Download or read book The Home to the Army Union Soldiers Gender and the Response to Suffering During the U S Civil War written by Cathryn Entner Wright and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Civilian War written by Lisa Tendrich Frank and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civilian War explores home front encounters between elite Confederate women and Union soldiers during Sherman's March, a campaign that put women at the center of a Union army operation for the first time. Ordered to crush the morale as well as the military infrastructure of the Confederacy, Sherman and his army increasingly targeted wealthy civilians in their progress through Georgia and the Carolinas. To drive home the full extent of northern domination over the South, Sherman's soldiers besieged the female domain-going into bedrooms and parlors, seizing correspondence and personal treasures-with the aim of insulting and humiliating upper-class southern women. These efforts blurred the distinction between home front and warfront, creating confrontations in the domestic sphere as a part of the war itself. Historian Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that ideas about women and their roles in war shaped the expectations of both Union soldiers and Confederate civilians. Sherman recognized that slaveholding Confederate women played a vital part in sustaining the Rebel efforts, and accordingly he treated them as wartime opponents, targeting their markers of respectability and privilege. Although Sherman intended his efforts to demoralize the civilian population, Frank suggests that his strategies frequently had the opposite effect. Confederate women accepted the plunder of food and munitions as an inevitable part of the conflict, but they considered Union invasion of their private spaces an unforgivable and unreasonable transgression. These intrusions strengthened the resolve of many southern women to continue the fight against the Union and its most despised general. Seamlessly merging gender studies and military history, The Civilian War illuminates the distinction between the damage inflicted on the battlefield and the offenses that occurred in the domestic realm during the Civil War. Ultimately, Frank's research demonstrates why many women in the Lower South remained steadfastly committed to the Confederate cause even when their prospects seemed most dim.

Download or read book Occupied Women written by LeeAnn Whites and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spring of 1861, tens of thousands of young men formed military companies and offered to fight for their country. Near the end of the Civil War, nearly half of the adult male population of the North and a staggering 90 percent of eligible white males in the South had joined the military. With their husbands, sons, and fathers away, legions of women took on additional duties formerly handled by males, and many also faced the ordeal of having their homes occupied by enemy troops. With occupation, the home front and the battlefield merged to create an unanticipated second front where civilians-mainly women-resisted what they perceived as unjust domination. In Occupied Women, twelve distinguished historians consider how women's reactions to occupation affected both the strategies of military leaders and ultimately even the outcome of the Civil War. Alecia P. Long, Lisa Tendrich Frank, E. Susan Barber, and Charles F. Ritter explore occupation as an incubator of military policies that reflected occupied women's activism. Margaret Creighton, Kristen L. Streater, LeeAnn Whites, and Cita Cook examine specific locations where citizens both enforced and evaded these military policies. Leslie A. Schwalm, Victoria E. Bynum, and Joan E. Cashin look at the occupation as part of complex and overlapping differences in race, class, and culture. An epilogue by Judith Giesberg emphasizes these themes. Some essays reinterpret legendary encounters between military men and occupied women, such as those prompted by General Butler's infamous "Woman Order" and Sherman's March to the Sea. Others explore new areas such as the development of military policy with regard to sexual justice. Throughout, the contributors examine the common experiences of occupied women and address the unique situations faced by women, whether Union, Confederate, or freed. Civil War historians have traditionally depicted Confederate women as rendered inert by occupying armies, but these essays demonstrate that women came together to form a strong, localized resistance to military invasion. Guerrilla activity, for example, occurred with the support and active participation of women on the home front. Women ran the domestic supply line of food, shelter, and information that proved critical to guerrilla tactics. By broadening the discussion of the Civil War to include what LeeAnn Whites calls the "relational field of battle," this pioneering collection helps reconfigure the location of conflict and the chronology of the American Civil War.

Download or read book Across the Divide written by Steven J. Ramold and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-04-22 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Ramold disputes the old argument that citizen-soldiers in the Union Army differed little from civilians. He shows how a chasm of mutual distrust grew between soldiers and civilians during four years of fighting that led many Democratic soldiers to…build the groundwork for the postwar Republican Party. Filled with gripping anecdotes, this book makes for fascinating reading." —Scott Reynolds Nelson, College of William & Mary Union soldiers left home in 1861 with expectations that the conflict would be short, the purpose of the war was clear, and public support back home was universal. As the war continued, however, Union soldiers noticed growing disparities between their own expectations and those of their families at home with growing concern and alarm. Instead of support for the war, an extensive and oft-violent anti-war movement emerged. In this first study of the gulf between Union soldiers and northern civilians, Steven J. Ramold reveals the wide array of factors that prevented the Union Army and the civilians on whose behalf they were fighting from becoming a united front during the Civil War. In Across the Divide, Ramold illustrates how the divided spheres of Civil War experience created social and political conflict far removed from the better-known battlefields of the war. Steven J. Ramold, Associate Professor of American History at Eastern Michigan University, is the author of two previous books, Slaves, Sailors, Citizens: African Americans in the Union Navy and Baring the Iron Hand: Discipline in the Union Army. He and his wife reside in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Download or read book The Union Soldier in Battle written by Earl J. Hess and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 1997-04-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I saw enough to sicken the heart. . . . The scenes which I witnessed were enough to overthrow all imaginations concerning the glory of war; but, dreadful as they were, I hope and believe that I would be willing to suffer the worst, . . . rather than prove a traitor to the trust which our country reposes in all her sons.--J. Spangler Kieffer, Pennsylvania Militia With its relentless bloodshed, devastating firepower, and large-scale battles often fought on impossible terrain, the Civil War was a terrifying experience for a volunteer army. Yet, as Earl Hess shows, Union soldiers found the wherewithal to endure such terrors for four long years and emerge victorious. A vivid reminder that the business of war is killing, Hess's study plunges us into the hellish realms of Civil War combat-a horrific experience crowded with brutalizing sights, sounds, smells, and textures. We share the terror of being shot at for the first time and hear the "grating sound a minie ball makes when it hits a bone instead of the heavy thud when it strikes flesh." We are assaulted by choruses of groans from the wounded and dying and come to understand why some soldiers returned to battle with great dread Drawing extensively upon the letters, diaries, and memoirs of Northern soldiers, Hess reveals their deepest fears and shocks, and also their sources of inner strength. By identifying recurrent themes found in these accounts, Hess constructs a multilayered view of the many ways in which these men coped with the challenges of battle. He shows how they were bolstered by belief in God and country, or simply by their sense of duty; how they came to rely on the support of their comrades; and how they learned to muster self-control in order to persevere from one battle to the next. Although our ability to appreciate war as it was conducted in the previous century has been clouded by our familiarity with modern conflicts, Hess's study conveys that reality with an immediacy rarely matched by other books. Even more, it urges us to reconsider these soldiers not as victims of the battlefield but rather as victors over the worst that war can inflict.

Download or read book Gender and the Sectional Conflict written by Nina Silber and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an insightful exploration of gender relations during the Civil War, Nina Silber compares broad ideological constructions of masculinity and femininity among Northerners and Southerners. She argues that attitudes about gender shaped the experiences of the Civil War's participants, including how soldiers and their female kin thought about their "causes" and obligations in wartime. Despite important similarities, says Silber, differing gender ideologies shaped the way each side viewed, participated in, and remembered the war. Silber finds that rhetoric on both sides connected soldiers' reasons for fighting to the women left at home. Consequently, although in different ways, women on both sides took up new roles to advance the wartime agenda. At the same time, both Northern and Southern women were accused of waning patriotism as the war dragged on, but their responses to such charges differed. Finally, noting that our postwar memories are often dominated by images of Southern belles, Silber considers why Northern women, despite their heroic contributions to the Union cause, have faded from Civil War memory. Silber's investigation offers a new understanding of how Unionists and Confederates perceived their reasons for fighting, of the new attitudes and experiences that women--black and white--on both sides took up, and of the very different ways that Northern and Southern women were remembered after the war ended.

Download or read book Army at Home written by Judith Giesberg and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing readers to women whose Civil War experiences have long been ignored, Judith Giesberg examines the lives of working-class women in the North, for whom the home front was a battlefield of its own. Black and white working-class women managed farms that had been left without a male head of household, worked in munitions factories, made uniforms, and located and cared for injured or dead soldiers. As they became more active in their new roles, they became visible as political actors, writing letters, signing petitions, moving (or refusing to move) from their homes, and confronting civilian and military officials. At the heart of the book are stories of women who fought the draft in New York and Pennsylvania, protested segregated streetcars in San Francisco and Philadelphia, and demanded a living wage in the needle trades and safer conditions at the Federal arsenals where they labored. Giesberg challenges readers to think about women and children who were caught up in the military conflict but nonetheless refused to become its collateral damage. She offers a dramatic reinterpretation of how America's Civil War reshaped the lived experience of race and gender and brought swift and lasting changes to working-class family life.

Download or read book The Vacant Chair written by Reid Mitchell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-07-13 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many ways, the Northern soldier in the Civil War fought as if he had never left home. On campsites and battlefields, the Union volunteer adapted to military life with attitudes shaped by networks of family relationships, in units of men from the same hometown. Understanding these links between the homes the troops left behind and the war they had to fight, writes Reid Mitchell, offers critical insight into how they thought, fought, and persevered through four bloody years of combat. In The Vacant Chair, Mitchell draws on the letters, diaries, and memoirs of common soldiers to show how mid-nineteenth-century ideas and images of the home and family shaped the union soldier's approach to everything from military discipline to battlefield bravery. For hundreds of thousands of "boys," as they called themselves, the Union army was an extension of their home and childhood experiences. Many experienced the war as a coming-of-age rite, a test of such manly virtues as self-control, endurance, and courage. They served in companies recruited from the same communities, and they wrote letters reporting on each other's performance--conscious that their own behavior in the army would affect their reputations back home. So, too, were they deeply affected by letters from their families, as wives and mothers complained of suffering or demanded greater valor. Mitchell also shows how this hometown basis for volunteer units eroded respect for military rank, as men served with officers they saw as equals: "Lieut Col Dewey introduced Hugh T Reid," one sergeant wrote dryly, "by saying, 'Boys, behold your colonel,' and webeheldhim." In return, officers usually adopted paternalist attitudes toward their "boys"--especially in the case of white officers commanding black soldiers. Mitchell goes on to look at the role of women in the soldiers' experiences, from the feminine center of their own households to their hatred of Confederate women as "she-devils." The intimate relations and inner life of the Union soldier, the author writes, tell us much about how and why he kept fighting through four bloody years--and why demoralization struck the Confederate soldier as the war penetrated the South, threatening his home and family while he was at the front. "The Northern soldier did not simply experience the war as a husband, son, father, or brother--he fought that way as well," he writes. "That was part of his strength. The Confederate soldier fought the war the same way, and, in the end, that proved part of his weakness." The Vacant Chair uncovers this critical chapter in the Civil War experience, showing how the Union soldier saw--and won--our most costly conflict.

Download or read book The Gentlemen and the Roughs written by Lorien Foote and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-21 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this contribution to Civil War and gender history, Lorien Foote reveals that internal battles were fought against the backdrop of manhood. Clashing ideals of manliness produced myriad conflicts when educated, refined, and wealthy officers found themselves commanding a hard-drinking group of fighters.

Download or read book Union Soldier of the American Civil War written by Denis Hambucken and published by The Countryman Press. This book was released on 2012-03-27 with total page 73 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through photographs and historical documents, profiles the lives of Union soldiers during the American Civil War, discussing their day-to-day activities, weapons, and equipment.

Download or read book Daughters of the Union written by Nina Silber and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-18 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daughters of the Union casts a spotlight on some of the most overlooked and least understood participants in the American Civil War: the women of the North. Unlike their Confederate counterparts, who were often caught in the midst of the conflict, most Northern women remained far from the dangers of battle. Nonetheless, they enlisted in the Union cause on their home ground, and the experience transformed their lives. Nina Silber traces the emergence of a new sense of self and citizenship among the women left behind by Union soldiers. She offers a complex account, bolstered by women's own words from diaries and letters, of the changes in activity and attitude wrought by the war. Women became wage-earners, participants in partisan politics, and active contributors to the war effort. But even as their political and civic identities expanded, they were expected to subordinate themselves to male-dominated government and military bureaucracies. Silber's arresting tale fills an important gap in women's history. She shows the women of the North--many for the first time--discovering their patriotism as well as their ability to confront new economic and political challenges, even as they encountered the obstacles of wartime rule. The Civil War required many women to act with greater independence in running their households and in expressing their political views. It brought women more firmly into the civic sphere and ultimately gave them new public roles, which would prove crucial starting points for the late-nineteenth-century feminist struggle for social and political equality.

Download or read book Women Making War written by Thomas F. Curran and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Partisan activities of disloyal women and the Union army’s reaction During the American Civil War, more than four hundred women were arrested and imprisoned by the Union Army in the St. Louis area. The majority of these women were fully aware of the political nature of their actions and had made conscious decisions to assist Confederate soldiers in armed rebellion against the U.S. government. Their crimes included offering aid to Confederate soldiers, smuggling, spying, sabotaging, and, rarely, serving in the Confederate army. Historian Thomas F. Curran’s extensive research highlights for the first time the female Confederate prisoners in the St. Louis area, and his thoughtful analysis shows how their activities affected Federal military policy. Early in the war, Union officials felt reluctant to arrest women and waited to do so until their conduct could no longer be tolerated. The war progressed, the women’s disloyal activities escalated, and Federal response grew stronger. Some Confederate partisan women were banished to the South, while others were held at Alton Military Prison and other sites. The guerilla war in Missouri resulted in more arrests of women, and the task of incarcerating them became more complicated. The women’s offenses were seen as treasonous by the Federal government. By determining that women—who were excluded from the politics of the male public sphere—were capable of treason, Federal authorities implicitly acknowledged that women acted in ways that had serious political meaning. Nearly six decades before U.S. women had the right to vote, Federal officials who dealt with Confederate partisan women routinely referred to them as citizens. Federal officials created a policy that conferred on female citizens the same obligations male citizens had during time of war and rebellion, and they prosecuted disloyal women in the same way they did disloyal men. The women arrested in the St. Louis area are only a fraction of the total number of female southern partisans who found ways to advance the Confederate military cause. More significant than their numbers, however, is what the fragmentary records of these women reveal about the activities that led to their arrests, the reactions women partisans evoked from the Federal authorities who confronted them, the impact that women’s partisan activities had on Federal military policy and military prisons, and how these women’s experiences were subsumed to comport with a Lost Cause myth—the need for valorous men to safeguard the homes of defenseless women.

Download or read book Nurse and Spy in the Union Army written by Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds and published by Applewood Books. This book was released on 2008-12 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Canadian-born Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds (nee Edmondson) recounts her sensational life on the front lines of the American Civil War. As a young woman she ran away from home. To avoid being discovered, she assumed the identity of a man, taking the name Franklin "Frank" Thompson. Frank worked for awhile as a Bible salesman, but in 1865 joined the Union Army as a nurse. Frank, already a master of disguise, eventually volunteered to be a spy and penetrated the enemy lines multiple times in various forms: as a slave and, curiously, as a woman. Frank eventually deserted the army, and Sarah Emma Edmonds returned, enlisting in the army as a nurse.

Download or read book Women and the Civil War written by Louise Chipley Slavicek and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2014-05-14 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War brought enormous hardship and tragedy to America's female population. Yet, it also provided women of all races and social classes with unprecedented opportunities to participate in civic, economic, and military activities that had previously been closed to them. Although officially banned from serving in combat by both the Union and Confederate governments, women played a vital role in each side's war efforts. During the bloodiest conflict in U.S. history, some risked their lives as spies, scouts, and saboteurs, and in some instances, even disguised themselves as men to challenge their foes directly on the battlefield. Others produced and donated desperately needed supplies for the troops, or cared for ill and wounded soldiers. Those at home kept farms and businesses running while their male relations were off fighting. Women and the Civil War describes the important roles women filled while the Union and Confederate armies fought.

Download or read book War Stories written by Frances M. Clarke and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “layered, nuanced, and focused study” of Civil War era writings reveals a popular sense of patriotism and hope in the midst of loss (Journal of American History). The American Civil War is often seen as the first modern war, not least because of the immense suffering it inflicted. Yet unlike later conflicts, it did not produce an outpouring of disillusionment or cynicism in public or private discourse. In fact, most people portrayed the war in highly sentimental and patriotic terms. While scholars typically dismiss this everyday writing as simplistic or naïve, Frances M. Clarke argues that we need to reconsider the letters, diaries, songs, and journalism penned by Union soldiers and their caregivers to fully understand the war’s impact and meaning. In War Stories, Clarke revisits the most common stories that average Northerners told in hopes of redeeming their suffering and hardship—stories that enabled people to express their beliefs about religion, community, and personal character. From tales of Union soldiers who died heroically to stories of tireless volunteers who exemplified the Republic’s virtues, War Stories sheds new light on this transitional moment in the history of war, emotional culture, and American civic life.

Download or read book Marching Home Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War written by Brian Matthew Jordan and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-01-26 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of the Gov. John Andrew Award (Union Club of Boston) An acclaimed, groundbreaking, and “powerful exploration” (Washington Post) of the fate of Union veterans, who won the war but couldn’t bear the peace. For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative. These veterans— tending rotting wounds, battling alcoholism, campaigning for paltry pensions— tragically realized that they stood as unwelcome reminders to a new America eager to heal, forget, and embrace the freewheeling bounty of the Gilded Age. Mining previously untapped archives, Jordan uncovers anguished letters and diaries, essays by amputees, and gruesome medical reports, all deeply revealing of the American psyche. In the model of twenty-first-century histories like Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering or Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles that illuminate the plight of the common man, Marching Home makes almost unbearably personal the rage and regret of Union veterans. Their untold stories are critically relevant today.

Download or read book Patriotic Toil written by Jeanie Attie and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Civil War, the United States Sanitary Commission attempted to replace female charity networks and traditions of voluntarism with a centralized organization that would ensure women's support for the war effort served an elite, liberal vision of nationhood. Coming after years of debate over women's place in the democracy and status as citizens, soldier relief work offered women an occasion to demonstrate their patriotism and their rights to inclusion in the body politic. Exploring the economic and ideological conflicts that surrounded women's unpaid labors on behalf of the Union army, Jeanie Attie reveals the impact of the Civil War on the gender structure of nineteenth-century America. She illuminates how the war became a testing ground for the gendering of political rights and the ideological separation of men's and women's domains of work and influence. Attie draws on letters by hundreds of women in which they reflect on their political awakenings at the war's outbreak and their increasing skepticism of national policies as the conflict dragged on. Her book integrates the Civil War into the history of American gender relations and the development of feminism, providing a nuanced analysis of the relationship among gender construction, class development, and state formation in nineteenth-century America.