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97 No Fit Wife z Soldiers’ Wives and Their In-Laws on the Indiana Home Front Nicole Etcheson When her husband joined the Union army, Alice Chapin was a young wife with two small children. Both she and her baby son were sick in early 1862 when Lucius Chapin enlisted. Unlike most enlistees’ wives, who accepted their husbands’ decisions, Alice’s reaction was anguished: “now my dear husband let me tell you I do not verily believe I could live & bid you good bye to go in the Army how can you for a moment think of such a thing, can you leave me? can you leave our babes? no, no, no, ever since the idea has got into my brain I’m like a foolish one, I cry & cant help it most all the time.” Lucius had not consulted with his wife about enlisting, and they had very different ideas of his duty. While Alice focused on the need for Lucius’s physical presence at home, where he could care for her and their children, Lucius and his father-in-law emphasized the need for Lucius to make a living. Although Lucius Chapin would later achieve considerable success in life, he was not doing well in the 1850s.1 Alice’s father, newspaperman John Willson Osborn, spoke of the army as a new start for Alice and Lucius’s family: “It has been said that she tied your hands, so that you could not make anything. For this the present arrangement has been made for her support, until you can make a start. I know at the present time, when money matters are so stringent, and under your depressed state of feeling, it will be hard. But we must bear hardship as good soldiers.”2 Lucius himself wrote to Alice of the nicole etcheson 98 practical disposition of his pay and bounty money: “We were mustered in on yesterday—will have to wait a day or two for our money—You will be compelled to use the most of it for provision for winter supplies as it maybe some time before I draw any more money—and I did want to save our Bounty money but we will not be able to do so and must pay up as fast as possible.”3 Clearly, Lucius had enlisted at a difficult time for his family, however much it eased certain financial pressures. He repeatedly avowed his love for his family and asked after the children, especially their seven-month-old boy, who was ill. Lucius assured Alice, “Many times in the day my heart turns to the dear ones at home[.]”4 The conflicting pressures on him are revealed in another letter: “I am detirmined to do my best for my dear family My little Boys sick. Please write how he is often as you can—”5 Lucius was still at Camp Morton in Indianapolis, where Indiana’s regiments were being formed, when his son’s condition worsened. At Alice’s urging, Lucius returned home to Putnamville, Indiana. Their son died an hour after Lucius arrived. The emotional turmoil surrounding the infant’s death and Lucius’s enlistment precipitated a tumultuous scene. Lucius’s sister Sue turned upon Alice with accusations that cut to the heart of her marriage.6 Alice did not truly love Lucius, for she had not named their son after him. She was lazy and not a “fit wife” for Lucius. And perhaps most hurtful of all, Sue insisted that the family had sent Lucius into the service in order to get him away from Alice. Sue was particularly anguished by the way the family troubles had affected her mother. She said, “That in giving up George [another son who had gone into the army] her husband dying & all the trouble her Mother had ever had did not begin to compare with her sorrow at the wreck of Lu, ‘That they had got Lu to go to the Army on purpose to get him away from me & hoped he never would come back to me.’” Ruth Osborn, Alice’s mother, told Sue, “If these were her feelings towards me [Alice] I never should step my foot in their house[.]” Sue “immediately cooled down & said they did not feel so now.” Sue’s evident dislike of Alice and Sue’s feeling of family grievance against her warred with the need for Lucius’s wife and daughter to have a home during the war. And Alice may have related these events not just...

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