Women’s War review: Women and the changing rules of war

Women’s War - Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War

Author: Stephanie McCurry

ISBN-13: 9780674987975

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Guideline Price: £19.95

Women have been wrongly rendered invisible in histories of war, including the American Civil War, according to Stephanie McCurry, professor of history at Columbia University and one of America’s leading authorities on its civil war. We need, she believes, the version of history that does not leave out the role played by women. Her last book, Confederate Reckoning, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In her latest book, McCurry uses Clara Judd, a Confederate spy in Tennessee, to illustrate how universal rules of war were changed in 1863 to address the problem of women like Judd who were taking advantage of the existing distinction between combatants and non-combatants to pass freely between Union and Confederate lines. They would give information on enemy troop movements to the Confederacy and even hide firearms in their homes.

German-born legal philosopher Francis Lieber was instructed by the Lincoln administration to draft new rules, effectively a code for soldiers in the field, to deal with the problem of “disloyal citizens”, including women, in time of civil war.

When the war began, neither side believed that women would be anything but victims who needed protection. The author demonstrates why this rapidly changed, culminating with Gen William T Sherman and his prosecution of “hard war”, which would not spare women, and how Leiber’s code provided its legal basis.

The author relates in “The Story of the Black Soldier’s Wife”, the humanitarian disaster that enfolded all over areas coming under Union army control, accelerating when the limited war becomes a war of liberation in 1863. Thousands of black women and children were rushing to the Union lines for protection. McCurry’s highlighting of the bravery of these women is long overdue because they were running the huge risk of being caught as runaway slaves.

The Militia Act of 1862 provided that slaves of rebels and their wives were “free forever” on the slave’s enlistment into the Union army. The problem was that the newly emancipated soldier had no wife because marriage had been illegal for slaves. The author rightly points out the absurdity of this. However, given that slavery was still legal in the border states and that the war was going badly for the north, McCurry is perhaps too harsh on this admittedly crude attempt to shoehorn the black soldier and his partner (if he had one) into the traditional family paradigm.

The priority was winning the war and the north needed these black soldiers. This “legal fiction” was an unwieldy, patriarchal 19th-century formula, but did weaken the Confederacy and did emancipate some women.

A sharp insight into the planter mind, including the sexual politics lurking in the background

The final section deals with Gertrude Thomas, a wealthy southern belle who kept a fascinating diary for more than 40 years that provides a sharp insight into the planter mind, including the sexual politics lurking in the background.

She chronicles plantation life, secession, “betrayal” of their location by one of “our” slaves to Gen Sherman’s advancing troops and the destruction by them of her three plantations and way of life, and descent into poverty. Her father was one of the richest men in Georgia with 12,000 acres and more than 400 slaves so Gertrude’s fall was far, indeed.

McCurry’s account of Gertrude’s life is riveting and reminds one of a morality play, a wealthy oppressor being brought down to the level of those whom she had oppressed, with an alcoholic husband who goes through, like Sherman through Georgia, what little money she has left from her father’s estate.

She admits that she hardly knew how to wash dishes, or to mind her own child. At this remove it is scarcely believable that, even after the war’s end and emancipation, Gertrude refused to hand over her now free, former slave girl, Betsey, to Betsey’s own mother – and did not understand why she should not keep her.

McCurry describes the veiled admission in Gertrude’s diary of the sexual violence that surrounded her on both her and her father’s plantations. Her father’s will in 1864 all but stated that he was father to about 10 slave children. She wondered, given what her own father had done, whether the light-skinned slave boy working in the field was the son of her husband.

As McCurry comments, “Slavery and its sexual violence left a lasting legacy . . . felt by every southerner, white and black.” After the defeat, Gertrude was proud that her husband was re-imposing white supremacy by Klu Klux Klan terrorism and she later became active promoting the “Lost Cause” myth which extolled the “noble” Confederacy.

The author’s perceptive insights put flesh on the bones of a bare historical record. Like James Joyce, McCurry is parochial, but never provincial. A wonderful narrator, her connecting of these dots in such an erudite, yet eminently readable way has opened wider that window that historians have kept shut for so long. McCurry emigrated from Belfast at a young age. Ireland’s loss was surely American academia’s gain.