African American Women's Activism during the Civil War

This poster will highlight Northern Black women’s work on the home front during the Civil War to show how they tailored their activism to changing political climates. Northern aid societies are rich sites for this endeavor; my poster will, therefore, center Black women’s relief societies, charities, and sanitary commissions during the Civil War and explore how this cataclysmic event shaped their public roles, as they directed their domestic labors to aid Colored Troops and displaced Black Southerners. There are numerous African American women’s societies that remain understudied in Civil War historiography; The Colored Women’s Sanitary Commission, Women’s Central Branch Freedmen’s Relief Association, Colored Soldiers’ Aid Society of Chicago, and the Ladies Union Bazaar Association are some of groups that deserve scholarly attention. I hope to uncover the often forgotten lives and labors of the women involved in these groups.

This poster will serve as a visual version of my current research, which analyzes the ways African American women wielded domestic labor as a form of political engagement. Black women raised funds, gathered supplies, and formed sewing circles, creating regimental flags as well as other cloth-based needs. Knowing that the products of their handiwork would be displayed and waved as a symbol of freedom, these women affirmed their citizenship with each stitch, laying claim to a status that the troubled nation was yet to grant them. Because many of these women were active in anti-slavery movements prior to the war, I will create a social network map to show how women’s connections sustained collective, political action. Activists in their own right, Sarah Mapps Douglass, Charlotte Augustus Burroughs Ray, and Malvina Barnet Smith took the reins in relief work, thriving outside the auspices of abolition and anti-slavery groups dominated by white leadership. This map will also reveal their personal ties to well-known historical figures such as Frederick Douglass, Robert Purvis, and James McCune Smith. Often, the prominence of these men obscures the labors of their wives, daughters, and female relatives, and such ties have come to identify these women. However, my goal in creating a social network visualization is to disclose how female friendship formed and preserved a number of aid societies and sanitary commissions largely without the need for male support, thus these women asserted themselves as independent, political agents.

Lastly, my poster will feature the material production of African American women. Elite Black women’s friendship albums from Philadelphia contain their artistic and literary expressions of friendship and reveal women’s personal investment in each other that animated their relief groups during the war. I will also include letters of thanks from Colored Troops and African American women’s sewn work, as they exemplify the intimacy between the home front and battlefront. By uncovering Northern African American women’s labors during the war and displaying material evidences, I hope to make a strong argument that Black women did not play a marginal role in the war effort; rather, they continued and bolstered their activism in the face of a momentous and dire national struggle.