What was it like to be a plantation wife in the South during the Civil War? What was it like to be a northern wife? With a high percentage of the men from both sides away at war, and with a shortage of available staples, the lives of those left behind often were quite difficult. Professor Faust has been at the forefront of the scholarship on the Civil War homefront, and more particularly how the war affected women. Not surprisingly, she finds that their lives were very difficult. But she also found that most women bore their new burdens, and came out of the conflict saying, as did one Confederate woman, that it was "certainly our [war] as well as that of the men."

It is important at the outset to emphasize that there was no single Civil War "home front"--no single experience that can encompass the variety of civilian life between 1861 and 1865. North and South, Union and Confederacy endured the war quite differently--primarily because of the far greater pressure the war placed on the economic and manpower resources of the South. A far higher percentage of Confederate than Yankee men left their homes and jobs and families to serve in the army: four out of five white southern men of military age entered the army; fewer than half of northern men did so. And a far higher percentage of Confederate men died in military service, leaving a greater proportion of widowed, orphaned and bereaved southerners. The death rate--numbers of deaths in comparison to the size of the population--was 6% in the North and a striking 18% in the South. As a South Carolinian observed in 1863, "death has been in our midst as a people."

Even within North and South, different "home fronts" existed. Those portions of the Confederacy subjected to military invasion became a realm not easily characterized as either home or battlefront, and these areas incurred particularly high costs during the war. Families living in much of Virginia, for example, endured the presence of troops and the loss of their crops, livestock and property to the military for four long years. Their war was very different from that experienced by individuals remote from the line of battle. These sorts of contrasts were less important in the North, for only a few areas confronted actual Confederate military invasion. Nevertheless, the war had a different impact on city dwellers and rural residents. Even within the same geographic areas North and South, wars' effects were different for rich and poor, black and white, women and men. This attention to difference, to the complexity of the civilian experience, and to the kinds of conflicts that occurred behind the lines has been a major contribution of the new social history to our understanding of the Civil War.

Southern Homefront

Historians have been particularly assiduous in exploring these divisions within the South--possibly because such investigations seemed to offer a means of using social history to answer one of the central and abiding questions of Civil War historiography: why the Confederacy lost. An older portrait of a patriotic and united white South has yielded to an understanding of the Confederacy as plagued by conflict. The war's economic demands and the departure of nearly a million white men from productive labor into the military created hardships keenly felt by yeoman and planter families alike. Shortages of food--probably the result of inadequate distribution systems rather than actual absolute shortfalls--plagued many soldiers' wives and children. Cloth production was imperiled both by absence of raw materials and by the Confederacy's inability to manufacture the cotton cards essential for home clothing manufacture. A Georgia grand jury proclaimed in August 1862, "We are grieved and appalled at the distress which threatens our people especially the widows and orphans and wives and children of our poor soldiers." An official in Alabama noted that in parts of the state citizens were actually dying of starvation.

Many desperate southerners blamed these hardships on the rich and powerful, manifesting a sensitivity to class differences that had been muted in the general prosperity of the white South in the 1850s. Accusations of "extortion" against merchants and other individuals believed to be hoarding necessities became a central theme of Confederate public discourse. Both the Confederate government and individual states endeavored to respond to this discontent, both with largely ineffective laws against price gouging and with unprecedented efforts to provide direct aid. In some areas of North Carolina, for example, as many as 40% of white women received government support to relieve hunger and deprivation.

Historians differ on the question of how effective these welfare efforts proved, but few would deny the emergence of sharply felt divisions within the white population. Some of these conflicts originated in political differences--opposing sentiments of Unionism and pro-southernism. Yet in many cases economic and class resentments intensified the oppositions. … In some regions, most notably border areas like Missouri and Kentucky, tensions escalated to the point that many civilians themselves became victims of …violence. … In January 1863, for example, soldiers murdered thirteen suspected Unionists, including boys thirteen and fourteen years old. … Military service was a frequent focus of such tensions and hostilities as the exemption of slave managers from conscription laws introduced a wedge between the approximately 25% of the white population that owned slaves and the 75% that did not. Women, too, became embroiled in the controversy--most notably in bread riots that erupted in Richmond and locations across the Confederacy in 1863 and later. An eloquent but barely educated North Carolina woman named Nancy Mangum wrote feelingly to Governor Zebulon Vance in 1863: "I have threatened for some time to write you a letter--a crowd of we poor women went to Greensborough yesterday for something to eat as we had not a mouthful meat nor bread--what did they do but put us in jail--we women will write for our husbands to come home and help us." … Civilian deaths in the wartime South have almost certainly been underestimated. Under such circumstances, the distinction between home front and battlefront begins to blur; the violence of war was far from the exclusive province of the military.

Historians have vigorously debated the impact of this dissent and division upon Confederate survival and military effectiveness--most specifically on desertion rates and economic productivity. But these discussions have for the most part overlooked a critical characteristic of the southern home front: if four out of five white men of military age were absent in the army, the Confederate home front was overwhelmingly a world of white women and slaves. How might the recognition of this fact change our understanding both of the home front experience and of its relationship to war's outcome? Louisa Walton reported that her South Carolina community had by 1862 been "thinned out of men." Margaret Junkin Preston of Lexington, Virginia described "a world of femininity with a thin line of boys and octogenarians." In Shelby County, Alabama, 1600 of 1800 white males were in the army. What was the significance of such demographic shifts? …

During the war, southern white women of the poorer classes of necessity undertook an unprecedented level of physically demanding agricultural labor. In search of support for their families, many toiled for the Confederate Clothing Bureau, sewing uniforms for a paltry wage, thirty cents for an entire shirt, for example. Arsenal workers in Augusta made cartridges for a dollar a day. In Richmond, forty female ordnance workers were killed in an 1863 explosion; fifteen died in similar circumstances in Jackson, Mississippi. By the last years of the war, munitions workers in Richmond had become so dissatisfied and desperate they struck for higher wages. Ladies of the privileged ranks confronted new work responsibilities as well. Some few found themselves sometimes forced into the fields; more often, they assumed new duties managing slaves, or entering the workforce as teachers, government employees or hospital matrons, areas of southern life all but closed to women in the prewar years. In the fall of 1862, the Confederate Congress authorized women to serve officially in Confederate hospitals because wards managed by females demonstrated far lower mortality rates. Yet only a few respectable middle or upper class women worked as matrons or nurses. Caring for mens' bodies seemed demeaning and indelicate; most of the more privileged females supervised the wards or visited the sick while slaves or poorer white women bandaged, bathed and fed the soldiers. Many white women were compelled by the war to seek remunerative work for the first time. Teaching seemed an obvious prospect because of women's traditional nurturing roles. Northern women had flocked to classrooms in the prewar years, but no similar development had taken place in the South. In North Carolina in 1860, for example, only 7% of teachers were women. By the end of the war, there were as many females as males in the classroom. For the most part, however, white southern women of the middle and upper classes regarded their new roles as necessity, not opportunity; no rhetoric of liberation or empowerment accompanied these shifts. George Rable has described white women's experience as "change without change." …

War's most trying burden for white women of the slaveholding classes had proved to be its transfer of responsibility for managing slaves onto their shoulders. When white men departed for war, Confederate women assumed the duty of controlling the region's four million slaves. Despite an ideology that celebrated slaves' loyalty and docility, white women expressed profound anxieties about the possibility of slave insurrection and violence. "I fear the blacks more than I do the Yankees," a Mississippi woman declared. Virginian Ellen Moore complained that in her husband's absence her slaves "all think that I am a kind of usurper and have no authority over them." Indeed, a federal officer reported that slaves who fled to Union lines shared her sentiments: "They said there was nobody on the plantations but women and children and they were not afraid of them." Living with slavery in wartime, one Virginia woman observed, was "living with enemies in our own households."

Many white women found the daily acts of coercion and domination slavery required at odds with their understandings of themselves as females. Slaves clearly perceived this crisis of authority and confronted women's doubts, uncertainties and inexperience as managers with enhanced assertiveness and resistance. The difficulties of controlling slaves in the changed wartime environment led many white women to regard the institution as more trouble than benefit. As Sarah Kennedy of Tennessee declared in 1863, she "would rather do all the work rather than be worried with a house full of servants that do what, how and when they please." Their experiences as slave managers seriously eroded their support for the purposes of the war. …

Northern Homefront

[The] war was less of a presence in northern society: a smaller proportion of men left home to fight; a smaller proportion of the north's resources were expended on the war; enemy troops did not for the most part march across northern soil. As a result, it is more difficult to identify shared wartime experiences or to produce generalizations about war's impact at home. …

Unlike most southerners, many northerners were not called upon to confront the economic hardships that characterized the Confederate South. Agriculture, which employed 3,500,000 of the North's 5,000,000 workers in 1860, flourished during the conflict. … The departure of men for the army raised wages of agricultural laborers, encouraged more rapid mechanization, such as further spread of the reaper, and increased the responsibilities of northern, like southern, women for the day to day labor of farming. The demands for foodstuffs from the army and from the North's growing urban population generated significant increases in market involvement, and rural families found themselves by war's end much more tied to the commercial economy. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened millions of acres of new farmland to upwardly and westwardly mobile settlers, seemingly affirming the Union's commitment to the independent yeoman and to the ideals of free labor.

The experience of the North's industrial laborers was more bleak. Industrial workers served in the army at a high rate, and although their families received military bounties and wages from absent men, many women and children faced hardships in the context of the war's inflationary economy. Most wartime workers experienced an actual decline in their standard of living, a decrease that was even sharper for women laborers than for men, and more dramatic for unskilled than skilled laborers. Tens of thousands of children were drawn into the workforce as well to help replace manpower lost to the war. Although deprivation was neither as widespread nor as intense as in the Confederate South, many on the northern home front, especially in urban areas, also suffered as a result of the war. By 1865, for example, the city of Philadelphia had meted out $2.6 million in an effort to provide support for needy soldiers' families.

Such pressures contributed to growing labor activism, thousands of strikes and many new unions. But the opportunity to stigmatize resisting workers with charges of disloyalty and hindrance of the war effort enhanced the power of owners who were already benefitting from the consolidation of business and wealth encouraged by the war. Much of the intensification of class conflict that resulted from these transformations would not make its appearance until the labor battles of the 1870s and after, but the North did not escape the wartime fissures that rent southern society. Conscription became a focus of much of this conflict, for the slogan "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight" took on special resonance in the context of the economic shifts I have described. The most dramatic manifestations of these divisions were, of course, the New York City draft riots of July 1863. Beginning with an attack on draft offices and upon the wealthy who could escape conscription by paying a commutation fee, the rioters soon redirected their hostility toward black New York, murdering African Americans and burning an orphanage to the ground. … In the North, as in the South, war brought to the surface deep-seated hostilities of both race and class.

Although the northern home front did not display the same sort of demographic shift toward female predominance as did the South, northern women's lives were also profoundly changed by the war. In a two-volume History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1882, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage hailed the war as transformative. "The social and political condition of women was largely changed by our Civil War," they wrote. "In large measure," they explained, it was because war "created a revolution in woman herself."

One of the areas of women's participation that has gained most attention in this regard was nursing. In the South, most women who entered hospital work during the war were erstwhile volunteers or visitors, rather than long-term salaried hospital workers, and their labors were more likely to prove a temporary extension of the domain of … domesticity than a lasting transgression of conventional gender boundaries. Northern nurses, by contrast, were more likely to use their wartime experiences as a foundation for a new sense of self and vocation. In the North, the war provided a catalyst for women's advancement into both professional nursing and medicine. …

Despite Stanton, Anthony and Gage's triumphant assessment, the legacy of war for northern women seems ultimately to have been mixed. … Women regarded work as a burden rather than an opportunity and swelled the ranks of the North's manufacturing labor force during the conflict. But even for the ranks of more privileged women who were their subjects, Stanton, Anthony and Gage may have been overly optimistic. As Elizabeth Leonard recently concluded, the northern "gender system in the end demonstrated remarkable rigidity at its core." Yet its rigidity, its resistance to change, was not as great as in the South; wartime experiences of middle-class northern women encouraged many to imagine the possibility of different lives, as the postwar entry of women into medicine attests. Stanton and Anthony may in fact have derived their triumphalism from their own first-hand knowledge of the impact of war's democratic ferment upon the movement for woman suffrage. Although they would be bitterly disappointed when the fifteenth Amendment enfranchised black men but not white women, Stanton and Anthony believed that the foundation for women's ultimate success in achieving the vote was assured by the victory of the ideologies of citizenship and human rights for which the North fought. …

The home was critical… to the soldier's motivation to fight and to his understanding of himself; just before the battle he thought not of politics or God or death, Mitchell believes, but mother. Here we have another rendering of a theme we have seen throughout our considerations of home front North and South: the profound and abiding connections between home and battlefront, the way the two can blur in the context of Civil War experience. … Home and battlefront seem to merge as well in the incidences of serious conflict and violence amongst civilians distant from war's front lines. In draft riots in the North, food riots in the South, in the erupting tensions of a disintegrating slave system, hostilities and violent confrontation moved beyond the battlefield both to enlist and victimize civilians. And battle and home front joined as well in the close links of influence and motivation that tied them together. Men enlisted to protect women or deserted for the same end. Soldiers fought for homes and communities which in turn became an overarching rationale for commitment and sacrifice. …

With such an enormous rate of death in the army, nearly all Americans were touched by the war's impact. Indeed, death may have been the most powerful Civil War reality for many Americans. Obviously it was so for those who actually died, but for survivors as well, the deaths of loved ones, comrades, neighbors may have proved the most powerfully felt of all the Civil War's experiences. …Both battle and home front played a significant role in the outcome of the war and in the experience of every one of war's participants.

Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Civil War Homefront," in Rally on the Highground, online book http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/rthg/chap6.htm