Unruly Women by Victoria E. Bynum

Author:Victoria E. Bynum [Bynum, Victoria E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780807843611
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 1992-05-18T00:00:00+00:00

Six

“The Women Is as Bad as the Men”

Women’s Participation in the Inner Civil War

Writing on December 28, 1864, to her brother, newspaper editor Marmaduke S. Robins, Easter Robins mentioned in passing that a neighbor, Nathan York, having been denied an exemption from Confederate service, had declared that “he [would] not go [into the army] untill they come after him.”1 Such news would hardly have surprised editor Robins. By late 1864 fully two-thirds of North Carolina’s enlisted soldiers were reported absent without leave. By the war’s end, the state had contributed one-fourth of the Confederacy’s total 103, 400 deserters and one-sixth to one-seventh of the total number of men who served.2 North Carolina had the highest number of deserters of any southern state, and the greatest concentration of these disloyal men hailed from Easter Robins’s own county of Randolph. There, desertion rates over the course of the Civil War averaged 22.8 percent, compared to a state average of 12.2 percent.3

The ambivalence of the state’s citizens and political leaders toward disunion—manifested by North Carolina’s late entry into the Confederacy—has long been recognized by historians, although most have dismissed Unionist sentiment within the state as temporary and quickly dissipated by President Lincoln’s call for troops to put down the insurrection at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.4 More recent work, however, emphasizes that opposition and, later, outright disloyalty to the Confederacy were rooted in long-standing political, economic, regional, and cultural divisions among the people of North Carolina that remained strong during and after the war.5 The inner civil war that erupted between 1863 and 1865 in the North Carolina Piedmont reflected a tension between yeoman and planter society that had long existed throughout the South. The large number of nonslaveholding farmers in North Carolina’s western half, coupled with its unusual degree of ethnic and religious diversity, heightened the explosive potential of this division.6

The participation of women in North Carolina’s inner civil war has received only scattered attention, although women altered the balance of power between Confederate and Unionist men and their behavior sharply contradicted traditional notions about the “natural” timidity and deference of their sex. Indeed, in their struggle to protect the traditional order of their communities, many North Carolina women displayed a striking level of untraditional disorderliness. They clearly preferred to join the struggle that divided community and state rather than become its victims. The intensity of the confrontation left men little choice but to welcome aggressive behavior from female kinfolk and friends. This was particularly true of disloyal men, who depended on the willingness of women to act in a manner commonly thought unrefined, even “degraded,” for their sex.

An anonymous North Carolinian heralded the contribution of “bold” women to southern Unionism in the following lines of a poem sent to Governor Zebulon Vance:

Then chiear up you Union ladies bold

For you[r] courige must be told

How youv withstood abuses

When your property they’d take

The witty ansers you would make

That would vanish their rude forces.7

Women, this writer recognized, had held their own very well on the “front

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