What Did Some Families Experience During the War?

White Families

White families in Virginia first confronted the state of war'south impact with the enlistments of their male person kin. Service in the Confederate Regular 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. Notwithstanding many soldiers reasoned that army service could still fulfill that duty by allowing a human to fight confronting the Union's threats to his family unit's livelihood and privilege. As 1 Virginia soldier put it, 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 dear to a man." More than 50 per centum 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 kin assumed much of the work normally pursued past men—managing plantations, harvesting crops, running businesses—while confronting the new strains of war on their own, such as inflation and slave resistance. These mounting pressures took a cost on women. "We felt similar clinging to Walter and holding him back," wrote ane Virginia woman in reaction to a family 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, merely their correspondence proved an imperfect surrogate when the mail, disrupted by state of war, was slow in coming. Other women searched for ways of bringing their men home, either past filing a petition with the Confederate secretary of war for a man's exemption, or by urging a soldier to desert the regular army. Such efforts were oft unsuccessful, nevertheless, leaving nigh white families to wait until the war'due south end to rebuild their lives—something made fifty-fifty more hard when death intervened and rendered a family'south separation permanent.

Political divisions sometimes compounded the separations experienced past white families. Regions with high Unionist concentrations, such as western Virginia, witnessed the sectionalization of households on opposing sides of the war's split up—pitting father against son, husband against wife, and fifty-fifty the oft-cited brother confronting brother. As ane Virginian noted of his own family's division, "There are thousands of families in the same situation." These families included some of Virginia's most prominent Amalgamated leaders: Confederate general Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson became estranged from his Unionist sister, while J. Eastward. B. Stuart, the famed Confederate cavalryman, urged his married woman, Flora Stuart, to modify their son'south name and so that he no longer diameter the moniker of his Unionist father-in-law, Philip St. George Cooke.

Estrangement occurred, too, for Virginians whose loyalty did non transfer to the Confederacy afterward the state seceded in April 1861. Union general George H. Thomas was a slaveholder from Southampton County whose family unit had been forced to escape into the woods during the Nat Turner uprising in 1831. Simply when he decided to remain in the United States army in 1861, his family objected and cutting off contact with him. He later reconciled with his brothers, simply his sisters remained estranged from him until his expiry.

Such divisions were at once a source of fascination and lament for Virginians, equally newspapers covered cases like that of Amalgamated Antonia Ford of Fairfax Court House who, after being arrested past Union regime for spying, brutal for 1 of her captors, Major Joseph Willard of the Union Regular army, and married him in 1864. (When Confederate spy Belle Boyd brutal in honey with and married one of her captors, Samuel W. Hardinge, he was arrested and thrown in jail.) Many of these families reconciled in practical means every bit the state of war came to a close, providing ane some other with cloth support, but they found it harder to reunite emotionally. Every bit Warner Thomson, a slaveholding Unionist living in the Shenandoah Valley, wrote of his estrangement from his Confederate sons, "My natural amore for my sons & beloved for my land cause a struggle in my mind—it is a painful one."

Blackness Families

While the centrifugal forces of war pulled white families apart, blackness families found in the war a chance to bring their families back together after years of separation. Enslaved men, in particular, had been involuntarily sold away from their families through the antebellum domestic slave trade, either to nearby plantations or, in many cases, to states in the Deep Southward. But as the Union Ground forces 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 Annunciation (1863), enlist in the Union Army. Although this created new separations for some families, and subjected women left behind to the abuse of masters frustrated at the men'south departure, thousands of women and children somewhen followed and helped establish makeshift refugee settlements ("contraband camps") on the outskirts of military encampments, such as Fort Monroe in Virginia's Tidewater. These camps became of import sites of black family reunions during the war and postwar menstruum.

Marriage officials from the Freedmen'southward Bureau, equally well every bit Northern missionaries who soon arrived at the camps, assisted former slaves in reuniting with family unit members by sending inquiries to military officials throughout the South request for help in finding lost kin, performing union ceremonies, and helping freedpeople realize their newly caused legal rights to spousal relationship and child custody. Yet the family reunions did not come without conflict, as some found their spouses had remarried and others fought over children.

Notwithstanding others found their marital relationships contradistinct by the war itself. Men, by serving every bit soldiers, earning voting rights with the Reconstruction Act (1867), and being treated every bit heads of households past Freedmen'due south Agency 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 every bit 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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