Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

of the New Mexico territory in early 1862, a combined force of Federal regulars, Colorado militia, and a company of the mostly Hispanic 2nd New Mexico Volunteers under Lt. Col. Manuel Chavez faced the Texans at Glorieta Pass, on the Santa Fe Trail. Together, on March 28, 1862, the Anglo-Hispanic Union troops administered a thorough drubbing to the Texans, sinking Confederate hopes of western conquest beneath the sands of the New Mexico desert.33

Much to the surprise of those who thought that the Civil War would be “a white man’s war,” the conflict quickly broadened, by policy and by accident, to include a kaleidoscope of races and ethnic minorities, from Battery Wagner to Glorieta Pass. Each of these groups saw the confusion of civil war as a moment of opportunity, whether they had rights and respect to win or political agendas to build or merely scores to settle. None of them saw their hopes fully realized. What is remarkable is how the issues and battles of the Civil War made those hopes soar. “This is essentially a people’s contest,” Lincoln told Congress in 1861, a war that would justify confidence in what Lincoln’s Whig forerunner Daniel Webster had called “a popular government, erected by the people… responsible to the people” and “just as truly emanating from the people, as from the State governments.” In 1861, neither Lincoln nor his Congress could have dreamed of the ways in which many different kinds of American people were eager to claim a seat at that democracy’s table.

“THE LIVES WHICH WOMEN HAVE LED SINCE TROY”

For Virginia governor Henry Wise, the Union was like a marriage of man and woman. “It is with the Union of the States as it is with the union of matrimony,” Wise explained in 1860—in it, the husband must be “a good man, a good citizen, a good moralist,” and so long as his honor is not questioned by his wife, all within that marriage would be peace. The moment the wife challenged that authority, however, then “he will burst the bonds of union, as the burning Wythes were bursted by the vigorous limbs of the yet unshorn Nazarite.” Abraham Lincoln took precisely the opposite view. It was actually easier for a husband and wife to be divorced, because they could go out of each other’s sight, but the North and the South were bound together geographically in ways which made anything less than conjugal union impossible. To secessionists, “the Union, as a family relation, would not be anything like a regular marriage at all, but only as a sort of free-love arrangement.”34

If secession was equivalent to the disruption of a marriage, then civil war could hardly be less than the overthrow of gender itself. On Wise’s logic, divided Americans could not avoid some uncomfortable reflection on gender roles in American society, not just as symbol but as reality. A house divided was literally a house whose meanings and roles were now being contested, and each individual within this divided American household would feel the impact of that challenge in a different way. For Southern slaveholders such as Wise, authority and fatherhood were the prerogatives of men, and the threat posed first by John Brown, then by Lincoln, and then by the invading Yankee armies was really a threat to strip slaveholders of their “fatherhood” over their slaves and their families. For the black males whom Wise enslaved, it offered the opportunity to assert a manhood and fatherhood that slavery had denied them. And as American men struggled to define themselves in the midst of civil war, American women likewise found a fresh series of opportunities to question what gender roles meant in the ambiguous context of a liberal democracy.35

From time out of mind in European societies, adult males had been assigned the primary role of providers and leaders. The combined risks and necessities of biological reproduction limited the mobility of women and restricted them, with few exceptions, to the subordinate role of caring for children, performing gender-based “women’s work” (spinning, carding, butter making, sewing, making and mending clothes, storing and preparing food, making soap and candles, household cleaning), and yielding to the direction and authority of men. The twin dictatorship of tradition and biology gave husbands the role of command and women the role of support, and these were taken as verities from which no more appeal could be made than an appeal against the weather. In America, however, re-creating these ancient patterns of subordination, like the re-creation of other patterns of European social organization, had been neither easy nor straightforward. The disorientation and disorganization of migration frequently jumbled the boundaries of gender; on top of this, the turmoil of the Revolution and the Revolution’s appeal to an equality of natural rights over traditional hierarchy rendered unquestioned male control over women much less easy to assume and much less legitimate in America.36

Yet it would be a grave mistake to overestimate the independence of women in the new republic. “It is needful,” warned Catharine Beecher, the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, “that certain relations be sustained, which involve the duties of subordination.” That included “the relations of husband and wife, parent and child, teacher and pupil, employer and employed, each involving the relative duties of subordination.” Otherwise, “Society could never go forward, harmoniously, nor could any craft or profession be successfully pursued, unless these superior and subordinate relations be instituted and sustained.” American law continued to be guided by English common law until well into the nineteenth century, and under English common law, marriage very nearly meant the legal annihilation of a woman. Up to the point that an adult woman married, she suffered no special restrictions and could own property in the same way as men; once a woman was married, however, her property and property rights were automatically transferred to her husband, and she was permitted to own nothing in her own name. Married women could not make contracts, could not sue, could not write a will, and