National Humanities Center

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National Humanities Center Civil War Home
Fronts a live, online professional development
seminar
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Focus Questions How did the total mobilization
of the Civil War affect the Northern and Southern
home fronts? What was life like for women on
the Northern and Southern home fronts? What was
life like for African Americans on the Northern
and Southern home fronts?
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Fitzhugh Brundage National Humanities Center
Fellow 1995-96 William B. Umstead Professor of
History University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill A Socialist Utopia in the New South The
Ruskin Colonies in Tennessee and Georgia,
1894-1901 Lynching in the New South Georgia and
Virginia, 1880-1939

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• Scale of the Civil War
• When we consider the home front during the Civil
  War, it is important to take into account the
  unprecedented scale of the American Civil War.
  Nothing in the experience of Antebellum Americans
  prepared them for a war of the magnitude of the
  Civil War. The only pre-Civil War conflict that
  was comparable was the Crimea War, fought a few
  years before the Civil War. Americans, however,
  had only the vaguest understanding of the carnage
  of that war, which took place in far-distant
  Russia, Turkey, and the Baltic region.

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• Scope of Wars Impact
• Mobilizing for modern war necessarily places
  great strains on a society, often accelerating
  changes and magnifying tensions already present
  in a society. Because the Civil War was long and
  bloody, its impact was felt in virtually every
  corner of American society.

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• Civil War Casualties Compared
• One way to highlight the immensity of the war is
  to compare and contrast the number of American
  combatants and casualties in previous wars with
  the Civil War.

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• Revolutionary War
• 20,000 regulars served in the Continental Army.
  An estimated 25,000 American Revolutionaries died
  during active military service. About 8,000 of
  these deaths were in battle the other 17,000
  deaths were from disease, including about 8,000 -
  12,000 who died while prisoners of war. The
  number of Revolutionaries seriously wounded or
  disabled by the war has been estimated from 8,500
  to 25,000. The total American military casualty
  figure was therefore as high as 50,000.

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• War of 1812
• At the beginning of the war, there were 7,000
  regulars in the Army. By the end of the conflict
  the ranks had swollen to almost 40,000.
  Approximately 2,260 were killed in action and
  another 4,505 wounded. Approximately 17,000 died
  from disease.

9

• Indian Wars
• The various Indian wars of the early nineteenth
  century, including the three Seminole Wars,
  claimed fewer than 1,000 casualties. At any
  given time there were perhaps 10,000 regulars
  engaged in the Indian wars.

10

• Mexican War
• For most Americans at the time of the Civil War,
  the Mexican War was their most recent experience
  with war and combat. During the Mexican War,
  78,700 soldiers served. Of these 1,733 were
  killed in battle, and another 13,271 died from
  disease, etc. 4,152 were wounded.

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• U.S. Civil War
• Perhaps as many as 4 million men fought in the
  Civil War. 2.5 million men served in the Union
  Army. There are no definitive number of the
  strength of the Confederate States Army.
  Confederate war department reports recorded
  326,768 men in 1861, 449,439 in 1862, and 464,646
  in 1863 before declining to 358,692 in 1865.
  Based on these totals, the total number of men
  who fought for the Confederacy has been estimated
  between 1.2 and 1.4 million.

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• U. S. Civil War
• Of the troops who fought for the Union, 110,070
  died in combat and an additional 249,458 of other
  causes. 275,175 were wounded.
• Of the troops who fought for the Confederacy,
  74,524 died in combat, and 124,000 of other
  causes. An estimated 137,000 were wounded
  while in the ranks.

13

• U. S. Civil War
• In starkest terms, approximately 4 million out
  of an American population of 31.5 million fought
  in the war, and perhaps as many as a million of
  these soldiers died or were wounded.

14

• U. S. Civil War
• To mobilize a population to wage war and to
  endure casualties in this scale, arguably, was
  the greatest challenge that Presidents Lincoln
  and Davis confronted.

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• U.S. Civil War
• Because of deeply rooted animosity to standing
  armies in the United States, both the Union and
  the Confederacy initially had to rely on
  voluntary support for the war effort. Even when
  both governments eventually adopted conscription
  to fill their armies, they insisted that their
  publics the home fronts -- enthusiastically
  supported the war.

16

• Response of Women
• How women in the Union and the Confederacy
  responded to the war is especially revealing of
  the pressures of modern war on the home front.
  Just what were the appropriate roles for women
  during war? What sacrifices could women be
  expected to make? To what extent were women
  expected/allowed to deviate from inherited codes
  of feminine conduct?

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• What was life like for women on the northern and
  southern home
• fronts?
• In what capacities were women expected to
  contribute to the war? How did women justify the
  roles that they assumed?
• In reading Sarah Morgans diary, we get an
  interesting perspective on female Confederate
  patriotism. Did Morgan distinguish between the
  expectations of patriotic behavior according to
  gender? What did she expect of loyal southern
  white women? Of southern white men? And what
  were her views of the enemy?
• To what extent were Gail Hamiltons views of
  female sacrifice consonant with Sarah Morgans?
  In other words, were the expectations of feminine
  patriotism and sacrifice in both the Union and
  the Confederacy?
• How much should we make of the Bread Riots in
  the South? Were they symptomatic of a deep
  crisis in the patriotism of Confederate women?

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• A Confederate Girls Diary
• The diary entries of Sarah Morgan of Louisiana
  after the capture of southern Louisiana by Union
  forces in 1862 offer us a glimpse into how one
  white southern woman negotiated her conflicting
  roles as a Confederate, a lady, and an American.

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• Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girls Diary,
  1913
• May 9, 1862
• If we girls of Baton Rouge had been at the
  landing, instead of the men, that Yankee would
  never have insulted us by flying his flag in our
  faces! We would have opposed his landing except
  under a flag of truce, but the men let him alone,
  and he even found a poor Dutchman willing to show
  him the road! . . . .
• I wear one pinned to my bosom - not a duster,
  but a little flag the man who says take it off
  will have to pull it off for himself the man who
  dares attempt it - well! a pistol in my pocket
  fills up the gap. I am capable, too.
• O! if I was only a man! Then I could don the
  breeches, and slay them with a will! If some few
  Southern women were in the ranks, they could set
  the men an example they would not blush to
  follow. Pshaw! there are no women here! We are
  all men!

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• Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girls Diary,
  1913
• May 14, 1862
• Shall I acknowledge that the people we so
  recently called our brothers are unworthy of
  consideration, and are liars, cowards, dogs? Not
  I! If they conquer us, I acknowledge them as a
  superior race I will not say that we were
  conquered by cowards, for where would that place
  us? It will take a brave people to gain us, and
  that the Northerners undoubtedly are. I would
  scorn to have an inferior foe I fight only my
  equals. These women may acknowledge that cowards
  have won battles in which their brothers were
  engaged, but I, I will ever say mine fought
  against brave men, and won the day. Which is most
  honorable?
• I don't believe in Secession, but I do in
  Liberty. I want the South to conquer, dictate its
  own terms, and go back to the Union, for I
  believe that, apart, inevitable ruin awaits both.
  It is a rope of sand, this Confederacy, founded
  on the doctrine of Secession, and will not last
  many years - not five.

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• Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girls Diary,
  1913
• May 9, 1862
• If we girls of Baton Rouge had been at the
  landing, instead of the men, that Yankee would
  never have insulted us by flying his flag in our
  faces! We would have opposed his landing except
  under a flag of truce, but the men let him alone,
  and he even found a poor Dutchman willing to show
  him the road! . . . .
• I wear one pinned to my bosom - not a duster,
  but a little flag the man who says take it off
  will have to pull it off for himself the man who
  dares attempt it - well! a pistol in my pocket
  fills up the gap. I am capable, too.
• O! if I was only a man! Then I could don the
  breeches, and slay them with a will! If some few
  Southern women were in the ranks, they could set
  the men an example they would not blush to
  follow. Pshaw! there are no women here! We are
  all men!

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• Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girls Diary,
• 1913
• May 17, 1862
• O my discarded carving-knife, laid aside under
  the impression that these men were gentlemen. We
  will be close friends once more. And if you must
  have a sheath, perhaps I may find one for you in
  the heart of the first man who attempts to
  Butlerize me. I never dreamed of kissing any man
  save my father and brothers. And why any one
  should care to kiss any one else, I fail to
  understand. And I do not propose to learn to make
  exceptions.

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• Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girls
• Diary, 1913
• June 10, 1862
• It made me ashamed to contrast the quiet,
  gentlemanly, liberal way these volunteers spoke
  of us and our cause, with the rabid, fanatical,
  abusive violence of our own female Secession
  declaimers.

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• Sarah Morgan Dawson, A Confederate Girls
• Diary, 1913
• June 16, 1862
• I would put aside woman's trash, take up woman's
  duty, and I would stand by some forsaken man and
  bid him Godspeed as he closes his dying eyes.
  That is woman's mission! and not Preaching and
  Politics. I say I would, yet here I sit! O for
  liberty! the liberty that dares do what
  conscience dictates, and scorns all smaller
  rules! If I could help these dying men!

25

• A Call to My Country-Women
• Gail Hamiltons A Call to My Countrywomen is
  an equally striking counterpoint to Morgans
  diary. Hamilton exploits every possible
  rhetorical device to appeal to the women of the
  North. In what ways does her appeal parrot or
  differ from the ideas that Morgan expressed in
  her diary?

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• A CALL TO MY COUNTRY-WOMEN
• Gail Hamilton
• (Mary Abigail Dodge)
• Atlantic Monthly 6 (March 1863)
• . . . If women, weak or strong, consider that
  praying is all they can or ought to do for their
  country, and so settle down contented with that,
  they make as great a mistake as if they did not
  pray at all. True, women cannot fight, and there
  is no call for any great number of female nurses
  notwithstanding this, I believe, that, to-day,
  the issue of this war depends quite as much upon
  American women as upon American men, and depends,
  too, not upon the few who write, but upon the
  many who do not.

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• A CALL TO MY COUNTRY-WOMEN
• Gail Hamilton
• (Mary Abigail Dodge)
• Atlantic Monthly 6 (March 1863)
• When I read of the Rebels fighting bareheaded,
  bare-footed, haggard, and unshorn, in rags and
  filth, fighting bravely, heroically,
  successfully, I am ready to make a burnt-offering
  of our stacks of clothing. I feel and fear that
  we must come down, as they have done, to a
  recklessness of all incidentals, down to the
  rough and rugged fastnesses (remote and secluded
  places) of life, down to the very gates of death
  itself, before we shall be ready and worthy to
  win victories.

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• A CALL TO MY COUNTRY-WOMEN
• Gail Hamilton
• (Mary Abigail Dodge)
• Atlantic Monthly 6 (March 1863)
• Take not acquiescently, but joyfully, the
  spoiling of your goods. Not only look poverty in
  the face with high disdain, but embrace it with
  gladness and welcome. The loss is but for a
  moment the gain is for all time. Go farther
  than this. Consecrate to a holy cause not only
  the incidentals of life, but life itself.
  Father, husband, childI do not say, Give them up
  to toil, exposure, suffering, death, without a
  murmurthat implies reluctance. I rather say,
  Urge them to the offering fill them with sacred
  fury fire them with irresistible desire
  strengthen them to heroic will.

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• A CALL TO MY COUNTRY-WOMEN
• Gail Hamilton
• (Mary Abigail Dodge)
• Atlantic Monthly 6 (March 1863)
• Therefore let us have done at once and forever
  with paltry considerations, with talk of
  despondency and darkness. Let compromise,
  submission, and every form of dishonorable peace
  be not so much as named among us. Tolerate no
  cowards voice or pen or eye. Wherever the
  serpents head is raised, strike it down. Measure
  every man by the standard of manhood.

30
By 1863 the rhetoric of sacrifice no longer could
assuage the mounting frustration and anger on the
home front. When scattered bread riots flared up
in Richmond and elsewhere observers and public
officials struggled to make sense of the unrest.
31

• African American Response
• Complicating the mobilization for the war in
  both the North and the South were African
  Americans, who had their own hopes for the wars
  outcome. What insights does A. Jacksons
  testimony give us about how blacks in the South
  responded to the war?

32

• Testimony of Alonzo Jackson
• An African American merchant in South Carolina
• Yes, about 8 months before Georgetown was
  occupied by Union soldiers, while I was in the
  freighting business on my flat boat on Mingo
  Creek (up Black River) about 30 or 40 miles from
  Georgetown by water, three white men came near
  the boat which was at the bank of the river. I
  was on the boat with only one person, a colored
  man (in my employ named Henry). As soon as the
  three white men saw we were colored men they came
  to the boat and said, We are Yankee soldiers,
  and have escaped from the rebel stockade at
  Florence. We are your friends cant you do
  something for us, we are nearly perished.

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• As soon as I saw them, before they spoke, I knew
  they were Yankee soldiers by their clothing.
  They were all private soldiers, so they told me.
  I invited them to come on the boat and told them
  I would hurry and cook for them, which I did and
  gave it to them in my boat. As soon as they
  entered the boat I shoved off from land and
  anchored in the creek about sixty feet from
  shore. I was loading cord wood in my boat when
  the soldiers came and had completed my load
  within about four cords. I did not wait to take
  it all, fearing that someone else might come and
  catch these Yankees. Neither of the three
  soldiers ordered me to take them in the boat or
  made any threats. They did not go in the boat or
  secure it in any way so that I could not leave
  it. They only entered the boat after they had
  told me who they were (as stated) and when I
  invited them. They were very weak and had no
  weapons. They had no shoes on. It was then winter
  weather, and cold.

34

• The three Yankees did not suggest anything for
  me to do for them except to feed them, and wanted
  to get to the gun boats. They did not know where
  the gun boats were. I did, and I told them I
  would take them where they could get to the gun
  boats unmolested. The soldiers did not pay or
  give me anything, or promise anything to me at
  any time, and I have never received anything for
  any service rendered to any Union soldiers. They
  did not threaten me or use any violence. They
  were very friendly and glad to get into such good
  hands. They showed that they felt very grateful.

35

• In about three days time we came to North
  Island (about twelve miles from Georgetown)
  which I then knew was in possession of the Union
  forces. I did not pass Georgetown by daylight for
  fear of being stopped by the rebels who had
  pickets all along the shore to stop all boats
  from going below. In the night I floated with the
  ebb tide (without being seen) to North Island.
  I got there in the night and landed the three
  soldiers in my small boat. I showed them the
  direction to cross the Island so as to get to the
  gun boats. I knew there were many of the gun boat
  people on the shore there at that time. I saw the
  three soldiers go as I directed. I never saw or
  heard from any of the three soldiers afterwards,
  but through a colored man named Miller (who was
  on the shore near the gunboats) learned about
  three soldiers had got to the fleet. Miller
  told me this about two weeks after I took the
  three soldiers. He saw them and described them so
  that I was certain he had seen the same three
  soldiers safe in the protection of the gun boats.

36

• Slavery as Cornerstone
• Given that Vice President Alexander Stephens had
  described slavery as the cornerstone of the
  Confederacy in 1861, how and why did Confederate
  General Cleburne justify emancipating slaves who
  fought for the Confederacy in 1864?

37

• Home Front Fault Lines
• Cleburne acknowledged the moral high ground
  that the Union occupied with its war against
  slavery. And yet only a year earlier New York
  City had erupted in rioting against the draft and
  African Americans. Just as the bread riots of
  1863 drew attention to fault lines in the
  Confederacy, so too the riots in New York exposed
  deep divisions there. What were those divisions
  according to the editorialists of Harpers Weekly?

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• What was life like for African Americans on the
  northern and southern
• home fronts?
• Alonzo Jacksons testimony is very matter of the
  fact. Yet, the actions he took reveal a great
  deal about the response of southern African
  Americans to their circumstances during the Civil
  War. Is there anything in particular that
  strikes you as noteworthy or surprising about
  either Jacksons actions or his description of
  them?
• Do you think Jacksons actions are the sort of
  behavior that prompted Cleburne to offer his
  proposal for Confederate emancipation?
• How different do you think the northern
  motivation for arming African Americans was than
  Cleburnes motivation? In other words, did the
  same exigencies that drove the North to arm
  blacks subsequently prod the South to contemplate
  doing so? How likely was it that blacks would
  have fought for the Confederacy?
• The New York Draft Riots are a conspicuous
  reminder of how circumscribed freedom was for
  blacks in the North. From the perspective of the
  editorialists of Harpers Weekly, what did the
  riots reveal about New Yorkers?

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• January 2, 1864
• COMMANDING GENERAL, THE CORPS, DIVISION, BRIGADE,
  AND REGIMENTAL
• COMMANDERS OF THE ARMY of TENNESSEE
• GENERAL
• We can give but a faint idea when we say it
  means the loss of all we now hold most
  sacredslaves and all other personal property,
  lands, homesteads, liberty, justice, safety,
  pride, manhood. It means that the history of
  this heroic struggle will be written by the
  enemy that our youth will be trained by Northern
  school teachers will learn from Northern school
  books their version of the war will be impressed
  by all the influences of history and education to
  regard our gallant dead as traitors, our maimed
  veterans as fit objects for derision. It means
  the crushing of Southern manhood, the hatred of
  our former slaves, who will, on a spy system, be
  our secret police.
• The enemy has three sources of supply First,
  his own motley population secondly, our slaves
  and thirdly, Europeans whose hearts are fired
  into a crusade against us by fictitious pictures
  of the atrocities of slavery, and who meet no
  hindrance from their Governments in such
  enterprise, because these Governments are equally
  antagonistic to the institution. . . . Apart from
  the assistance that home and foreign prejudice
  against slavery has given to the North, slavery
  is a source of great strength to the enemy in a
  purely military point of view, by supplying him
  with an army from our granaries but it is our
  most vulnerable point, a continued embarrassment,
  and in some respects an insidious weakness.
• As between the loss of independence and the loss
  of slavery, we assume that every patriot will
  freely give up the lattergive up the negro slave
  rather than be a slave himself.
• It enlisting slaves to fight for the
  Confederacy would remove forever all selfish
  taint from our cause and place independence above
  every question of property.

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• Harpers Weekly
• July 25, 1863
• The Draft
• The leaders and principal actors in the affair
  were boysbeardless youths of fifteen to
  eighteen. Behind these, and seemingly operating
  as a mere reserve force, was a body of
  menoperatives in foundries and factories,
  laborers, stablemen, etc. who did the murdering
  of policemen, the gutting of houses, the firing
  of dwellings, etc., after the boys had opened the
  battle with volleys of stones. In all the crowds
  there was a fair sprinkling of women, not young,
  but married women, who were probably roused to
  fury by the fear of having their husbands taken
  from them by the draft. This kind of mixed crowd,
  though often good-humored and apt to be easily
  managed by a skillful leader, is likewise prone
  to the wildest excesses of passion and brutality.
  The boys and men invariably get drunk at an early
  stage of the proceedings the women appear to
  become equally intoxicated with excitement and
  all together commit crimes from which every
  individual in the crowd would probably shrink if
  he were alone. Such crowds are so cowardly

41

• Harpers Weekly
• August 1, 1863
• The Riots
• The outbreak was the natural consequence of
  pernicious teachings widely scattered among the
  ignorant and excitable populace of a great city
  and the only possible mode of dealing with it was
  stern and bloody repression. Had the mob been
  assailed with grape and canister on Monday, when
  the first disturbance took place, it would have
  been a saving of life and property. Had the
  resistance been more general, and the bloodshed
  more profuse than it was, on Thursday,
• Some newspapers dwell upon the fact that the
  rioters were uniformly Irish, and hence argue
  that our trouble arises from the perversity of
  the Irish race. . . . Turbulence is no exclusive
  attribute of the Irish character it is common to
  all mobs in all countries. It happens in this
  city that, in our working classes, the Irish
  element largely preponderates over all others,
  and if the populace acts as a populace Irishmen
  are naturally prominent therein. It happens,
  also, that, from the limited opportunities which
  the Irish enjoy for education in their own
  country, they are more easily misled by knaves,
  and made the tools of politicians, when they come
  here, than Germans or men of other races. The
  impulsiveness of the Celt, likewise, prompts him
  to be foremost in every outburst. . . .

42

• An Open Letter
• MY DEAR FRIEND,YOU are a German and a Jew, and
  you have come to make your living in a foreign
  land, of which Christianity is the professed
  religion. You have no native, no political, no
  religious sympathy with this country. You are
  here solely to make money, and your only wish is
  to make money as fast as possible. You neither
  know our history nor understand our Government
  but, believing that all men are selfish and mean,
  nothing is absurder to your mind than the
  American doctrine of popular government based
  upon equal rights.
• You are the material out of which despotisms are
  made. It is upon such people as you that the King
  of Prussia counts when he deliberately destroys
  the constitutional rights of his subjects. And
  whatever in this country is despotic, mean, and
  repugnant to the great and fundamental democratic
  doctrine of equal rights before the law, receives
  your hearty sympathy and support. The country you
  left did not regret your coming away the country
  in which you trade will not mourn your departure

43
Focus Questions How did the total mobilization
of the Civil War affect the Northern and Southern
home fronts? What was life like for women on
the Northern and Southern home fronts? What was
life like for African Americans on the Northern
and Southern home fronts?
44

• Final slide.
• Thank you.