Women in the Civil War: Two Books and a Zoom Talk

As you know from your own life, Zoom is how we operate these days. In keeping with the times, I moderated a book talk for History Author Talks last Monday that brought together authors of two books on the role of women in the Civil War.

Stephanie McCurry, a professor at Columbia University, wrote Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War. Robert Plumb, a writer in the DC area, wrote The Better Angels: Five Women Who Changed Civil War America.

They began with the same “big topic”—Women in the Civil War. From there, they went in different directions. I am always intrigued by how authors figure out their approach to their subject. What gave them their original idea? How did they find the material to back up their idea? What were the ups and downs? Check out the Book Talk on YouTube, with a few highlights summarized below.

McCurry’s book is divided into three main sections: Enemy Women and the Laws of War, The Story of the Black Soldier’s Wife, and Reconstructing a Life amid the Ruins. The first two sections are about concepts and broad identities, rather than individual women.

Specifically, the first section deals with the Union Army’s changing view of Confederate women as enemy, not just bystander. as spelled out in the Lieber Code. Francis Lieber was a German theorist requested by the Union Army to draft guidelines for warfare. At first, he assumed what McCurry said is the usual—false—assumption about women during wartime—that they are not active participants and should be left alone. McCurry read a copy of Lieber’s draft at the Huntington Library that had a handwritten note from Gen. Henry Halleck requesting Lieber to amend that portion of his guidelines. (Having used the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California, myself, I could picture the combination of this wonderful setting and the thrill of picking up this piece of paper with the notation—sometimes research is REALLY NEAT).

Plumb wrote an earlier book based on letters of a Union soldier (Your Brother in Arms, 2011). He said as he researched that book, he kept coming across the accomplishments of women. His book is more of a straightforward narrative than McCurry’s. The “five women” are (in alphabetical order) Clara Barton, Sarah Josepha Hale, Julia Ward Howe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Tubman.