Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War

Inescapable Realities: Rural Midwestern Women and Families during the Civil War

125 Inescapable Realities z Rural Midwestern Women and Families during the Civil War Ginette Aley Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete, And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son. . . . Lo, where the trees, deeper green, yellower and redder, Cool and sweeten Ohio’s villages with leaves fluttering in the moderate wind, . . . (Smell you the buckwheat where the bees were lately buzzing?) . . . Fast as she can she hurries, something ominous, her steps trembling. . . . Ah now the single figure to me, Amid all teeming and wealthy Ohio with all its cities and farms, Sickly white in the face and dull in the head, very faint, By the jamb of a door leans. —Walt Whitman The separation of families is one of the great evils of war. —Alice Grierson to husband, Springfield, Illinois, July 22, 1861 Walt Whitman’s poem “Come Up from the Fields Father” captures that desperate moment when the American Civil War crossed the domestic threshold and gripped the hearts of families in the reality of war’s fatal consequences. A similar tragic scene is memorialized in a contemporary double-folio engraving “News from the War,” by Winslow Homer that appeared in the June 14, 1862, Harper’s Weekly. In it, the most arresting subject is a despondent woman (a wife, mother, lover, sister) who is placed near the center of the assortment of images. She is slumped forward in a chair, head down on her forearm on the table. Clutched in the other hand hanging at her side is a letter, one that has ginette aley 126 clearly just conveyed the kind of war news about a loved one that was all too familiar to this and other wartime generations. The lives of individuals, families, and communities—representing a host of relationships—were forever altered by America’s Civil War. What we know less about, even given the tremendous historiography of the war, is how Northern home-front women and families negotiated and managed the struggle to stabilize a relational and material world that was rapidly destabilizing, as is clear from the period’s voluminous correspondence between family members, especially between husbands and wives. Whitman was speaking to this in the poem, as was Homer in his engraving, in that both of their observations turn to focus squarely on the soldier’s female relatives to illustrate upon whose shoulders the heaviest combined emotional and situational burden fell, in terms of those who must carry on without their loved ones. This is not, in any way, to minimize the pain, depth of love, or loss felt by grieving fathers. However, when a solider enlisted and went off to war, he took his wife’s, children’s, and mother’s futures with him, a sensibility made more clear when one considers that accepted nineteenth-century gender norms defined a woman’s life almost entirely by her relationships and in terms of her family.1 Jennie Hall of Logan, Ohio, observed in 1863 how the war was leaving in its wake “many hearts and homes made desolate. As I look around me here and there I see a vacant place. A Mother’s hope and a Father’s pride taken away from their fond embrace no matter how dear.” Women stood to lose even more than beloved son or husband; the very terms of their world as they knew and understood it as mothers and wives were at stake. That powerfully symbolic vacant chair at the family hearth held out the constant dark prospect of remaining empty and, thus, an uncertain future for women and families. Changes, some of them drastic, were inevitable. These inescapable realities and rural midwestern women’s responses to them form the basis of inquiry and historiographic exploration in this chapter. Despite the fundamental significance of agriculture and farming to Civil War America, the wartime experiences of Union rural women and families have been overshadowed by the more high-profile homefront organizations, such as the U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC).2 Another aspect of Whitman’s poem that is striking is the context of the Midwest’s home front. Along with the gendered implications of the poem and Homer’s engraving, this convergence of event, time, and place represents a vital historiographic field to harvest. As noted in this 127 inescapable realities volume’s introductory essay, students of the Midwest’s home...