Women in the Civil War

The geography of the region--eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina take in the part of the Appalachian region known as the Great Smoky Mountains--had the effect of isolating the settlers in the area from the context of the slave-holding South. A number of sources make reference to the social effects of the region's geography. In the introduction to an annotated diary from what the editor calls a yeoman farmer of western North Carolina, for example, the reference is to "the hermetic world of Appalachian North Carolina" and to "the [] hermeticism of the mountain hollows and Thomasson's [the farmer's] hardscrabble day-to-day existence." The area is fertile and not inaccessible, being served

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Jobs and food were rarities for all social classes in the overcrowded cities that were teeming with refugees, but the poor—both whites and free blacks with little or no resources to buffer them—suffered most. The number of women-led households trying to survive on a Confederate soldier's pay increased, causing many among the middle classes and yeomanry to face hunger. . . . To further exacerbate the food crisis, the Confederate military impressed wagons and other vehicles normally used to transport food. The aggravating influence of commodities speculation and profiteering may easily be inferred, since Salisbury modeled similar incidents in other southern cities, including Richmond, two weeks after the Salisbury incident. In 1864, five women got five-month jail terms for their part in raiding the flour. But the prospect of arrest would have been unlikely to deter them because they had exhausted their options. The women had sought relief via petitions to government but had received no joy. Harper's interpretation is that these incidents illustrated a class-based cleavage between the working and affluent classes. As she explains: [A]s both poor and yeoman farm women struggled to keep their children and elderly relatives from s
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Approximate Word count = 8133
Approximate Pages = 33 (250 words per page)

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