Civil War History

While visiting Gettysburg National Military Park in 1899, a small group of the Iowa Woman’s Relief Corps (WRC) broke away from its delegation to visit the home and gravesite of Mary Virginia “Jennie” Wade. Wade was the only recorded civilian casualty during the Battle of Gettysburg and sister of prominent Iowa WRC leader, Georgianna “Georgia” Wade McClellan.¹ Despite several attempts by Pennsylvanians living outside of Gettysburg, little had been done to memorialize Wade in the thirty-six years since her death. Astounded that nothing honored “the heroine who gave her life for her country,” Iowa WRC member Margaret Hinman proclaimed, “a monument ought to mark her resting place,” and “Iowa women ought to be the first to move in this matter.”² Fellow Iowa WRC members agreed, and in September 1901 they gathered in Gettysburg’s Evergreen Cemetery to unveil the modest monument they had erected in Wade’s memory. Northerners rarely constructed monuments to Union women; therefore, the Jennie Wade Monument is a rare example of not only a monument commemorating a Northern woman but also—and even more extraordinary—a monument campaign led by Northern women. [End Page 373]

While historians have examined Wade’s death, less attention has been paid to the efforts to commemorate her.³ Gettysburg residents’ reluctance to commemorate Wade and Iowa women’s eagerness, however, illuminate the complexities of commemoration. The Gettysburg community renounced Wade because some believed she had failed to obey rigid nineteenth-century gender roles, therefore marking herself as unworthy of remembrance. Historian Margaret Creighton skillfully demonstrates how Gettysburg women resented the attention paid to Wade at the expense of their own wartime service.⁴ While Creighton’s scholarship is largely focused on Pennsylvania, the Iowa WRC devoted a great deal of time and money to the Jennie Wade Monument at a moment when Iowa veterans were erecting numerous monuments to their military service in the western theater. Capitalizing on Iowa’s association with McClellan and Mc-Clellan’s connection to Wade and therefore Gettysburg, the Iowa WRC enthusiastically commemorated Wade to bring recognition to Iowa women’s work for the Union cause and its remembrance. Fighting in the western theater during the war, Iowa’s troops were not present at the Battle of Gettysburg, but through the Jennie Wade Monument, the Iowa WRC celebrated Iowa at the famed battle site. The Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) often obscured Northern women’s wartime contributions, but Iowa veterans did not block efforts to erect the Jennie Wade Monument because the monument did not compete with any Iowa GAR-sponsored monuments.⁵ Iowa WRC women’s efforts to commemorate Wade reveal that place and region affected how Northerners decided who was deemed worthy of commemoration in the Civil War North.

The monument to Wade was one of few—and perhaps the first—successful WRC-sponsored monuments to Northern women.⁶ The Northern public infrequently [End Page 374] celebrated Northern women’s contributions to the Union, and “on the whole, women’s war work was relegated to a footnote” in Civil War remembrances.⁷ There were a few notable exceptions, however. In 1863, Pennsylvanians placed a commemorative tablet listing the female victims who had died the previous year in the Allegheny Arsenal explosion. Similarly, in 1865 a monument was erected at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC, to commemorate the twenty women who died in the 1864 Washington Arsenal fire. Despite these token commemorations honoring Northern women’s war work and sacrifice, historian Judith Giesberg notes the dominant trend was toward forgetting rather than remembering the catastrophes that effectively blurred the line between home and battle fronts.⁸

Likewise, the WRC seldom sponsored monuments of any kind, let alone those aimed at honoring Northern women. Historian Nina Silber argues that when the Tennessee department expressed interest in erecting a memorial to Northern women in 1896, its members “agreed to forgo a monument . . . because their main work, they believed, had to focus on ‘the needy veteran and his family.’”⁹ Silber contends the Tennessee WRC’s decision signifies that...