Beyond the Outskirts of Civil War History

Abstract

Thirty years ago, historian Drew Gilpin Faust transformed Civil War history by using the experiences of women to answer one of the field’s most central questions. In an essay in the Journal of American History and then a few years later in her award-winning Mothers of Invention (1996), Faust connected the declining morale of slaveholding women to the ultimate defeat of the Confederate army. The Confederacy lost, she explained, because the white women who put themselves on “Altars of Sacrifice” (1990) to sustain it ultimately withdrew their support. Despite longstanding assumptions to the contrary, men, machinery, and troop movements could not explain everything. Throughout the 1990s, other scholars similarly argued that women were more than inconsequential spectators to or victims of the war. Catherine Clinton, Tera W. Hunter, Elizabeth D. Leonard, George C. Rable, Leslie A. Schwalm, Nina Silber, and LeeAnn Whites, to name a few, demonstrated that women indelibly altered the course of the Civil War. In addition to expanding the questions and shape of Civil War historiography, these scholars took direct aim at the terrain occupied by traditional military historians. They showed how wives shaped the tactical decisions of their officer husbands; how Black women’s actions dictated the course of emancipation; how women of all regions and backgrounds fueled supply lines and recruitment efforts; and how officers chose strategies and tactics that accounted for the white and Black civilians they knew they would encounter. The field flourished and the scholarship that followed “[bridged] the artificial gap separating military history from women and gender studies—a gap that did not exist for the participants.”1 A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg, Volume One, From the Crossing of the James to the Crater, the first volume of A. Wilson Greene’s proposed trilogy, boldly claims it will ultimately create the most comprehensive exploration of the campaign to date. However, a generation after these award-winning studies of gender, women, and war, the 726 page-volume feels as incomplete as it is long. Greene’s exclusion of white and Black women from his analysis