From The Archives: Tough Broads of the Civil War
Just to prove that I've been thinking about nurses and other women who played a role in the American Civil War for a while now, here's a post that first appeared in the Margins in 2011:
-
- Harriet Beecher Stowe
-
- Julia Ward Howe
-
- Clara Barton
I've said it before: If you hang out in Popular History Land, or even Book World these days, it's impossible to ignore the American Civil War and its sesquicentennial. Civil War references are everywhere.
The most recent bit of Civil War "stuff" to start my brain churning was a review of a new book by historian David S. Reynolds: Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. Reynolds' book looks fascinating. I've added it to my ever-growing To-Be-Read list. But I'm not sure it will have as much impact on me as the first book I ever read on Harriet Beecher Stowe.
When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, our school library got a handful of biographies on American women in history. I'm not sure now if they were a series or separate biographies pulled together by a school librarian with a bee in her bonnet. Either way, I loved the books and read them as often as I was allowed before they circulated on to another school. Although each woman's story was different, they held a common theme: a smart tomboy (or at least a not-very-girly girl) has trouble as a child but grows up to do Something Important. They were balm to my nerdy, not-very-girly soul. They also left me with the abiding impression that the Civil War was a period when women were kicking down doors and doing things they'd never done before.
Turns out that impression was right. Look at the roster:
- Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin inflamed the North on the subject of slavery. To quote Abraham Lincoln (via Carl Sandburg), "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!"
- Julia Ward Howe provided the North with a soundtrack for the war: a little ditty called The Battle Hymn of the Republic.
- Clara Barton, "the soldier's friend", charmed and kicked men in high places until they allowed her to provide comforts and medical care to "her boys" on the battlefield. When the need for her services in the field diminished, she helped the families of missing soldiers locate their fathers, sons, and brothers. After the war, she started a little group called the American Red Cross. Maybe you've heard of it?
- Hundreds of women in both the North and South took the unheard of step of volunteering in military hospitals. (If you want a lively first hand account of one young woman's Civil War nursing experience, check out Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches.)
- Most amazing of all, women cut their hair, disguised themselves as men, and enlisted to fight.* Some followed their husbands or fiancés. Others enlisted out of a sense of patriotism or adventure. For obvious reasons, we don't know how many women fought disguised as men, but an article in the National Archives estimates 250 women fought for the Confederacy and almost 400 for the Union. Most were not discovered until they were wounded or died. At least one woman, discovered and discharged for the official reason of "incompatibility of sex" (The fact that there was an official term of discharge tells you everything you need to know.), suited up and joined a new regiment.
Tough broads indeed.
Who's your favorite tough broad of the Civil War?
*If you want to read a take on this general topic that's hysterical rather than historical, check out Monstrous Regiment by one of my favorite novelists, Terry Pratchett. It will make you both laugh and think. I promise.
The Great River Road–Take 2
As some of you may remember, last year My Own True Love and I planned and abandoned a road trip on the grand scale: driving along the Mississippi from Minnesota to Louisiana on the Great River Road*--or at least as far as we could get in three weeks.
I'm pleased to tell you, we're doing it! By the time you read this, we'll have been on the road for almost a week. The plan is a little different this year. Instead of starting in Minnesota,** we began by headed south. Two days in Memphis. Three days in New Orleans.*** Then back up the river, stopping anywhere that takes our fancy, until we run out of time. (Marginites may want to start a blog-reader pool, betting on how far north we get before we run out of time.) Roots music! Regional food! Historical sites! More historical sites! Not to mention blog posts.
If you have suggestions, we'd love to hear them. Must see historical sites--famous or obscure? Widely heralded sites that are duds? A little town with a great restaurant, bakery, farmers' market or music venue? Let me know.
*Like the Silk Road, the Great River Road isn't actually a single road. It's a conglomeration of local and state roads that cross back and forth across the river.
**Many of the places we want to see in Minnesota close for the winter. I can't imagine why.
***Thanks to Bart Ingraldi's suggestion last year, we plan on spending two of those days at the World War II Museum
“Our Army Nurses”
Nurses and doctors at Fredericksburg after the Battle of the Wilderness, 1864
About a million years ago, I wrote a study guide to Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage for a reference book called The Literature of War. In the course of my research, I was introduced to the flood of material produced about the American Civil War some twenty or thirty years after it ended: regimental histories, general histories, poetry, pamphlets, biographies, lightly edited diaries and, most of all, memoirs by war veterans. Many war memoirs were small privately printed works distributed to friends and family. At the other end of the spectrum, The Personal Memoirs of US Grant (1885) was one of the best selling American books of the nineteenth century.* It was a fascinating view of warfare, and useful context for writing about Crane. When I was done, I tucked it away in the back of my brain with all the other miscellaneous bits of information I collect as a writer of popular history and moved on to my next assignment.
I didn't think about the specialized narrative of the Civil War memoir again until I got the call about writing The Heroines of Mercy Street** It had never occurred to me that Civil War nurses also wrote memoirs--it didn't come up in the course of my research on Crane. (Women are largely invisible in traditional military history and its spin-offs. Something I want to help change.) Boy did they ever! The first to appear, and probably the best known at the time, was Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, a lightly fictionalized account of Alcott's brief stint as a Civil War nurse that was published in 1863 while the war was still in progress. But she was by no means alone. After the war, women in the North and South wrote their memoirs and edited their letters for publication, with titles like Ministering Angel, An Army Nurse in Two Wars, The Lady Nurse of Ward E, Hospital Pencillings, etc. Others wrote out their story for family members.
One of my favorite Civil War nursing memoirs will probably never be reprinted: Our Army Nurses. Interesting Sketches, Addresses and Photographs of nearly One Hundred of the Noble Women Who Served in Hospitals and on Battlefields during Our Civil War, compiled by Mary A. Gardner Holland. The book is exactly what it sounds like: one hundred short accounts by written by Civil War nurses roughly thirty years after the fact. Holland took on the task of tracking down as many former nurses as possible and asking them to contribute. She received more letters and photographs in response than she could include. Some of them are beautifully written--most notably Holland's own essay. (I suspect her desire to write her story inspired the project.) Some of them suggest that their authors seldom picked up a pen for any purpose other than labeling jars of piccalili and chow chow at the end of the summer's canning. All of them display pride in their service. And well they should.
Nurse's memoirs are easier to get hold of than they used to be. When the study of women's history began to gain solid ground in the 1980s and 1990s, many of these works were reprinted, along with previously unprinted collections of letters. I am now the owner of a small collection of well-thumbed reprints; some with scholarly introductions and footnotes, others as naked of scholarly apparatus as the day they first left the printers. Charming, funny, heartbreaking--they're worth reading if you are interested in different perspective on the Civil War.
*Thanks in part to a clever marketing campaign devised by its publisher, Mark Twain. Grant finished the book only a few days before he died. Twain sent 10,000 sales agents across the North, many of them Civil War veterans dressed in their old uniforms. They sold the two-volume memoir by subscription, using a script written by Twain himself, which was designed to appeal to veterans mourning Grant's death. Twain described the work this way: "this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts." Some of Twain's praise may be sales puffery, but Grant's work remains highly regarded for its shrewd and intelligent depiction of the war.
**I did warn you there would be a certain amount of "my book, my book!" over the next few months.