INDG 401 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Raleigh, North Carolina, White League, Rebecca Latimer Felton
9 Jun 2018
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Day 7: February 28
The Murray family under slavery and segregation
Today:
Civil War memory
• Confederates are remembered weirdly nicely
o People still try to give “states rights” as the reason-- wrong, it was slavery
• What did confederate women do during the war?
o Sewing-- men needed uniforms, flags, the women formed sewing circles
o Filled mens’ roles that were vacant-- after 5 years of a man’s absence they
automatically divorced, many women became “deputy husbands”
o Nursing-- very physical labor, sewing limbs off, etc, almost like being soldiers
themselves. Not very feminine
o Teachers-- in the N, teachers were mainly “spinsters” or unmarried women but in
the S a lot of young men waiting for their inheritances would teach. During war >
more women
o Sent/sacrificed their men to war-- they were supposed to suppress the dramatic
female sadness that would naturally arise, present a brave “spartan woman” front
▪ punished/taunted men for staying at home
▪ There was a universal Confederate conscription/draft spring of 1862
• In the N men could get out of it with a bounty
• In the S there was no way out UNLESS you had 20+ “bondsmen”
aka slaves
• These rules were only effective because women enforced them
• They made sacrifices of their families, not for them
• Why does women’s participation break down?
o Protection coverance (from previous weeks)-- person in charge of women went
from King in England/colonies to head of household in the US
▪ Basically they’re obedient as subjects in exchange for protection
▪ This is complicated by slavery
▪ War → this breaks down even more, women are being “loyal” but men
aren’t protecting them (at home)
o Women start to act in subversive ways-- it’s wartime so you’re not supposed to
party, but some women with money still throw them
o At some point women seemed to withdraw support
• How did they push back at the Confederacy?
o They were told by the gov’t not to write gloomy letters in order to keep soldiers’
morale up but they did anyway
o They deliberately didn’t report deserters
o Bread riots from 1863-on-- blockade meant they weren’t getting enough food,
they protested
o They wrote the Confederate gov’t demanding their men be sent home (esp.
women who had already lost some)
▪ Invoked “god’s” wrath if they didn’t, not their own-- still looked to a greater
form of patriarchy above the one they didn’t like
• Gilpin Faust uses careful language in her final point-- the Confederate war effort was
going to fail anyway, but women made it happen earlier than it would have otherwise
• Way more southern women lost family than northern women
o Each side lost roughly the same # of men but S had much fewer to begin with
find more resources at oneclass.com
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Document Summary
Not very feminine: teachers-- in the n, teachers were mainly spinsters or unmarried women but in the s a lot of young men waiting for their inheritances would teach. In the n men could get out of it with a bounty. In the n there was an office just for pensions for widows: most men died of dysentery/cholera, not in battle. In the farm this doesn"t happen-- farm outweighs society as an institution: mary chesnut wrote that many white women were secret abolitionists because they didn"t like seeing their husbands" kids with slaves around-- not really true. Case study: proud shoes : the fitzgerald-smiths in freedom and slavery, 1840s-1910s. In the 1830s king cotton was an enormous, incomparable economic power as a. Black belt in the south was so called because of the black, rich soil that runs from sc (the old seat of slavery) to the mississippi river.
