Mapping the Spaces of Women's Civil War History

"Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings."

—Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

"History," writes historian Elsa Barkley Brown, is "everybody talking at once, multiple rhythms being played simultaneously. The events and people we write about did not occur in isolation but in dialogue with a myriad of other people and events."¹ As historians, we work to isolate one thread of the conversation, she argues, but "the trick is how to put that conversation in a context," to illuminate its dialogue with others. Recent work on women during the Civil War reflects a new interest in the way multiple rhythms play simultaneously during that era, and they increasingly "put that conversation in a context."

The word many historians use to describe the work they are doing is geography. Stephanie Camp, who considers the Civil War in the final chapter of Closer to Freedom, reveals a "rival geography" at work on slave plantations, one with consequences for the Union and Confederate armies. This rival geography was not so much fixed as "characterized by motion: the movement of bodies, objects, and information within and around plantation space."² In Confederate Reckoning, Stephanie McCurry also sees an "alternative geography," one grounded in slave politics, and one deeply threatening to the white social order.³ When multiple vantage points are taken into account, Margaret Creighton argues in her narrative of the battle of Gettysburg, The Colors of Courage, "the battle's geography shifts distinctly."⁴

But this sense of alternative geographies, of worlds in motion, replete with bodies and information and meaning, was not just a Southern phenomenon, or one germane to border states, but speaks to the North and West, as well. Judith Giesberg's Army at Home is framed around an exploration of an "alternate wartime geography," for "as women moved into new spaces, or expanded to fit the void left in old ones, women redrew the lines that separated home from war and mapped an alternate wartime geography dictated by the material conditions of war rather than the ideological constraints of gender or the limits of the middle-class imagination." For Giesberg, as for others, the emphasis was on motion: women, North and South, rarely stood still on a shifting landscape, no matter that they were and are drawn that way. As LeeAnn Whites and Alecia P. Long note in the introduction to their book of essays, women were occupied, "as in busy and responsive, in the face of an occupying presence."⁵

Geography, of course, has always been at the center of the work of military historians, who necessarily take into account the ways the physical and social landscape affects the outcomes of both battles and wars. For some— like Warren E. Grabau, in 98 Days—the physical terrain of the battlefield, the condition of the soil, has profound explanatory power, with bad maps and uncertain weather thwarting decision-making at every turn during the Vicksburg campaign. Lee's success, Joseph Glatthaar writes in General Lee's Army, stemmed not only from his ability to take risks or his deep knowledge of the material and psychological needs of his army, it came from his insistence on detailed maps, maps that included marshes, clearings, farm houses and commanding elevations, among other things. He writes that a profound element in the willingness of Confederate soldiers to fight and die for their cause came from their deep belief that "their society was ideally suited to the geography, the climate, the crops they grew, and freedom for whites."⁶ Place invoked a complex web of meanings for Confederate soldiers.

If geography has always been a crucial part of military history, it has increasingly—particularly since the growth of the separate discipline in the 1970s—been influential across the discipline of history. In "Turning toward Place, Space, and Time," Civil War historian Edward Ayers argues that historians have gained a...