Soliders That Were Helping Families in the Civil War

White Families

White families in Virginia first confronted the war'due south bear on with the enlistments of their male kin. Service in the Confederate Army pulled men away from their homes for years at a time and appeared to threaten their culturally prescribed duty to protect and provide for their families. Yet many soldiers reasoned that ground forces service could still fulfill that duty by assuasive a man to fight against the Union'southward threats to his family's livelihood and privilege. As one Virginia soldier put information technology, his duty in the war encompassed "the defense of our country, our liberty and the protection of our parents, wives, and children, and all that is beloved to a man." More than l percent of the men who eventually enlisted from Virginia were heads of households who similarly tried to reconcile their family's interests with that of the Confederacy.

No thing how these white Virginians justified the absence of men, the separation took a toll on those left behind. Wives, daughters, sisters, and other female person kin assumed much of the piece of work usually pursued past men—managing plantations, harvesting crops, running businesses—while confronting the new strains of war on their own, such equally inflation and slave resistance. These mounting pressures took a toll on women. "Nosotros felt like clinging to Walter and holding him back," wrote one Virginia woman in reaction to a family unit member's enlistment. "I was sick of war, sick of the butchery, the anguish."

Soldiers tried to sustain their role in family affairs through frequent letters home, but their correspondence proved an imperfect surrogate when the postal service, disrupted by war, was slow in coming. Other women searched for ways of bringing their men home, either by filing a petition with the Confederate secretary of state of war for a homo'south exemption, or by urging a soldier to desert the regular army. Such efforts were often unsuccessful, however, leaving virtually white families to wait until the state of war'south end to rebuild their lives—something fabricated even more difficult when decease intervened and rendered a family'southward separation permanent.

Political divisions sometimes compounded the separations experienced by white families. Regions with high Unionist concentrations, such equally western Virginia, witnessed the partition of households on opposing sides of the war'southward divide—pitting male parent against son, married man confronting married woman, and even the oft-cited brother against brother. As ane Virginian noted of his own family's division, "In that location are thousands of families in the aforementioned state of affairs." These families included some of Virginia's most prominent Confederate leaders: Amalgamated general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson became estranged from his Unionist sister, while J. E. B. Stuart, the famed Confederate cavalryman, urged his married woman, Flora Stuart, to change their son's name then that he no longer bore the moniker of his Unionist father-in-law, Philip St. George Cooke.

Estrangement occurred, too, for Virginians whose loyalty did not transfer to the Confederacy after the state seceded in April 1861. Union full general George H. Thomas was a slaveholder from Southampton Canton whose family had been forced to escape into the forest during the Nat Turner insurgence in 1831. Only when he decided to remain in the United States regular army in 1861, his family objected and cut off contact with him. He afterwards reconciled with his brothers, only his sisters remained estranged from him until his expiry.

Such divisions were at once a source of fascination and lament for Virginians, as newspapers covered cases like that of Confederate Antonia Ford of Fairfax Courtroom Business firm who, afterward being arrested by Union authorities for spying, fell for one of her captors, Major Joseph Willard of the Union Regular army, and married him in 1864. (When Confederate spy Belle Boyd fell in dear with and married one of her captors, Samuel W. Hardinge, he was arrested and thrown in jail.) Many of these families reconciled in practical ways as the war came to a shut, providing i some other with fabric support, simply they found it harder to reunite emotionally. As Warner Thomson, a slaveholding Unionist living in the Shenandoah Valley, wrote of his estrangement from his Amalgamated sons, "My natural affection for my sons & dear for my country cause a struggle in my mind—it is a painful one."

Blackness Families

While the centrifugal forces of war pulled white families autonomously, black families found in the war a chance to bring their families back together later years of separation. Enslaved men, in particular, had been involuntarily sold abroad from their families through the antebellum domestic slave trade, either to nearby plantations or, in many cases, to states in the Deep Due south. Only as the Spousal relationship Army entered the South, and slaves recognized that freedom was on the horizon, roughly 100,000 black men from Virginia began to flee to army camps, and, with the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), enlist in the Marriage Army. Although this created new separations for some families, and subjected women left behind to the abuse of masters frustrated at the men's departure, thousands of women and children eventually followed and helped establish makeshift refugee settlements ("contraband camps") on the outskirts of armed forces encampments, such as Fort Monroe in Virginia's Tidewater. These camps became important sites of black family reunions during the war and postwar menses.

Union officials from the Freedmen's Bureau, besides equally Northern missionaries who before long arrived at the camps, assisted former slaves in reuniting with family members by sending inquiries to armed services officials throughout the Southward asking for assistance in finding lost kin, performing marriage ceremonies, and helping freedpeople realize their newly acquired legal rights to marriage and kid custody. Still the family reunions did not come without conflict, as some found their spouses had remarried and others fought over children.

Still others found their marital relationships contradistinct by the war itself. Men, by serving as soldiers, earning voting rights with the Reconstruction Act (1867), and beingness treated as heads of households by Freedmen'southward Bureau policies, earned a newly elevated public position over women, creating a gender imbalance unfamiliar to many black families. Sorting out these domestic relationships and redefining them in the new context of freedom would remain as a long-term legacy of war for black families.

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Source: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/family-life-during-the-civil-war/

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