"Not Intended to Dispossess Females": Southern Women and Civil War Amnesty

"Your petitioner has not done any act inconsistent with the duties of a Southern woman." Mary E. Brown of Greene County, Alabama, wanted President Andrew Johnson to know why she had contributed to the relief of Confederate soldiers and their indigent families. She further explained that she sympathized "with the cause of the people of her section, as would naturally be supposed." Her "natural" sympathies notwithstanding, similar to almost four hundred other southern women, Brown found herself in the unenviable position of asking Johnson for a presidential pardon. Officially, like most of the other female applicants, her "offense" was that she lived in a former Confederate state and possessed taxable property valued in excess of $20,000. This placed her clearly within one of the fourteen groups of individuals denied general amnesty according to the provisions of Johnson's first Amnesty Proclamation and thus required her to petition the president directly. But why did Brown and other women bother to apply? After all, exactly what rights did they expect to lose or regain? Did they truly fear punishment at the hands of Federal authorities, or was something more significant at work? Had the trials and sacrifices of the Civil War pushed these women to demand more from their government? An examination of one hundred southern women's applications sheds light on these questions, reveals that property rights motivated the applicants more than any other factor, and illustrates that elite southern white women applied for amnesty as a means to preserve an old world rather than to advance toward a new one. It further demonstrates that southern women employed numerous strategies, including the skillful exploitation of prevailing gender concepts and dexterous knowledge of sectional politics, to secure presidential pardons.¹

Southern women such as Mary E. Brown certainly had legitimate reasons for concern because the legal fate of former Confederates remained unresolved at war's end and appeared to rest entirely in Johnson's hands. Similar to Congress and Abraham Lincoln before him, Johnson considered the Confederates guilty of treason. In 1865, Johnson famously proclaimed that traitors must be punished, and indeed possible penalties for treason included death, disfranchisement, imprisonment, confiscation of property, and heavy fines. Despite such rhetoric, he pursued a lenient plan of Reconstruction that provided for a rapid return of the southern states to their "proper relationship" with the union. The plan included proclamations of amnesty that restored legal and political rights to most former Confederates in exchange for an oath of future allegiance to the United States and a promise to obey all legislation pertaining to emancipation. Johnson's first proclamation affected by far the greatest number of southerners, but it excluded from general amnesty fourteen specific classifications of individuals, who were required to request a pardon directly from the president (see table for a list of the excepted classifications). Johnson promised to grant those personal requests "liberally" and indeed pardoned approximately 13,500 of 15,000 applicants between May 29, 1865, and September 6, 1867.²

Exception	Explanation
Note: This table is based on the one in Brad R. Clampitt, "Two Degrees of Rebellion: Amnesty and Texans after the Civil War," Civil War History 52 (Sept. 2006): 255–81.
First	Confederate civil or diplomatic officials
Second	Individuals who vacated judicial positions in the U. S. to aid the rebellion
Third	Confederate Army officers above the rank of colonel and Navy officers above the rank of lieutenant
Fourth	Individuals who left seat in the U. S. Congress to aid the rebellion
Fifth	Individuals who resigned commissions in the U. S. Army or Navy and afterward served the rebellion
Sixth	Individuals who treated black prisoners of war or their white officers unlawfully
Seventh	Individuals who absented themselves from the U. S. in order to aid the rebellion
Eighth	Confederate military personnel who were educated at the U. S. Military Academy or the U. S. Naval Academy
Ninth	Former Confederate governors
Tenth	Individuals who left homes in U. S. jurisdiction to aid the rebellion
Eleventh	Individuals who engaged in the destruction of U. S. commerce on...