Civil War & Reconstructon

Since the 1990s, two themes have emerged in the historiography of Black women and slave emancipation. The first theme centers on how Black women negotiated the transition to freedom under a variety of competing influences. The second theme centers on the violence that Black women experienced in their transition to freedom. Although numerous books have been devoted to examining the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on former slaves, very few provide a comparative regional perspective of Black women’s experiences.

Thavolia Glymph’s The Women’s Fight: The Civil War Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020) is the most recent study to provide an analysis of what the war meant for Black and White women in the North and South. Glymph’s work is a part of a larger historiography that has attempted to move gender to the forefront of our understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Earlier studies by Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me (2014), and Hannah Rosen, Terror in the Heart of Freedom (2009), which both examine gender and violence, have demonstrated that freedwomen laid claim to full and equal citizenship, to their own conceptions of womanhood, and to access to public spaces that had previously been denied them.

Emancipation in the United States stretched over a century from the revolutionary war to the end of the Civil War.   This period was punctuated by intermediate struggles for freedom before the Civil War and more struggles to define and claim the freedom promised after the official end of slavery.    Black women used the chaos of the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War to forge alternative and expanded paths to self-liberation.   Black women figured prominently in this “long emancipation” as they developed resistance strategies to challenge enslavement.   Enslaved women malingered, feigned illness, destroyed property, committed infanticide and suicide and escaped slavery to undermine the system.   Given that the woods, swamps, and slave cabins were spaces where the enslaved could exercise more autonomy than the fields and other open spaces on the plantation, bonded men had more autonomy than bond women because the latter were more confined to the plantation.  Although men comprised the majority of runaways and truants, women were also truants and truancy facilitators, providing food and information, which served to make these two forms of resistance individual and collective at the same time.  

Enslaved women faced “formidable obstacles to freedom: limited mobility, little knowledge of geography, and concern for loved ones, further complicated by the encumbrances of escaping with young children.”  Despite these obstacles, women such as Margaret Garner and Harriet Tubman fled slavery while managing family attachments in complex and innovative ways.   Beyond plantations, women escaped from presidents and statesmen.  They escaped to cities and towns, North and South; they fled poverty, wealth, benevolence, and malevolence alike.  As historian Cheryl LaRoche has argued, “although the constraints that kept women mired in captivity are well documented, their strategies for overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles to freedom are not.”

Black women initiated their own liberation amid disparate circumstances.  Mothers who fled took extreme risks, fleeing with young children in the middle of the night and walking for days until reaching Union lines. Mothers who were desperate to leave abandoned their children in the most vulnerable circumstances.  A Virginian recalled her older sister, who “had a baby boy that she left behind with a daughter who had been used so bad it made her crazy.  While her mother was gone the baby died.”  Women who reached the Union lines found cruel and deadly conditions.  Union soldiers abused fugitive men, women, and children in every conceivable way.  Women were raped, children died of hunger, and men worked without pay.  Soldiers often offered ready assistance to slaveowners trying to locate their missing property, while generals barred the entrance of fugitives into Union lines altogether.

Source: Cook Bell, Karen, “Black Women, Agency, and the Civil War, Black Perspectives, September 22, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/black-women-agency-and-the-civil-war/