“Never Has Anything Been More Deserved”: Union Women and Hard War Tactics in the Western Theatre

            This paper explores the views of Northern white women about the Union army’s “hard war” treatment of Southern civilians, particularly Confederate-sympathizing women in the western theatre. By 1862, as the army made significant incursions into the Confederacy (particularly along the Mississippi), it encountered widespread guerrilla resistance by Confederate civilians. In addition to communal punishment of communities suspected of harboring guerrillas, the Union army targeted Confederate-sympathizing women for banishment, arrest, and violence as part of its counter-guerrilla strategy.

            Scholars have developed sophisticated analyses of the ways that the Union military, soldiers, and politicians debated and ultimately endorsed hard war tactics against civilian white women. Other historians have focused on the ways that Southern women, themselves, expressed their loyalty to their Confederate male kin through active resistance to invading armies. This paper expands upon these areas by assessing the relationship between newly evolving tactics against southern women and the support or endorsement of those tactics by Northern women married to Union officers fighting in the South.

            Many northern elite women understood their role as wives to encompass the expression political and military opinions that if rendered in the aid of their husband’s public and professional objectives, represented a form of patriotic, nationalist action that nonetheless preserved traditional gender roles. Using personal correspondence and memoirs, this paper explores the ways that such Union women living in occupied territory or on the Northern home front understood, countenanced, or opposed the ways that the Union army treated Confederate-sympathizing women. It explains how northern wives conceived of the gendered consequences of disloyalty by Southern women through a military and/or political lens, and to explore some of the ways that these women shaped and shared their opinions—through newspaper reading, personal travel, correspondence with male kin, and discussions with women in similar circumstances.