The Collapse of the Confederacy

Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction, and Despair on the Home Front

Jean V. Berlin Did Confederate Women Lose the War? Deprivation, Destruction, and Despair on the Home Front The collapse of the Confederacy was disastrous for Confederate women. Women who had invested their hopes, their money, and their menfolk in the cause found that in a few short months they lost homes, crops, and worldly goods, as well as the husbands, sons, brothers, and sweethearts who were fighting and dying. Under the successful and increasingly stern leadership of generals such as William T. Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Philip H. Sheridan, Federal troops respected the private property and rights of women less and less. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, Sheridan’s Valley campaign, and Grant’s activities in Virginia in 1864 served notice that the nature of the war had changed. What followed would alter forever the lives of Southern women while it brought about the end of their nation. What role did these women play in the collapse of their country? The recent growth of gender studies and women’s histories of the Civil War has reawakened interest in this question. While white Southerners have always honored the struggle of their foremothers during the darkest hours of the South,some historiansbeganto question whetherwomenwere the subversive agents of their own undoing. Women, they asserted, expected much the same results from war as the men, but both experienced it and contributed to it in different ways. Exploring these differences and their implications for Confederate women’s loyalty to their cause has become a growing segment of historiography. Early writings on women and the Confederacy, often by Southerners themselves, focused on the unselfish support and sacrifice of women, echoing the words chiseled on the monument to South Carolina women in Columbia: “In This Monument Generations Unborn Shall Hear the Voice of a Grateful 168 Did Confederate Women Lose the War? 169 People to the Sublime Devotion of the Women of South Carolina in Their Country’s Need.”1 Historians began to attempt a more dispassionate view of the experiences of Confederate women in the 1950s and 1960s, notably with the work of Mary Elizabeth Massey. Massey, herself a Southerner, was able to stand back and criticize Confederate women, while preserving a firm sense of their accomplishments.2 But the most innovative and far-reaching work has been done in the last ten or fifteen years, with the exponential growth in women’s history and gender studies.3 Many of these works focus on the explosion of opportunity that the war offered and ponder implications for the postwar period in the absence of an active women’s movement in the South. Recent studies on Confederate nationalism and ideology also have addressed the attitudes of white Confederate women to the war.4 Drew Gilpin Faust’s dense and careful explication of the structure of Confederate nationalism explains why it failed. Based as it was on the notion of the individual households as the building blocks of society and the sanctity of the liberty of thosehouseholds,thesignalfailureofthenationanditsarmiestoprotectthese units by the end of the war undermined the very foundation of Southerners’ support for their country: “Confederate nationalism prescribed change in the service of continuity, but then proved able neither to contain nor explain the ensuing transformations. . . . Confederate ideology was defeated in large measure by the internal contradictions that wartime circumstances brought so prominently to the fore.” Also, the wartime need for national and united action by the new government and its adherents struck at another notion dear to the hearts of Southerners: states’ rights. “The logic of Confederate ideology prescribed an effort to build a social consensus that would have implied a significant transformation in southern life,” she concluded.5 Paul Escott’s earlier work on Confederate nationalism also addressed many of these issues, offering insights into the role of class conflict and states’ rights in hampering the formation of an effective national government that could win a war. George Rable’s work on the Confederate republic in turn offers ideas on how the dynamics of republicanism and party politics created conflicts that also hindered an effective war effort.6 Two historians who have written most recently and directly on Confederate womenandthewarareGeorgeRableandDrewGilpinFaust,whoseexpertise in Confederate politics and ideology give them great insight into women, war, and the republic. Rable’s Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism was the first such survey to appear in many years and certainly the first to use the methodologies and theories of the new generation...