Judith Ann Giesberg

Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (review)

liantly researched piece that explains how, even as late as 1864, Confederate volunteers in the Army of Tennessee maintained their faith in the Confederate cause. John Inscoe examines similar motivations and responses, in this case those of elite North Carolina women responding to Union General George Stoneman’s cavalry raids in 1865. These are only a few examples of the broad range of issues addressed in the nineteen essays contained in this collection. The editors do a superb job of organizing the essays so that every chapter comes back to the issue of how southerners understood the Confederacy as a nation, how they adapted to the evolving demands that nation made on them, and how the war changed them and the traditions they so desperately fought to preserve. Professors teaching courses that relate to the U.S. Civil War, Southern history, U.S. military history, and nineteenth-century America will find this work an excellent addition to their syllabi. Inside the Confederate Nation has joined Emory Thomas’s own classic works as an essential starting point for any study of the Confederacy.

Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition

The Civil War-era U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC) was the largest wartime benevolent institution. Judith Ann Giesberg demonstrates convincingly that that generation of women provided a crucial link between the local evangelical crusades of the early nineteenth century and the sweeping national reform and suffrage movements of the postwar period. Drawing on Sanitary Commission documents and memoirs, the author details how northern elite and middle-class womens experiences in and influence over the USSC formed the impetus for later reform efforts. Giesberg explores the ways in which women honed organizational and administrative skills, developed new strategies that combined strong centralized leadership with regional grassroots autonomy, and created a sisterhood that reached across class lines. She begins her study with an examination of the Womans Central Association of Relief, an organization that gave birth to the USSC. Giesberg then discusses the significant roles of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, Dorothea Lynde Dix, and Henry Whitney Bellows, and considers the rationale for bringing women and men together in a collaborative wartime relief program. She shows how Louisa Lee Schuyler, Abigail Williams May, and other young women maneuvered and challenged the male-run Commission as they built an effective national network for giving critical support to soldiers on the battlefield and their families on the home front. This fresh perspective on the evolution of womens political culture fills an important gap in the literature, and it will appeal to historians, womens studies scholars, and Civil War buffs alike.