The Civil War’s Personal Histories

A Schlesinger Library exhibit reveals the domestic side of the war.

Photographs of abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and her son Samuel, who died at 18 months
A photograph of Frances Hook, who disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Union Army
A diary and comb were some of the small comforts that enlisted men carried with them.

Harriet Beecher Stowe—the best-known subject in the new exhibit on the Civil War at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study’s Schlesinger Library—is known largely for her public writings. But in the exhibit What They Wrote, What They Saved: The Personal Civil War, the daguerreotype portrait of the abolitionist author does not sit next to a copy of her most famous work, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Instead, visitors who peek behind the black curtain that protects the century-and-a-half-old portrait will find it nestled beside a far more intimate memento: a postmortem portrait of Samuel, the son she lost when he was just 18 months old.

Correspondence displayed in the exhibit builds the story of an author intensely concerned with her family. It was grief over losing her young son, letters suggest, that propelled her to imagine the pains of a slave family facing the prospect of separation. “In that act of empathy comes the foundation for change,” President Drew Faust, a Civil War historian and the founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute, said in remarks at the exhibition’s launch yesterday. “The personal is very political in these writings.”

The new exhibit, organized to mark the 150th anniversary of the war, showcases how personal documents like portraits, letters, diaries, and family account books serve as revealing sources for life during the Civil War, both in battle and on the home front. “The domestic concerns of home and family were not detached from war,” Radcliffe dean Lizabeth Cohen said in her introduction at Wednesday’s launch. “The Civil War was a domestic conflict in several senses of the word.”

For the first century after the fighting ended, Faust explained, the history of the Civil War was a public one, focused on laws and proclamations, newspaper accounts and abolitionist tracts, generals and battle plans. But the Schlesinger exhibit builds on a strand of history that’s grown in the last half-century, focusing on new questions and new sources, including the rich trove of documents, once hidden away in family attics, that now reside in places like the Schlesinger.

The two-pronged title of the small exhibition—What They Wrote, What They Saved—highlights in particular how ordinary people played a role in recording and preserving history. The Civil War was one of the first wars to involve a truly literate population, Faust said, and letters sent between the battlefronts and home were still essentially uncensored. Families, who had a sense that “they were living history,” decided to save the letters their sons and husbands sent back.

It was far more difficult for men, constantly on the move, to hold on to their letters from home, so the exhibit’s examples focus particularly on rich details of military life sent back to loved ones. One missive describes an awful Thanksgiving at the front; other soldiers included drawings of battle-camp furniture, a commander’s tent, and the center of a town he’d recently passed through. One young man confided his fears to his mother, but warned her in a postscript: “If you read my letters to any outsiders I will immediately rap my head against a tent pole—hard.” These letters, Kathy Jacob, the curator of manuscripts at the Schlesinger, said at Wednesday’s event, will “make you weep or laugh out loud.”

Other items in the exhibit speak more directly to the roles that women played in debating and supporting the war. There’s a diary of Catherine Porter Noyes, who traveled to South Carolina’s Sea Islands to teach former slaves, and a photograph of Frances Hook, the “soldier girl” who disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Union Army. The first fundraising cookbook, A Poetical Cookbook, demonstrates how war infused even the most basic parts of everyday life. The diaries of two women showcase independent widows who took real stands to support their chosen cause. The first, an ardent abolitionist from New Orleans, moved North to escape threats of tar and feathering, while her counterpart, a Confederate sympathizer originally from Delaware, waited out the war on an Arkansas plantation. “So maybe [they] aren’t representative,” Jacob noted at Wednesday’s opening. “But they were really good stories we just had to tell.”

Even for the more reserved of those featured in the exhibit, the act of writing letters and, especially, diaries and journals, came with an “inevitable empowerment” for many women at home, Faust said. “Warfare is of course about the power of guns, but I think we see in this exhibit how it is also about the power of words.”

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