Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of the Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City

CHAPTER 6 - ‘‘A Duty of the Hour’’: The Home Front in Dubuque

CHAPTER 6 ‘‘A Duty of the Hour’’: The Home Front in Dubuque [T]he Families of Soldiers are begging [throughout?] the City with less Success then Circus men meet with[.] Shame on the Community who Suffer the defenders of the Constitution to Complain that their Families are not Provided for while they are Batling for Liberty Ⳮ Law[.] —Solon M. Langworthy, diary entry, August 4, 1862, several weeks before enlisting himself While expressing concerns about decaying civilian morals, some observers in Dubuque found at least one area to praise: the response of the city’s benevolent community, especially the women, to the relief needs of soldiers and their families. In its May 1864 editorial on ‘‘the effect of the war on the morals of the people,’’ for example, in addition to noting the positive impact ‘‘the wholesome restraints of military discipline’’ would have on the soldiers, the Times ‘‘affirmed ’’ more broadly that the war was ‘‘a national purifier, burning, as by fire, the most insidious and destructive vices and preparing the way for the development of the noblest virtues.’’ Although prewar relief efforts had often fallen short of the need, ‘‘new views of duty towards our fellow men are impressed on our minds and hearts by the lessons of the war’’ and ‘‘cannot die out.’’ In short, the paper concluded that in the war emergency ‘‘the benevolence of the nation, phrenologically speaking, is almost as fully developed as its combativeness .’’1 On the other hand, Solon Langworthy’s diary entry from August 1862 indicates that perhaps the reality of war relief efforts differed from what the Times imagined. From Langworthy’s perspective— and more important from the perspective of the soldiers and their 1 Times, 15 May 1864. THE HOME FRONT IN DUBUQUE 239 families—the nation’s benevolence lagged well behind its combativeness . At the beginning of the war, the benevolent community in Dubuque tried to provide both provisions to send to the soldiers in the field and relief aid to their families. But as the needs of both groups became greater and as the numbers and enthusiasm of Dubuque’s benevolent women and men waned, they faced a choice: continue to do both less well, or focus on one or the other. Then in March 1864 the Dubuque Ladies Aid Society, the largest private war relief organization , resolved the conflict, agreeing to organize a Northern Iowa Sanitary Fair for the specific and exclusive purpose of raising money and provisions for the soldiers. Thereafter, soldiers’ families were left to rely upon individual acts of kindness, public poor relief, and whatever money the soldiers could send home. Civilian relief work represented an important contribution to the war effort, and a number of scholars have argued that wartime relief efforts laid the foundation for postwar urban and moral reform movements culminating in the early twentieth-century progressive era. This scholarship, like the relief workers during the war, has focused on the patriotic provisioning of soldiers, what one scholar calls ‘‘warwork ,’’ or ‘‘the voluntary contribution of homemade goods to the army.’’ Although this scholarship has led to important insights, especially about women’s wartime and postwar roles, it misses the ‘‘other’’ war work: the efforts on behalf of the soldiers’ families. A proper understanding of the total relief effort represents an important element in understanding the ways the Civil War contributed to the formation of urban-industrial society in the North. Through their involvement in provisioning work, middle- and upper-class women may have ‘‘chipped away at the ideology of domesticity,’’ as one scholar argues, but family relief was used to promote domesticity among the mostly working-class recipients. War relief work in Dubuque reinforced and extended existing class and gender boundaries for both aid givers and recipients. Indeed, like service in the military for men, war relief helped mobilize business- and working-class women for their roles in the urban-industrial society that developed in Dubuque during and after the Civil War.2 2 Jeanie Attie, ‘‘Warwork and the Crisis of Domesticity in the North,’’ in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 247–59 (quotes from 248). For broader historiography see, for example, George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern 240 WARRIORS INTO WORKERS Prewar Poor Relief in Dubuque In Dubuque, war relief fit existing patterns of prewar poor relief. The relief efforts directed toward the...