Suchergebnisse

Northern women were mobilized in unprecedented numbers during America's Civil War. In its aftermath, it looked like their efforts would be celebrated long into the future, a possibility signaled by the publication of Frank Moore's Women of the War in 1866. Instead, this unique flourishing of female volunteerism was largely forgotten by the turn of the century. This article explains this erasure by analyzing the letters women sent to Moore as he set about memorializing their war work. It demonstrates that women were deeply divided over how to articulate an ideal of patriotic womanhood, and these divisions undermined their ability to advance a coherent story about their efforts. Moreover, most adhered to a standard of humility that worked against remembering women's wartime participation. As a result, memories of the Civil War quickly came to focus solely on the battlefield.

Of Age is the first study to focus on underage enlistment in the US Civil War. By tracing the heated conflicts between parents who sought to recover their sons and military and federal officials who resisted their claims, this book exposes larger, underlying struggles over the centralization of wartime legal and military power.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, state judges lost their long-held right to inquire into the legality of federal detentions. Habeas corpus—once almost solely the business of state courts—was largely transformed into a federal remedy. We argue that the wartime furor surrounding underage enlistees was a key factor in driving this legal change. Whereas scholarship on the use of habeas corpus at this time generally concentrates on cases involving freedom of speech or political association, thousands of parents and guardians also petitioned Union authorities and state courts to retrieve children who had enlisted without their consent. Parents, who understood their control over the personhood and labor of minors as one of the bedrocks of American liberty, angrily protested the state's abrogation of their rights, while state court judges fought to retain their jurisdiction over such cases. We illuminate these conflicts by drawing on a rich array of sources that capture the perspectives of federal and state court judges, Lincoln Administration officials, elected representatives, military officers and parents, and minors themselves. In the process, we show the halting, contested nature of debates over habeas corpus, the outcome of which ultimately redefined the relationship between American citizens and their government, preventing aggrieved parents from using state courts to safeguard their rights against federal and military authorities, and blocking state courts from querying the legality of federal detentions of any kind.