Category: Civil War Women

Civil War Women
Civil War Women, Philanthropists, Women in Business

Margaret Haughery

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Women in Business in the Civil War Era Margaret Haughery was a business entrepreneur and philanthropist who became known as the Mother of the Orphans. She devoted her life to the care and feeding of the poor and hungry, and to funding and building orphanages throughout the city of New Orleans, Louisiana. Born into poverty and orphaned at a young age, she began her adult life as a washwoman and a peddler – yet she died an epic business woman and philanthropist who received a state funeral. Image: Margaret Haughery with Two Orphans Painting by Jacques Amans, New Orleans, c. 1842 Out of the horror of civil war and a nation of diverse people bound by a shared tragedy, armies…

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Civil War Women, Famous Children

Kate Chase

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Washington Hostess During the Civil War Kate Chase was the daughter of Salmon P. Chase, Treasury Secretary under President Abraham Lincoln and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Despite her youth, Kate was the reigning social queen of Washington, DC during the Civil War and a strong supporter of her widowed father’s presidential ambitions that would have made her First Lady. Katherine Jane Chase was born August 13, 1840, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of famous Ohio politician Salmon P. Chase and his second wife Eliza Ann Smith, who died shortly after Kate’s fifth birthday. Kate is best known as a society hostess during the American Civil War, and a strong supporter of her father’s political ambitions. Kate Chase…

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African Americans, Civil War Women, Women in Business

Lydia Hamilton Smith

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Abolitionist and African American Businesswoman S. Epatha Merkerson plays Lydia Hamilton Smith in the 2012 film Lincoln, alongside Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln and Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln. Merkerson owes much of her fame to her role as Lt. Anita Van Buren on the original Law and Order television series. Lydia Hamilton Smith had a special relationship with U.S. Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. She became Stevens’ housekeeper in 1847, and for 25 years she managed his homes and businesses. Through their partnership she gained the skills and social contacts necessary to become a successful businesswoman after his death. Lydia Hamilton was born in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on February 14, 1815, to…

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Civil War Women, Diaries and Letters

Kate Stone

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Civil War Diarist from Louisiana Kate Stone was twenty years old when the Civil War began. At that time, she was living with her widowed mother, five brothers and younger sister in northeastern Louisiana at her family home Brokenburn, a large cotton plantation of 1,260 acres and 150 slaves. Kate kept a diary from 1861 through 1868, in which she recorded her daily experiences. She had doubts about what her future might bring, writing that “women grew significantly uglier in wedlock and ignored and abandoned their former female friends.” During the war Kate and her family lost everything, watched as their way of life was destroyed and left their home to become fugitives to escape the Union Army they feared…

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Civil War Women, Diaries and Letters

Judith McGuire

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Civil War Diarist and Refugee Judith Brockenbrough McGuire, the daughter of a Virginia Supreme Court justice and mother of two Confederate soldiers, was married to John P. McGuire, founder of the Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia, where he taught until the beginning of the Civil War. He was elected to the Virginia secession committee and voted to secede from the Union. Judith McGuire’s journal, Diary of a Southern Refugee during the War, by a Lady of Virginia, (University of Nebraska Press, October 1995), is one of the best civilian records of the Civil War. The book is based on a diary she kept between May 4, 1861 and May 4, 1865. Matthew Page Andrews’ The Women of the South in…

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Civil War Women, Female Soldiers

Jennie Hodgers

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Female Soldier in the Civil War In 1862, Jennie Hodgers was living in Belvidere, Illinois. As the Civil War escalated, in July of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln sent out a call for an additional 300,000 men to serve in the Union Army. Nineteen-year-old Jennie Hodgers wanted to help her country. Image: Jennie Hodgers (right) as Albert D.J. Cashier Jennie Hodgers was born in Clogherhead, Ireland, on Christmas Day, 1844. She sailed to America as a stowaway and settled in Belvidere, Illinois. Little is known about her early life because her true identity was not discovered until a few years before her death. According to later investigation by the administrator of her estate, she was the child of Sallie and Patrick…

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Civil War Women, Gettysburg

Josephine Miller Slyder

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Nurse at the Battle of Gettysburg Erected in 1886, this monument to the First Massachusetts Infantry Regiment is south of Gettysburg on the Emmitsburg Road, where the regiment fought during the battle. It depicts a skirmisher stepping over a rail fence with Seminary Ridge in the background. At that time the Peter Rogers house stood just to the south of this monument. The Battle of Gettysburg resulted in as many as 40,000 deaths, laid waste to the town’s structures, and prompted many of its civilian population of 2,400 to hide in cellars, holes and ditches. Fortunately, several Gettysburg residents remained in the fray to feed the hungry soldiers soon to be engaged in battle and to care for those who…

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Civil War Nurses, Civil War Women

Jane Stuart Woolsey

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Civil War Nurse from New York When the Civil War began, Jane Stuart Woolsey was 31 years old and living in New York City with her eight siblings and her mother. Woolsey participated in the first meetings of the Women’s Central Relief Association, a precursor to the acclaimed U.S. Sanitary Commission. In 1863 she became Superintendent of Nurses at Fairfax Seminary Hospital, and served there until the end of the war. Jane Stuart Woolsey was born in Connecticut in 1830, the second daughter of Charles and Jane Eliza Woolsey. She had seven sisters and one brother. In 1840 her father died, but the family lived in relative comfort in New York City, supported by relatives and inheritances. Jane was raised…

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Civil War Nurses, Civil War Women

Fannie Beers

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Florence Nightingale of the South Image: Aftermath by Martin Pate This painting shows Civil War nurse Fannie Beers at Brown’s Mill battlefield in Coweta County, Georgia during the Atlanta Campaign. The scene is described in Beers’ journal, Memories. There is not much information available about the personal life of Fannie Beers, only that she was born in the North, and married A. P. Beers when she was very young. She wrote in her memoirs, Memories: A Record of Personal Experiences and Adventures During Four Years of War, that she met him while he was a student at Yale University and she was living with her mother in New Haven, Connecticut. The couple moved to New Orleans at some point, and…

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Virginia Clay, wife of Senator Clement Clay
Civil War Women

Virginia Clay

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  Southern Belle and Wife of Confederate Senator Clement Clay Virginia Tunstall was born in 1825 in Nash County, North Carolina, the daughter of a doctor. Her mother died when she was very young, and her father left her upbringing to his wife’s family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Virginia graduated from the Female Academy at Nashville, Tennessee in 1840. In 1843, she returned to Tuscaloosa, where she met a newly-elected member of the Alabama Senate, Clement Clay, Jr. Virginia married Clement Clay after courting for only a month, and moved with Clay to his home in Huntsville, Alabama. Virginia gave birth to their only child in 1853, and it died in infancy. Clay was elected to the United States Senate in…

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