Module 7: Women and the War

While the men were off fighting the war for the respective region their wives, daughters, and children would be asked to take the their place. Due to a labor shortage during the Civil war, women would get their first chance at working and having a voice. Ultimately it would give them the courage to step up for themselves and women’s rights. Both Northern and Southern women would be asked to go to work; however, their jobs would be much different.

In the North, where white-collar jobs were far and wide with the technological advance and the wealth of the Northern states, women would be asked to work in “white-collar government jobs, retail sales, and nursing, women found a permanent place in the workforce.” (Foner page 505) Women also organized some other notable jobs or volunteering on the behalf of the war and its campaign. Much like the organizations that we still have today that send care packages to our soldiers in the Middle East, “Hundreds of thousands of northern women took part in organization that gathered money and medical supplies for soldiers and sent books, clothing, and food to freedmen.” (Foner page 505) Northern women took part in jobs that lead to be activists for women’s rights following the civil war. Women life Mary Livermore, would emerge “from the war with a deep resentment of women’s legal and political subordination and organized her state’s first women’s suffrage convention.” (Foner page 506) Mary Livermore encouraged women to “think and act for themselves.” Other women like the Grimke sisters from Pennsylvania would arise to stand for women’s rights as well. In two passages from Angelina and Sarah Grimke they compare the political campaign to free slaves to the continued discrimination against women. The two women speak of how a women’s best weapon is prayer, but they still battle with comprehending how they are to take in slaves, when they themselves feel like slaves. Angelina Grimke ends her passage with these moving words that really made me think about a women’s perceptive during this time, and her role in the household: “What then can woman do for the slave, when she herself is under the feet of man and shamed into silence?” (Flexner) While northern women worked in offices and non-labor jobs, the women of the south would find themselves in a much different position.

Southern women contrary to their northern counterparts would find themselves conducting much more laborious duties: “the war placed unprecedented burdens on southern white women. Left along on farms and plantations, they were often forced to manage business affairs and discipline slaves, previously the responsibility of men.” (Foner page 510) There were few white-collar jobs, some which included working at the confederacy bureau, but it would be the women left to tend to the farm in the place of their spouses that would leave their legend behind. As the death toll continued to rise and the south was defiantly on the losing end:

…increasing numbers of women came to believe that the goal of independence was not worth the cost. The growing disaffection of southern white women, conveyed in letters to loved ones at the front, contributed to the decline in civilian morale and encouraged desertion from the army.” (Foner page 510)

A women’s power in words and her prayers would convey their soldiers to come home and quit the war.

As women from the north and the south stepped into roles that they had never dreamed of occupying they would set forth on a new expedition. Women final had a voice and would later come to realize that their voice was worth hearing. Later women like the Grimke sisters would lay grassroots for others to follow and eventually led to the Seneca Falls convention 1848. “Women alone will say what freedom they want.” (Foner page 434)

Works Cited

Foner, Eric. Give Me Liberty!: An American History. 2nd Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2005. Print.

Module 6: Pro-slave arguments

After reading George Fitzhugh and James Henry Hammond’s essays on slavery I can’t help but feel a little angry. The way they both so lightly talk about slavery as if black slaves are no more then homeless puppies that are better off in a life of torture and speechless dependence on their masters. But many pro-slavery spokesmen would agree with George Fitzhugh’s statement that "... the negro race is inferior to the white race, and living in their midst, they would be far outstripped or outwitted in the chaos of free competition." (H. Fishel, Jr. and Quarles) I do agree with Fitzhugh’s argument that slave labor was giving slaves the opportunity to learn skills and become craftsmen at their trade. Both Hammond and Fitzhugh make arguments that slaves were given the best conditions and were treated well. In fact both cite that they found that slaves were happy and merry. Hammond writes, “They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations.” (Hammond), and Fitzhugh writes on the same note that “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters.” (Fitzhugh) However, I would beg to differ as a slave accounts for his own feelings and how can two men who live in wealth and aren’t in the field with the slaves account for their true feelings. “John Little, a former slave, wrote: (Zinn page 130)

They say slaves are happy, because they laugh, and are merry. I myself and three or four others, have received two hundred lashes in the day, and had our feet in fetter, yet, at night, we would sing and dance, and make others laugh at the rattling of our chains. Happy men we must have been! We did it to keep down trouble, and keep our hearts from being completely broken: that is as true as the gospel! Just look at it, -must not we have been very happy? Yet I have done it myself---I have cut capers in chains.

Despite the attitude that slaves presented to their master’s, it can’t make up for the mistreatment. Slaves were treated like property that could be traded and bartered with. Families were displaced and torn apart by their master’s. In 1858 a slave named Abream Scriven writes, “Give my love to my father and mother and tell them good Bye for me, and if we Shall not meet in this world I hope to meet in heaven.” (Zinn page 130) Just like a litter of puppies slaves were sold and separated from their mothers, fathers, and siblings.

Although both men write in words that at the time they believed were true and just, I can’t help but think that they were brought up in a society in which these thoughts and ideals were standard, and their fathers and mothers only bred ignorance, and ignorance breed’s ignorance!

Works Cited

The Black American: A Documentary History, Third Edition, by Leslie H. Fishel, Jr. and Benjamin Quarles, Scott, Foresman and Company, Illinois, 1976,1970.

"The 'Mudsill' Theory," by James Henry Hammond. Speech to the U.S. Senate, March 4, 1858.

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. Abridged Teaching Edition. New York, NY: The New Press, 2003. Print.

Module 5: “He loves his red children, and his tongue is not forked”

It never ceases to amaze me what humans are capable of doing when the idea of becoming wealthy at the cost of others is on the line. This first passage in chapter 7 of Howard Zinn’s: A People’s History of the United States, he immediately sets the record straight about the difference between what we have been taught as children and what actually happened. “ “Indian removal,” as it has been politely called, cleared the land for white occupancy between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, cleared it for cotton in the South and grain in the North, for expansion, immigration, canals, railroads, new cities, and the building of a huge continental empire clear across to the Pacific Ocean. The cost in human life cannot be accurately measured, in suffering not even roughly measured.” (Zinn page 97)

“…The Indian Removal Act of 1830 authorized President Andrew Jackson to move Indians residing east of the Mississippi to lands in the West.” (Reader, article: The Indian Removal Act) Tribes like the Shawnee Indians were frustrated once again that they were being asked to relocate out of land that they used to share and live in complete harmony with one another, not placing ownership over land, but that it was for everyone’s use. Chief Tecumseh, of the Shawnee tribe, gathered five thousand Indians in 1811 and spoke of an uprising. He wanted to send the white settlers back where they came from, and was tired of the way they had been treating the Indians. (Zinn page 98) Other tribes like the Creek and Cherokee Indians were occupying very valuable land in Georgia, “The Creek Indians occupied most of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. In 1813 some their warriors massacred 250 people at Fort Mims, whereupon, Jackson’s troops burned down a Creek village…” (Zinn page 98) Jackson, however, wouldn’t stop the war against the Creek tribe, as him and his men killed another eight hundred Creeks in 1814 in the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Jackson used Cherokee tribesmen to help fight this battle in promise that they would be given “governmental friendship.” It wouldn’t take long for the white man to turn on the Cherokee’s too. “In 1829, gold was discovered in Cherokee terroratory in Georgia.” (Zinn page 102) In a passage written by tribesmen of the Cherokee’s by the name of Speckled Snake, Speckled Snakes is obviously angry at the way that the white man has continuously taken from the Indians, and how they have been taken advantage of again and again. In closing I found Speckled Snakes closing statement in his passage very interesting, and left me wondering, who’s side is he on? “He loves his red children, and his tongue is not forked.” (Moquin, page 149-150)

Works Cited

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. Abridged Teaching Edition. New York, NY: The New Press, 2003. Print.

Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green, eds., The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (Boston, 1995), pp. 116-17.

Wayne Moquin, ed., Great Documents in American Indian History, (New York, 1973), pp. 149-150.

Module 4: "Don't Forget the Ladies"

The United States Constitution was built to ensure that a Government as that in England would never be present. The Constitution set out in a post-revolutionary society to protect and define the U.S However, the Constitution did not represent everyone. “Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, and men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interest of those groups,” (Zinn page 69).

One of these groups had an advocate from the very beginning. I found the letter between husband and wife Abigail and John Adams very interesting in telling a story from 1776 of inequality and discontent not only in a nation but also in the household.

Abigail Adams wrote her husband John Adams on the discrimination that is relevant to women in the Constitution. She asked of her husband to “remember the ladies” and provide rights to women under that of their husbands. In the letter address on March 31, 1776 she writes, “Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness,” (Abigail and John

Adams, letters 1776).

John Adams would write back to her, and it seems as if he has very little faith in the constitution at the time and is almost laughing writing his wife back. Adams writes to his wife, “…we know better than to repeal our Masculine systems. Altho they are in full Force, you know they are little more than Theory,” (Abigail and John Adams, letters 1776). I think that he is trying to explain to Abigail that if they were to give such freedoms to women that slaves, and indentured servants would also come banging down the door for a place in the Constitution. In Abigail’s letter she seems to be a very independent minded women. In her letter, in response to John’s letter, she is not laughing and finds and finds his response offensive. Abigail writes in her letter addressed on May 7, 1776 “I can not say that I think you very generous to the Ladies, for whilst you are proclaiming peace and good will to Men, Emancipating all Nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over Wives,” (Abigail and John Adams, letters 1776). It has been and will be citizens like Abigail Adams that have lead to change in this country and will continually lead to change.

Works Cited

Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States. Abridged Teaching Edition. New York, NY: The New Press, 2003. Print.

Abigail and John Adams, letters 1776, in L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., The Book of Abigail and John (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 120-22, 127 reprinted in Mary Beth Norton, Major Problems in American Women's History (Lexington: D.C. Heath, 1989), p. 83-84.