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The Civil War unleashed a revolution that left few areas of national life untouched. Liberation transformed what had been the largest portion of the nation’s antebellum labor force – slaves – into wage workers, and planters entered into contractual relations with those they had owned, promising however grudgingly to pay for labor services they had customarily taken by force. Individual citizens found themselves in new relationships with the state, the result of four years of war during which the national government inserted itself in new ways into areas that had once been the purview of individual states: assessing taxes, conscripting soldiers, and later, offering aid to veteran soldiers and to tens of thousands who had been displaced and impoverished by war. Political parties realigned and the Republicans, who in the 1850s had been mostly confined to eastern and northern states, swept into and across the former Confederacy, transforming the political landscape.
The revolution did not stop there. As is the case with most major conflicts, the Civil War and emancipation wrecked havoc on existing gender relations, propelling women and men into unaccustomed roles and in the process, forcing Americans – black and white, rich and poor, propertied and not – to reconsider what it meant to be a good woman, a good man, a good partner, a good parent. In the Confederacy, for example, the departure of white men to the front lines pushed white women into areas formerly reserved for men: tending crops, overseeing enslaved field hands, offering up Sabbath-day sermons, and engaging in public and paid labor. Some enjoyed the opportunities opened by war. Others were horrified, wishing for nothing more than a return to antebellum conditions, especially as their enslaved servants laid down their tools, dropped their dish rags, and abandoned the wash tubs that stood in every yard – actions that compelled more than a few prideful white women to perform chores they still considered the work of slaves.
War and emancipation transformed the gendered lives and ideals of black Americans too. Enlistment in Lincoln’s armies, for instance, changed fundamentally the ways black men thought about themselves in relation to their wives, their children, their states, and the nation. Introduced to Northern gender sensibilities as they marched alongside and fought alongside Yankee soldiers, black Southerners who served often returned home with new understandings about what it meant to be men. As new scholarship has revealed, the enlistment of men also changed how black women thought about themselves and about their social, civil, and political rights. Many, for example, believed that the sacrifice of a son or husband on a faraway battlefield bought them the right to intervene directly in political matters. For the enslaved left behind on Confederate plantations, the departure of men forced them to reconfigure themselves into wholly new domestic units, drawing together the female, the aged, the infirm, and the young in “families” of people who may or may not have been actual kin.
Gendered ideas, expectations, and experiences continued to evolve beyond the end of the war. As the documents assembled below suggest, the tumultuous circumstances of freedom rendered “gender” – those understandings about what it meant to be good women and good men – a particularly volatile set of ideas. The advent of wage labor proved especially treacherous for black women. Once prized by slaveholders for the babies they could bear, freedwomen found themselves shunted swiftly to the side, roughly dismissed by planters who could not afford – and with emancipation, no longer needed – women who could bear babies. As one Union official observed from his post in Alabama, such women along with any young children were soon “every where regarded and treated as an incubus.” Yet that same devaluation of black women as agricultural wage workers thrust black men into new roles. For in seeking to survive a freedom that had turned suddenly bad, black women turned to those they knew the best for assistance: calling on their husbands, sons, and brothers to represent women’s interests in a capricious and gendered labor market.
As gendered ideals and assumptions continued to evolve, shaped this time by the deeply contingent circumstances of emancipation and free labor, they were often caught up and deployed in political debate. Frequently considered one of the most “natural” of divisions, though always and everywhere the product of human creation, gender and the languages to which those ideas give rise, became commonplace weapons as black people and white jockeyed for power. For example: military service, and the assumptions about manhood it gave rise to, provided black men with a compelling argument for the exercise of full citizenship rights. In their minds, and in the minds of most nineteenth-century Americans, they had earned that right on the battlefield. At the same time, white conservatives, made anxious by the rising power of black men – at the bargaining table, at the voting booth, and eventually in elected office – regularly attempted to paint their opponents as female, a rhetorical strategy meant to call into question freedmen’s capacity for independent political action. Women, such proponents would argue, were “naturally” dependent and for that reason “naturally” unfit for civic and political duty. Thus “gender” and the countless discussions about what it ought to mean, for whom, and why, took shape from and gave shape to nearly every aspect of social, civic, and productive life in the post-Civil War nation. The documents presented below are meant to provide a small taste of a dimension of human experience that was at one and the same time a product and a producer of new power relations.
Sources:
Document 1. The Social and Domestic Price of Free Labor
Document 2. A Black Woman Imagines a Differently Gendered Working Class
Document 3. A Virginia Freedwoman Comments on Women and Work
Document 4. A Freedwoman’s Civil and Domestic Expectations
Document 5. A Husband Shoulders a New, Free-Labor Duty
Document 6. The Problems of Family-based Labor
Document 7. Soldiering Men
Document 8. Clashing Ideas about Gender and Political Rights
Document 9. Playing Politics with Gender
Document 10. A Black Minister Proposes a Collective Solution to Freedom’s Gendered Problems
Document 11. A Southern White Woman Reflects on New Circumstances, a New Identity
