Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War

The Great National Struggle in the Heart of the Union, An Introduction

1 The Great National Struggle in the Heart of the Union z An Introduction Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson In the momentous spring of 1861, Galena, Illinois, was “throbbing with patriotism,” according to Julia Dent Grant, wife of future U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant. The rhetoric of secession and war followed by the attack on Fort Sumter sparked a fury of activity across the heartland that was typified by events in Galena. Almost instantly, the daily transacting of business ceased. Julia later recalled that men held meetings , called for volunteers, and began to muster and drill while boys imitated the men and played at soldiering. Women young and old also held meetings and determined to act upon their patriotism and support the “great national struggle” at hand. For Julia and other Galena women, this entailed a range of activities, including hulling strawberries for jam and whatnot as well as participating in sewing and knitting meetings that were formed to produce clothing for their soldiers. The women obtained a description of the U.S. infantry uniform, subscribed funds and purchased the material, hired tailors to cut out the garment pieces, and then sewed the uniforms themselves in their own parlors. Within days, the enlistees were outfitted and ready to depart. Hasty preparations were also made to ensure that the loss of many men from households and communities could be to some degree absorbed by women and noncombatants at home—at least for a time.1 The engagement of the midwestern home front in war-related activities and support, while immediate and ubiquitous, did not simply appear ginette aley and j. l. anderson 2 out of nowhere. Indeed, much of the intensifying political and ideological turmoil of the 1850s had played out within the region and fired its people with a powerful sense of being actors in this important drama. Consider the circumstances and consequences of the following: the 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Law and subsequent highly visible efforts to recapture former bondsmen and women who had escaped, many even settling north of the Ohio River; the so-called underground railroad stations and supporters throughout the region, despite persistent anti–African American sentiment; publication of Ohioan Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely influential and best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which fairly quickly caused the Kansas territory to degenerate into the aptly named Bleeding Kansas because of rampant fighting, involving free-state midwesterners, over the slavery issue; the zealous, murderous abolitionist John Brown, who gained notoriety and hero status attacking proslavery advocates in Kansas but was known in Ohio and Iowa; and the emergence of the Republican Party and Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln.2 Neither the issues nor the personalities of the impending national crisis were abstract or remote to midwesterners. They experienced these events and lived their passions. Ulysses S. Grant encountered this when as a clerk in his father’s Galena leather-goods store, he visited customers in southwest Wisconsin, southeast Minnesota, and northeast Iowa during late 1860 and early 1861: “[W]herever I stopped at night, some of the people would come to the public-house where I was, and sit till a late hour discussing the probabilities of the future.” Although “trying” in the implications of war (especially for those like him who had served previously in other military campaigns), Grant identified the period as one of “great excitement” among the citizenry of what was then referred to as the Northwestern United States, a forerunner to the early-twentieth -century regional labels Middle West and Midwest.3 Yet, this great excitement among midwesterners that Grant observed is often lost or muted within a larger, relatively undifferentiated master narrative historians have constructed about the Northern or Union perspective. Was there really only one relatively cohesive North, any more than there was one cohesive South? Everything we have learned about the American Civil War thus far tells us otherwise. The starting point for this study, then, is the premise that multiple Norths existed that were marked by regional differences and distinctiveness on several levels, and each, like the Midwest, asserted its own counternarrative of 3 the great national struggle the larger Northern narrative of the Civil War. The contributors to the current volume aspire to not only offer fresh considerations and insight of the era but also contribute toward the construction of a usable regional past that remains neglected.4 Historically...