National Park Service Rally on the High Ground The National Park Service Symposium on the Civil War

What was it like to be a plantation wife in the South during the Civil War? What was it like to be a northern wife? With a high percentage of the men from both sides away at war, and with a shortage of available staples, the lives of those left behind often were quite difficult. Professor Faust has been at the forefront of the scholarship on the Civil War homefront, and more particularly how the war affected women. Not surprisingly, she finds that their lives were very difficult. But she also found that most women bore their new burdens, and came out of the conflict saying, as did one Confederate woman, that it was "certainly our [war] as well as that of the men."

Introduced by Mary Ann Peckham
Stones River National Battlefield

In the past decade, the Civil War home front has attracted new and significant attention. The almost exclusive focus on military history that prevailed in writing about the war had yielded only a few explorations of the lives of civilians, and many of these studies had focused on politics and the public arena. The growing importance of social history in the 1970s and 80s affected almost every area of the study of the American past before finally in the late 1980s its practitioners began to direct their attention to the almost unparalleled riches of the Civil War era--the extensive collections of official records as well as the letters and diaries often produced by individuals who never would have recorded their experiences for posterity apart from the crisis of war. The arrival of social history in Civil War studies has transformed the field--in its military as well as nonmilitary dimensions. Much of the best recent writing on soldiers has focused on the everyday lives of common infantry--men, on the texture and meaning of their experience. But social history has also encouraged scholars to look beyond battle, at the world behind the lines, at the experiences of civilians white and black, male and female, as they found themselves caught up in the maelstrom of war.

It is on the lives of such individuals that I would like to focus my remarks today. "Home front" is a bit of an amorphous category and might be seen to include such non-military dimensions of the war as Union and Confederate politics, finance and economic policy. But instead of examining these public dimensions of civilian life, I would like to explore what we have learned about the everyday experiences of the ordinary men and women across the nation who were also significant actors in the drama of Civil War.

It is important at the outset to emphasize that there was no single Civil War "home front"--no single experience that can encompass the variety of civilian life between 1861 and 1865. North and South, Union and Confederacy endured the war quite differently--primarily because of the far greater pressure the war placed on the economic and manpower resources of the South. A far higher percentage of Confederate than Yankee men left their homes and jobs and families to serve in the army: four out of five white southern men of military age entered the army; fewer than half of northern men did so. And a far higher percentage of Confederate men died in military service, leaving a greater proportion of widowed, orphaned and bereaved southerners. The death rate--numbers of deaths in comparison to the size of the population--was 6% in the North and a striking 18% in the South. As a South Carolinian observed in 1863, "death has been in our midst as a people."

Even within North and South, different "home fronts" existed. Those portions of the Confederacy subjected to military invasion became a realm not easily characterized as either home or battlefront, and these areas incurred particularly high costs during the war. Families living in much of Virginia, for example, endured the presence of troops and the loss of their crops, livestock and property to the military for four long years. Their war was very different from that experienced by individuals remote from the line of battle. These sorts of contrasts were less important in the North, for only a few areas confronted actual Confederate military invasion. Nevertheless, the war had a different impact on city dwellers and rural residents. Even within the same geographic areas North and South, wars' effects were different for rich and poor, black and white, women and men. This attention to difference, to the complexity of the civilian experience, and to the kinds of conflicts that occurred behind the lines has been a major contribution of the new social history to our understanding of the Civil War.

Historians have been particularly assiduous in exploring these divisions within the South--possibly because such investigations seemed to offer a means of using social history to answer one of the central and abiding questions of Civil War historiography: why the Confederacy lost. An older portrait of a patriotic and united white South has yielded to an understanding of the Confederacy as plagued by conflict. The war's economic demands and the departure of nearly a million white men from productive labor into the military created hardships keenly felt by yeoman and planter families alike. Shortages of food--probably the result of inadequate distribution systems rather than actual absolute shortfalls--plagued many soldiers' wives and children. Cloth production was imperilled both by absence of raw materials and by the Confederacy's inability to manufacture the cotton cards essential for home clothing manufacture. A Georgia grand jury proclaimed in August 1862, "We are grieved and appalled at the distress which threatens our people especially the widows and orphans and wives and children of our poor soldiers." An official in Alabama noted that in parts of the state citizens were actually dying of starvation.

Many desperate southerners blamed these hardships on the rich and powerful, manifesting a sensitivity to class differences that had been muted in the general prosperity of the white South in the 1850s. Accusations of "extortion" against merchants and other individuals believed to be hoarding necessities became a central theme of Confederate public discourse. Both the Confederate government and individual states endeavored to respond to this discontent, both with largely ineffective laws against price gouging and with unprecedented efforts to provide direct aid. In some areas of North Carolina, for example, as many as 40% of white women received government support to relieve hunger and deprivation.

Historians differ on the question of how effective these welfare efforts proved, but few would deny the emergence of sharply felt divisions within the white population. Some of these conflicts originated in political differences--Opposing sentiments of Unionism and pro-southernism. Yet in many cases economic and class resentments intensified the oppositions. As we shall see, the passage of a measure exempting supervisors of twenty or more slaves from conscription provoked especially vocal resentment about the wartime meaning of privilege within southern society. In some regions, most notably border areas like Missouri and Kentucky, tensions escalated to the point that many civilians themselves became victims of the violence of Civil War. Even in North Carolina, differences that tended most often to express themselves in the realm of Confederate politics erupted into violence on numerous occasions. In January 1863, for example soldiers murdered thirteen suspected Unionists, including boys thirteen and fourteen years old. Novelist Charles Frazier has made the exploits of the bands of raiders seeking out deserters widely known through his best seller, Cold Mountain. Military service was a frequent focus of such tensions and hostilities as the exemption of slave managers from conscription laws introduced a wedge between the approximately 25% of the white population that owned slaves and the 75% that did not. Women, too, became embroiled in the controversy--most notably in bread riots that erupted in Richmond and locations across the Confederacy in 1863 and later. An eloquent but barely educated North Carolina woman named Nancy Mangum wrote feelingly to Governor Zebulon Vance in 1863: "I have threatened for some time to write you a letter--a crowd of we poor women went to Greensborough yesterday for something to eat as we had not a mouthful meat nor bread--what did they do but put us in jail--we women will write for our husbands to come home and help us." Historian Paul Escott has described these divisions in North Carolina as so extensive as to have constituted an "internal war." Ongoing work by Daniel Sutherland will furnish us with a portrait of far more extensive guerrilla action against civilians across the South than has heretofore been acknowledged. Civilian deaths in the wartime South have almost certainly been underestimated. Under such circumstances, the distinction between home front and battlefront begins to blur; the violence of war was far from the exclusive province of the military.

FREDERICKSBURG, VA: NURSES AND OFFICERS OF THE U. S. SANITARY COMMISSION

Historians have vigorously debated the impact of this dissent and division upon Confederate survival and military effectiveness--most specifically on desertion rates and economic productivity. But these discussions have for the most part overlooked a critical characteristic of the southern home front: if four out of five white men of military age were absent in the army, the Confederate home front was overwhelmingly a world of white women and slaves. How might the recognition of this fact change our understanding both of the home front experience and of its relationship to war's outcome? Louisa Walton reported that her South Carolina community had by 1862 been "thinned out of men." Margaret Junkin Preston of Lexington, Virginia described "a world of femininity with a thin line of boys and octogenarians." In Shelby County, Alabama, 1600 of 1800 white males were in the army. What was the significance of such demographic shifts?

The burgeoning literature on southern women and the war has introduced new perspectives into the consideration of the southern home front. While scholars have explored the relationship of women's actions to the compelling issue of Confederate defeat, they have not confined their analysis to the issue of women's impact on the war. Equally significant has been an investigation of how the war affected women and gender roles more broadly. What were the consequences, to use the words of one Confederate female, of women's "trying to do a man's business" in response to war's exigencies? As women took up men's responsibilities, managing farms and plantations, working for remuneration for the first time, providing their own support, their understandings of themselves were profoundly challenged. In a study of Augusta, Georgia, LeeAnn Whites re-frames the Civil War as a "crisis in gender," noting that definitions of manhood and womanhood were profoundly destabilized by the conflict. Whites believes the power of southern masculinity to have been ultimately reinstated in war's aftermath, but she, like a number of other historians, describes a rethinking of gender categories and a new understanding of their mutability among women of the postwar South.

During the war, southern white women of the poorer classes of necessity undertook an unprecedented level of physically demanding agricultural labor. In search of support for their families, many toiled for the Confederate Clothing Bureau, sewing uniforms for a paltry wage, thirty cents for an entire shirt, for example. Arsenal workers in Augusta made cartridges for a dollar a day. In Richmond, forty female ordnance workers were killed in an 1863 explosion; fifteen died in similar circumstances in Jackson, Mississippi. By the last years of the war, munitions workers in Richmond had become so dissatisfied and desperate they struck for higher wages. Ladies of the privileged ranks confronted new work responsibilities as well. Some few found themselves sometimes forced into the fields; more often, they assumed new duties managing slaves, or entering the workforce as teachers, government employees or hospital matrons, areas of southern life all but closed to women in the prewar years. In the fall of 1862, the Confederate Congress authorized women to serve officially in Confederate hospitals because wards managed by females demonstrated far lower mortality rates. Yet only a few respectable middle or upper class women worked as matrons or nurses. Caring for mens' bodies seemed demeaning and indelicate; most of the more privileged females supervised the wards or visited the sick while slaves or poorer white women bandaged, bathed and fed the soldiers. Many white women were compelled by the war to seek remunerative work for the first time. Teaching seemed an obvious prospect because of women's traditional nurturing roles. Northern women had flocked to classrooms in the prewar years, but no similar development had taken place in the South. In North Carolina in 1860, for example, only 7% of teachers were women. By the end of the war, there were as many females as males in the classroom. For the most part, however, white southern women of the middle and upper classes regarded their new roles as necessity, not opportunity; no rhetoric of liberation or empowerment accompanied these shifts. George Rable has described white women's experience as "change without change." In my own work, I have portrayed white southern women after Appomattox simultaneously frightened about continuing dependence on defeated and seemingly unreliable white men, yet at the same time eager to retreat from wartime's burdens of independence.

Race played a critical role in resolving these contradictions and influencing white women to embrace a reinstatement of patriarchy. The advantages of whiteness and the protections of femininity remained too precious to abandon. War's most trying burden for white women of the slaveholding classes had proved to be its transfer of responsibility for managing slaves onto their shoulders. When white men departed for war, Confederate women assumed the duty of controlling the region's four million slaves. Despite an ideology that celebrated slaves' loyalty and docility, white women expressed profound anxieties about the possibility of slave insurrection and violence. "I fear the blacks more than I do the Yankees," a Mississippi woman declared. Virginian Ellen Moore complained that in her husband's absence her slaves "all think that I am a kind of usurper and have no authority over them." Indeed, a federal officer reported that slaves who fled to Union lines shared her sentiments: "They said there was nobody on the plantations but women and children and they were not afraid of them." Living with slavery in wartime, one Virginia woman observed, was "living with enemies in our own households."

Many white women found the daily acts of coercion and domination slavery required at odds with their understandings of themselves as females. Slaves clearly perceived this crisis of authority and confronted women's doubts, uncertainties and inexperience as managers with enhanced assertiveness and resistance. The difficulties of controlling slaves in the changed wartime environment led many white women to regard the institution as more trouble than benefit. As Sarah Kennedy of Tennessee declared in 1863, she "would rather do all the work rather than be worried with a house full of servants that do what, how and when they please." Their experiences as slave managers seriously eroded their support for the purposes of the war.

The ineffectiveness of many white women in what they and their slaves saw as the essentially contradictory role of female masters played an important part in the disintegration of the peculiar institution in the Confederate South. A vigorous recent historical debate has focused on the question of how freedom came. Expressed most starkly, the question is whether Lincoln freed the slaves by government action or whether the slaves freed themselves through thousands of acts of flight, rebellion and resistance that ultimately destroyed the system from within. What seems to me most striking about this debate is not so much the controversy, but the broad agreement on both sides about the powerful impact of slaves' agency in the Civil War South. No one in this debate embraces a notion of slave loyalty and docility; all agree that the institution of slavery was in considerable upheaval behind Confederate lines. This consensus is critical to our conception of the Confederate home front, for it offers an image of profound disruption, dissension and conflict at the heart of the wartime social order. The Civil War took place not just on the battlefield, not just on the home front between different classes of whites, but even within slave owning households--between women and their servants, between owners and their supposed property within the context of everyday life. From the slaves who smothered their mistress, to those who put salt in the coffee or refused to work on Saturdays or after sundown, to those who fled to freedom or to Union military service, African Americans in the wartime South embraced means of claiming new roles for themselves and of undermining the Confederate social order. Slaves did not rise in open revolt, as had been the case in Saint-Domingue during the French Revolution. "Whenever possible," Vincent Harding has written, they "avoided the deadly prospects of massive, sustained confrontation for their ultimate objective was freedom, not martyrdom." They were, in the words of South Carolina Civil War diarist Mary Chesnut, "biding their time," waiting for means and opportunity for liberation. But we should not underestimate the violence that their efforts to claim freedom produced. Although we can offer numbers that at least approximately quantify the extent of the war's military casualties--620,000--we will never be able to describe civilian death rates with even this precision. But I am constantly struck as I read manuscript materials from the Confederacy by the incidences of violence arising from the conflict over slavery within the South--on its farms and plantations. Some masters shot slaves to keep them from joining the Union army or, in fits of rage, beat female slaves to death after their husbands had fled. For their part, slaves on at least one plantation banded together to give a cruel master a whipping like the ones they had so long endured. The fear and actuality of racial violence were a central component of life on the Confederate home front--not in the form of organized insurrection, but in innumerable day-to-day atrocities arising from the determination of blacks to be free and of whites to prevent them from achieving their goal. These conflicts remind us as well that in an important sense there existed separate black and white home fronts in the South. While one race faced profound challenge to its power, its assumptions, its very existence, the other could regard war's disruptions as opportunity.

Work on the northern home front has been more diffuse and less abundant than this recent outpouring of writing about the Confederacy. In considerable measure, this is because war was less of a presence in northern society: a smaller proportion of men left home to fight; a smaller proportion of the north's resources were expended on the war; enemy troops did not for the most part march across northern soil. As a result, it is more difficult to identify shared wartime experiences or to produce generalizations about war's impact at home.

One outcome of this dilemma is that some of the best recent work on northern wartime society has taken the form of community studies, explorations where a town or city becomes the organizing framework for looking at war. There have also been community studies of southern locales--Daniel Sutherland's on Culpeper County, Virginia; Wayne Durrill on Washington County, North Carolina, for example--but the community study offers a particularly valuable analytic perspective on northern society, for it enables the historian to explore dimensions of life that continued apart from war's influence as well as the impact of the conflict itself. Yet these studies have so far not offered a consistent portrait of what war meant in the North, despite the rich detail they offer about day-to-day lives. Matthew Gallman, for example, argues for little significant change as a result of the war in Philadelphia; Theodore Karamanski sees Chicago "forever transformed." A huge expansion in the meat packing industry--to supply army needs--revolutionized Chicago's labor market and political structures, as well as the lives of city residents for decades to come. Phillip Paludan has argued that the North's war experience must be conceptualized in terms of communities because "northerners had learned the meaning of self-government in these small places" and it was thus for the survival of these cherished communities--and for that of America as democracy's "last best hope on earth"--that northerners fought.

Unlike most southerners, many northerners were not called upon to confront the economic hardships that characterized the Confederate South. Agriculture, which employed 3,500,000 of the North's 5,000,000 workers in 1860, flourished during the conflict. As Paludan notes, "economically the war brought most farmers the best years of their lives." The departure of men for the army raised wages of agricultural laborers, encouraged more rapid mechanization, such as further spread of the reaper, and increased the responsibilities of northern, like southern, women for the day to day labor of farming. The demands for foodstuffs from the army and from the North's growing urban population generated significant increases in market involvement, and rural families found themselves by war's end much more tied to the commercial economy. The Homestead Act of 1862 opened millions of acres of new farmland to upwardly and westwardly mobile settlers, seemingly affirming the Union's commitment to the independent yeoman and to the ideals of free labor.

The experience of the North's industrial laborers was more bleak. Industrial workers served in the army at a high rate, and although their families received military bounties and wages from absent men, many women and children faced hardships in the context of the war's inflationary economy. Most wartime workers experienced an actual decline in their standard of living, a decrease that was even sharper for women laborers than for men, and more dramatic for unskilled than skilled laborers. Tens of thousands of children were drawn into the workforce as well to help replace manpower lost to the war. Although deprivation was neither as widespread nor as intense as in the Confederate South, many on the northern home front, especially in urban areas, also suffered as a result of the war. By 1865, for example, the city of Philadelphia had meted out $2.6 million in an effort to provide support for needy soldiers' families.

Such pressures contributed to growing labor activism, thousands of strikes and many new unions. But the opportunity to stigmatize resisting workers with charges of disloyalty and hindrance of the war effort enhanced the power of owners who were already benefitting from the consolidation of business and wealth encouraged by the war. Much of the intensification of class conflict that resulted from these transformations would not make its appearance until the labor battles of the 1870s and after, but the North did not escape the wartime fissures that rent southern society. Conscription became a focus of much of this conflict, for the slogan "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight" took on special resonance in the context of the economic shifts I have described. The most dramatic manifestations of these divisions were, of course, the New York City draft riots of July 1863. Beginning with an attack on draft offices and upon the wealthy who could escape conscription by paying a commutation fee, the rioters soon redirected their hostility toward black New York, murdering African Americans and burning an orphanage to the ground. As Phillip Paludan has written, "These were the people at the bottom of New York City's society, angered by their suffering, fearful of further inroads on their lives, resentful of both those above them, whose money protected them, and those below them, who seemed potential beneficiaries of the war now that emancipation was a goal. Suffering, envy, hatred, all served to spark the uprising." In the North, as in the South, war brought to the surface deep-seated hostilities of both race and class.

Although the northern home front did not display the same sort of demographic shift toward female predominance as did the South, northern women's lives were also profoundly changed by the war. In a two-volume History of Woman Suffrage, published in 1882, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage hailed the war as transformative. "The social and political condition of women was largely changed by our Civil War," they wrote. "In large measure," they explained, it was because war "created a revolution in woman herself."

One of the areas of women's participation that has gained most attention in this regard was nursing. In the South, most women who entered hospital work during the war were erstwhile volunteers or visitors, rather than long-term salaried hospital workers, and their labors were more likely to prove a temporary extension of the domain of nurturant domesticity than a lasting transgression of conventional gender boundaries. Northern nurses, by contrast, were more likely to use their wartime experiences as a foundation for a new sense of self and vocation. In the North, the war provided a catalyst for women's advancement into both professional nursing and medicine. The lives of Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix exemplify this northern pattern, one which leads historian Elizabeth Leonard to conclude that northern nurses "trespassed en masse into the 'public sphere,"' and became "wielders of a new kind of institutional power previously hoarded by men."

Women's wartime activism in the North grew directly out of prewar traditions of reform and focused on a variety of goals: abolition, first and foremost; Lincoln's reelection, female suffrage, and philanthropic efforts for soldiers and their families. As with studies of white southern women, however, the question remains of how empowering and transformative these undertakings proved. Matthew Gallman's study of Philadelphia shows women engaged in a broadening array of benevolent efforts, but he does not see a concomitant rise in their authority. In larger organizations, women volunteers tended to labor under male directors. Lori Ginzberg's study of northern wartime benevolence identifies gender conflicts between male and female philanthropists. She concludes that an older female style of benevolence was replaced by a masculine gospel of charitable efficiency that eclipsed not just female values but women themselves.

Despite Stanton, Anthony and Gage's triumphant assessment, the legacy of war for northern women seems ultimately to have been mixed. The attention of these nineteenth-century writers was, we should note, in any case directly--almost exclusively--to the meaning of the war in the lives of middle-class women like themselves, and so they took little account of working women pressured by war's economic circumstances. Women regarded work as a burden rather than an opportunity and swelled the ranks of the North's manufacturing labor force during the conflict. But even for the ranks of more privileged women who were their subjects, Stanton, Anthony and Gage may have been overly optimistic. As Elizabeth Leonard recently concluded, the northern "gender system in the end demonstrated remarkable rigidity at its core." Yet its rigidity, its resistance to change, was not as great as in the South; wartime experiences of middle-class northern women encouraged many to imagine the possibility of different lives, as the postwar entry of women into medicine attests. Stanton and Anthony may in fact have derived their triumphalism from their own first-hand knowledge of the impact of war's democratic ferment upon the movement for woman suffrage. Although they would be bitterly disappointed when the fifteenth Amendment enfranchised black men but not white women, Stanton and Anthony believed that the foundation for women's ultimate success in achieving the vote was assured by the victory of the ideologies of citizenship and human rights for which the North fought.

The centrality of gender to war's meaning for the North has assumed an additional dimension in recent work on masculinity, on the way soldiers defined themselves and their purposes in relationship to a "female domestic sphere." The home was critical, Reid Mitchell has argued, to the soldier's motivation to fight and to his understanding of himself; just before the battle he thought not of politics or God or death, Mitchell believes, but mother. Here we have another rendering of a theme we have seen throughout our considerations of home front North and South: the profound and abiding connections between home and battlefront, the way the two can blur in the context of Civil War experience. This was certainly true for many civilians, particularly southerners, whose homes and farms became battlefields--like Wilmer McLean who hosted the First Battle of Manassas, the first major conflict of the war, on his northern Virginia farm in 1861, then moved South to Appomattox to entertain Grant and Lee in his parlor four years later. Home and battlefront seem to merge as well in the incidences of serious conflict and violence amongst civilians distant from war's front lines. In draft riots in the North, food riots in the South, in the erupting tensions of a disintegrating slave system, hostilities and violent confrontation moved beyond the battlefield both to enlist and victimize civilians. And battle and home front joined as well in the close links of influence and motivation that tied them together. Men enlisted to protect women or deserted for the same end. Soldiers fought for homes and communities which in turn became an overarching rationale for commitment and sacrifice.

Yet our understanding of what we call the "home front" remains partial and incomplete. Dozens of topics that would enhance our understanding of the war have been overlooked entirely or are only beginning to be explored. Let me speak of two such neglected dimensions of life central to nineteenth-century Americans--North and South--and central to their experience of Civil War. The first is religion. Both the Union and the Confederacy believed that God was on its side. Religion was at the heart of the soldiers' reasons for fighting and their consolations for dying; it was a foundation of strength for civilians sacrificing their loved ones to the cause; it was a motivation for slaves struggling for the Day of Jubilee. The language of the war was cast in religious metaphor, as both sides worried about God's chastening hand. Yet as three prominent scholars recently observed, "the religious history of the war has yet to be written." A recent collection of essays about religion and the Civil War is designed as an invitation to further research and inquiry, for this is a topic both military and home front historians need to understand far better. It is also another example of a force linking the civilian with the military experience and reaching across any division between home and battlefront.

The second area I want just to mention is the focus of my own current research: the subject of death in the Civil War. With such an enormous rate of death in the army, nearly all Americans were touched by the war's impact. Indeed, death may have been the most powerful Civil War reality for many Americans. Obviously it was so for those who actually died, but for survivors as well, the deaths of loved ones, comrades, neighbors may have proved the most powerfully felt of all the Civil War's experiences. I think we need to know far more about the meaning of this slaughter for the generation that lived through it. And as I have already suggested, it seems to me highly probable that we have seriously underestimated the number of civilian deaths that resulted from the war. Contagious diseases brought to cities and towns by encamped troops killed more than just soldiers; the disruptions of slavery brought the kinds of violence and retribution I have already described; the irregular warfare of the conflict may well have been, as Daniel Sutherland is beginning to show, far more extensive than we have heretofore imagined.

The Civil War home front offers rich opportunities for historical research and exploration which scholars are investigating in growing numbers and with increasing sophistication. The studies of the decade to come are likely to enhance our understanding at least as greatly as those of the decade just past. And as we understand more about the home front, we will be compelled to reconfigure our assumptions about the battlefront as well, for, as I have tried to suggest here, the division between the two in a conflict like the American Civil War is often arbitrary. Both battle and home front played a significant role in the outcome of the war and in the experience of every one of war's participants.

Suggestions for further reading:

Ash, Stephen. When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

Attie, Jeanie. Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Blair, William. Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Berlin, Ira and Leslie Rowland, eds., Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era. New York: New Press, 1997.

Berlin, Ira. et al., Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War. New York: New Press, 1992.

Bernstein, Iver. The New York City Draft Riots. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Campbell, Edward D.C. and Kym Rice. A Woman's War: Southern Women, Civil War, and the Confederate Legacy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996.

Clinton, Catherine and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Durrill, Wayne K. War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion. New York: Oxford, 1990.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Fellman, Michael. Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Gallman, J. Matthew. Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

_______. The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1994.

Ginzberg, Lori D. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth Century. United States. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Karamanski, Theodore. Rally Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1993.

Leonard, Elizabeth. Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. New York: Norton, 1994.

Marten, James. The Children's Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Miller, Randall M., Harry S. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Mitchell, Reid. The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Paludan, Phillip Shaw. A People's Contest: The Union and Civil War. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Rable, George. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Sutherland, Daniel E., ed., Guerrillas, Unionists and Violence on the Confederate Home Front. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999.

Sutherland, Daniel E. Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861-1865. New York: Free Press, 1995.

Whites, LeeAnn. The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.