When I was a lad in Rhode Island, our public library had a wall clock with an illustration in which a Civil War officer, orders tucked into his belt, stood beside an elegantly dressed young lady. He stretched his hand out to her, but she was turned away, Victorian anguish on her face, twisting a handkerchief in her own hands. The tableau was entitled, “Letting Him Go – The Hardest Thing a Woman is Ever Asked to Do.”
What were women doing while so many men were fighting the Civil War?  Women’s history is often invisible or hidden, but some women are telling us themselves, in their own words, across a century and a half.  Far too often they’re anonymous or overlooked — what women did wasn’t considered really important.  But we have extensive letters from Maryett Kelly, a farm wife and mother in Fremont… another set of letters from Rhoda McConnell, teaching school in the Prattsburgh area… and a diary from Adelaide Church of Bath.
At the final Steuben County Historical Society Winter Lecture (4 PM Friday, April 4), a panel of three modern women will report on the experiences of these three nineteenth-century women.  Sarah Love will report on Adelaide Church, and Jean Doherty on Rhoda McConnell.  Helen Kelly Brink will tell about her great-grandmother, Maryett Kelly.”
The three women experienced the war differently, of course.  Maryett wrote in 1863, “Scottie is as busy as a bee finding all the mischief he can get in to.  He comes in once in awhile and lays down on the floor and says ma I am tired.  He is a grate deal of company for me theas long lonesome days and sis is as good as she can be.  John, how I do wish you could see her.  She is as fat as a little pig.”

On the other hand, Rhoda McConnell in 1865 wrote from her teacher’s desk, “Oh Dick, Angi Riman has sent her baby about 2 years old down to school today and I don’t thank her for it. For I have enough trouble without being bothered with such little rats and I’ve a mind to send it right home….”
Teaching one-room schools was not as idyllic as we’d like to think. But at least her soldier friend came home (albeit without the use of one arm), and, in his own description, they married to live happily ever after. John Kelly came safe home as well.

Adelaide Church was from a different economic stratum and at a different stage of life than the others, at finishing school in Buffalo as the war drew on. In many ways she seems not to have noticed the great calamity much… in one diary entry she gives equal weight to a game of chess, and the fall of Fort Sumter.

Henry Clay Work, who lived near the end of his life at the Bath Soldiers’ Home, wrote a wildly-popular song pointing out that while patriotism was mighty important to the solders, they had other things on their minds as well.

When the shadows dance on the canvas walls
And the camp with melody rings;
‘Tis the good old song of the Stripes and Stars
That the fireside circle sings.
Of the Stripes and Stars, the Stripes and Stars
For love of which they roam;
But the final song and the sweetest one
Is the song of the Girls at Home.
So – what was life like for the girls at home? Women experienced the Civil War much as they experienced the two World Wars. They tended the kids, and the farms, on their own. They staffed the war factories. They took over jobs that were always considered men’s jobs, and they lost them when the men came home. They nursed casualties. They tried to sleep while agonizing over the next arrival of casualty lists.
Far too often, of course, those lists brought bad news. Everybody in America knew men who died in the Civil War. For some it was far more personal… a husband, brother, father, son, fiancee. That illustration from my childhood library may have been hokey, but it reflected a horrible reality. Henry Clay Work wrote another song, this one about a mother who doesn’t understand the big war or its big words.

And these are the britches he used to wear,
The very same stitches, the patch, and the tear,
But Uncle Sam’s give him a brand new pair,
When they grafted him into the army.
Oh, Jimmy, farewell,
Your brothers fell,
Way down in Alabammy.
I thought they would spare a lone widder’s prayer –
But they grafted him into the army.

Not every woman was willing to “let him go,” and whether they did or not, they didn’t just sit around waiting for casualty lists. They had lives to get on with, and they even took time to write about it, so we can look over their shoulders.
The presentation at the Bath Fire Hall is free and open to the public.