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 shapes”73—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 places produced, as David Reynolds states, “almost as many Methodist churches in the United States as there were post offices.”87 Ellen’s views on key issues—rebellion, slavery, and postwar welfare of the newly freed—placed her squarely within the moral framework of her denomination, which held that “the destruction of slavery was the chief object of the war,” unequivocally defended the Union, and urged support of Freedmen’s aid societies to ease the transition from bondage to freedom.88 Religious grounding, however, did not eliminate her anxiety, as shown by a lament: “Why am I so apprehensive?”89
Ellen consistently invoked biblical injunctions and urged her husband to become a better moral agent than he had been before enlistment.90 She was far from unique: both sides relied on Bible texts for endurance and justification. Leaders including Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln invoked scripture, the latter most iconically in his Second Inaugural speech.91 Military service in the Deep South afforded Samuel the opportunity to reconsider his spiritual framework in light of Ellen’s continuing encouragement. Samuel had his first encounter with African Americans in a church setting by attending “Negro meetings” of the formerly enslaved. He concluded “there are some very inteligent [sic] Negroes.”92 His letters revealed that while he had held no abolitionist sentiment at enlistment, his outlook changed: “I have come to the conclusion that it is a just war—I have had an opportunity to learn something of the horrid institution of Slavery. O how wicked; how cruel! I have conversed with a great many, from all parts of the south that have come into our lines for protection—& it has drawn tears from my eyes to listen to their sad story.”93
Samuel’s approach to spiritual matters underwent something of a transformation. He was not much of a believer or of any particular faith at enlistment, a significant difference from his wife’s fervor evidenced from her first epistle. Ellen’s letters recounted how he had engaged in pursuits, such as card playing, that she thought less than virtuous. Military service caused him to rethink his behavior and beliefs. Receiving “a Testament & hymn book” not long after enlisting, his mention of the gift evoked this response from Ellen: “I hope you will read your books that you spoke of, that had been given you; for your sake, & mine.”94 She longed that he “might become a christian.”95 His letters do show change, exemplified by news that “I sent Vesper a soldiers hymn book this week.”96 Eventually, he would write home: “It is pretty hard to be a christian, among what we have to contend with.”97
Ellen wrote of gratification that his politics had come into alignment with hers. “You will now call me an abolishionist,” he confessed.98 She affirmed his change of heart: “if any one will listen to reason and look for the right, they will not be governed by party spirit, when truth, & Justice tells them they are in error.”99 Her defense of the Union and opposition to slavery remained constant. Not until 1881 did Michigan women gain a limited right to vote, a precursor to broader achievements in 1918–1920.100 Without the right to vote, Ellen Woodworth’s letter writing gave her an avenue to express political views and influence her husband in a new, meaningful way.
Though neighbors were few and far between in Lincoln Township, Ellen’s letters speak of visits among neighbors and social interactions that proved critical to a sense of community. Her move to Mount Pleasant began to widen her circle of contacts, though the town featured only nine structures.101 She was called on to take in and nurse an injured lumberman; she took in a boarder, a new arrival who launched a town newspaper. Her repeated mentions of a brother-in-law who was becoming a leading citizen, other community leaders, and their spouses demonstrated the interconnectedness of the rural inhabitants.
As in her husband’s, Ellen’s letters spoke of novel cultural experiences. Like his, they first occurred in a religious context. Unlike his, her reactions were mixed. On the one hand, she could speak of Native congregants as her “brothers, & sisters.”102 On the other hand, employing a descriptive term of them as “dusky” revealed something less than full acceptance as fellow children of God. When visiting Native children at the Mission School, she regarded “some of them quite intelligent looking.” But calling them “filthy and disobedient,” and expressing a preference for teaching “white children, at less remuneration,” revealed an attitude that bore markings of prejudice.103 There was not much Christian compassion in her complaining about higher prices for fruit because “the Squaws” had more enterprise in picking it first.104 Still, she did not refer to Native people as a “menace” as did persons of prominence, raised in a “pioneer” environment, such as suffragette Anna Howard Shaw.105 Nor did she express fear about their proximity as did other midwestern women.106
Missing from her written observations is awareness of the varied and parallel lives of Native families in the county. As documented in the 1860 Census, male heads of Native families principally maintained two occupations, “Farmer” and “Hunter.” They shared such “jobs” with Euro-Americans. Three males were recorded in religious roles, as Methodist preachers. Several told the enumerator that their occupation was “Conncilor”—a tribal leadership designation—or “Ex Chief,” and one woman described herself as “Chiefs’ widow.” Names were listed in Native as well as European forms. Family units ranged in size from that of the Woodworths to larger numbers.107 Native women and children had to cope with their family members’ absence in blue uniform just as much—including their deaths.108
After the initial twelve months apart, Ellen could express pride in her contribution to the Union war effort. The challenges of separation were felt daily, sharpened by a visit to their farmstead when she “could not stay there long” because of reminders of Samuel in his “work on every hand.”109 Yet, such hardships could be endured on account of the cause:
When I think of the lonely hours I have passed since you went away, and still must pass—I feel that I too am doing something for our Country. I have given all I had to give, for the cause of Liberty & freedom; and should the happy hour come when we can welcome our brave Soldiers home, we can truly unite in the glad anthem of gratitude & praise that will burst from the national heart, & feel that we have helped hasten the happy era, & borne a share in this great & fearful struggle. God bless you, my dear Husband.110
Ellen’s views on contemporary politics found expression in anticipating the day when “a prosperous & purified Nation” would emerge.111 She looked to “restoration of our noble Union”112 and denigrated those of the “Copperhead” party,113 counting them as southern sympathizers arrayed against her husband. She opined on the 1864 presidential election, clearly favoring Lincoln’s reelection over his opponent, Union general George B. McClellan, who ran on a platform without emancipation. Samuel lagged behind; he did not vote and initially suggested that “Uncle Abraham is losing friends among the Soldiers—he may be all right but he will lose votes by the course he is taking.”114 When the canvass concluded, Samuel observed: “Abraham has a firm hold of me, so I shall have to stay; yet he clothes me well, & feeds us—such as it is.”115
Despite a fairly dependable delivery system, the vagaries of the mail compounded the difficulty of separation.116 As Ellen waited “two long weeks in suspense” for a letter, the dearth of news from her distant spouse caused her to confess that it “makes me nearly sick.”117 At the lowest emotional point early in the winter of 1864–1865, she did ask him to “come home on furlough,” a need so powerfully felt that “it has seemed the past few days as though you were coming—so much so that I sat up Saturday night till past 12 o clock watching for you.”118 Her candor revealed a state almost of desperation: “Three weeks of suspense—what can be the reason—Are you sick, or a prisoner—or—O what! Not dead!”119
Samuel complained of not receiving correspondence from home, but he expressed willingness to sacrifice, temporarily, if the lack of letters was due to military necessity, such as trains being occupied with carrying munitions. When an envelope did arrive, his well-being was buttressed: “the letter I received to day pays me for waiting—so full of hope and good news it cheers me on.”120 Can you “ever realize,” he replied, “how much good they do me”?121 Ellen’s constancy in corresponding inspired Samuel to remain in uniform until war’s end. He received his discharge on May 17, 1865.122 A week later, his regiment paraded through the streets of Washington, D.C., in a victory celebration tempered by Lincoln’s assassination. Samuel’s recuperation from lingering illness prevented his participation but brought him home quicker.
In addition to teaching for an income, Ellen’s other pursuits were representative of women “[a]cross the Old Northwest” who “increasingly moved from their traditional domestic roles” into formerly exclusive male domains because they and their families and the Union required it: “necessity knew no law.” Like Ellen, there were those who received advice from absent soldiers but “acted independently from necessity.”123 Such forbearance against obstacles entitled them, in the words of the sixteenth president, to be counted as among “the best women” in America.124
After his discharge, Samuel Woodworth became a veterinarian in Mount Pleasant and, like many veterans, joined the local post of the Grand Army of the Republic.125 He and Ellen had a third son, Raymond Preston, who was born on July 20, 1871. In 1888, since two sons had homesteads nearby, the couple relocated to Emmet County, Michigan, and lived in the Village of Petoskey.126 Samuel died there in 1899; Ellen was still living and working in Petoskey the next year, teaching German.127 She moved back to Mount Pleasant during the next decade.128 Ellen received a veteran widow’s pension until she died in 1914 at her son Dallas’s home in Illinois.129 The couple’s graves are found together in section 3 of Riverside Cemetery in Mount Pleasant.
Vesper Lagrande Woodworth, born on November 9, 1854, in Java Center, Wyoming County, New York, died on December 1, 1950, in Ashland County, Ohio, at the age of ninety-six. He was buried in Brookside Cemetery in Charlevoix, Michigan. He had been a farmer and a United States Post Office mail carrier.130
Dallas Charles Woodworth, born in Java Center on December 26, 1859, died July 17, 1916, at Rock Island, Illinois, at the age of fifty-six. He had worked as a tailor and as a motion picture operator and inventor.131 He coauthored a dramatic production titled The Pioneer: A Game of Hearts.132 He was buried in Chippiannock Cemetery, Rock Island, Illinois.
Raymond Preston Woodworth died September 30, 1948, in Ashland County, Ohio, at the age of seventy-seven. In 1900, he was employed as a “musician (show)” and was living in Birmingham, Alabama.133 A decade later, that was still his occupation, but he had moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan.134
The field of academic study known as “Civil War Memory” has yet to give fully proper attention to the service and sacrifice of the rural women of the Midwest. As Nina Silber notes, southern women have obtained “an exaggerated presence in our memory,” leaving their Union counterparts “with barely a memorial or tribute worth noticing.” Ostensibly, this uneven reckoning was due to an insufficient record to document (for Union farm women) “their trials and travails.”135 Even if recorded, readability might suffer from insufficient education. Not with the Woodworths as authors. Their writing is descriptive—Ellen, a teacher, penning a letter “to the constant patter of the rain against the window pane”136—Samuel, a woodworker, making keen observations about the destitution of the southern society he is helping to reform.
The Woodworths’ correspondence may serve as among the “few monuments” of tribute earned by the women of the Union and, especially, those of the rural Midwest. Ellen Woodworth’s writings demonstrated her resourcefulness and determination as she engaged in bartering, trading, borrowing, and investing, stood ready to litigate her family’s rights, and sought not to be dependent on her deployed husband. She did not submit “to perform as ‘women’” were expected.137
Samuel Woodworth would confess that, in retrospect, “I did not realize what I was doing when I enlisted.”138 It was an admission applicable to the extensive burden he shifted onto his wife by volunteering. Ellen Preston Woodworth appreciated her husband gaining comprehension of “some thing of the anguish that wrung my soul when you enlisted; but heaven forbid that you should ever feel the intensity of grief that filled my heart at that time.”139 Her anguish “wasn’t because I lacked Patriotism; for I felt & knew that your Country needed you, & every other such brave heart as yours; but O, how much we needed you too.”140 Her constancy served to reinforce her husband’s endurance, perhaps in no better way than in her envisioning a glorious conclusion to their separation: “Keep a brave heart—my Boy—for the day will dawn, ere long—when slavery—& rebellion will be wiped out—and the heroes of this war come proudly marching home.”141
Immediately after organized fighting ceased in 1865, an insightful commenter offered a challenge to those who would chronicle the War of the Rebellion: “The story of the war will never be fully or fairly written if the achievements of women in it are untold.”142 With this volume, an important chapter in that complex story is supplied in aid of comprehending the full historical truth of America’s greatest crisis.
Notes
1. The original correspondence has vanished, but the manuscript journal and typescript are preserved in the Clarke Historical Library in Isabella County, Michigan, where the Woodworths lived during the war. The journal was donated in 1966.
2. McPherson, “Foreword,” xv. That assertion may have exaggerated. Some early chroniclers saluted the “nobleness and self-sacrificing spirit” of women who were “patriot workers in quiet country homes.” Brockett and Vaughan, Woman’s Work in the Civil War, 591–592. Other historians acknowledged that “families waited wearily at home,” their male members gone, with “women taking their places.” Hubbart, Older Middle West, 237. In 1991, a monograph sought to remedy how historians “gloss over the experiences of women.” Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs, 1; a review termed it a “major comprehensive survey of women in the Civil War.” Caffrey, Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 100.
3. Clinton and Silber, Divided Houses, 335.
4. McPherson and Cooper, “Introduction” in Writing the Civil War, 6.
5. McCurry, Women’s War, 3.
6. Gallagher, Union War, 121; Jordan, Robertson, and Segards, The Bell Irvin Wiley Reader, 14–15. The two books were The Life of Johnny Reb (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1952).
7. Linderman, Embattled Courage; Reid Mitchell, Vacant Chair; McPherson, What They Fought For; Noe, Reluctant Rebels; Carmichael, War for the Common Soldier.
8. McPherson and Cooper, “Introduction,” 3.
9. Faust, “‘Ours as Well as that of the Men,’” 228, 239–240; Giesberg, “Future of Civil War Era Studies.”
10. On race, see, e.g., Glymph, Women’s Fight.
11. Aley and Anderson, Union Heartland, 3.
12. Ibid., 6; Aley, “Inescapable Realities,” 126–129.
13. Kennedy, Population of the United States, iv.
14. Quist, Michigan’s War, 106.
15. Connolly, Thrilling Narrative.
16. Lanman, Red Book of Michigan, 307.
17. See generally Glymph, Women’s Fight; McCurry, Women’s War; Monson, Women of the Blue & Gray; Berry and Elder, Practical Strangers; Marshall, “‘Sisters’ War’” 481; Chestnut, Mary Chestnut’s Diary.
18. Leonard, Yankee Women, 163.
19. See, e.g., Keating, Greatest Trials I Ever Had.
20. Weiner, “Rural Women,” 150; Silber, Gender and the Sectional Conflict, 83, 94.
21. Mohr, Cormany Diaries, x–xi.
22. Marks, Effects of the Civil War, 22 [bibliography]. This Commission did publish a farm wife’s diary, but it only covered a three-month period. McCune, Mary Austin Wallace. It was incorporated into another slim monograph embracing a fuller survey. Michigan Women in the Civil War.
23. Historical Statistics, 29.
24. Silber, Daughters of the Union, 111. Approximately one-third of Union enlistees were married, but many had not started families. Gallman, Defining Duty, 8.
25. Rable, “Hearth, Home and Family,” 88–89.
26. A 1989 local history relied on the journal for a chapter titled “The First Schoolteacher.” Cumming, This Place Mount Pleasant, 24–26.
27. Fancher, Past and Present, 466.
28. Nowlin, Bark Covered House, 18.
29. Dunbar, Michigan, 351. The county name came at the suggestion of Henry R. Schoolcraft (1793–1864; U.S. government agent who married a Native American) “for Queen Isabella, of Spain, patron of Columbus.” Romig, Michigan Place Names, 288.
30. Portrait and Biographical Album, 556; Fancher, Past and Present, 325; Miles, School ma’m, 17.
31. Alternatively, a homesteader could purchase land from the U.S. Government for $1.25 per acre, an option the Woodworths did not pursue. Hyman, American Singularity, 35. “Singular” means “unusual” or “exceptional,” here reflecting that “a nation caught up in such a trauma as our Civil War” nonetheless legislated “on the greater access of its citizens” to land. Ibid.
32. Foner, Free Soil, 28; United States Statutes at Large, Vol. XII, 392 ff. The program could benefit African Americans: a nearby official State marker recounts that “In the 1860s Negroes from southern Michigan, Ohio and southwest Ontario settled in this region as farmers and woodsmen.” Michigan Historic Register Site L81, Nine Mile Road at Ninetieth Avenue, Morton Township, Mecosta County, http://www.michmarkers.com [Negro Settlers]. See Hyman, American Singularity, 38, 40, 45–46, 48.
33. The township name was adopted October 16, 1863. Isabella County, Michigan, 19. This adoption shows a greater level of support for the war than apparent from the 1860 presidential election returns. Isabella County cast 123 votes for Lincoln (48.5%), 131 for his chief opponent, Stephen A. Douglas (51.5%). Dubin, United States Presidential Elections, 1788–1860, 171.
34. Peters, Public Statutes, Vol. VII, 203.
35. Kappler, Indian Affairs, 461.
36. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa, 51.
37. Michigan Historical Marker, State Historic Register No. 352, 368 East Main Street, Harbor Springs, http://www.michmarkers.com [Andrew J. Blackbird House].
38. Minot and Sanger, Statutes at Large, 633.
39. The Michigan Ojibwe story is part of “a more complex and less linear narrative” than typically told. White, Middle Ground, ix; McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 327; Danziger, Great Lakes Indian Accommodation. The Museum of Ojibwa Culture is located in St. Ignace, Michigan.
40. United States Census Bureau, “Population of the United States in 1860: Michigan,” accessed January 30, 2023, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1860/population/1860a-20.pdf This summary document listed no “Colored,” an inaccuracy. For example, Joseph Lett enlisted in the First Michigan Colored Infantry on January 11, 1864, for 3 years, age 17, and served until September 1865. Record of Service, vol. 46, 61. He resided northwest of Mount Pleasant. Isabella County, Michigan, 18.
41. Fancher, Past and Present, 86, 88.
42. The closest depots were in Owosso and Ionia, at least sixty miles away.
43. Portrait and Biographical Album, 540, 563.
44. Id., 563.
45. United States Statutes at Large, XII, 731–737.
46. Gallman, Defining Duty, 252.
47. Portrait and Biographical Album, 312-313.
48. Draftees “had numerous options for avoiding service.” One could become exempt from serving through medical disability, pay a commutation fee, or supply a substitute. A draftee might also fail to report. Gallman, North Fights the Civil War, 68–70. See Murdock, Patriotism Limited.
49. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, October 12, 1863.
50. Descriptive Roll of Company M, 170. His enlistment papers list “Sargt D[?] Nelson” as Recruiting Officer. Service Record, National Archives. Nelson resurfaces later in the correspondence.
51. Service Record.
52. Robertson, Michigan in the War, 507.
53. Hoffman, Among the Enemy, 1; Hoffman, My Brave Mechanics, 4–6, 17.
54. Fancher, Past and Present, 312–313.
55. See generally Hauptman, Between Two Fires; Sutton and Latschar, American Indians and the Civil War; Herek, These Men Have Seen; Czopek, Who Was Who; Walker, Deadly Aim.
56. Herek, These Men Have Seen, 35.
57. Fancher, Past and Present, 310.
58. Art. VII, sec. 1, Revised Constitution, 18. The name of the state had derived from a Native term. Romig, Michigan Place Names, 366.
59. Hemenway, “Foreword,” viii.
60. Walker, Deadly Aim, 243.
61. Record of Service, vol. 43, 229.
62. Hess, Civil War Supply and Strategy, 6–7, 10, 139.
63. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, September 26, 1864.
64. Glymph, Women’s Fight, 59.
65. For Civil War era economic matters, see: Unger, Greenback Era; Lowenstein, Ways and Means. Unlike Northern farmers and growers who harvested their crops and produce for sale in a bountiful market, Hurt, Food and Agriculture, 78, Ellen grew for subsistence and had to be a net purchaser rather than producer.
66. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, November 30, 1863.
67. Fancher, Past and Present, 145–146. The 1850 Michigan Constitution provided for a system of public instruction for children under which a school must be kept without tuition, at least three months in each year, in every school district in the State. Revised Constitution, 23.
68. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, October 9, 1864.
69. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, April 18, 1864.
70. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, October 9, 1864.
71. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, February 14, 1864.
72. Dyer, Compendium, 162; Robertson, Michigan in the War, 498–499.
73. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, June 3, 1864.
74. “There were just so many bodies to count.” Faust, This Republic of Suffering, 260.
75. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, January 3, 1864.
76. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, January 11, 1864.
77. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, February 7, 1864.
78. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, December 4, 1864.
79. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, January 11, 1864. For studies on children and the Civil War, see Marten, Civil War America, and The Children’s Civil War.
80. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, November 29, 1864.
81. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, September 3, 1864.
82. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, February 2, 1864.
83. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, February 9, 1864.
84. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, October 15, 1864.
85. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, November 21, 1864.
86. Reynolds, America, Empire of Liberty, 104.
87. Id., 104.
88. Macmillan, Methodist Episcopal Church, 59.
89. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, December 20, 1864.
90. For studies on how the war intersected expectations on morality and social conventions, see Stout, Upon the Altar and Foote, Gentleman and the Roughs.
91. See, e.g., Byrd, Holy Baptism; Woodworth, While God Is Marching On. Many battlefields are known by their religious landmarks or connotations: the Dunker church at Antietam; Shiloh; New Hope Church; New Bethel; the Wilderness (to name a few).
92. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, October 15, 1864. He did not employ terminology in his letters disrespectful by contemporary standards.
93. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, October 15, 1864.
94. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, November 10, 1863.
95. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, April 12, 1864.
96. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, March 18, 1864.
97. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, April 30, 1864.
98. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, October 15, 1864.
99. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, November 21, 1864.
100. The 1881 change permitted “[e]very person” (with some additional requirements) in “any school district” and who held property “liable to assessment for school taxes,” or who was a parent of a child, to vote at “any school meeting.” Act No. 164, effective May 21, 1881, Public Acts, 163, 168; voter approval of HJR 14 on November 5, 1918, extended the franchise to women; Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, effective August 1920.
101. Cumming, This Place Mount Pleasant, 29. See Ellen’s sketch later in this volume. For a period map of Lincoln Township, see Hayes, Atlas of Isabella County, Michigan, 19.
102. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, June 14, 1864.
103. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, June 28, 1864.
104. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, August 9, 1864.
105. Shaw, Story of a Pioneer, 34.
106. Works that examine prevalent views of nineteenth-century white individuals toward Native Americans, and help explain Ellen’s, include Drinnon, Facing West; and Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian. Even for abolitionists—those seeking the eradication of human slavery—the issue of extending rights to others (including women voting) took later priority.
107. See schedules for Isabella Township, Isabella County, Michigan, in the Eighth United States Decennial Census. Other lines of work included “Boatman,” “Com[mon] Laborer,” “Ind[ian] Trader,” “Sawier” (Sawyer), and “Interpreter.”
108. One poignant example is the “Maishcaw” or “Mash-kaw” family of Elbridge Township, Oceana County, almost due west. James (Kahkuhgewa/Kaw-gaw-ge-way) enlisted on July 4, 1863, in Company K, 1st Michigan Sharpshooters, age thirty-one. Younger brother John, age twenty-two, did the same. Both volunteered for three years; both were killed in action on the same day, May 12, 1864, at Spotsylvania Court House. Record of Service, vol. 44, 61; Herek, These Men Have Seen, 148, 343. Both are interred in the Fredericksburg National Cemetery, according to one database. They left behind bereaved parents and James’s widow. Herek, These Men Have Seen, 346; “Mash-kaw Brothers,” Company K 1st Michigan Sharpshooters blog, November 16, 2018, https://nativesharpshooters.blogspot.com/2018/11/mash-kaw-brothers.html (a roster of death on this website indicates they died “while charging the enemies works”).
109. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, May 30, 1864.
110. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, July 12, 1864.
111. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, June 14, 1864.
112. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, July 12, 1864.
113. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, November 21, 1864. Copperheads were an element of the Democratic Party who opposed war and sought a settlement without emancipation. Weber, Copperheads, 1.
114. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, September 4, 1864.
115. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, November 16, 1864.
116. For information on the U.S. mail system during the Civil War, see Hager, I Remain Yours; Woods, “Neither Snow Nor Rain”; John, Spreading the News.
117. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, July 19, 1864.
118. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, December 20, 1864.
119. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, December 27, 1864.
120. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, October 5, 1864.
121. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, January 1, 1865.
122. Record of Service, vol. 43, 229 (at Nashville).
123. Hurt, Food and Agriculture, 51–52, 86.
124. Basler, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 5, 326–327.
125. Portrait and Biographical Album, 497. For postwar experiences of Union soldiers like Samuel, see Jordan, Marching Home; McConnell, Glorious Contentment; Michigan in the American Civil War.
126. Census of the State of Michigan 1894, 86.
127. Miles, School ma’m, 40; Twelfth United States Decennial Census; Place: Petoskey, Emmet County, Michigan; p. 4; Enumeration District 89.
128. Thirteenth United States Decennial Census; Place: Mt. Pleasant, Isabella County, Michigan; p. 2; Enumeration District 96.
129. United States General Index to Pension Files, 1861–1934, https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/
130. Twelfth United States Decennial Census—Place: Springvale, Emmet County, Michigan, p. 15, Enumeration District 0091; Official Register, 1909, vol. II, 696.
131. Twelfth United States Decennial Census—Place: Petoskey, Emmet County, Michigan, p. 29, Enumeration District 90; Thirteenth United States Decennial Census—Place: Chicago Ward 21, Cook County, Illinois, p. 9B, Enumeration District 0921; Fraprie, American Photography, vol. III, 436, 497.
132. Dramatic Compositions, 1825.
133. Twelfth United States Decennial Census—Place: Birmingham Ward 8, Jefferson County, Ala., 2, Enumeration District 0153.
134. Thirteenth United States Decennial Census—Place: Ann Arbor Ward 1, Washtenaw County, Michigan, Roll: T624_677, p. 7A, Enumeration District 0111.
135. Silber, Gender and the Sectional Conflict, 83, 94.
136. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, April 24, 1864.
137. Attie, Patriotic Toil, 5.
138. Letter of Samuel to Ellen, September 22, 1864.
139. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, September 3, 1864.
140. Ibid.
141. Letter of Ellen to Samuel, October 9, 1864.
142. Moore, Women of the War, v.