Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice, Thomas F. Curran
274 pages, 6 x 9.25, 18 illustrations, bibliography, index, paperback, $26.50
Partisan activities of disloyal women and the Union army’s reaction
During the American Civil War, more than four hundred women were
arrested and imprisoned by the Union Army in the St. Louis area. The
majority of these women were fully aware of the political nature of
their actions and had made conscious decisions to assist Confederate
soldiers in armed rebellion against the U.S. government. Their crimes
included offering aid to Confederate soldiers, smuggling, spying,
sabotaging, and, rarely, serving in the Confederate army. Historian
Thomas F. Curran’s extensive research highlights for the first time the
female Confederate prisoners in the St. Louis area, and his thoughtful
analysis shows how their activities affected Federal military policy.
Early in the war, Union officials felt reluctant to arrest women and
waited to do so until their conduct could no longer be tolerated. The
war progressed, the women’s disloyal activities escalated, and Federal
response grew stronger. Some Confederate partisan women were banished to
the South, while others were held at Alton Military Prison and other
sites. The guerilla war in Missouri resulted in more arrests of women,
and the task of incarcerating them became more complicated.
The women’s offenses were seen as treasonous by the Federal government.
By determining that women—who were excluded from the politics of the
male public sphere—were capable of treason, Federal authorities
implicitly acknowledged that women acted in ways that had serious
political meaning. Nearly six decades before U.S. women had the right to
vote, Federal officials who dealt with Confederate partisan women
routinely referred to them as citizens. Federal officials
created a policy that conferred on female citizens the same obligations
male citizens had during time of war and rebellion, and they prosecuted
disloyal women in the same way they did disloyal men.
The women arrested in the St. Louis area are only a fraction of the
total number of female southern partisans who found ways to advance the
Confederate military cause. More significant than their numbers,
however, is what the fragmentary records of these women reveal about the
activities that led to their arrests, the reactions women partisans
evoked from the Federal authorities who confronted them, the impact that
women’s partisan activities had on Federal military policy and military
prisons, and how these women’s experiences were subsumed to comport
with a Lost Cause myth—the need for valorous men to safeguard the homes
of defenseless women.
Text Source: Southern Illinois University Press
Author Interview: H-Net
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