Maryland Women in the Civil War: Unionists, Rebels, Slaves, & Spies / Claudia Floyd -- Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2013

Most histories of the Civil War have approached the topic either from the perspective of a limited military campaign or battle or from a national military-political perspective.  Some, of course, examine specific themes related to the war, e.g., the emancipation of slaves, international relations, or political intrigue.  Others focus on the biographies of key historic figures.  Many of these approaches overlook how different the war seemed to people in different states.  The people of Virginia experienced the war quite differently, of course, from how it was experienced by the people of Wisconsin.  Ohio University Press has begun a very interesting series of Civil War histories that recognize the importance of these state differences.  Included in their offerings are Ohio's War, Indiana's War, Illinois's War
, Missouri's War (reviewed in this blog), and Kansas's War.
In this vein, The History Press has published Maryland Women in the Civil War by Claudia Floyd.  The work treats exactly what you would expect from the title.  Examining the role of women in Maryland's war is particularly interesting, in that the Maryland was a slave state that was secured by the Union in the early months of the war.  Consequently, a large number of southern sympathizers found themselves going about their normal domestic lives under what they perceived as a hostile occupation and resisting that occupation or supporting the southern cause often involved covert activities and not open, armed Resistance.  Both men and women could and were fully engaged in these activities.

By and large, Floyd's book examines the roles of a handful of women who we might assume are representative of larger groups of women.  We learn about Anna Ella Carroll, a prolific pro-Union propagandist; Elizabeth Phoebe Key Howard, a member of a prominent Baltimore pro-secession family; Madge Preston, a diarist and southern supporter living outside Baltimore; and perhaps the most famous woman from Maryland during the Civil War era, Harriet Tubman; but there are a host of other women who's lives and views make brief appearances in the work.

Floyd does an admirable job of illustrating how different women reacted differently to the war, not just based on their sympathies for the Union or Confederacy, but due to their station in society and particularly due to the effects that the war had on their families.  One gets the sense that more than in many other states, the women of Maryland were driven to engage in politics because of the high stakes that existed for families living in a slave state, that bordered the nation's capital and separated free states from slave states.  The controversial suspension of habeas corpus by the Lincoln administration mostly affected men living in Maryland, Maryland's geographic location made it particularly important to the underground railroad, and Baltimore's large free black population complicated race relations in ways that the rest of country did not experience.  Again, elements of this sort meant that the war reached into domestic life in a way that was not common in other states.

If there is a weakness in the work, it is that it appears to rely too completely on diaries and letters.  While this gives the work an admirable immediacy, it is not clear how much the experiences of the women who are the subjects of the book can be generalized to the rest of the women in Maryland.  Many of Floyd's women are socially prominent, making it less clear that working class women experienced the war in the same way.   For what it is, though, Maryland Women in the Civil War is an engaging and informative work.

Fanny Wright: Rebel in America / Celia Morris Eckhardt -- Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984.

I first read about Fanny Wright (1795-1852) in Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger's description of her was intriguing, but sketchy. His occasional references to her as a champion of the working class led me look for a more thorough biography which I found in Eckhardt's Fanny Wright.

Indeed, a champion of the working class, Wright also held many views that placed her easily a century ahead of her time. In a time when "respectable" women could not allow their names to be published with their own work, Fanny Wright became a well-known author, and well-received by prominent progressive figures of her time. She maintained a long and close relationship to Jeremy Bentham, Lafayette, and Robert Dale Owen. She was respected by Jefferson and other prominent American politicians. However, her radical views on marriage and education eventually left her personally and politically isolated.

Wright was born in Scotland, raised in England, and lived for some years in France. She later travelled three times to the United States and became an American citizen. Her first significant social enterprise was to form a community in Tennessee on a plantation she called Nashoba. The community was to be modeled roughly on Robert Owen's community at New Harmony, Indiana, but Nashoba was intended foremost to emancipate slaves and prepare them for colonization in Haiti or Africa. Wright believed slavery could be gradually and peacefully abolished by establishing plantations that would out-perform those based on slave labor. Nashoba and other plantations would be based on the indentured servitude of slaves purchased by or donated to these new plantations.

Nashoba turned out to be a financial failure, due in part to Wright and her partners' inexperience in running a plantation. Furthermore, scandals related to the treatment of the Nashoba slaves and the sexual relations on the plantation compounded the obstacles to success. Eventually, Wright took her slaves to Haiti where they were freed.

The vilification of Wright by the newspapers and journals of her time was stunning. It is hard to imagine anyone standing up to such criticism, and eventually it took its toll on Wright. While publicly rejecting marriage as oppressive to women, Fanny moved to France and was secretly married after she became pregnant. Eckhardt's portrait of this period in her life suggests that she was in a deep depression which lasted several years and resulted in the end of all of her previous friendships.

Wright did eventually return to public life, touring and speaking in the United States during the late 1840s and advocating the re-election of Martin Van Buren. Her reputation, however, had spoiled any real opportunity for her to be effective. As crowds dwindled and those attending were more curious than committed, Fanny eventually retired into a private life, struggling to retain her financial solvency in her conflicts with her husband. Suffering a nervous breakdown in her last years, she died estranged from her daughter and attended only by maids.

Eckhardt's portrait of Wright goes well beyond a factually reliable account and details Wright's inner life and motivations. While this make the book extremely interesting, it sometimes slips into speculative psychologizing. It isn't clear from the end notes how well founded this speculation is. Over all, the work is a sympathetic -- but not uncritical -- examination of an extremely interesting historical figure. Clearly, Wright's talents and determination to advance the cause of liberty everywhere allowed her to achieve more than women could ever hope during her lifetime. Her actions, while damaging to herself, broke seemingly impenetrable ground for women in Europe and the United States.