Civil War History

Stephanie McCurry grew up in a Belfast, Northern Ireland, war zone, realizing then and after that women were “never just witnesses to war” (2). As such, she “cannot recognize histories of war that leave women out” (xi). In Women’s War, McCurry uses three case studies to bring Southern women to center stage in the Civil War era. In doing so, she brilliantly shows the ways women made that war and that war made them.

In the strongest chapter in the book, which revises and expands a 2017 Law and Society article on the subject, McCurry examines Southern women’s intense and persistent involvement in the Civil War—among other actions, spying, cutting telegraph wires, stealing supplies, and taking up arms, as well as by supporting their men by demanding men be men. Women’s wartime activities forced Union authorities to revise the prevailing assumptions about their supposed passivity and innocence, which warranted their protection during war, to consider women as political beings capable of independent judgment, action, and responsibility. All this led to drafting Lieber’s Code in 1863, which provided instructions for the conduct of armies and became the template for later codes of war in the Western world. By McCurry’s accounting, Gen. Henry Halleck was the principal mover in revising the code of war, for in facing women and supposed noncombatants engaged in acts of war during his time in bloody Missouri, he realized that old [End Page 66] concepts of treason and respect for noncombatants made no sense. In the Lieber Code that followed, the distinctions between combatant and noncombatant were virtually erased and loyalty tests became the determinant of one’s status and whatever protection one might deserve in war. To be sure, as McCurry notes, Southern women’s wartime roles and their new status in the military code faded from memory as a Lost Cause mythology of women at home sacrificing for their men and a noble cause put Southern white women back on a pedestal, but the facts of women’s war, as reflected in the code, provide the true narrative.

McCurry provides another example of women’s place in war by tracking the emancipation experience of black women during the war, as they left their bondage for the seeming protection and freedom of Union army camps. Many did so to follow their husbands, but others seized the moment of war to make their own run to liberty, often with their children. Such actions forced the Union army to grapple with definitions of enslaved people’s status and the army’s obligation to them. This first led to the army and the Congress describing such people as contraband of war—a word whose definition hinged on them as property rather than persons— but soon led to recognizing them as persons by demanding from them work and, for the men, military service. But women posed a problem, for the presumption of their dependence meant they could only get support by being espoused to a man who served in the army or otherwise actively worked for the Union cause. Marriage thus became critical to gain refuge and support; this had the effect of the army and government encouraging and recognizing marriage as essential to black freedom and to an orderly, Christian society. The army moved women and children to work on loyal and abandoned plantations or to do other tasks, so their “dependence” was not dependence at all, but the assumption of such stuck. Although McCurry does not much explore it, that practical necessity of marriage also met black peoples’ own interests, as many wanted legally recognized marriage—as a respecter of their own wishes, a means of protecting their children, and channel granting access to the law. The irony in this was that as black men and women effected a social revolution by their actions, that revolution in some ways conserved prevailing social concepts, framing women...