Roles of Important Women During the Civil War

Women played an important role during the American Civil War but it wasn't until 100 years afterwards that they received recognition. Even today history books skip over the important roles women had during the Civil War. Wives, mothers, daughters, and grandmothers impacted the War both at home and on the battlefield. Their lives changed in many ways with the onset of the Civil War. Women took on many different roles that helped their side during the Civil War.

Born on December 25, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts, Clarissa Harlow Barton was educated at home and began teaching at the age of 15 ( Pryor). Her most notable antebellum achievement was the establishment of a free public school in Bordentown, N.J. Though she is remembered as the founder of the American Red Cross, her only prewar medical experience came when for 2 years she nursed an invalid brother.

In 1861 Barton was living in Washington, D.C., working at the U.S. Patent Office. When the 6th Massachusetts Regiment arrived in the city after the Baltimore Riots, she organized a relief program for the soldiers, beginning a lifetime of philanthropy.

When Barton learned that many of the wounded from First Bull Run had suffered, not from want of attention but from need of medical supplies, she advertised for donations in the Worcester, Mass., Spy and began an independent organization to distribute goods. The relief operation was successful, and the following year U.S. Surgeon granted her a general pass to travel with army ambulances .

For 3 years she followed army operations throughout the Virginia theater and in the Charleston, S.C., area. Her work in Fredericksburg, Va., hospitals, caring for the casualties from the Battle of the Wilderness, and nursing work at Bermuda Hundred attracted national notice. At this time she formed her only formal Civil War connection with any organization when she served as superintendent of nurses.

She also expanded her concept of soldier aid, traveling to Camp Parole, Md., to organize a program for locating men listed as missing in action. Through interviews with Federals returning from Southern prisons, she was often able to determine the status of some of the missing and notify families.

By the end of the war Barton had performed most of the services that would later be associated with the American Red Cross, which she founded in 1881. In 1904 she resigned as head of that organization, retiring to her home outside Washington, D.C., where she died 12 Apr. 1912

The women who came to be nicknamed "Moses" was born into slavery in Maryland forty years before the Civil War began ( Heidler and Heidler 1978). Tubman escaped her own chains in 1849 to find safe haven in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She did so through the underground railroad, an elaborate and secret series of houses, tunnels, and roads set up by abolitionists and former slaves. She would spend the rest of her life helping other slaves escape to freedom.

Her early life as a slave had been filled with abuse; at the age of 13, when she attempted to save another slave from punishment, she was struck in the head with a two-pound iron weight. She would suffer periodic blackouts from the injury for the rest of her life.

After her escape, Tubman worked as a maid in Philadelphia and joined the large and active abolitionist group in the city. In 1850, after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, making it illegal to help a runaway slave, Tubman decided to join the Underground Railroad. Her first expedition took place in 1851, when she managed to make her way through the backwoods to Baltimore and return to the North with her sister and her sister's children. From that time until the onset of the Civil War, Tubman traveled to the South about 18 times and helped close to 300 slaves escape.

Tubman was never caught and never lost a slave to the Southern militia, and as her reputation grew, so too did the desire among Southerners to put a stop to her activities; rewards for her capture once totaled about $40,000. During the Civil War, Tubman served as a nurse, scout, and sometime-spy for the Union army, mainly in South Carolina. She also took part in a military campaign that resulted in the rescue of 756 slaves and destroyed millions of dollars' worth of enemy property.

After the war, Tubman returned to Auburn and continued her involvement