Women staying home do what they can do to support their family and men in the battlefield. Local Ladies Aid Societies knitted socks, rolled bandages, sewed clothing, sent bedding and towels and food. They wrote letters, kept the family farm or local store going, and held the family together as news from the front slowly trickled in.
Women served in combat during the American Civil War in far larger numbers and in more significant roles. In a gesture of liberation, they let down their hair and took off their hooped skirts. Many people did not like the idea of women doing a man's job, so the women made up their spy networks. In many cases the information that the women received was more accurate then the men, they can get through the detection, and would not be capture or suspect as a spy. While doing this challenged and dangerous work, many of these female spied were captured and imprison, they contribute their whole life to this works. In this terrible four years conflict, people everywhere involved in this war, it was not only inflicted on soldiers, but civilians, land and cities as well.
Women accomplished a lot in this war, but they also lost their important man. The Confederate Army began to draft soldiers in the spring of 1862, during planting time, and the sight of women behind plows became common. People always saying that women couldn't doing anything without man, but the effort they contribute during the war, evidence that they could also did a very good job as their man did, there were no any different between women and men, they worked hard to support their man in the army. "While our soldiers stand and fight," Clara Barton say, " I can feed and nurse them" that was the beginning of the war, even though women were not allowed to be in the armed forces, but they disguised enlisted themselves as men in the Union and Confederate to served as a soldier just like man did. They did what they can do, cause they were part of these big family, and they want to fight for what they really wanted,
Nursing was a popular occupation for many women during the Civil War. At least 3,000 women held a paid nurse positions in the North and South, and thousands of others worked as volunteers. Thousands of women at the War's outset left their homes to take care of wounded soldiers. "The war is certainly ours as well as men's," said Kate Cummings, of Mobile, Alabama, who became the matron of a large Confederate hospital. Clarrisa (Clara) Barton, attributed with the founding of the American Red Cross, began her nursing career when Union soldiers arrived in Washington D.C. after having been brutalized by secession sympathizers. She gathered baskets of food and supplies from her own household and from the homes of her friends and donated these to the bloodied regiment. This opened up a new area of service - the gathering of supplies for the wounded.
"In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield."
Dr. James Dunn, surgeon at Antietam Battlefield.
"Clara Barton worked on parallel lines, but outside the official military system. A Massachusetts schoolteacher, Barton had come to Washington in 1854 to work at the e U.S. Patent Office. Determined to play a role in the events of 1861, she cared for wounded soldiers who had returned to Washington. Thanks to financial support garnered throughout New England, Barton had the means, along with the resolve, to overcome the military bureaucracy ad travel to the front lines. "I went in while the battle raged," she recalled with pride. After the war, she was instrumental in the creation of an American branch of the International Red Cross."
Source: Civil War Nurse, The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes. Introduction and commentary by John R. Brumgardt.
During the civil war, approximately 130,000 freed slaves became Union soldiers, and of the 364,000 on the Union side who lost their lives, a third were killed or died of wounds and two-thirds died of disease.
"We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination"
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
------- Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address
The Declaration of Independence, which was proclaimed by the president of the United States in 1776, that the whole country was reunited and slavery were free. That was in the end of the war, our braved male and female soldiers return home from the battlefield, the whole country was celebrate for the country reunified.
When talking about the Civil War, it was used to be a man’s war, fighting with the enemy in the battlefield, left their family behind, to guard their country. People don’t really know that was also our women’s war too. It was the women who care for the wounded everyday. It was the women who took a secret mission that would always be in a dangerous condition. It was the women who gave our men strength, so they would be no more concern about their home behind them. The women's role in the Civil War is just as significant as the man's, and any discussion of the War in general should not leave this fact out.
