Abstract
By the spring of 1863, the prospects for Union victory were looking dim. On the military front, the Union had experienced a string of depressing defeats. It was, however, the “fire in the rear,” the rising levels of disaffection and ever more active disloyalty among the northern citizenry that Lincoln most feared would bring down the Union war effort. In his 1858 campaign for the Illinois senate seat, Lincoln had correctly predicted that a nation half slave and half free, a “house divided” could not stand. No one could have predicted, however, the ferocity of the war that ensued over how, in what way, with what consequences the nation would be purged of slavery. In the South, the abolition of slavery threatened the very foundation of the most powerful households of the region, but Lincolns’ issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in the fall of 1863 also tested the depth of northern households’ commitment to the liberties of free men. Would they continue to send their men to fight and die now that defeating the southern slavepower—the overweening power of slaveowners—meant that their slaves would be rendered free?1
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Notes
For a more extended discussion of the “fire in the rear,” see, James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988), 591–526.
Loyal Publication of New York, “The Great Mass Meeting of Loyal Citizens” (New York, s.n., 1863; Loyal Reprints no. 3), 5. On the crisis of loyalty and the formation of Loyal Leagues, see George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, Harper & Row, 1965 ), 130–150
Jorg Nagler, “Loyalty and Dissent: The Home Front and the American Civil War,” in On the Road to Total War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler, eds. (Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, German Historical Institute 1997), 329–356
“The Great Mass Meeting of Loyal Citizens,” 5. The contribution that Confederate womens’ demoralization played in the defeat of the Confederacy has been discussed at some length. See Drew Faust, “Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War,” Journal of American History 76 (March 1990): 1200–1228
Gary Gallagher, Confederate War (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1997).
Frank Moore, Women at War: Their Heroism and Self Sacrifice (Hartford, CT, National Publishing Co, 1866)
L. P. Brockett and Mary Vaughn, Womans’ Work in the Civil War: A Record of Heroism, Patriotism and Patience (Philadelphia, Zeigler, McCurdy & Co, 1867).
Elizabeth Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (New York, W.W. Norton, 1994)
Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998)
Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Womens’ Politics in Transition (Boston, Northeastern University Press, 2000).
On the role of women in antebellum women to partisan politics see, Elizabeth Varon, “We Mean to Be Counted”: White Women and Politics and Antebellum Virginia (Chapter Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 1991).
Faye Dudden, “New York Strategy and the New York Womens’ Movement in the Civil War,” in Votes for Women: The Struggle for the Suffrage Revisited, Jean H. Baker, ed. (New York, Oxford University Press, 2002), 56–76
Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1991)
Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades (New York, Knopf, 1966), 163–166.
Many historians have discussed the early and intense militancy of Confederate women see, e.g., George Rable, Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989)
H. E. Sterkx, Partners in Rebellion: Alabama Women in the Civil War (Rutherford, Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 1970)
Bell Wiley, Confederate Women (Westport, CT, Greenwood Press, 1975).
Jacqueline Glass Campbell, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina, 2003)
On the political significance of the transformation of northern womens’ domestic work into public labor during the war, see Attie, Patriotic Toil and Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence, University of Kansas, 2002), 14–40.
St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat, March 24, 1863. See also, April 19, 1863; April 22, 1863; April 28, 1863; May 4, 1863; and April 20, 1862; and St. Louis Daily Missouri Republican, April 6, 1863 and April 29, 1863. On southern sympathizing women as “She Devils,” see also Reid Mitchell, Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York, Oxford University Press, 1993), 89–114.
Paula Coalier, “Beyond Sympathy: The St. Louis Ladies’ Union Aid Society and the Civil War,” Gateway Heritage 11, no. 1 (Summer 1970): 38–51
Laura Staley, “Suffrage Movement in St. Louis during the 1870s’,” Gateway Heritage 3, no. 4 (Spring 1983): 34–41.
Caroline Kirkland, “A Few Words on Behalf of the Loyal Women of the United States by One of Themselves” (New York, W.C. Bryant & Co., Printers, 1863), 1.
On the ideological usefulness of the “slavepower” to the Republican Party, see, Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, Oxford University Press, 1970), 73–102.
Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Womens’ Rights and Abolition (New York, Schocken Books, 1971)
Jean Fagin Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1989)
Ronald Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976).
Discussion of Butlers’ General Order #28 has generally considered it as a serious attack on southern mens’ masculinity, rather than as a seriously needed defense of northern men. See, e.g., Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 26–27 and Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1990), 143–146.
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© 2005 LeeAnn Whites
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Whites, L. (2005). Strong Minds and Strong Hearts: The Ladies National League and the Civil War as an Intragender War. In: Gender Matters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05915-4_3
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