A closer look

From Martyrdom to Depravity: Seeing “Rebel” Women

How did images from Union and Confederate sources offer opposing views about southern white women and the Confederate cause?

by Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, CUNY (Emeritus)

On April 2, 1863, a large and mostly female crowd in the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia, protested severe wartime food shortages by raiding the city’s stores and markets for scarce and overpriced provisions. Similar food riots occurred in other southern cities, inspiring this two-panel cartoon a month later in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, attacking southern white womanhood. Under the title “Sowing and Reaping,” the panel on the left showed white southern women “hounding their men on to Rebellion,” followed by the right panel depicting them, now confronting the bitter fruits of their ardent support for secession, “feeling the effects of Rebellion and creating Bread Riots.”

What are the contrasting ways women are portrayed?

A Mysterious Addition

One puzzling aspect of the Leslie’s cartoon is the inclusion of the African American boy on the margin of the riot scene. He is dressed in rags and clutching a loaf of bread.

What is the significance of his presence in the context of the rioting white women?

A Baltimore Dentist’s View of the War

Due to shortages of ink and paper resulting from the Union blockade of Confederate shipping, there were few pictorial publications in the South, and therefore few depictions of southern women to challenge images that appeared in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper and other northern publications.

An exception was the work of Adalbert Volck, a German-born dentist living in Baltimore. In addition to smuggling medical supplies to the Confederate army and serving as a courier for Confederate president Jefferson Davis, during the war Volck produced a series of prints (under the pseudonym V. Blada) that excoriated the Union as a corrupt and cruel aggressor and heralded southern women as virtuous supporters of the Confederate cause.

Southern Women Pictured as Martyrs

Among pictures showing women making uniforms for the Confederate army and serving as morale boosters, other Volck prints featured them as victims of northern marauders and as martyrs to the Confederacy. For example, Valiant Men dat “fite mit Sigel” showed Volck’s countryman, the popular German immigrant Union general Franz Sigel, supervising the burning of a farmhouse, ignoring the pleas of a defenseless woman while her children escape the flames. But the impact of these rare visual representations of industrious and martyred southern womanhood was severely limited. Distribution of this and other Volck prints reached no more than the two hundred or so Baltimore patrons who purchased them through subscription.

What narrative, or symbolic details in the image might appeal to southern audiences? And why?

Southern Women Pictured not as Ladies . . .

In the North, Confederate women were depicted in news illustrations, cartoons, and other visual media as neither self-sacrificing nor victims. Instead, they often were portrayed as harridans driving southern men to fight and die (as in “Sowing and Reaping”) or as haughty and ill-mannered ladies (as in news images of women spitting at Union soldiers in captured New Orleans). And most northern pictures ignored class distinctions, depicting southern white women not in accord with the view promoted by southern elites of genteel and virtuous mothers and wives who obeyed and deferred to men.

. . . but as Depraved Looters

In some pictures these women appeared to have lost any remnant of humanity, such as in this gruesome double-page scene in Harper’s Weekly showing local Maryland women joining men in looting the bodies of dead Union soldiers after the battle of Antietam in September 1862. “Of the hundred or more bodies to be seen above the ground,” noted the accompanying report, “there was not one whose pockets had not been rifled, and their shoes and other articles of clothing taken away.”

How might you describe the expression of the woman pictured bottom center? What is the significance of how she is positioned over the dead body? What might she do next?

“The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir,” 1862

While the Antietam scene showed southern women who had descended to a level of depravity usually reserved for depictions of men, this 1862 cartoon offered a vision of southern womanhood that exposed the ideals of female virtue, gentility, and grace professed throughout southern society as merely a veneer covering its exact opposite.

What objects or activities in “The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir” speak to idealized traits of a southern woman?

Southern “Belles” and their Ghastly Souvenirs

“My dearest wife,” the Rebel lady reads from a letter from her soldier husband, “I hope you have received all the little relics I have sent you from time to time. I am about to add something to your collection which I feel sure will please you—a baby-rattle for our little pet, made out of the ribs of a Yankee drummer-boy.”

“The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir,” decorated and furnished with the remains of Union soldiers, replete with a toddler playing with a human skull, represented—in nineteenth-century terms—the terrible result of southern women’s ardor for the Confederate cause: a savage betrayal of their vaunted domestic and moral duty.

What additional objects might you include? And why?

Reflection Questions

Examine the depictions of the women’s clothes and expressions in “Sowing and Reaping.” What did the differences between the two panels convey to readers in 1863?

An African American boy is shown in the margin of the “Sowing and Reaping” riot scene. Consider this figure in the context of the larger scene and discuss the possible messages his presence conveyed to contemporary viewers.

Examine the stances and actions of the Union soldiers in Adalbert Volck’s Valiant Men print. For example, what are the soldier on the far right and the soldier next to the pleading woman doing? Discuss how their depictions contribute to the message of white southern female martyrdom.

List some of the idealized traits of a southern white woman that were espoused in Confederate culture. Then examine “The Rebel Lady’s Boudoir” and discuss the ways the various ghastly souvenirs shown in the cartoon contradict that idealized view

Additional Reading

Kate Roberts Edenborg, and Hazel Dicken-Garcia, “The Darlings Come Out to See the Volunteers: Depictions of Women in Harper’s Weekly during the Civil War,” in Seeking a Voice: Images of Race and Gender in the 19th Century Press, eds. David B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and Roy Morris, Jr. (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000).

Drew Gilpin Faust, “Race, Gender and Confederate Nationalism: William D. Washington’s Burial of Latané, in Faust, Southern Stories: Slaveholders in Peace and War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992).

Joan E. Cashin, “Torn Bonnets and Stolen Silks: Fashion, Gender, Race, and Danger in the Wartime South,” Civil War History 61, no. 4 (December 2015).

Related Chapters

The Civil War: America's Second Revolution, 1861-1865