When Slavery and Rebellion Are Destroyed: A Michigan Woman’s Civil War Journal

The voices of rural midwestern women are missing from the relatively new field of Civil War–era women’s history. This growing literature has focused on women of the Confederacy, and the voice of northern women traditionally only subsumes those in urban settings or of the middleclass who participated in aid societies. Rural northern women, especially from the Midwest, are largely absent from scholarly publications.

When Slavery and Rebellion Are Destroyed makes a groundbreaking contribution to the comprehension of gender issues by making an extensive collection of intimate letters between Ellen Preston Woodworth and her husband, Samuel, accessible to the scholarly field and all readers interested in the Civil War, homefront challenges, military family struggles, and gender roles.

The journal collection of this correspondence invites comparison between Ellen’s encounters with Indigenous peoples in her rural, recently settled community and Samuel’s experiences with African Americans in the Deep South—unique in such a collection of letters. Wife and husband also delve into spiritual matters as they confront their lengthy separation. Scholars will find value in Samuel’s service in a “construction battalion” that is frequently in harm’s way. The national struggle over slavery and freedom becomes personal for this couple and is revealed powerfully to the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780820365626

Book preview

When Slavery and Rebellion Are Destroyed

New Perspectives on the Civil War Era

SERIES EDITORS

Judkin Browning, Appalachian State University

Susanna Lee, North Carolina State University

SERIES ADVISORY BOARD

Stephen Berry, University of Georgia

Jane Turner Censer, George Mason University

Paul Escott, Wake Forest University

Lorien Foote, Texas A&M University

Anne Marshall, Mississippi State University

Barton Myers, Washington & Lee University

Michael Thomas Smith, McNeese State University

Susannah Ural, University of Southern Mississippi

Heather Andrea Williams, University of Pennsylvania

Kidada Williams, Wayne State University

When Slavery and Rebellion Are Destroyed

A Michigan Woman’s Civil War Journal

Edited by Jack Dempsey

The University of Georgia Press

ATHENS

© 2023 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

All rights reserved

Set in 9.75/13.5 Baskerville 10 Pro Regular by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

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Printed digitally

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Woodworth, Ellen Preston, 1833–1914. | Dempsey, Jack, 1952– editor.

Title: When slavery and rebellion are destroyed : a Michigan woman’s Civil War journal / edited by Jack Dempsey.

Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2023] | Series: New perspectives on the Civil War era | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023019306 | ISBN 9780820365619 (hardback) | ISBN 9780820365602 (paperback) | ISBN 9780820365626 (epub) | ISBN 9780820365633 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Woodworth, Ellen Preston, 1833–1914—Correspondence. | Woodworth, Samuel, 1832–1899—Correspondence. | Michigan—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives. | Michigan—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Social conditions. | Women—Michigan—Isabella County—Biography. | United States. Army. Michigan Engineers and Mechanics Regiment, 1st (1861–1865). Company M. | Woodworth family. | United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Personal narratives. | Isabella County (Mich.)—Biography

Classification: LCC F572.I7 W66 2023 | DDC 977.4/03092—dc23/eng/20230502

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019306

To the loyal women of the Union

for their devotion

on behalf of

one free American nation

Contents

Introduction

Editorial Method

CHAPTER 1. September–December 1863: You Will Be Far Away

CHAPTER 2. January–April 1864: Must You Stay There & Die!

CHAPTER 3. May–August 1864: O How Much There Is to Worry Over

CHAPTER 4. September 1864–May 1865: Our Nation Is Purged from Sin

Acknowledgments

Appendix. Additional Writings by Ellen Preston Woodworth

Bibliography

Index

When Slavery and Rebellion Are Destroyed

Introduction

The old letters were fraying, and their wartime words were fading. An irreplaceable record of family conversations might become lost to posterity; Ellen Preston Woodworth could not countenance such an outcome. Twenty years had elapsed since her veteran husband had risked his life for the Union during the Southern Rebellion. Ellen’s part of the story during his twenty months of absence was equally compelling. So she opened a bound volume of blank pages and began painstakingly copying each word of the more than one hundred letters they had exchanged during the Civil War. Once completed, this irreplaceable journal would await the attention of a historiography that would not be limited to battles, strategy, guns, and men.¹

The journal that Ellen compiled out of that carefully preserved correspondence provides a window into the rural life of a young wife and mother during the gravest crisis to befall the United States, a civil war that took the lives of over three quarters of a million soldiers. Though Ellen and her children were far from the front lines, that war’s traumatic effects become powerfully felt through Ellen’s faithful witnessing by ink on paper. The journal is an intimate record, revealing Ellen’s thoughts, emotions, and convictions as she lived in a sparsely populated midwestern locale, enabling readers to grasp the grassroots reality and stresses of a military family during wartime thanks to a voice rarely saved for publication.

In 1992, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian James McPherson introduced Divided Houses, the first book (according to the back cover) to thoroughly examine wartime gender issues by affirming that the Civil War affected the female half of the population as profoundly as the male half.² The volume’s coeditors, Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, sought to weave gender into the tapestry of the war and demonstrate its centrality.³ In 1998, McPherson and William Cooper surveyed the writing of Civil War history and maintained that a great deal remains to be done to paint a comprehensive picture of those times, including the role of religion and the impact on families, children, and marriage patterns.⁴ Especially in the new millennium, scholarship has brought to the forefront a recognition that women are not just witnesses to history but actors and makers of it.⁵ Primary source collections and focused studies on women’s experiences have expanded and enriched the narrative of this pivotal era.

The rapid growth in literature on women during the Civil War has roots in the mid-twentieth century. Contrary to popular histories that had overwhelmingly focused on armies and generals, two epic studies of the everyday Union and Confederate soldier became classics for concentrating on the words and actions of men in the ranks.⁶ The motivations of individual soldiers as revealed in diaries and correspondence informed works that garnered critical praise.⁷ Historians began to probe connections between the men on the battlefield and the civilians at home.⁸ A new body of scholarship sought to address how women shaped events, sustained the soldiers, supplied the war machine, and participated, through a multiplicity of roles, in remaking America. This explosion of scholarship helped increase the understanding of women and gender in the Civil War but also began to demonstrate its complicated and diverse nature.⁹ This current work opens the door into a woman’s rarely examined life through an extraordinarily revealing correspondence.

The broad development of studies on female participation has come accompanied by inquiry into the experiences of Union women differentiated by factors such as race and region.¹⁰ In the Heart of the Union—the Midwest—agriculture most profoundly shaped identity, more so than for the rest of the North.¹¹ When the Civil War came, and midwestern males flocked to defend the U.S. flag, the region became a place of struggle and hardship for the largely agrarian women and families who coped with their absence. The experience of midwestern women who negotiated a rapidly destabilizing world has been overshadowed—yet deserves telling.¹² In some rural areas, a particular factor came into play: the presence of Native Americans.

The 1860 population of Wisconsin and Michigan each amounted to approximately 750,000 to 775,000 persons, with Minnesota’s around 175,000. Ohio (2.3 million), Illinois (1.7), and Indiana (1.35) were far more populous.¹³ Settlement in the Upper Midwest had accelerated during the previous decade, encroaching on traditional homelands of Native Americans and replicating the clash of cultures that had transpired in the lower three states. One midwestern wife wrote her deployed husband that many persons here are afraid that the Indians in Mich[igan] will make trouble during the soldiers’ absence.¹⁴ Events such as the so-called Sioux War in Minnesota during 1862–1863 could stoke such fear.¹⁵ But how might someone in Ellen Woodworth’s straits process that Native men from nearby would volunteer, like her husband, and be accounted as gallant and brave though suffering dreadfully, but never faltered nor moved in battle?¹⁶

An impediment to such inquiry has been the comparatively few documents remaining from women that reveal their contributions. Collections of everyday letters and diaries originating from the southern home front are numerous and occupy much of Civil War scholarship and publication inventories.¹⁷ Initially, as Elizabeth Leonard argued, one of the few aspects of Northern women’s Civil War experience that has received focused scholarly attention has been of ladies’ soldiers’ aid societies.¹⁸ These organizations were more typical in cities and towns. Correspondence between eastern men and women is also more extant.¹⁹

The expanding literature on Civil War women since the 1990s has helped correct a skewed record, but rural midwestern women’s voices remain largely silent compared to those of southern white women or middle-class eastern women. The experience of Union farm women is lesser known, allegedly because they were strikingly silent and unseen and since scant literature documented their trials and travails.²⁰ In addition to the scarcity, scholars judged writing by such common folk as excessively routine, poorly expressed, and irregularly kept.²¹ A century after the war, a study of its effects on a Union state’s agriculture made no mention of the role of women.²² The participation in the war by women of the rural Midwest where Indigenous people still lived remains obscure.

Ellen Woodworth’s Civil War journal helps fill such gaps. Her letters originated from a farm homestead in a small community in central lower Michigan. Farming alone would not sustain the family while the husband and father went off to war, prompting Ellen into a different resourcefulness. Her point of view serves to reveal a predominant understanding of the population, since nearly nine out of ten Michiganders could call themselves rural.²³ After twelve years of marriage, Samuel Woodworth’s enlistment left the thirty-year-old mother to raise their two young children and manage family affairs during a crisis that, in historian Nina Silber’s words, severely tested the marital stability of many Northern couples.²⁴ As George Rable has argued, this trauma of separation might be eased through regular and mutual correspondence, which itself became a test of love and devotion. By contrast, irregular mail threatened relationships.²⁵ Ellen would fulfill her promise to be a regular correspondent; after the war, she would ensure her letters, and her soldier husband’s, would not be lost.²⁶

Ellen L. Preston was born on July 7, 1833, in Strafford, Vermont, to William (1803–1881) and Mary Fisk Preston (1806–1888), members of a sterling old Eastern family.²⁷ Samuel Woodworth was born September 20, 1832, in New York State to Charles (1804–1861) and Nancy Whitney Woodworth (1806–1878). They were married on April 13, 1851. Their first child, Vesper Lagrande Woodworth, was born on November 9, 1854, in Java Center, Wyoming County, New York. Dallas Charles Woodworth, their second child, was born on December 26, 1859, in the same western New York community. On the eve of the Civil War, the couple decided to relocate westward and came to Isabella County, Michigan. They followed in the footsteps of other easterners seeking a better country, where land was cheap and wild grapes and other wild fruit grew in abundance in rich soil.²⁸ They were among the first white inhabitants in a region long inhabited by the Ojibwe people (usually called Chippewa by non-Natives); Isabella County was home to the second-largest Native American population in Michigan.²⁹ Due to federal policy that opened Indigenous lands to non-Native settlement, the Woodworths were able to stake a claim, despite having few financial assets, on 160 acres of land in the southeast quarter of section eleven in what is today Lincoln Township. An 1838 U.S. survey described the property as second rate and rolling.³⁰

The couple would own their farm outright once they secured a patent under the Homestead Act. That statute, signed by President Abraham Lincoln on May 20, 1862, encouraged migration by enabling settlers to make a claim on surveyed public land in exchange for constructing a dwelling, living in it, and farming it for five continuous years.³¹ The program was justified as an incentive for the spread of free labor.³²

The Woodworths’ opportunity at land ownership in newly named Lincoln Township was made possible by a series of treaties with the resident Indigenous people.³³ The first, in 1819, ceded Ojibwe land in the east-central portion of the Lower Peninsula.³⁴ The second, in 1836, involved even larger cessions in the northwestern Lower Peninsula and eastern Upper Peninsula.³⁵ As to the latter, Odawa councilor Mack-e-te-be-nessy (Andrew J. Blackbird) wrote of watching our people as they were about going off in a long bark canoe . . . to Washington to see the Great Father, the President of the United States, to tell him to have mercy on the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan, not to take all the land away from them. The disappointing result, he recounted, was a treaty signed at Washington, not with the free will of the Indians, but by compulsion.³⁶ Blackbird participated in negotiations over a treaty in 1855, which from the Native perspective sought to forestall forced emigration from their remaining Michigan homes.³⁷ As for the Ojibwe, the treaty withdrew from alienation to settlers all unsold land in six Isabella County townships to be selected by said Indians for their own eighty-acre homesteads, a step to resolve legal and equitable claims they had against the United States.³⁸ The territory encompassed nearly one hundred thousand acres—much less than they once enjoyed but a successful outcome given the context.³⁹

Once settled into their woodland home, the Woodworths’ situation brought major differences from life back East. The 1860 Census recorded an exiguous county population of approximately 1,500 (of whom 848 were recorded as Indian, likely Ojibwe).⁴⁰ The county seat, initially placed at its geographic center, was not divided into sellable lots and lacked access to water transportation.⁴¹ Roads were few and rail transportation distant.⁴² Women often braided their hats out of straw.⁴³ Since non-Native homes were scattered, fashionable entertainment meant hitching a team of oxen, [and] go[ing] to a neighbor’s to spend the entire day and eat dinner with them. The fare at these gatherings further emphasized the area’s remoteness. Coffee and tea were scarce, requiring the use of substitutes including pine bark, dried strawberry leaves, scorched peas, beans, barley, and corn. As with the Native peoples, maple sugar became the staple sweetener.⁴⁴

The Civil War, which began in April 1861, only indirectly affected the Woodworth family until President Lincoln signed a compulsory military service system into law on March 3, 1863. Males between twenty and forty-five years of age were subjected to enrollment and potential conscription into the Union army.⁴⁵ Each congressional district received a quota, which, if unmet by enough volunteers, would require a draft. The law could have the effect of spurring communities to more aggressive recruiting.⁴⁶ Six months after passage of the law, a recruiting officer came to Isabella County seeking volunteers to enlist in advance of the draft taking place.⁴⁷

Samuel Woodworth—five foot seven, with light hair, a light complexion, and blue eyes—had suffered from a respiratory condition, potentially enabling a physician to find him unfit for duty if conscripted.⁴⁸ Generally, no married man could be drafted until all eligible unmarried men had been taken. Despite such factors, on September 22, 1863, without his wife’s full assent,⁴⁹ Samuel, a carpenter by trade, voluntarily enlisted for a three-year tour of duty in Company M of the 1st Michigan Engineers & Mechanics Volunteer Regiment. The enlisting officer was Sergt Nelson.⁵⁰ Samuel was paid 25 Dollars Bounty and four Dollars prem[ium].⁵¹

The contributions of this unit were specially valuable to the government and earned for it a national as well as State reputation.⁵² Its members were trained for warfare but devoted to construction projects and logistical support through road and rail building, bridge and tunnel maintenance, and military operations. Like many of his comrades who were experienced in clearing forests and using the lumber produced,⁵³ Samuel’s experience in clearing his homestead land helped qualify him for duty. He also brought an enthusiasm for service—measured by how he escorted the recruiting officer through the settlements. He sought to foster enlistment by his neighbors by taking part in war meetings where old patriotic songs were sung, speeches made and papers read, exhorting volunteerism.⁵⁴

Ironically, another of the State’s specialized regiments—the 1st Michigan Sharpshooters—was bolstered during 1863 by the formation of a unit composed of marksman from several tribes.⁵⁵ The Isabella reservation furnished several.⁵⁶ Some sixty-seven Indigenous males enlisted, primarily for service in that regiment.⁵⁷ Company K was composed almost entirely of members of three major tribes in Michigan: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi. They did not hold U.S. citizenship, though the 1850 Michigan Constitution afforded voting rights to every civilized male inhabitant of Indian descent, a native of the United States and not a member of any tribe.⁵⁸ The unit was the largest all-Native company east of the Mississippi.⁵⁹ They participated in some of the bloodiest and most consequential battles late in the war, and their heroism proved second to none.⁶⁰

Samuel’s enlistment came at a challenging juncture. Two July victories, at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, had boosted Union morale, countered by Confederate victory at the Battle of Chickamauga in north Georgia on September 19–20. The formidable Confederate Army of Northern Virginia continued to stalemate the war in the East. Samuel was mustered in on October 7 in Detroit as artificer, a craftsman or carpenter.⁶¹ He reached his first duty station at Louisville, Kentucky, later that month, then joined the regiment at Elk River near the Alabama/Tennessee border. Deep in the South, it was the site of the unit’s largest construction project, a bridge more than five hundred feet long. If the Union army was to prevail, the rail supply line to Chattanooga, and beyond, would have to be maintained through such efforts. As Earl Hess has noted, the interior of the Deep South was a kind of citadel of resistance for the Rebels, requiring an almost superhuman effort of perseverance by Union soldiers to keep the supply artery open.⁶²

The responsibility of the Engineers & Mechanics for constructing and protecting Union military communications coincidentally enabled the Woodworths to correspond regularly, though several interruptions brought anxiety for each of them. Ellen wanted all the particulars attending her husband’s situation: if its only where you sleep—who with, who you eat with, talk with—what you talk about—think about—what you do evenings, where you sit, what you sit on, how you look, how you feel—& how you are treated; any thing concerning you is of great interest to me. Tell me about every thing.⁶³ When trips to the rural post office found no letter waiting, Ellen’s heart sank.

With Samuel’s enlistment, Ellen had to assume nearly total responsibility for the family’s well-being for the first time. Doing so brought her into a similar sphere with many other women in the North and poor white women of the South who sent their sons to war, sewed for the soldiers, sacrificed, and suffered for the war effort.⁶⁴ Her letters about the home situation demonstrate management of financial, social, educational, and other necessary aspects of family welfare. She coped with the harsh conditions of a midwestern winter. She encountered the inflationary effects of the war on food prices, necessitating substitutes for staples, especially difficult in such a remote locale. Without consistent income from farming or in pay envelopes from Samuel, she looked for opportunities to improve the family’s financial resources.⁶⁵

In January 1864, the new community seat of Mount (or Mt.) Pleasant held a meeting to discuss constructing a schoolhouse and hiring a teacher. Ellen applied for the position, after spending Christmas there and having written Samuel that I almost wish I had a house up there, to live in, & rent our place here, while you are away.⁶⁶ On May 1, she was hired for that summer’s session. The income was significant: there was paid to the teacher, Mrs. Woodworth, during 1864 at one time thirty-six dollars and fifty cents, and at another time thirty-four dollars and twenty-five cents.⁶⁷ Her resourcefulness did not end there. Without her husband’s foreknowledge, she determined on, bargained for, and acquired a house near the school. It would be a good investment, she wrote him. Samuel expressed surprise at your buying so expensive a place at present.⁶⁸ She insisted her plans were well considered: I thought it better to be earning something & not be wholly dependent on you.⁶⁹ He relented: I will do all I can to help you pay for it.⁷⁰

Supplemental aid came from local government. In February 1864, Isabella County acted to provide a bounty of two hundred dollars to families whose breadwinners had gone off to war. Half would be paid one year from enlistment and the rest at the two-year mark. When it arrived that fall, the bonus payment aided Ellen’s efforts at balancing their books. Still, she expressed concern about accepting aid and becoming known as a war-widow.⁷¹ That label came home when she supported widows at their husbands’ funerals.

The dangers inherent in service at a post deep in enemy territory informed the couple’s writings. Maintaining the supply lifeline subjected Samuel’s company to organized raids by Confederate cavalry and to ambushes from guerilla forces.⁷² The dangers from bushwhackers were so pronounced that Samuel frequently slept with his weapon nearby. A number of his comrades were killed, and his frankness about the wounds incurred in hostilities—witnessing Union soldiers being transported to hospital from the front, cut to pieces in all shapes⁷³—made vivid the combat he could face at a moment’s notice. Still, illness took most lives in uniform during the war.⁷⁴ Samuel was not immune. He wrote Ellen after only a few months in uniform about suffering from a regular Camp sickness, attended with fever & dysentery.⁷⁵ O, Samuel, are you seriously ill? she replied.⁷⁶ When he wrote a month later about having a hard week of it,⁷⁷ the implications underscored that his return home had no guarantee.

Unable to help nurse her husband, Ellen freely confessed to the weight of anxiety that her nervous system constantly experienced.⁷⁸ Her fortitude was bolstered by the couple’s two young boys—all I have left to comfort me, now that you are gone.⁷⁹ Their illnesses and injuries were yet another problem to bear, and Ellen sought to involve Samuel by inviting him to write fatherly counsel to Veppy & Dallie. The older, in turn, penned a note to My Dear Papa. The letters from home sought to keep Samuel apprised of the boys’ behavior, including the mischievous. Her vivid writing of how the children now both stand beside me—Vesper with his slate & pencil—and Dallie with a book,⁸⁰ re-created homelife for the absent father. The war came home to the family: Ellen wrote of how one child has got his Geography out, to find where the last battles are being fought while the other has got some large illustrations of battle scenes spread out on the floor, & trying to find his papa among the Soldiers.⁸¹ Samuel’s descriptions of military events helped inspire such interest.

The proximity of friends and family also served to help ease Ellen’s loneliness. She attended Singing School at the Court House, went to meetings and on visits to other homes, came home in a neighbor’s horses, & sleigh. When a sister and her friends paid a call, Ellen warmed a mince pie . . . served some refreshments & then had some music from an Accordeon.⁸² Advance notice of a Surprise Party by a visit of fifteen late one evening tested her hospitality, but she wrote about rising to the occasion. Still, she wrote Samuel, "if you had been present I should have enjoyed it much better than I did."⁸³

Her husband wrote about the novelty of meeting southerners and Negroes, and Ellen reveled in sharing and reacting to his experiences. [W]hen I get home I will tell you some of their sad history, he promised.⁸⁴ She replied: I am also glad to see that your views on the question of Slavery, and the justness of the course pursued by our leaders in this war, is changing—from what your belief was formerly.⁸⁵ When he revealed danger from Confederate raiders, the news prompted far different feelings. Her emotional stress was heightened when Samuel’s letters told of becoming seriously ill. Recuperation, albeit a slow one, became a theme in the rather brief letters next received at home. Ellen’s lengthier reports sought to reassure her husband of how the family longed for his health and his eventual return and to encourage upholding moral strictures. Eventually, Samuel would reveal the full circumstances of his afflictions: vermin infestation, boils, hair and weight loss. He also told the family of his messmates’ surprise at the invalid’s recovery.

Religious beliefs helped foster endurance, especially for Ellen. Membership in the Methodist church placed her in the religious mainstream since it was among the more populist denominations.⁸⁶ Its network of itinerant ministers who preached the faith in rural