and hatred wherever it may be throughout the world. that is one of our jobs as soldiers and sailors. i want to say final word in yiddish to these two gentleman. "go in good health." [applause] clicks need silver and her classes in the lives of women during the civil war. she talks about the challenges that female slaves take -- face. she also talks about the reason that southern white women would or would not have supported a confederacy. her talk is about one hour and

15 minutes. prof. silber: we started talking about the beginning of the movement of women's right. black women, as i was saying, were usually on the margins, i would say, of the women's writes movements. we talked about search on her truth -- sojourner truth, and harriet jacobs also had contact with a number of women's writes activists -- rights activists, but she was also very critical of white suffragists and often made the point that they did not fully recognize the way that race had created, you know, kind of a distinct set of obstacles for black women.

i think somebody in our debate made exactly that point in our discussion. so we are to talk about that in a couple of weeks. now i'm good to talk about jacob herself, the narrative she composed, and i think as you know, she wrote about narrative under the name of linda brent. she also changed the name of a number of people in that account. she was born it not as linda brent but as jacob in 1814, her parents were slaves, but i also think you get a sense of this as she describes her childhood, her parents were skilled workers. which meant that they, especially her father, had the opportunity to higher out their time and had the opportunity to live somewhat independently from the save -- from the slaveholders. her father was a carpenter, and that meant that they could have the opportunity to have their children live with them.

her brother john was referred to as william in the narrative and also residing close to them was harriet's maternal grandmother, her name was molly. what is she? i think she is and martha in the book. but her actual name was mauling -- aunt martha in the book. but her actual name is molly. she was freed during the revolution and she was re-enslaved when she was captured during this of a war, so she was one of those as we talked about where some opportunities opened up for slaves to get their freedom. she was captured, she was re-enslaved, and i think in the books, she was freed again when somebody bought her in the town

and an freighter. -- and then freed her. most of harriet's experience is that she was living in a town or on a plantation, but most of the time she was living in a household and not on a plantation. i don't know how to make this a sharper image. i can try turning off the backlights. does that help a little bit? so this is harriet jacob in 1894, she is aged 81, i really tried to find a picture of her when she was younger but i could not seem to find one. she is a slave in north carolina, which had a somewhat different system from what existed in other parts of the south at this point. it was never a state that was dominated by large slave plantations. once we had this second middle passage, which was a point after the foreign slave trade has ended and when slaves are being

shipped from the seaboard south to the interior and into the mississippi valley and into mississippi, louisiana, once you have that second little package -- passage, laser being taken to places like north carolina and being moved to the -- slaves are being taken to places like north carolina and being moved to places like louisiana. it meant like places in the seaport south, there was a predominance of women, children, and the elderly in the slave community. the other thing i would save about -- say about slavery in north carolina is that even though there were not large plantations, there were ways that slaveholders were trying to make system of slavery make dividends for them, even though, there was kind of a whole system

of slavery moving westward. in north carolina, they were having slaves hire themselves out, they were letting slaves by their own freedom, so i think you're getting a sense of some flexibility, perhaps, for the slaves who lived around harriet jacob, at least compared to slaves living further to the west. so. further points out that she was aware she was a slave when she was six or's old, i think that was right after her mother died. i think she was 11 -- six euros old -- six-years-old, i think she was the hearing out right after her mother died. here is james nor come -- norcom, and he looks sort of suitably devilish in this photo, as he should. james norcom was an older man and this is the house where

harriet spent most of the time working in it in 10, north carolina -- edenton, north carolina. so at 16, she meets of the son of dr. norcom's partner, and she had by him two children. these are believed to be pictures of harriet jacob's children. this is her daughter luisa at her son joseph. -- louisa, and her son, joseph. she had been reassigned at that point to the plantation, and at

that point, she began her stay in the crawlspace of her grandmother's attic. the dimensions of the crawlspace were 90 long, seven feet wide, and about three feet wide at one end -- nine feet long, seven feet wide, and about three feet wide at one end. after she spent seven years in the crawlspace, she then began a successful escape to the north. here then, is kind of an overview of harriet jacob's grandmother's house. it is a somewhat substantial house for this time. and then that is a kind of cut away of the crawlspace were harriet jacob would have stayed. and then this is i think harriet

jacob mentioned norcom's split, and she is in the crawlspace at this point, but this is the runaway notice that norcom placed. it is assigned by james norcom. it says north carolina, i think it says 1835 on that. when she got out of there, she became very active and abolition, she traveled around with white women who were active abolitionists, the encouraged her to write her story as a narrative. she finished writing it in 1858. it is not a novel, sometimes people call all of these kinds of books novels. she did not have a publisher until she met one of her white abolitionist friends.

she gave her an endorsement. there is this idea that, "well, you write so well, how could you have written so well if you were a slave?" it was published then in 1851 on the eve of the civil war. it is one of the few, not the only, and not even the first, but one of the few slave narratives that was written by a woman. most of the ones of that we are familiar with that we have come across that are published are narratives that were written by male slaves, you know, they wrote about their confrontation with slave masters, you know, their quest for freedom and their kind of individual activity. have any of you read a, like, frederick douglass or any kind of slave narrative? i am seeing, like, one.

we will talk about the difference between harriet jacobs and the other kinds of slave narratives. anybody have any initial thoughts about this book or comments? things that surprised you or stood out for you as you were reading this account? yes? >> [indiscernible] all the time she apologized for what she was doing, like, she had her children and she was like, she kept trying to explain herself and i really didn't feel like -- prof. silber: you didn't really feel like it was necessary to go through all of that explaining? >> i thought it was strange that she would apologize to all of those people. prof. silber: anybody else have any thoughts on that as to why she keeps apologizing? yeah?

>> one of the primary factors in the writing, in her book, is to appeal to white northerners, she will want to make sure that there aren't any loopholes or places where they can pick apart at her story and say, "well, why did you do that?" so she is taking great pains to explain everything. prof. silber: right, so i think a big part of it has to do with the audience that she writes for and how they are going to think of her if she doesn't make an apology. anything else that stood out for you if you read it? things that were surprising? things that were kind of, you know, unusual about how she describes her situation? you? >> i like how dr. flint -- prof. silber you can call him doctor fled, that's what we call

him and he is known and hated as. >> yeah, i like how she described people were going and yelling at her. prof. silber: it is amazing that people did that, yeah, and that flint was afraid of her. people see her as an important person in the town, they liked her baking, and you are really write about that. one of the most interesting stories, i think, is when he says he is going to sell her and she says, "well, you know, i have always been promised i would get my freedom," and he says, "well, i don't care what anybody says." and she goes to the slave auction and she gets up on the auction block and everyone says, "that's horrible, nobody should be selling you, and martha -- aunt martha!" people know her and it is to an extent a power-play.

yeah, that is an interesting part. yeah? >> [indiscernible] harriet would wake up in the middle of the night and they were tapping on her or whispering, i wouldn't want to say sexual things, but things of that may be a slave master would tell her that she would respond to, like she was having an affair with the master. prof. silber: yeah, you are right, that relationship between mrs. flint and harriet is very interesting, and you feel like this is a very interesting, frustrated, angry woman. you feel like she has been cheated or she has been betrayed. she doesn't have any power to do anything against her husband, so the only person that she thinks she has power over is harriet jacobs.

but yeah, it is very interesting. we sort of touched on this already, but the other point i want to pull out here is, from the standpoint of being a woman in slavery, what makes harriet jacobs's experiences distinctive? so how would you kind of -- what stands out as something that separates her from male slaves? ok, people have to have things that they want to say about this. >> i think her story is that she is constantly torn about wanting her own freedom and wanting to be a mother for her children. prof. silber: ok, so motherhood and the ties that she has her children are definitely an issue here.

what else? what else stands out in her experiences specifically as a female slave? >> i think a lot of the slaves depended on religion for comfort, it was very important to them, and her religion was sort of threatened in that she had the threat of being sexually abused by the master and then that would make her go back on her moral and religious principles and then she went and had relations with mr. sands. prof. silber: mr. sands, right. so she is kind of trying to balance or deal with this issue, it is the idea of morality, christianity that is with it and this constant threat that she is

dealing with regarding constant sexual abuse and how she is going to deal with that. so she does kind of her for you to a couple of places, but she is very conscious that she has particular concerns that confront her as a slave and as a woman. she says on page 58, for example, this is the bottom of that first paragraph, she says, "the influence of slavery had the same effect on me that they had on other young girls. they made me ritually -- me prematurely knowing of the evil ways of the world. i knew what i did and i did it with deliberate calculations." she mentions that she had given birth to her second child and she found that it was a girl and when she said "when i found up my second child was a girl, my heart was heavier than it ever had been before. slavery is particularly hard for women, and they have been

wronged and suffer more vacations particularly difficult for their own." these are part of the distinctive wrongs and suffering of the threat of sexual abuse and there is the question of how to be a mother and the sort of constant fear as a mother that slave women have for their children, what is quite happen to their children, and how, in fact, in a very specific way, how does motherhood complicate harriet jacobs's plan for escape? what is her plan for escape? does she just get on a boat right away and leave?

no. what does she do? yeah. what did she do? >> in order to secure her own freedom, she has to secure the freedom of her children first. she wants you make sure that her children can go up north with her, so she has to make sure that she has the ability to secure freedom for three people. prof. silber: yeah, she has to make sure that there is freedom for her children as well. but what did she do to try to manage that problem of her childrens' freedom as well? yeah? >> even if she is on the run, she tries to talk to them and understand to make sure that he will buy the children and freedom. prof. silber: right, so she is in negotiation with the childrens' father. she goes, i mean, the whole seven years in the crawl space is really about protecting her children.

right? the seven years and the crawl space, she calls it her loophole. right? doesn't she call in her loophole of retreat or something like that? page 128, the title of that chapter, "the loophole of retreat." she has the dilemma as a female slave, she says it she is going to exploit a loophole right here. she is good to make it look like she is gone, when in fact she is not really gone. so instead of completely taking herself out of the community, she is going to be in a place where she can watch, where she can sort of, you know, have some kind of supervision, even indirectly over her children, where she can hope she can intervene in their situation, so can you imagine a male slave pursuing these kinds of strategies?

what do men do? the whole, aproach slave who is in man, what is their escape plan? >> he could just go to the north by himself. >> you are right. the only thing i would add is that that is the way he would portray it. he doesn't have ties, he is not bound by commitments or relationships, he's going to pursue a strategy on his own. something interesting about frederick douglass, he makes it seem like he did the whole thing on his own. if you know more about him, you find out he got help from

relatives, his fiancee. there were a lot of people who were instrumental in the process but there is a way in which men who are slaves are portrayed. and women emphasize these relationships. let me get more specific about this. they are three important scenes in understanding harriet jacob'' slave narrative. the first is what we talked about. unique becauseis she writes as a slave woman and in that sense, she has certain kinds of experiences that are different from the kinds of experiences that men have.

there are different experiences in terms of the threat of sexual abuse, how to deal with being a mother, protecting your children, and unique circumstances of that pursuing freedom. the second thing that is up in terms of how she tells the story. when it comes to telling the , two, she faces to choices that are the predominant writing strategies of that time. them onshe could write the lines of a male slave narrative, like frederick douglass. over, she could write in the tradition of the sentimental novel. the third theme stemming from

this, one reason why she is influenced by this model of the sentimental novel is that she is trying to appeal to a specific audience. erin made this point. who is the specific audience? north whoeople in the may already have abolitionist meetings that she feels are not getting enough board trying to create sympathy in people who were not really addressing the issue. >> correct. she is writing for northern white abolitionist leaving vaguelyere kind of anti-slavery. she is writing to northern white women. there are a couple of points in the book where she says very

explicitly, this is who i am writing for. she is talking about, right after the other quote that i read about how slave girls have can benfluences that destructive of their morals. after that she says, "oh ye happy with the news. he has been sheltered and free to choose the objects of your affection, who zones are protected by law, do not judge the slave girl to severely. >> this is a direct appeal she is baking to white women in the north. she has another part where she talks about this. in the middle of the page she says, paid amy and pardon me. you never knew what it is to be a slave, to be unprotected by the law.

other parts, too. she makes it very clear that that is the audience she is interested in. i would say even more, there is probably suspicion on her part that those northern white female readers, even if she doesn't say this, are influenced by the idea of the feminine difference, that these are women who feel like and moralral goodness virtue are especially important qualities for women to have in cultivate. i think she sets -- and suspects that these are women who put a high premium on that which is she is apologizing so much. ok, so. we talked aue -- bit about one but in terms of

two, the different options about how to write about her experience and whether she is going to follow the male slave narrative at the sentimental novel. if you have read -- has anybody read anything else about slave narratives by men? also butebody else has so for example, like frederick douglass, how you might compare. jake is a counter frederick douglas? >> it was a while ago. i don't think he places much aspects on the female for obvious reasons. there are a lot of things that stood out to me about what she had to say about white women in the affected had on them. i don't remember.

i have only read pieces but i remember he makes it more of an account. hers reads more like a diary, pulling at the emotions. >> yes. less emotional. if you remember, there are some key moments and frederick douglass's narrative like one moment is when he has a fight with this guy who is trying to and make him a more obedient slave and he has a fight with this guy and he beats this isny sort of says, a moment when i started to feel that i was a man and i could attain my freedom. moments in these narratives to put the emphasis on doing it yourself, struggling as an individual, and achieving he'ss as an end of jewel,

worthy important markers in the male slave narrative. in a more general way, the whole movement about abolitionism emphasized freedom, being free, as a male experience. in other words, the relationship people understood was once you are free, you were a man. they didn't -- they wouldn't have said, once you are not a slave, you are a woman. do you know what i mean? being a man was critical. for example, this was one of the symbols used in the abolitionist movement. england,t was made by but this is a widely circulated image in the abolitionist movement. can you read what it says?

this was the trope of abolitionism. and my not a man and a brother? the juxtaposition is either you are a slave i think harriet jacobs is aware of this, but there are points in the course of her narrative where she makes reference to the genre of trying -- this juxtaposition of, if you are not a slave, you are going to be a man. can you think of any parts in the book where he might be seen something sort of referencing this idea of being a man? talking about how her lover was very prideful. -- would not be submissive. she is it to talk about her

brother. there is a part where -- can anybody think of any other parts? prof. silber: she uses it to talk about her brother. there is a part where, can anybody think of any other parts? because there is also a part where she is talking about her uncle, maybe, let me check. and it is chapter four, it is wherever chapter four starts, i think it is page 14. this is about her uncle benjamin and this is her quest for freedom, and she writes in this kind of a form of the male slave narrative, the slave who dared to feel like a man. there is also a way where harriet jacobs herself, and this is the way that the struggle for freedom has been phrased. this is the way people talk about being a slave who seeks their freedom and presents it as being a man.

you see this in chapter 16, also in chapter four, and he says -- right, this is sort of on the bottom, and this is sort of the reference of her uncle, and she talks about herself, she says, "it was the very knowledge of my own shortcomings and needed to be retained. the need, if possible, about my brother's god-given nature." in other words, she wants to take on those masculine qualities herself, because this is what the quest for freedom is all about. all right, so the other point on part two here is that she is torn on presenting her story, the one being the male slave narrative, and the other about the sentimental novel. we have talked about the sentimental novel, what have we said about it? anybody remember?

all right, i will help you out here. we talked about how there is an emphasis on feelings and emotion. the sort of sentimental novel was told about the christian heroine who has all of these circumstances but nonetheless, through it all, by the sort of threats being made against her, she is able to retain her future -- her -- can you think of ways that she has tried to explain her virtue?

obviously her story does not lend itself completely to this genre because he does not retain her virtue. manage the tries to problem of her virtue and her sexuality because she is in some ways influenced by the genre of the sentimental novel. can you think of ways in which she tries to somehow explain and manage that problem of her virtue, which you can get back to the first point that she is constantly apologizing. think about the way that she is making her apologies or the way that she is trying to wayne herself. >> if she doesn't have her children with mr. sands, then the other slave owner would sexually abuse her.

it would take her out of the equation completely. prof. silber: yes, and if she does enter this relationship with dr. sands, then she will be bothered by dr. flint. >> that's right, so it works like a double-edged sword. >> that's where she has the whole long thing about i made this horrible thing. so don't judge me, you happy, free women, so she made this choice to go with mr. sands, because that would at least be a way that i can control what happened to my children, she says, you know, "it sort of gave me a little measure of freedom to make that choice." and i think she also says, i think what she also said that this point, there is this point on page 58, in some ways, the quote i read to you before, "the

real source of problem, the way -- the reason i didn't retain my source of effort you, the reason i went with sands is because of slavery." it wasn't that i was a woman, it wasn't because i didn't understand what was collect -- correct and not correct, it was problems with slavery. so she tries to make it clear that that is what corrupts a young girl's moral situation. she also, i think then, tries to redefine what it means to be free. she says at one point on page 59 when she makes her decision about taking mr. sands, she says, "it seems less degrading to give oneself than two submit to compulsion -- than to submit to compulsion. there's something akin to freedom by having a lover who has no control over you other

than kindness and attachment. let's talk for a minute about this whole situation. do you think there was a choice that she had? would you call that a choice for harriet jacobs? >> i think it was a moment of relative choice more so then other situations in her life, but nothing was really good or free. she had to make a tough decision. prof. silber: so it was not a wide-open choice there? >> yeah. >> i think choice kind of implies that she is free, so i don't think that is a choice at all. prof. silber: right. >> that is not a choice of freedom. she was not free when she made that choice. prof. silber: right. so the decision that she made was sort of saved by the fact that she was a slave, in other words.

and here is this thing that i read later which i thought was so interesting. this is another story that i was reading about harriet jacobs's's situation and it gave me some very interesting insight about this. she said norcom's threats and harriet's distress notified dr. sands to her sexual availability. he began at this point with courting her with letters and said that the and she was caught between two older stockers and she gave into the younger evil. so in other words, this analysis, which she doesn't explain about it this way in the book, here is sands, or sawyer, who knows about harriet, and he is actually the son of flint's partner, and he knows very well what is going on between flint and a harriet, and he knows that

harriet is trying to get away from flint, and so she says, " -- he says, "hey, i am going to take this opportunity." he is playing this opportunity for well knowing that the kind of distress of that harriet is under. by the time it is over, who do you think is a nice guy? he finally gives the children their freedom, that is, until he is badgered to death about it. i think we go to that point, how much choice is therefore harriet jacob at this point? ok. so at the very end of the book, just to kind of conclude this point of these different genres that harriet jacobs writes, at the very end, she confronts outright the fact that she is not writing a sentimental novel.

you remember what she says at the very end? [sneezes] prof. silber: bless you. bless us all. [laughter] prof. silber: exactly. >> she says she obtain freedom and not in the usual way with marriage, but being free instead. prof. silber: exactly, my freedom ends not in the usual way, with marriage, which would be the sentimental novel. i am the virtuous heroine and i go through all of these ordeals, and at the end, she finds the managing luz, and she says, i am not going to end this way, the book doesn't and this way.

but it ends, and she says, maybe it ends in a more important way? it ends in freedom and not with marriage. ok. so i am going to throw one other point here and maybe will -- we'll have time for something else. there are other interpretations i have read where people say, in fact, harriet jacobs was not successfully able to resist the threats and sexual abuse of dr. flint and that he did in fact rape her and that sense of propriety compels her to tell the story in a different kind of way. what do you think about the -- that? like did you read this book and think, "oh yeah, i am sure he did it?"

>> it seems really unrealistic to me that he would go through like, all through the notes and that mrs. flint would be so upset about it, if it never physically escalated to that point. >> the only thing i could think of is that he was so afraid of the grandmother that it seems like he probably did. prof. silber: yeah. >> because it she was so apologetic through it, i could understand where she is coming from because she has all this pressure and especially because she wants to appeal to northern white women it where she doesn't want to make it seem like she -- it looks bad on her, almost. prof. silber: right, in other words, it is totally plausible that it could happen, but you could see what she has to present it differently? yeah. yeah.

i mean, i suppose another way of saying this is, given what she describes, it feels like a pretty escalated version of sexual abuse no matter what we call it. he throws her down the stairs, there is all the kind of, in a sense, the physical abuse that she endures, almost, it is a gray area of what we would actually call it. ok. i am going to move on to something else and we are going to sort of switch gears here and talk about the coming of the civil war, as i mentioned, you know, harriet jacobs's novel is published right on the eve of the civil war in 1851. so i feel that kind of chronologically it makes sense to move on to that topic. at the time of the civil war, i would say that most people knew that slavery, without question,

had something to do that was causing the civil war, and people knew that the war was linked to the struggle for abolition. in fact, the story was often told that sometime in 1853 in the middle of the civil war, abraham lincoln, who was then the president, met this famous woman writer harriet beacher , stowe, and she wrote this book, "uncle tom's cabin," and apparently they had a meeting where he met her and he said quote the little lady who wrote this book that started this great big war -- he said quote, "the little lady who wrote this book that started this great big war." i have to say i have always been a little bit confused about that. is that a compliment? i don't think that that is really the way the story is presented. it is meant to be more like how

influential. pitcher still was. whether or not lincoln actually said this, i think there is a reason that lincoln might have said it. because when you put things like this, here is the lady that wrote the book that started this big war, it implies that the human -- that the union cause had the standing and moral credibility because here was a woman like harriet beecher stowe who kind of put her stamp on it. who said, this is what we -- this is what it is all about. if we can refer back to this woman's concern, then it gives our cause moral credibility. by 1863, lincoln of course was now pursuing a policy of emancipation to end slavery. he, himself was trying to put , the war on a higher moral foundation, so it makes sense that he would, in some way, draw on the endorsements of somebody like harriet beecher stowe.

now in the south, white southerners did something similar, although obviously they were not putting the same emphasis on emancipation. they portrayed southern white women as a source of moral inspiration for their cause, for the confederacy, and they even made the argument that they were fighting for the war in the first place to protect her women. obviously -- protect their women, obviously in this case, white women. we can find contrast between north and south and the way they thought about women and the way they thought about gender. and here is where i think the important difference is. the confederates, more than union supporters, tended to downplay women's direct involvement in the war. yes, they were important, yes they were a part of our moral foundation, but in terms of

direct participation in the work, the confederates said no, not important. they had a small, totally unimportant role for women. and i think it came from a tradition and the south of seeing women protected, of being women's shelter, even if they didn't do all of these things, they liked to believe that they did all of these things, and we talked about putting women on a pedestal. i think that sort of comes across here. as a result, it meant that women, white women, who lived in the confederacy were much more limited and constrained in terms of what kind of involvement and participation they could have in the war effort. case in point here, although not really historically accurate, would be "gone with the wind." does anybody know "gone with the wind?" you have probably read -- watched the movie, nobody has read the book.

you might have seen the movie, it is for and a half hours. does anyone remember the heroine? yes, it is scarlet o'hara. one of the central tensions of her story in this book that she is constantly confronting are the kind of limits that southern society puts on women. she can't run a business, she actually wants to have more sexuality, society says, no, no, no, women don't do this sort of thing. she goes to a fund-raising fair and all she can do really is kind of sit behind the table at the fair. we can't allow women to do anything more than that, even though she is a widow. i want to compare and talk about

some of the ways that women figured into the war effort and also the way that causes were being defined in both the north and in the south. how both sides were putting women into the picture when they talked about the reasons that they were fighting, but then they also talked about, you know, the things or the way that women did things in the course of the war. right. so here's the first point that i want to make. to understand the role and the expectation in terms of southern women and northern women in the war, we have to go back and connect that to a thing that we have been talking about already for the past few weeks in terms of either the separate spheres in the north or that other thing in the south, does anybody remember what i called it? >> the civic sphere? prof. silber: the civic sphere

was of the third sphere, but we talked about the patriarchal households of the south. so we have these two different ways of thinking about gender roles in the north and the south. in fact, understanding the basic division of war between the north and the south is very much connected to understanding something about gender. now as we know, we have had all kinds of debates and discussions and war was caused by slavery and war was caused by constitutional principles, and my point is not, i don't really care about that or it is not about slavery, but my point is, we can't really understand the different ways that the two sides conceived of their causes and formulated their differences without understanding gender. but let me get more specific about what i mean. in the south, i believe that southern white men went to war, yes they went to war for slavery, but another way to talk about this is that they went to

war -- i have so little blackboard space -- they went to war for something we should call mastery. and what i mean by that is that they went to war to fight for their right to be independent, land-holding men who controlled and ran their own households as they saw fit. i will say that again. they fought for the right to be independent, land-holding men who controlled and ran their own households as they saw fit. for many of them, this meant the right to control, by, sell -- buy, sell their black slaves, and for many of them, it it meant for them to one day

themselves be owners of black slaves, but in a more general sense, it meant the power over their own household. to run their own household and to reject the idea that a government could kind of come in and mess with your household. right? that a government has the right to kind of intervene in any way in what happens in your home. and i think this language -- i mean, this mentality, was reflected in the language that southern white men used when they went to war. because what they talked about, if you listen to the things that some soldiers wrote about or even some politicians wrote about, some of these were very matter of fact principles or some kind of abstract idea, but they wrote about preserving and protecting their homes. a soldier from virginia, for example, said quote, "the man who loves his family the best

now is he who is most anxious and who will risk the most and suffer the most to repel the invader." another soldier said it this way, "dear is my country to thee, but dearer to me by far is my little woman." so your family, your home, you're kind of domestic space, this household. obviously one part that is going on here is that here are the people that were being attacked and invaded. and they saw their fight as something that was close to home. the home had to be protected. but i also think there is something else going on in this language. because they fight to retain this position of the protectors and the patriarchs of the household. and they were fighting to retain a position because that was the source of all of their power and their wealth.

it was a place to kind of, you know, encapsulate all of their worldly assets. we are fighting for matters real and tangible, said one soldier from texas, our property and our home. in other words, really to a great extent, we are not mixing this up with, we want a nation, we want a country, they are very much talking about home and family. now these might seem like words that menus a lot when they go to war, and yes, that is true. these are things that men often say when they go to war -- that men use a lot when they go to war, and yes, that is true. these are things that men often say when they go to war. there was a different kind of language that men in the north use when they went to war. repeatedlyers separated the idea of a home from country or nation and they

tended to put the nation above the home. they tended to say that the most important thing we are fighting for is not home, family, etc., etc., but this national ideal. so one soldier said, for example, to his wife, "my duties to my country are of more important now than my duties to you." thank you, buddy, yeah. [laughter] prof. silber: another one wrote, "duty promise me to go, my home is first, and my friends are next." we got priorities of the most important thing now is the nation. now geographically speaking in terms of how the war was fought, that would make sense. these are men who were not staying in place and protecting their home as southerners might have. these were men who were going off, and it was far off. they put a lot of emphasis on that idea of the country. but again, there was something

else going on here. i think it was easier for union soldiers to be prioritized, is that a word? give less priority to their home because it wasn't their domain. not in the way that it was for confederate soldiers. so again, we had that whole very complicated diagram about separate spheres. in the north, right, we have home and work and in the south we have the one big sphere and a kind of plantation household with a home sphere in the middle. so in other words, you know, following this notion that the home was a kind of distinct, separate sphere, where women were more or less in charge, it meant that men thought it was a secondary consideration, northern men would have said

that. northern men initially did not have all of their wealth and property concentrated in their home in the same way that southern men did. right? because we know that northern men increasingly were looking outside of the home to factories, to businesses, to the marketplace, as a source of wealth. it meant that it was easier for northern meant to say, the most important thing is country, the less important thing is the home. or as one union soldier put it as he went off to fight, "first my god, second my country, third my mother." again, really? all right, so if you are in the south, it would have been inconceivable to rank your mother so low. that was not the language of that southern men used when they went off to war. one southerner went and wrote,

quote, "women had is enough to send strong men into tears and to shout and i verily believe that the ranks of the confederacy that they went into war solely for her that they fought." there are two different conceptions of that women are central and home is important and there are two different ways of talking about the cause and it had different effects on women. the women who heard these conceptions, the women who had to live through this and deal with these ideas, these ideas that were being put forth by men. so imagine, let's take a little -- let's put on our imagination cap's for a moment here, and imagine that -- caps here for a moment and imagine that you are a woman in the south during the civil war and that you hear the

things that i just said. that's the breaks of the confederacy went rolling into battle on the misty conviction were solely for her that they fought. you hear about this momentous struggle. so what do you feel? what is it going to make you want to do? >> makes you want to back the confederacy and preserve this way of life? prof. silber: ok, so it is definitely a way that is drawing you into the concerns of the confederacy. you want to support the confederacy. you want to support the confederacy because they are supporting you. it definitely gives you that sense of attachment. >> it makes you want to get involved in whatever war efforts that women would get involved with at the time, because i know

that women really could only put their political opinions in negative ways and would do its inner boycotts, but obviously, like, times have changed, but even slightly, but involving themselves in any ways that they could.