9. Women in the Civil War

The role of women throughout the American Civil War was diverse and widespread. No matter wether one was black or white, southern or northern, women were vital in the war efforts. Some were soldiers, nurses, or took control over their farms and families stations that the men usually would. 
PictureHarriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin
When one thinks about war, what comes to mind first? Usually, it is soldiers and the political leaders of the time who in the 1860s were all men. As always we ask, “Where are the women?” During the American Civil War, the answer was EVERYWHERE.

The Civil War was fought from April 1861 to April 1865 and began because the North and the South could no longer remain “half slave and have free” as Lincoln suggested. Southerners were threatened by Lincoln’s election and Northerners were not going to let them undermine a democratic election by succeeding.

Women from both the North and the South were important actors in the war. As soon as the first shots rang out at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, women were active on the homefront and the front lines. They immediately assumed the roles of soldiers, couriers, nurses, spies, and caretakers of their homes, farms, and families in the face of severe danger and deprivation.  

Leading up to the war, women influenced public opinion on the primary political issues of the time: ending slavery.  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was the closest thing to a national bestseller and riled up the north leading to the war. The book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin touched the hearts of readers throughout the North and as far away as London. Queen Victoria is even said to have wept on reading the novel. There’s a famous story that, when he was introduced to Stowe, President Lincoln commented that she was "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

Everyone loves a good pump up song… and if the book didn’t inspire them, the most memorable song of the Civil War was Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Howe heard Union soldiers draft new words onto an old Methodist hymn to create “John Brown’s Body.” She adapted the hymn with words of her own intended to cast the war in moral and religious terms. The song was a popular and invigorating anthem among Union soldiers not only toward victory, but the moral imperative to end slavery.

She said:
“Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free;
While God is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave.”
PictureLoreta Jareta Velazquez
Once the war began, women from both the North and the South sought to find their place in the war effort.

Neither the Union nor the Confederate military kept adequate records of women who served on the battlefield. This is likely because both sides actually forbade women from enlisting. In 1909, journalist Ida Tarbell inquired about women soldiers and was informed by the Army’s Adjutant General’, C. F. Ainsworth, that no women had fought in the Civil War, however, we know this was not true. Recent estimates indicate that anywhere from 400 to 1,000 women answered the call to arms for either the Union or the Confederacy.

Why did women join the fight? They went to war for the same reason as men. Some believed in the cause of their side, such as Loreta Janeta Velazquez, who revealed in her 1876 memoir that she had served as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford in the Confederate Army for eighteen months. She may have been able to obscure her gender identity because she was an independent soldier not attached to any regiment. She saw herself as a soldier, a spy, and a secret-service agent, dedicated to the cause of the Confederacy.

A few women went to war to be with their loved ones. Florina Budwin enlisted with her husband.  They were captured together by Confederate forces and were sent to the horrific prison at Andersonville at the same time. He died there in 1862, and she succumbed to an unspecified illness after being discovered as female and sent to a more humane prison in 1865. Budwin was one of a very few women who were prisoners of war.

Frances Clalin Clayton was a mother of three from Illinois. She enlisted as “Jack Williams” in order to join her husband in the Union Army. They fought side-by-side until he was killed, then, supposedly, she stepped over his body to continue fighting. She was honored as a veteran.
PictureAn image depicting a woman battling in the American Civil War
Some women sought adventure and wanted to do their part by serving their country. Sarah Emma Edmonds enlisted as “Franklin Flint Thompson” and served in the 2nd Michigan infantry regiment. When she first joined the army as Franklin Thompson, she was a male field nurse. In March of 1862, she was assigned to the role of mail carrier. This position allowed her to be involved in several battles without having to be on the battlefield. In August of 1862, during the Battle of Second Manassas, she was forced to ride a mule to deliver messages once her horse was killed. The mule threw her off, causing her to break her leg and suffer internal injuries which plagued her for the rest of her life.  However, by Spring of 1863 Edmonds contracted malaria. After being denied furlough “Franklin Thompson” deserted and she resumed life as Emma. She spent the rest of the war volunteering with the United States Christian Commission as a nurse. She wanted to be fully involved in the war effort to serve the Union and was grateful for the chance to fight and not be compelled “to stay home and weep.” After the war she recorded her story as an epic adventure in an autobiographical novel that in some cases seems far-fetched. She wrote, “I was highly commended by the commanding general for my coolness throughout the whole affair, and was told kindly and candidly that I would not be permitted to go out again… I would consequently be hung up to the nearest tree. Not having any particular fancy for such an exalted position… I turned my attention to more quiet and less dangerous duties.”
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A small number of biologically female people who enlisted in the war continued to live as men after the surrender at Appomattox. Jennie Hodgers enlisted in the 95th Illinois infantry regiment as Albert Cashier. Their identity was not discovered during the war, and they lived the remainder of their life as a man. Cashier received a military pension and spent their final years in a veterans’ home, where the staff found out about their biological gender, and forced them to wear a dress. Cashier was buried in their Union uniform, the casket was draped with the American flag, and was given a full military funeral. The tombstone has both his given name and the name that he chose for himself, Albert Cashier. 
PictureHarriet Tubman
Harriet Tubman served as a nurse, cook and laundress at Union occupied Fort Monroe in Virginia that houses refugee slaves. In June of 1863, Harriet Tubman became the first and only woman to lead a military expedition during the Civil War. She led 150 soldiers on three federal gunboats up the Combahee River in South Carolina to help free slaves from several prominent plantations. Altogether approximately 700 enslaved people were free on this expedition. Throughout the Civil War Tubman served the Union cause as a cook, a nurse, and a spy.

Tubman was paid only $200 for her years of service to the United States. She lived out her life in near poverty but is now remembered as a prominent abolitionist and crusader for women’s rights. Frederick Douglass, perhaps the most well known Black man of the time, wrote this of Tubman’s years on the underground railroad and the war, “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day – you in the night. I have had the applause of the crowd and the satisfaction that comes of being approved by the multitude, while the most that you have done has been witnessed by a few trembling, scarred, and foot-sore bondmen and women, whom you have led out of the house of bondage, and whose heartfelt, ‘God bless you’ has been your only reward.” She was incredible. 

Only a small number of women served in the military as soldiers. Instead, many chose to help through other means such as becoming nurses, teachers, or volunteers with ladies’ aid societies to help support the war effort. 

Susie King Taylor, like Harriet Tubman, was previously enslaved. She, like many other African Americans, found herself seeking safety behind Union lines in South Carolina during the early years of the Civil War. She attached herself to the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Black regiment in the US Army. While she was with them, she acted as laundress and cook, however, she also taught several members of the regiment how to read. Her ability to read and teach others how to read was an invaluable asset to the unit and per Thomas Wentworth Higginson helped create a “love of the spelling book [that] is perfectly inexhaustible". 
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Women such as Harriet Tubman in the North and Phoebe Yates Pember, Louisa McCord, and Ada Bacot in the South accepted employment in hospitals to help care for those wounded on the battlefield. Before the war began and depleted the amount of men available, men were the primary people involved in the field of nursing. During the War though a shift occurred placing women in the role of primary caregivers for wounded and dying soldiers. In the North, white and free Black women brought food, knitted socks, and homemade bandages. They also helped the soldiers write letters, and tended to the wounded, mainly as volunteers. In the Confederacy, enslaved women were required to perform nursing duties while their owners received compensation. 
PictureFemale nurses in the Civil War
Upper-class white women also volunteered in hospitals, some doing so for income because of the financial losses they endured during the war. Before her wider fame as the author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott wrote accounts of her time as a volunteer nurse in an army hospital, which appeared in the newspaper Commonwealth and were eagerly read by northern families of soldiers at war. She revealed the realities of battlefield medicine as well as the tentative first steps of women in military service. Her “Hospital Sketches.” led to safety protocols in military hospitals.

In June of 1861, a group of private citizens with the support of the federal government created the Sanitary Commission, which was charged with improving the conditions at Union army hospitals. The Commission, which was run by men, collected nearly $15 million in in-kind medical supplies. The medical supplies that they collected were primarily created and provided by women. 

Activist Dorothea Dix was appointed to the position of superintendent of nurses for Army hospitals in the Union. She set up a system through which women could volunteer for nursing assignments for three months at a time. Her goals were to train women in medical practices and professionalize nursing. She required that nurses be between 30 and 50 years of age, be physically healthy, and “plain looking.”

The best-known Civil War nurse was Clara Barton, called the “Angel of the Battlefield.” She aided wounded soldiers in hospitals and made dangerous journeys behind Confederate lines to deliver much-needed supplies to Union army hospitals. When she was asked to defend her activities as unfeminine, she replied,  “. . . if  you feel that the positions I occupied were rough and unseemly for a woman—I can only reply that they were rough and unseemly for men.” After her service in the Civil War, Barton was instrumental in the founding of the American Red Cross
PictureRose O'Neal Greenhow
Women were effective couriers of military messages, and they were very good spies, in part because most men, and many women, did not think women were capable of such dangerous activity. Rose O’Neal Greenhow was a wealthy Washington D. C. socialite whose social circle included Union officers. She listened as they discussed military operations and forwarded information to Confederate generals, using a network of volunteers, including her own daughter.

When Greenhow learned of Union plans to attack at Manassas in July of 1861, she sent courier Belle Duvall to General P. T. E. Beauregard with valuable information, helping the Confederates to thwart the attack in the first Battle of Bull Run. Greenhow was arrested and sent to prison later in 1861 but was still able to send messages to Confederate officers. She was released in 1862 and traveled  to Europe on a diplomatic mission to raise funds for  the Confederacy.


Isabella “Belle” Boyd was an effective Confederate spy. She gained notoriety by killing a drunken Union soldier who invaded her Virginia home in July of 1861. Boyd eavesdropped on a conversation among Union officers in May of 1862 and conveyed valuable strategic information to General Stonewall Jackson at considerable personal risk. A few months later, she was incarcerated but quickly released. Like  “Wild Rose” Greenhow, Boyd served as a Confederate emissary to England in 1864.

The Union also had its share of female spies. Born in Richmond, Elizabeth Van Lew held strong abolitionist views, convincing her brother to free the family’s slaves in 1843. Elizabeth and her mother visited Union captives in Richmond’s Libby Prison, bringing  food and medicine. The women also helped Union soldiers escape. Van Lew developed a web of spies who sent messages to Union officers revealing Confederate battle plans. She got past Confederate troops by hiding messages in hollowed-out eggs or by sewing them into the hem of her skirts. After the war, President Grant appointed Van Lew Postmaster of Richmond.

Freedwomen were some of the best informants. Southerners thought so low of their enslaved women that they would openly discuss strategy and leave maps laying about. Women would soak in that knowledge and flee to the Union lines full of rich intelligence.

Probably the most entertaining Black woman spy was an unnamed woman who served the Confederates as a laundress in Virginia just across the way from where Union soldiers were stationed. She would hang the literal dirty laundry of Confederate soldiers in such a way to provide a code that her husband on the other side would interpret. Ingenious!
PictureDrawing depicting women refilling cartridges during the Civil War.
On the home front, women stepped into new roles as proprietors of farms, businesses, and plantations in the absence of their husbands and other male relatives. In the North, women supervised the planting, tending, and harvesting of crops with the aid of their children and elderly relatives. They completed these tasks in addition to their regular jobs as cooks, seamstresses, and mothers. Many helped to supply the Union Army with food.

In the South, where the majority of battles were fought, cities, towns and plantations were devastated. After enslaved people gained their freedom because of the Emancipation Proclamation, plantation mistresses experienced poverty for the first time. Many Union regiments salted the fields so they could not nourish crops, making it all the more difficult for southern women to run their farms.

Women were active in the physical and emotional care of battlefield wounded. Most nursing activity had previously been performed by male “stewards.” During the War, women became the primary caregivers for wounded and dying soldiers. In the North, white and free black women brought food, knitted socks, made bandages, wrote letters, and tended to the wounded, mainly as volunteers. In the Confederacy, enslaved women were required to perform nursing duties while their owners received compensation.

In the South, as the men went to fight, they assumed the duties of managing entire farms and plantations and the slaves that worked them. They often became the primary financial provider for their families, a responsibility that obliged them to procure jobs as nurses, matrons, treasury workers, teachers, and seamstresses. For the first time, elite women in South Carolina negotiated financial hardships, shifting cultural norms, political activities, and a radically altered perception of what it meant to be a Southern woman. 

Phoebe Yates Pember, a Confederate nurse at the Chimborazo Hospital in Richmond, Virginia confided in her diary in the summer of 1864, that the confederate money is worthless, and that the weak Congress refused to raise the hospital fund to meet the depreciation of Confederate money. Inflation and Union blockades, alongside the destruction left behind after battles severely hindered the South’s ability to cloth and feed themselves. 

Whether working as soldiers, spies, volunteers, nurses, or staying home and maintaining the house women were active in the war effort. These ladies showed tremendous amounts of courage and strength as they supported either the Union or the Confederacy. Women in the North helped support the Union and its mission to abolish slavery. Women in the South supported their men in the fight to support states right, specifically the right to own slaves. 

Women were important actors in America’s most devastating war. On both sides of the conflict, as Unionist or Confederates, they supported the efforts of their troops, maintained life at home in the worst of circumstances, and cared for wounded and dying men on both sides of the conflict. 

By the end of this era, so much remained in question. How would the nation come together again? What rights would be afforded to the formerly enslaved and the women who worked tirelessly in service of the nation? How would Southern women honor their lost loved ones and how does this create the image of the Confederacy that we see today?

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Bibliography

​Collins, Gail, America's Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines. New York, William Morrow, 2003.

DuBois, Ellen Carol, 1947-. Through Women's Eyes : an American History with Documents. Boston :Bedford/St. Martin's, 2005.Indians Editors. “NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN.” Indians. N.D. http://indians.org/articles/Native-american-women.html.

Ware, Susan. American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Primary AUTHOR:
Dr. Barbara Tischler

Primary Reviewer:
Annabelle Blevins-Pifer

Consulting Team

Editors
Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Barbara Tischler, Consultant
​Professor of History Hunter College and Columbia University

Dr. Alicia Guitierrez-Romine, Consultant
Assistant Professor of History at La Sierra University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

Dr. Deanna Beachley
Professor of History and Women's Studies at College of Southern Nevada
Alice Stanley

Reviewers

18th Century
Dr. Margaret Huettl
​Hannah Dutton
​Dr. John Krueckeberg

19th Century
Dr. Rebecca Noel
Michelle Stonis, MA
Annabelle L. Blevins Pifer, MA
Cony Marquez, PhD Candidate
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​20th Century
Dr. Tanya Roth
​Dr. Jessica Frazier
Mary Bezbatchenko, MA
© The Remedial Herstory Project 2022