Confederate Reckoning

The Confederacy began to draft men for the war effort in the spring of 1861, the first draft in American history. This draft justified the widespread belief that the government had an obligation to protect soldiers’ families. The voices of women and claims of their sacrifices were often invoked, even required, in petitions toward officials asking for relief from and exemptions to the draft. The number of letters and petitions for women asking for relief from the draft increased after 1861. McCurry suggests this was the beginning of a new way poor white women interacted with the state, where instead of identifying themselves as just, for example, “a poor wife,” they began to consciously assert themselves as “soldiers’ wives” (145).

While poor and working-class women asked for protection through relief from the military draft, elite women demanded protection from their families’ own enslaved laborers. However, they identified themselves through their husbands’ surnames, not as soldiers’ wives. Their position as members of the ruling class entitled them protection, while poorer white women had to rely on their identity as soldier’s wives, arguing that because they had sacrificed their husbands and sons to the war effort, they had a right to protection and state support. Nonetheless, unlike the North where the Civil War galvanized the campaign to expand women’s rights led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, there was no such movement in the CSA.

Women were, in fact, more impacted by conscription in the CSA than in the United States. Seventy percent of Northern conscripts were unmarried men (152), but the Confederacy made almost no exceptions: “The women who described a rural landscape literally stripped of men who did not exaggerate” (152). Further, women living under the Confederacy faced a state that was more powerful and more involved in their personal lives than any other government that existed before in the United States. Besides conscription, the CSA also expanded their bureaucracy to collect taxes, employing a class of tax collectors called “TIK men.” The CSA’s taxes depended on “the infamous one-tent tax or tithe…which required citizens to surrender one-tenth of everything grown and raised on their farms and plantations beyond what was required for subsistence” (155). Also, the government practiced impressment, the practice of confiscating property in exchange for cash or government bonds.

The larger, more complicated government was difficult to handle, with women petitioning state governors only to be told they needed to write to the War Department. Officials had to inform citizens which of the new government departments to consult. While elite women continued to use family connections to get what they wanted out of the government, poor white women actively developed strategies to deal with the government. Such women found and communicated with each other successful ways to call upon government officials and used each other to back up their petitions. They often addressed letters and petitions to state governors. Poor white women even wrote to federal officials, including President Davis and the Confederate Secretary of War, although such appeals were less successful.

Because poor and working-class white Southerners typically relied on farming for their survival, the absence of men from the home caused serious economic hardship for the wives left behind. Their husbands and sons were away fighting in the war, and they could not afford enslaved labor. Many of these women were aware of the class dynamics underlying the draft. One North Carolina “soldier’s wife,” Martha Coletrane, criticized conscription policies for being shaped by elite enslavers, who benefited from exemptions for those who held political office or oversaw more than 20 enslaved people. Modern historians have argued that Confederate policies “cannibalized” (167) regional economies, a view reinforced by the letters written by soldiers’ wives. Soldiers’ wives also complained about speculators, who would not take Confederate currency and sold food and essential goods at high prices.

Such treatment by speculators and officials led women to accuse the rich of using the war to impoverish the poor further and take their land. Anger from women exploded in the form of food riots, which occurred across the Confederacy in the spring of 1863. Demands for justice in North Carolina culminated in a petition to the governor signed by 522 women, requiring significant political organization. Women’s letters to officials also sometimes took a more violent form, threatening some violence or God’s wrath. Women threatened mill owners or attacked them in groups. One letter sent to the governor of North Carolina threatened that a group of women, calling themselves the Regulators, would steal corn unless it was sold at a fair price, and a year later the Regulators were arrested for stealing food from a government warehouse in Bladensboro, North Carolina.