Page 383 - American Stories, A History of the United States

15.1 Total 1,556,678
strength 1,082,119

15.2 24%
Death rate
23%

15.3 275,175
Wounded
nonmortally 100,000*
15.4
Died from 110,070
wounds
94,000*

Died from 249,458
disease
164,000* *Confederate figures represent accepted estimates.

Union Confederacy

fiGUre 15.2 casUaLties of war

During the war, northern women pushed the boundaries of their traditional roles
by participating on the home front as fund-raisers and in the rear lines as army nurses
sanitary commission An and members of the Sanitary Commission. The Sanitary Commission promoted
association chartered by the health in the northern army’s camps through attention to cleanliness, nutrition, and
government during the Civil War medical care. Northern women simultaneously utilized their traditional position as
to promote health in the northern
army’s camps through cleanliness, nurturers to participate in the war effort while they advanced new ideas about their
nutrition, and medical care. role in society. The many who had served as nurses or volunteer workers during the
war were especially responsive to calls for broadening “the woman’s sphere.” Some
northern women who were prominent in wartime service organizations led postwar
philanthropic and reform movements. The war did not destroy the traditional barri-
ers to sexual equality in American society, but women’s efforts during the Civil War
broadened beliefs about what women could accomplish outside of the home.
The war had a different effect on white women in the Confederacy. Southern
women had always been involved in administering farms and plantations, but the
war forced them to shoulder even greater burdens. Wealthy plantation mistresses
had to run huge plantations without the benefit of extensive training or the assistance
of male relatives. Farmers’ wives found it hard to survive at all, especially at har-
vest time when they often had to do all the work themselves. The loss of fathers and
brothers, the advance of Union troops, and the difficulty of controlling a slave labor
force destroyed many southern women’s allegiance to the Confederate cause. As in
the North, the Civil War changed the situation of women in society. The devastation
of the southern economy forced many women to play a more conspicuous public and
economic role. They formed associations to assist returning soldiers, became teach-
ers, and established benevolent and reform societies or temperance organizations.
Although these changes created a more visible presence for southern women in pub-
lic, the South remained more conservative in its views about women’s “proper place”
than did the North.
At enormous human and economic cost, the nation had emancipated four mil-
lion African Americans from slavery, but it had not yet resolved that they would be
equal citizens. At the time of Lincoln’s assassination, most northern states still denied
blacks equality under the law and the right to vote. Whether the North would extend
more rights to southern freedmen than it had granted to “free Negroes” was an open
question.
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