The Essence of Liberty: Free Black Women during the Slave Era, and: Women on the Civil War Battle Front (review)

In their respective volumes, both Wilma King and Richard Hall write about women during the antebellum and Civil War era who pushed racial and gender boundaries. They have produced intriguing and significant history about women and the ways in which they were both bound to and liberated from gender conventions of their day.

In The Essence of Liberty, Wilma King embarks on the ambitious task of writing a comprehensive history of an understudied group: antebellum free African American women. King asserts correctly that while scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to the lives of enslaved African American women, the same cannot be said for free women of color. This is due partially to the scant evidence chronicling their lives, as well as to the fact that these women and their struggles have been seen, both during the time in which they lived and by subsequent generations of scholars, as less noteworthy than those of enslaved women. In this book, King proves otherwise. She deftly and exhaustively weaves her own research into the work of other historians in themed chapters devoted to subjects such as work, education, spirituality, and abolitionist activity in the lives of free black women. These aspects, she argues, became their "myriad founts of freedom" (4).

Although King's examination is broad and varied, its unifying theme is that free black women constantly encountered the tenuousness of their freedom, finding it circumscribed by gender conventions, economic hardship, and, of course, racism. King does a fine job of arguing that free black women consistently confronted and countered these limitations. Many of these women not only strove toward financial independence and education but also combated the less obvious challenges of being black women in the nineteenth century. They created for themselves a level of respectability denied them by white society by adopting middle-class standards of beauty, dress, and decorum. In doing so, they fought the double burden of being both black and female and, as King argues, "defin[ed] womanhood in ways that sometimes challenged society's expectations and beliefs about them" (34). In culling and synthesizing scattered and scarce sources, King creates a poignant, if unavoidably incomplete picture of the struggles and accomplishments of these women.

Like King, Richard Hall sets out to make sense of a historically elusive group of women. In Women and the Civil War Battlefront, he has sifted through an enormous amount of old and new evidence regarding women's experiences as Civil War soldiers, nurses, scouts, and spies. Based on this evidence, Hall estimates that there were "at least a thousand, possibly several thousand women who served as soldiers in the Civil War"—a number far greater than historians have previously acknowledged. While Hall admits that this is but a tiny fraction of the men who fought, he rightly argues that the numbers and the stories behind them were "sociologically significant," given limited social, economic, and political opportunities for women at the time (11). Indeed, the women he profiles responded to wartime exigencies by pushing and violating gendered boundaries of dress, speech, behavior, and occupation in important ways.

Organized around wartime activities, such as soldiering, spying, and dying in service, Hall discloses one fascinating story after another of women who cross-dressed, deceived, and lied about their purposes and identities to participate in the Civil War. Hall is committed to interrogating and debunking unreliable evidence regarding women and the war, displaying, as the subtitle of one chapter states, his "historical detective work," front and center.

Hall's research is exhaustive and will become an essential source for anyone interested in women and the Civil War. Especially helpful to future scholars will be the appendices, which contain profiles of and documents relating to female participants...