Wanted—Correspondence: Women's Letters to a Union Soldier

Notes

Notes The chapter epigraph is from p.  of Gail Hamilton [Mary Abigail Dodge], “A Call to My Country-Women,” Atlantic Monthly , no.  (March ): –. . Mount Vernon Democratic Banner (hereafter cited as Banner), November , ; Ohio State Journal, November , ; Eric Foner, “Ohio and the World: The Civil War Era,” in Ohio and the World, –: Essays toward a New History of Ohio, ed. Geoffrey Parker, Richard Sisson, and William Russell Coil (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, ), esp. ; Frederick H. Dyer, A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, rd Ohio (New York: T. Yoseloff, ; reprint, Dayton, OH: The Press of Morningside Bookshop, ); Frederick N. Lorey, ed., History of Knox County Ohio, –, nd ed. (Mt. Vernon, OH: Knox County Historical Society, ), . Eugene Roseboom discusses calculations of Ohio troops that vary from , to ,; see Roseboom, History of the State of Ohio, vol. , The Civil War Era (Columbus: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, ),  (hereafter cited as Roseboom, Civil War Era). Lybarger was in Camp Andrews at Mt. Vernon until early . . James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr., eds., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, ), . The terms Man’s War and Man’s Funeral are not in quotation marks, because they capture what is by now a common understanding of the war and I have not located authors who may have coined the terms originally. . Banner, November , . . James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ix. For ways in which writers hurried to promote women’s war contributions and patriotic symbolism in the postwar years, see Elizabeth D. Leonard, “The Women and the Storytellers after the War,” in Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War, – (New York: W. W. Norton, ). . JamesM.McPhersonintroducestheseideasinhisforewordtoCatherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, ), xvi. See Gerda Lerner, “Priorities and Challenges in Women’s History Research,” Perspectives  (April ): –;  M. A. Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations,” Journal of American History , no.  (): –; Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War (New York: Knopf, ); Agatha Young, The Women and the Crisis: Women of the North in the Civil War (New York: McDowell, Obolensky , ); Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, ); Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ); Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ). . For examples of such valor, see Karen Rae Mehaffey, “They Called Her Captain: The Amazing Life of Emily Virginia Mason,” in The Journal of Women’s Civil War History: From the Home Front to the Front Lines, ed. Eileen Conklin, :– (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, ); and Juanita Leisch, “Who Did What: Women’s Roles in the Civil War,” in Conklin, Journal of Women’s Civil War History, :–. For analysis of the shifting paradigms of U.S. women’s history and historians’ use of “women worthies,” see Manuela Thurner, “Subject to Change: Theories and Paradigms of U.S. Feminist History,” Journal of Women’s History  (): –. . A growing body of work provides examples of such figures and events, including Judith E. Harper’s Women during the Civil War: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, ), Elizabeth D. Leonard’s study, All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (New York: Penguin, ), and Eileen Conklin’s edited volumes of the Journal of Women’s Civil War History. “Behind the scenes” is taken from Leisch, “Women’s Roles,” in Conklin’s Journal, . . James McPherson notes that women’s “encouraging letters” from the home front are more often “lost to history” because many collections do not include both sides of communication. See McPherson, For Cause and Comrades : Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, ), , . . Faust, Mothers of Invention; Harper, Women during the Civil War, ; see also Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, ). . See Reid Mitchell, “Soldiering, Manhood and Coming of Age: A Northern Volunteer,” in Clinton and Silber, Divided Houses, ; Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, ), . McPherson discusses soldier demographics in Cause and Comrades, viii. Notes to Pages –  . A.E., Annie, Lizzie, and Lib Baker are different names for the same person. I use “Lib Baker” throughout the introduction...