A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-Century New York

Notes

Notes The following abbreviations are used in the notes: CWPR Civil War Pension Records. Case Files of Approved Pension Applications of Widows and Other Dependents of Civil War and Later Navy Veterans (Navy Widows’ Certificates), 1861–1910, Record Group 15, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs. M1279 NARA National Archives and Record Service, Washington, D.C. NYHS New York Historical Society NYMA New York Municipal Archives USCT United States Colored Troops USMC United States Manuscript Census n o t e s to t h e i n t ro du c t i o n 1. The CWPR were a rich source for this project. Many black women applied for pensions to which they were entitled after their husbands’ service in the Civil War. In so doing, they provided detailed family histories in their files. These are great sources but difficult to track down. To locate pension applications of African American Civil War soldiers, I first compiled a list of more than one hundred black men who enlisted in the three New York City USCT regiments . I found this information in the Compiled Military Service Records, which provided muster rolls for the USCT, Twenty-sixth, Twentieth, and Thirti161 eth Regiments, the three New York City regiments. I then used the General Index to Civil War and Later Pension Files to determine if the soldier or his family had applied for a pension. Next, I consulted the CWPR to determine if the soldier or his family had applied for a pension. Finally, I obtained the actual pension applications. Compiled Military Service Records of Volunteer Union Soldiers Who Served with the United States Colored Troops: Infantry Organizations , 20th through 25th, Record Group 94, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s–1917, M1823; General Index to Civil War and Later Pension Files, ca. 1949, Record Group 15: Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs , 1773–2001, T288; CWPR, Samuel Sisco, NARA. 2. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930), 14–16; The Negro in New York: An Informal Social History, ed. Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby (New York: New York Public Library, 1967), 88–90. 3. Many scholars have examined the idea of “respectability” as an earmark of the middle class, particularly in the nineteenth century. For example, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 2, 129–130, 133, 183–185; Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 39, 58–59, 60–63, 95, 186–187; Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790– 1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 145–155, 179–186. 4. Barbara Welter coined the phrase “cult of true womanhood” in 1966, arguing that women’s relegation to the domestic sphere kept them subordinate to men. She also suggested, however, that women chafed against the restrictions of this prescribed role and that many engaged in activities outside the home, including work as missionaries and reformers. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966): 151, 173– 174. Three years later, in an article exploring increasing class divisions in Jacksonian America, Gerda Lerner argued that middle-class women actually embraced their prescribed role in the domestic sphere in an effort to distinguish themselves from poorer women who had to engage in factory work in order to help support their families. Gerda Lerner, “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 10, no. 1 (1969): 10–12. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg contended that women’s separate sphere gave them a sense of independence and suggested that women had strong and fulfilling relationships with each other within their 162 | Notes to the Introduction sphere. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 52–76. In The Bonds of Womanhood, Nancy Cott argued that feminist activism actually emerged from women’s sphere because women had forged a sisterhood through their shared “perception of womanhood.” According to Cott, this sense of sisterhood was necessary for the emergence of the nineteenth-century feminist movement. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s...