Civil War and Civil Strife 10.17.23

• HIS 379 The Family in America
• Year 4

Civil War and Civil Strife

The History of Family in America (HIST 379)
Dr. Caitlin Wiesner
Main Hall Room 213
October 17, 2023 (Week 6)

Reconstructing the Family

“Out of all our old house servants not one remains except Patsey and a little boy, Frank...Nancy has been cooking since Tamah left. On last Wednesday I hired a woman to do the washing. Thursday I expected Nancy to iron but she was sick. In the same way she was sick the week before when there was ironing to do. I said nothing but told Patsey to get breakfast. After it was over I assisted her in wiping the breakfast dishes, a thing I never remember to have done more than once or twice in my life. I then thoroughly cleaned the sitting room and parlor...Immediately after breakfast as I was writing by the window Turner directed my attention to Nancy with her two children, Hannah and Jessy, going out of the gate. I told him to enquire “where she was going.” She had expected to leave with flying colours but was compelled to tell a falsehood for she replied “I will be back directly.” I knew at once that she was taking a “french leave” and was not surprised when I went into her room sometime afterwards to find that all her things had been removed. I was again engaged in housework most of the morning…”

- Diary of Gertrude Clanton Thomas (May 29, 1865)

Reconstructing the Family

“My mother came for us at the end of the year 1865, and demanded that her children be given up to her. This, mistress refused to do, and threatened to set the dogs on my mother if she did not at once leave the place. My mother went away, remained with some of the neighbors until supper time. Then she got a boy to tell [my sister] Caroline to come down to the fence. When she came, my mother told her to go back and get Henry and myself as quick as she could. Then my mother took Henry in her arms, and my sister carried me on her back. We climbed fences and crossed fields and after several hours came to a little hut which my mother had secured on a plantation. We had no more than reached the place, and made a little fire, when master’s two sons rode up and demanded that the children be returned. My mother refused to give us up. Upon her offering to go with them to the Yankee headquarters to find out if it were really true that all negroes had been made free, the young men left and troubled us no more.”

- Annie Burton, Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days (1909)

Discuss: Letters to the Freedmen’s Bureau from Cynthia NicKols and Milly Johnson (1867) 

• How do Cynthia NicKols and Milly Johnson plead their respective cases to the Freedmen’s Bureau?
• What did they see as the relationship between their freedom and their family ties?
  

Mormons and Polygamy (Plural Marriage)

1830: Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) was founded by prophet Joseph Smith in upstate New York

1843: Joseph Smith dictates the revelation of plural marriage privately

1852: Latter-Day Saints in Utah Territory (Deseret) led by Brigham Young embrace the doctrine of plural marriage (though only 20-30% of Mormon families practiced it)

1862: Morrill Act criminalizes polygamy at the federal level

Text

Discuss: The Great Indignation Meeting (1870)

 How did the LDS women of the Great Indignation Meeting defend the practice of plural marriage (polygamy)? 

Why do you think they believed in plural marriage as a positive social good?

Portrait of Bishop Ira Eldredge with his three wives: Nancy Black Eldredge, Hannah Mariah Savage Eldredge, and Helvig Marie Andersen Eldredge  (c. 1864)

The Rise and Fall of Plural Marriage

1882: Congress blocks Utah's application for statehood, passes Edmunds Act to make made "unlawful cohabitation" in the territories illegal and took the vote away from practitioners of plural marriage.

1887: Edmunds-Tucker Act disincorporates LDS church and seizes assets for continued practice of polygamy

1890: Supreme Court upholds Edmunds-Tucker Act, LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff's "Manifesto" ends official support for plural marriage

Female Husbands: 

Albert (a.k.a. Nancy) Guelph

“Female husbands” (people assigned female at birth who ‘transed’ gender, lived as men, and entered into legal marriages with women) posed a dramatic threat to 19th century society, raising two different troubling possibilities:

1. Female husbands were able to realize homosexual desire and participate in a same-sex relationship under the guise of a heterosexual one.
2. Female husbands threatened the notion that only those assigned male at birth could become men and enter into fulfilling sexual and romantic relationships with women.
   

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Brooklyn, New York 

Sat, Apr 26, 1856
Page  2

Female Husbands: Joseph (a.k.a. Lucy Ann) Lobdell (1829-1912)

“She considered herself a man in all that the name implies…Her excitement was of an erotic nature and her sexual inclination was perverted.” 

- Dr. P.M Wise, Willard Insane Asylum (1883)

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

We will begin discussion of readings each class with an FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise. All students will free write the following:

     A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
    An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
    A question that the reading raised for you

A fact is an objective and incontrovertible piece of information.
Evidence is the application of one or more facts to support an argument.
An argument is a subjective claim made to expand an area of knowledge.

FAQ (Fact, Argument, Question) Exercise

All students will free write the following:

1.  A fact that stood out to you in the reading (please include page number)
2. An explanation of how that fact works as evidence for the historian’s argument
3. A question that the reading raised for you

Laura Briggs, Taking Children (2022), Chapter 3-Conclusion

1.    According to Briggs, why has the American state perpetuated “child taking” in various forms over the course of three centuries? How can we compare these various forms of childtaking?
2.    What effect has “child taking” had on the meaning of “the family” in America?
3.    How does the “child taking” of the American state compare to its efforts to control the institution of marriage (as described by Nancy Cott in Public Vows)?