Women and the Civl War

The purpose of this research is to examine the status of women who lived in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee during the Civil War. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the experience of women of that region was shaped by events in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and then to discuss, with reference to documents generated from the period, ways in which women were obliged to adapt to a situation in which men in their prime were essentially absent. There is compelling evidence that the experience and behavior of the women in this part of the country revealed more concern with local and family issues than with the grand designs of either the Union or the Confederacy. Their concerns, however, intersected with the military and political history of the age in sometimes unexpected ways.

Eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina include the part of the Appalachian region known as the Great Smoky Mountains, which isolated settlers in the area from the customs and practices of the slave-holding South. A number of sources refer to the social effects of the region's geography. In his introduction to yeoman farmer Basil Armstrong Thomasson's diary, David Ward refers to the "hermeticism of the mountain hollows and Thomasson's hardscrabble day-to-day existence." The area was fertile and, though remote, accessible via rivers and roads. As a practical matter that meant that nineteenth-century settlers were able to d

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them call for the ladies of Catawba. What happened in Newton in 1862 pointed up the harsh realities of war that are visited on civilians. More important, it was replicated elsewhere in the South, first in Salisbury, North Carolina, and later in Richmond, Virginia. In 1864, when starvation was a real possibility, fifty women raided a Confederate army warehouse in Burnsville and made off with several dozen bushels of wheat, shocking the officer in charge. Judith Harper cites "the depth of misery of the poor white men and women of the Confederacy," which was amplified by the Confederacy's aggressive conscription efforts. Harper continues: 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. In 1864, five women received five-month jail terms for their part in raiding flour st

Category: History - W