Women Making War

Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice

Thomas F. Curran

“Women Making War takes up a worthy topic that has not received enough attention from historians. To date, it is the only full scholarly treatment of Confederate women engaged in war in the critical area of St. Louis. The book combines prodigious research in many dispersed and difficult-to-use sources with deep knowledge of the local context. Women Making War is an excellent piece of historical writing.”—Stephanie McCurry, author of Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War

The bond of citizenship earned during the Civil War

When curator Diana L. Dretske discovered that the five long-gone Union soldiers in a treasured photograph in the Bess Bower Dunn Museum were not fully identified, it compelled her into a project of recovery and reinterpretation. Utilizing an impressive array of local and national archives, as well as private papers, the author’s microhistorical approach records events that often go unnoticed, such as a farmer enlisting in the middle of a crop field, a sister searching her brother’s face for signs of war, and an immigrant dying in an effort to become a good American citizen.

Read more and order at www.siupress.com/bondsofwar.

This book, the most intensive examination of the 96th Illinois Volunteer Infantry since the regiment’s history was published in 1887 centers on immigrants from the British Isles who wished to be citizens of a country at war with itself. Far removed from their native homelands, they found new promise in rural Illinois. These men, neighbors along the quiet Stateline Road in Lake County, decide to join the fighting at its most dangerous hour. The bonds of war become then the bonds of their new national identity.

The Bonds of War uncovers the common soldier from the cataclysm that is the American Civil War by offering a collective biography of five soldiers of the 96th in the Western Theater. The human drama of their lives unfolds before the reader on battlefields such as Chickamauga and within the high pine stockades of Andersonville. Their lives argue that those who seem to matter least in military history are the very ones who can tell us the most about the experience of war and the reasons for remembering.

Diana L. Dretske, curator and Lake County historian at the Bess Bower Dunn Museum of Lake County, has explored, for more than thirty years, the history of northeastern Illinois through her research, presentations, and blog. Her books include Lake County, Illinois: An Illustrated History and Views of America: Fort Sheridan. In 2012 the Illinois State Historical Society recognized her with a lifetime achievement award for outstanding contributions in promoting, preserving, and commemorating Illinois history.

“Thomas F. Curran provides much-needed insight into the lives of Confederate women who, in their efforts to subvert the Union cause, ran afoul of military authorities. Anchored by a variety of entertaining and informative primary sources, he reminds us that there is still more to explore about female agency in directing the course of the Civil War.”

Victoria E. Ott, author of Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War

Partisan activities of disloyal women and the Union army’s reaction

During the American Civil War, hundreds of women were arrested and imprisoned by the Union Army in the St. Louis area. The majority of them were fully aware of the political nature of their actions and had made conscious decisions to assist Confederate soldiers in armed rebellion against the U.S. government. Their crimes included offering aid to Confederate soldiers, smuggling, spying, and sabotaging. By determining that women—who were excluded from the politics of the public sphere—were capable of treason, Federal authorities implicitly acknowledged that women acted in ways that had serious political meaning.

Thomas F. Curran analyzes the activities that led to arrests, the reactions women partisans evoked from Federal authorities, and the impact women’s partisan activities had on Federal military policy and military prisons. He also reveals how these women’s experiences were later disregarded in order to comport with a Lost Cause myth: the need for valiant men to protect defenseless women.

Thomas F. Curran has taught in the department of social studies at Cor Jesu Academy in St. Louis since 2003, and before that he taught at Saint Louis University and the University of Notre Dame. For eight years he served as managing editor of the Journal of Policy History. Curran is the author of Soldier of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement.

Paper: 978-0-8093-3803-0

E-book: 978-0-8093-3804-7 $26.50, 274 pages, 18 illus.

Read more and order at www.siupress.com/womenmakingwar.

Paper: 978-0-8093-3859-7

Cloth: 978-0-8093-3860-3

E-book: 978-0-8093-3861-0

$16.95 paper, $28.50 cloth, 218 pages, 21 illus. Read more and order at www.siupress.com/newsalem.