"She Wears the Flag of Our Country": Women, Nation, and War

Abstract

"She Wears the Flag of Our Country"Women, Nation, and War Thavolia Glymph (bio) Editors' Note: The following essay is derived from the acceptance speech for the Tom Watson Brown Prize, awarded for the best book published on the Civil War era in 2020. Tad Brown, president of the Watson-Brown Foundation, awarded the prize to Thavolia Glymph for her book The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation, published by the University of North Carolina Press. Glymph delivered her acceptance speech during the Southern Historical Association's virtual annual meeting on November 5, 2021. The Society of Civil War Historians judges and administers the book prize. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and Brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. —Toni Morrison, Beloved The Women's Fight is the product of the generous counsel of numerous colleagues, a rich and still growing historiography on the history of women in the Civil War and Civil War and southern history more broadly. It is also the product, most importantly, of archives bursting with millions of documents, most placed there to tell a story different from the one my book conveys. White Northerners and Southerners—believing they wrote for an audience solely of white people—wrote not only a great deal about the Civil War but perforce about enslaved people. Indeed, they wrote copiously about the black people ever-present in their lives and consciousnesses. They did not worry too much about this, because they had worked hard to ensure that white people only would have access to other white people's thoughts. In the North, it was not illegal for Black people to learn to read and write, but white Northerners made it difficult. White Southerners went the extra mile with laws that made black literacy a crime, hoping this would preclude them from independently forming ideas about slavery, [End Page 305] freedom, and citizenship. In this, we know, they failed signally, a failure captured in the reinvigorated resistance of enslaved people during the Civil War and in their refusal to abide the position of the majority of white Northerners and the federal government that black people had no stake in the war. This essay is about how I thought about the work my book would do or, put differently, what the archive might teach me. Just as slaveholders failed to fully appreciate how a law aimed at preventing literacy among Black people undermined the proslavery ideology they held dear, so they failed to anticipate the day historians would come along to read their diaries, letters, and business papers, including the notices they placed in newspapers to track down lost property in the form of human beings, and write a history at variance with proslavery ideology. Indeed, they and the historians trained to carry the buckets of proslavery ideology who came after them did everything in their power to forestall that possibility. They did not anticipate that one day historians would use the records they left behind to tell stories they did not want told or that their descendants, secure in their station in life, bolstered and protected by white supremacy, would place their papers in archives that would one day be open to Black scholars, including the descendants of enslaved people. One family, for example, donated its Bible to the Louisiana Historical Society with the assurance that it would have "an honored place in their collection of historic relics."1 But, of course, when the descendants of slaveholders began to donate family papers first to historical societies and later to state and university archives, they had no reason to believe that any but white scholars would have access to them. Historical societies like the South Carolina Historical Society, established in the South before the Civil War, were private institutions open only to the enjoyment of white Southerners, and state archives in the South were initially closed to Black scholars. Over time, some state archives set up segregated systems to accommodate them. The eminent historian John Hope Franklin, for example, found the Tennessee and Alabama state archives open to...