Stephanie McCurry's Women's War is the latest entry in a growing body of scholarship on the American Civil War that explores the essential role that women played in the military conflict and its aftermath. Historians of irregular warfare and occupation have demonstrated that women were the supply line for Confederate and Unionist guerrillas, that women's resistance activities prompted Union and Confederate officials to target them as military enemies, and that the progress of the war eroded any imagined division between “battle front” and “home front” in the South. Historians of emancipation and the refugee experience during the Civil War have shown that black women led rebellions on individual plantations, liberated themselves through flight to Union military lines, and labored for the Union Army in ways that contributed to the success of its war effort and altered the discourse of citizenship in the United States. McCurry makes two particularly important contributions to the literature in this volume. Through a close examination of archival evidence, she recovers how Confederate women's resistance activities forced lasting changes to the laws of war. Through the methods of micro-history, as she leads readers through the diary of a Confederate woman attempting to reconstruct her life in the post-war South, she presents a challenge to historians who claim that the Civil War and Reconstruction did not mark a fundamental change in the history of race and capitalism in the United States. Throughout the volume, McCurry explores the centrality of marriage to the social and political order.
McCurry expanded lectures given at her alma mater, Western University, into the three chapters of this volume. The first reflects the work of a master historian carefully mining primary source records. Her concern is the United States Army's General Orders No. 100, published in April 1863, which encapsulated, condensed, and revised an international body of literature on the laws of war. Francis Lieber, an academic and published expert on political theory, was its primary author. Lieber's Code formed the basis for the modern laws of war, and there have been several recent publications on its legal and military influence. Historians have already noted that the code incorporated women as enemies and undermined the distinction between civilian and combatant. McCurry explains why and restores the missing element of gender to the story of the code's creation. When the Union Army invaded the South, it confronted women guerrillas, saboteurs, spies, smugglers, and informants. They were a military threat and their activities undermined the assumption that all women were “innocent” and “outside” war because they were under the guardianship of their husbands through marriage. Women were still citizens, and even married women were under obligation to the state to refrain from treason. The turning point for the laws of war came when Union authorities in Tennessee arrested Clara Judd and charged her with being a spy and a smuggler. The Union general-in-chief, Henry Wager Halleck, issued an order on 5 March 1863, to address cases like hers. He divided the southern population according to loyalty rather than gender and included women in the categories of “war rebels” and “military traitors”. Through a careful examination of early drafts of Lieber's Code and correspondence between Halleck and Lieber, McCurry uncovered a salient fact: Halleck instructed Lieber to incorporate this order into the code, which originally had no section on civil war. Clara Judd and women like her changed the gender assumptions that had granted civilians immunity from the effects of war. Halleck, not Lieber, made sure the laws of war incorporated the new view. Lieber, and historians for decades afterwards, tried to ignore that gendered history.
The second chapter of Women's War, while thought-provoking, is less of a surprise to historians well versed in the literature on emancipation and Civil War refugees. McCurry analyzes the importance of marriage to the experience of black women who sought freedom inside Union military lines. She takes a hemispheric view of emancipation during wartime, pointing out that in San Domingo in the eighteenth century and the United States in the nineteenth, military service provided the official path to citizenship for black males, who would provide for black women through their headship in the institution of marriage. Government officials conceived of freed women as “soldiers’ wives” and crafted legislation accordingly. Emancipation had a gendered pattern, McCurry reminds readers, and women had to claim freedom through a different path than men. They had to fight through a government policy that did not reflect reality, since thousands of formerly enslaved women living in refugee camps were the heads of their families. The initial Congressional acts freeing soldiers’ wives only applied to women whose masters were disloyal, and it took until March 1865 for Congress to pass legislation that provided legal freedom to the more than 50,000 soldiers’ wives whose masters had remained loyal to the United States. McCurry's discussion of the relationship between marriage and emancipation has interpretive insight, but the chapter lacks detail of black women's lives in the refugee camps of the Union Army. “Soldiers’ wives” do not populate the chapter; policy does. Readers would benefit from considering this chapter alongside Amy Taylor's Embattled Freedom: Journeys through the Civil War's Slave Refugee Camps (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018), which provides a rich portrait of black women's struggle for economic independence and their importance to the Union Army. Eliza Bougan, a launderer, for example, received recognition in official regulations as “a company woman” of Co. E, 46th United States Colored Troops, who received her own ration even if she became separated from the unit, and Union authorities deemed black women laborers critical for their plans to occupy land in the Mississippi Valley.
The final chapter, a study of the post-war life of Gertrude Thomas, a Confederate diarist living in Augusta, Georgia, packs both an interpretive and a narrative punch. McCurry connects the intimate history of an individual woman's experience with marriage, family, and sexuality, to the structural history of land, capital, and race in the American South. She argues that emancipation and Reconstruction “involved a revolution on the level of every household and every family” and constituted a “fundamental reordering” of society (p. 10). She explicitly challenges historians who argue that slavery was a form of coercive capitalism in a rigid structure of racial exploitation that did not fundamentally change across the nineteenth century. McCurry posits that this interpretation is only possible because historians normally write about political economy and gender separately, when in fact it is impossible to separate the political, economic, and domestic spheres. “Slavery, like marriage, was a system of domestic relations”, she claims, “and when it was ripped up, virtually everything else was uprooted with it” (p. 131). In her two previous books, McCurry shows how the southern domestic ordering – patriarchal households with white women and slaves as dependents – were foundational to southern society and politics. In this book, she extends the implications through Reconstruction. Gertrude Thomas had to reconstruct every aspect of her life after emancipation: family relationships, labor, marriage, and identity. She had to confront the sexual violence of slavery when mulatto women slaves sired by her father left the household, successfully negotiated new domestic labor arrangements, re-unified their own families, and turned their attention to their own children. Her rage at these efforts, which she labeled as “defection, seduction, and insurrection”, shows that “it was not just capital or physical labor that Thomas lost” (p. 141). The formation of free black families, McCurry argues, was a fundamental gain that black people never gave up even after the violent overthrow of Reconstruction. Black equality posed an intimate threat to Thomas. She wrote overtly about the competition between women like herself and mulatto women for the social distinction of their children and for white men as marriage partners. Sexual humiliation infused her reaction to the changes emancipation wrought.
In her acknowledgements, McCurry writes that Women's War is “a down payment on something far bigger” (p. 281). Like all books derived from a lecture series, this one floats big ideas and lays out directions for future research to build more evidence into the conceptual structure. It is quite a hefty down payment, and social historians eagerly await the fulfillment of her efforts to write the history of war “with the women still in it” (p. 212).
