and education of 18–19, 98, 129n; and responsibilities, 15, 18, 19–20, 52, 73, 76, 123, 172n, 186, 256, 293 ; teachings of, 32, 38n, 98, 129n, 180, 293; of World War I, 73 Mound City Hospital, 176, 179, 185 Murfreesboro (Tenn.), 148 Musser, Charles, 80n, 105, 191, 216n mustered-out soldiers. See veterans Nashville (Tenn.), 70, 72, 113, 138, 149, 168 National Fast Day, 192

INDEX

New Bedford (Mass.), 95, 100, 238 New Bedford Mercury, 13 New Bedford Soldiers’ Relief Society, 209 Newcomb, Mary, 261–62, 265 New England Women’s Auxiliary Association, 104, 198, 206 New Hampshire Soldiers’ Aid Society, 106 New York, 154, 156, 182, 221n, 222, 229 New York City; and courting rituals, 139; and draft riots, 30; and prostitution, 68, 147; and rural migrations to, 46 New York Herald, 4 Nightingale, Florence, 187, 228–29, 230–31, 278n Nineteenth Illinois Zouaves, 194–95 Ninth Massachusetts Regiment, 59 Norten, Mary Beth, 35n, 97, 129n Norton, Mary, 116, 118 Northwestern Sanitary Commission (Chicago), 9, 13, 49, 50, 177, 179, 215n, 225, 235 nurses; battle with red tape, 179, 180; and civilizing soldiers, 240; conflict with surgeons 5, 135n, 217n, 257–58; Dix and, 6, 215n, 235; and domesticity, 214, 246–47, 261; estimate of women involved, 171n; and gambling, 57, 113; hardening of, 171n, 223, 265–70; and holidays, 260–62; housing for, 71, 85n, 268; as liaisons between home and camp, 29, 214, 224, 276–77, 287n; illness and death of, 274–76; independent, 116; and music, 252–53; and patriotism,

331 29, 275, 277; payment for, 270; and personal care of patients, 244–46, 259; and profanity, 56; and religion, 253–56, 283–84n; requirements for, 146, 263; and soldiers’ diet, 256–59, 284n; as surrogate mothers and sisters, 4, 13, 29, 146, 214, 221n, 226, 234, 235, 236–37, 245, 276–77, 280–81n; shared same privations as soldiers, 223, 262–77; types of, 6–7; washing patients, 239–40

Oates, Stephen, 221n, 272–73 Ohio, 221n Okker, Patricia, 158–59, 167 Oliphant, Catherine, 237 Olmstead, Frederick Law, 101, 184–85 Olson, Kenneth, 251–52 Olustee (Battle of), 201 Ordonaux, John, 52, 81n Ottawa (Ill.), 156, 177, 178, 228 Ottawa Ladies’ Aid Society, 177, 178, 179, 228 Patton, Rev. William W., 49, 73 Paine, Thomas, 31 Paludan, Phillip S., 128n, 180, 181, 224, 281n Parsons, Emily, 56, 110, 121, 235–36, 241, 242, 245, 250 Peach Tree Creek (Battle of), 223 Peninsular Campaign, 29, 37n, 183 Penny, Lydia, 7, 254, 271, 273 pensions, 42–44, 78–79 Perkins, S. G., 42, 78n Philadelphia, 46, 291 Philadelphia Ladies’ Aid Society, 102, 106, 193, 208

332

INDEX

physicians; battlefield attendance, 182, 184; conflict with nurses 5, 135n, 217n, 257–58, 271; maleness, 229 Pomroy, Rebecca, 110, 226, 235, 236, 246–47, 250, 254, 266, 268, 269, 270 Portland (Maine), 110, 246 Porter, Eliza, 13 Poughkeepsie (N.Y.), 301 Prentiss, Benjamin M., 40 prostitutes and prostitution, 65–73, 77, 145, 146–47 Quarles, Benjamin, 54–55 Quiner, Emilie, 61, 253, 258 Randall, Alexander, 187, 230 regimental flags, 194–95 Republican Motherhood, 19, 35n, 97–98, 129n Richmond (Va.), 42, 64 Richmond (Pa.), 193–94, 195 Rochester (N.Y.), 8 Ropes, Hannah, 234, 235, 244, 245–46, 256, 275 Ross, Kristie, 171n Rothman, Ellen, 144, 170n, 174n Rotundo, E. Anthony, 17, 20–21, 32, 48–49, 93, 170n, 280–81n, 284n Rush, Benjamin, 17 St. Bridget, 157 St. Louis (Mo.), 224, 302 St. Patrick, 157 St. Thomas Colored Episcopal Church of Philadelphia, 220n Safford, Mary, 255, 274, 275 Salem (Ohio), 87 Sanger, William, 72

Sanitary Commission. See United States Sanitary Commission Schultz, Jane Ellen, 6, 171n, 257 Schuyler, Louisa Lee, 203, 215n Schuyler, Mrs. George, 200, 201 separate spheres, 19, 20, 22, 89, 93 Seymour, Horatio, 30, 38n Shaw, Mrs. Robert, 132n Shawneetown, 58 Shenandoah Valley, 42 Shiloh (Battle of), 32, 94, 274 Sisters of the Holy Cross, 225 Sklar, Katherine Kish, 32 slavery; black women and, 24, 287n; black children and, 24; black men and, 24; families and, 23–25 Smith, Rev. E. P., 44–45, 49, 73–74 Smith, Issac, 62 Smith, Lydia Hamilton, 62 Smith, Nina Bennett, 99, 273 soldiers; and alcohol, 49, 60–63, 292, 293; and army bureaucracy, 88, 179–80, 243; and the civilizing nature of supplies, 114, 115, 117–18, 123, 196, 226, 246, 250–51, 260; comforted by aid society women, 28; conflict between familial responsibilities and duty to country, 94, 128n, 188, 191; and confidence men, 163, 174–75n, 292, 293, 296; corruption of, 3, 41, 44, 45, 47, 49–70, 93, 96, 134n, 224; and disease, 50–52, 66, 103, 105, 212; and dehumanization of combat, 242; and ethnic regiments, 133n, 195, 196, 237, 285n; and familial influence, 32, 33, 111, 135n, 141, 226; and female companionship, 66, 140,

INDEX

224, 251, 281–82n; and female nurses, 226, 241–42, 243, 250–51, 262, 276 ;and gambling, 49, 56–57; hardening of, 48, 69, 96, 129n, 224, 263, 264, 277n, 285n; and holidays, 260–62, 285; and morality, 95, 96, 141; and music, 251–53; and parties, 58–59, 145; and pay, 190–91; and politics, 98, 216n; and profanity, 49, 55; and prostitutes, 65, 69–70; and rations, 103–4, 107; and reading, 197–99; and religion, 53–54, 59, 253–56; and ties to their communities, 187–88 soldiers’ aid societies: 7–8, 79n; and bureaucracy within the society, 100, 176, 177, 178, 180; and children’s work, 98–99, 130n; and conflicts with the army, 183–84; and conflicts with the USSC, 101, 176, 179, 185, 186, 204–6; employment for soldiers’ families, 111; and sanitary fairs, 28; and letters to soldiers, 87; and methods, 88, 103; and psychological importance of supplies, 108–11, 114, 115, 116, 117–18, 135n, 196; saved men’s lives, 182–83; and society constitutions, 99; and soldiers’ diet, 104, 240; and supplies, 99, 102, 103, 106, 107, 114, 115, 132n, 182–83, 193, 246, 251 soldiers’ families; and effect of gambling, 57; as moral and physical support, 73–74, 135n soldiers’ homes; 5, 79n, 303n, 304; and African Americans, 291, 294; and decorum, 299–300; and domesticity, 291, 296, 298,

333

300–302, 305n, 306n, 307n; and meals, 302; as part of the aid society soldier regeneration, 289–90, 298–99; as protection, 293–94, 304n; and sick and wounded soldiers, 295; as surrogate relatives, 294 southern women; defiance by, 147; loyalty to Confederacy, 95; as nurses, 279n; rejected by Union soldiers, 145–46, 147, 171n Springfield (Mass.), 109 Springfield Soldiers’ Aid Society, 99, 114 Stansell, Christine, 22–23 Stephens, George, 55, 131n, 190, 196–97, 201 Stetham, David, 52, 57, 115–16, 117–18, 119 Stevens, Thaddeus, 62 Stevenson, Louise, 16, 197, 198, 247, 306n Stille, Charles, 7 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 249, 297–98, 301 Strong, George T., 101 Surgeon General. See United States Surgeon General surgeons. See physicians sutlers, 63, 84n Taylor, Susie King, 7, 238, 245, 257, 267, 271–72, 273 Temperance Union, 204 Thanksgiving, 260–62 Thetford (Vt.), 155 Tioga Mountaineers, 193, 194 “True Womanhood,” 3, 19, 141, 157–59, 167–68 “True man,” 21, 48–49, 95, 123 Truth, Sojourner, 7

334

INDEX

Tubman, Harriet, 7 Twelfth Iowa Volunteer Infantry, 152 Twenty-ninth Iowa Regiment, 105, 183–84, 191, 216n Union Hospital, 234 Union League Club of New York, 64 Union Refreshment Saloon (Pa.), 8, 107 United States Army, 228 United States Army Nursing Corps, 6, 193, 209, 222, 237 United States Christian Commission, 7, 27, 44, 130n, 179–80, 182, 186, 198, 203–7, 211, 220n, 239, 258 United States Colored Troops, 55, 57, 73, 103, 108, 115, 190, 195, 245, 254, 257, 271, 291, 294 United States Sanitary Commission, 4, 7, 27, 29, 42, 45, 51, 53, 57, 58, 63, 64, 100, 101, 130n, 133n, 148, 163, 176, 179, 180, 182, 183, 184–86, 190, 198, 200, 202, 203–7, 211, 214, 215n, 216n, 220n, 229, 240, 243, 257, 258, 295, 300 Upson, Theodore, 294–95 veterans, 42–44 Vicksburg (Miss.), 198–99, 261 Victorians; and agoraphobia, 285–86n; bodily comportment, 234–35; courting rituals, 142–44, 148, 169–70n, 174n, 175n; doctor/patient relations, 235; eating habits, 261–62; reading habits, 197, 198; sexual behavior, 67–68, 234–35 “village mentality,” 4, 10n, 46, 180–81

Wallace, Ann, 94, 95, 121, 124 Wallace, William, 94–95, 121 Ware, Rev. John, 74, 77, 93, 306n Washington (D.C.), 64, 70, 71–72, 110, 145, 147, 148, 182, 207, 208, 221n, 222, 233, 234, 264–65, 275, 292, 293, 295, 299 Waverly, 150 Weaver, Elisha, 44, 219n Webster, Noah, 180 Welter, Barbara, 19, 157–58 Wheeler, Elizabeth, 56 Wheelock, Julia, 109, 237, 254, 281–82n Whetten, Harriet, 239, 266, 268 Whitewater Soldiers’ Aid Society (Wis.), 8 Whitman, Walt, 198, 233 Wiley, Bell, 55, 98, 147, 197 Wilson, Woodrow, 73 Williamsburg (Va.), 239 Wisconsin Soldiers’ Aid Society, 111 Wittenmyer, Annie, 258–60, 272, 273 Woman’s Central Relief Association, 100, 130n, 200, 203, 207, 215n, 229 women; and aid societies, 27–28, 88, 186, 192; and family health care, 227, 229; moral role and, 26, 40, 75, 94, 102, 112–13, 123, 127n, 159, 184, 199, 227, 241; patriotism and, 26, 88, 184; and political meaning of their war work, 88, 125–26n, 186, 187; and political participation, 181; put moral stamp on war, 94, 95; and religion, 76, 204–5, 214, 254–55; and soldiers’ diet, 104 Wood, Gordon, 96 Woodward, Benjamin, 212, 213

INDEX

Woolsey, Abby, 81n Woolsey, Georgeanna, 81n, 182, 183, 239–40, 243–44, 248, 260, 265–66 Woolsey, Jane, 260 Worcester, (Mass.), 116 working-class children, 22–23 working-class men, 68

335

working-class women, 2, 5, 6, 22, 65, 66, 70, 111, 158, 237 working-class family, 21–22, 23 Wormeley, Katherine, 29, 243, 266, 268, 273 Young Men’s Christian Association, 27, 47, 199, 204

THE NORTH’S CIVIL WAR SERIES Paul A. Cimbala, series editor 1. Anita Palladino, ed., Diary of a Yankee Engineer: The Civil War Story of John H. Westervelt, Engineer, 1st New York Volunteer Engineer Corps. 2. Herman Belz, Abraham Lincoln, Constitutionalism, and Equal Rights in the Civil War Era. 3. Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union. Second revised edition, with a new introduction by the author. 4. William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments. 5. Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography. 6. Stephen W. Sears, ed., Mr. Dunn Browne’s Experiences in the Army: The Civil War Letters of Samuel W. Fiske. 7. Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. 8. Frank L. Klement, The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War. With a new introduction by Steven K. Rogstad. 9. Lawrence N. Powell, New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction. 10. John A. Carpenter, Sword and Olive Branch: Oliver Otis Howard. 11. Thomas F. Schwartz, ed., “For a Vast Future Also”: Essays from the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. 12. Mark De Wolfe Howe, ed., Touched with Fire: Civil War Letters and Diary of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. With a new introduction by David Burton. 13. Harold Adams Small, ed., The Road to Richmond: The Civil War Letters of Major Abner R. Small of the 16th Maine Volunteers. New introduction by Earl J. Hess. 14. Eric A. Campbell, ed., “A Grand Terrible Dramma”: From Gettysburg to Petersburg: The Civil War Letters of Charles Wellington Reed. Illustrated by Reed’s Civil War Sketches. 15. Herbert Mitgang, ed., Abraham Lincoln: A Press Portrait. 16. Harold Holzer, ed., Prang’s Civil War Pictures: The Complete Battle Chromos of Louis Prang. 17. Harold Holzer, ed., State of the Union: New York and the Civil War.

18. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments. 19. Mark A. Snell, From First to Last: The Lifetime of William B. Franklin. 20. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front. 21. John Y. Simon and Harold Holzer, eds., The Lincoln Forum: Rediscovering Abraham Lincoln. 22. Thomas F. Curran, Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement. 23. Kyle S. Sinisi, Sacred Debts: State Civil War Claims and American Federalism, 1861–1880. 24. Russell Johnson, Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City. 25. Peter J. Parish, The North and the Nation in the Era of the Civil War. Edited by Adam L. P. Smith and Susan-Mary Grant.