As the weather cooled in Alabama in the fall of 1864, the Confederacy continued to crumble. Union Gen. William T. Sherman captured Atlanta, Georgia, and marched through the Deep South as Grant and Lee faced off in what would turn out to be a months-long siege at Petersburg, Virginia. Meanwhile, in Alabama, white women continued to fill the voids left by their husbands and fathers. Since the men had left home in 1861, many women had been both caring for their children and tending crops of their family farms. Over the course of the war, the blockade not only made food scarce but sent inflation skyward. But despite starvation, many Alabama women remained on their land and supported the Confederacy.
Early in the war, women charged with maintaining their farms and families also found time to support the war by forming Ladies Aid Societies, which supplied the troops with clothing, and by working as nurses in Confederate hospitals. As early as 1862, one citizen of Mobile, Kate Cumming, journeyed to Mississippi to help care for soldiers wounded at Shiloh. On April 11, Cumming wrote that she “had never seen a wounded man” before and that nothing “that I had ever heard or read had given me the faintest idea of the horrors witnessed here. I do not think that words are in our vocabulary expressive enough to present to the mind the realities of that sad scene. Certainly, none of the glories of war were presented here.” Despite the gore, Cummings continued to serve.
Like her, other women in Alabama faced the hardships of war and the blockade with determination. Parthenia Antoinette Hague, who was living in Eufaula, found that her family and her community were “encompassed and blockaded by the Federal forces” and “were most sadly straitened and distressed.” Looking back on the war in the 1880s, Hague remembered that they “had to depend altogether upon our own resources,” and they “joined with zealous determination to make the best of our position, and to aid the cause our convictions impressed on us as right and just.” To cope with the blockade, women in South Alabama began growing food instead of cotton. At the same time, they dealt with the lack of common domestic goods by sewing their own clothing and making their own dyes. As Hague recalled, the women’s sacrifices sometimes required them to swallow their pride. They were willing, she explained, “to immolate ourselves on the altar of our Southern Confederacy.” Nevertheless, she continued, “it had fallen rather severely on us to think that we must wear hog-skin shoes!”
Wearing homemade shoes may have seemed devastating, but, in other ways, the women were remarkably creative. “Willow wickerwork came in as a new industry with us,” Hague remembered. “We learned to weave willow twigs into baskets of many shapes and sizes.” One innovative Alabama woman even used her willow-weaving skills to create “a beautiful and ornate body for her baby carriage.”
Despite white women’s willingness to endure hardship through innovation, by the end of 1864, Hague remembered that the inhabitants of southern Alabama “were caged up like a besieged city.” The South was “hemmed in,” and “[n]ot one tenth of the government tithes of grain and meat, west of the Mississippi River, could reach us; the blockade was all around, the Federal army’s tents were pitched on Southern soil; detachments of the Union army were invading the narrowing space of territory…and laying waste the country through which they marched.” With no provisions, Hague and her fellow Alabamians waited for the inevitable end of the war.
Like her, other women in Alabama faced the hardships of war and the blockade with determination. Parthenia Antoinette Hague, who was living in Eufaula, found that her family and her community were “encompassed and blockaded by the Federal forces” and “were most sadly straitened and distressed.” Looking back on the war in the 1880s, Hague remembered that they “had to depend altogether upon our own resources,” and they “joined with zealous determination to make the best of our position, and to aid the cause our convictions impressed on us as right and just.” To cope with the blockade, women in South Alabama began growing food instead of cotton. At the same time, they dealt with the lack of common domestic goods by sewing their own clothing and making their own dyes. As Hague recalled, the women’s sacrifices sometimes required them to swallow their pride. They were willing, she explained, “to immolate ourselves on the altar of our Southern Confederacy.” Nevertheless, she continued, “it had fallen rather severely on us to think that we must wear hog-skin shoes!”
Wearing homemade shoes may have seemed devastating, but, in other ways, the women were remarkably creative. “Willow wickerwork came in as a new industry with us,” Hague remembered. “We learned to weave willow twigs into baskets of many shapes and sizes.” One innovative Alabama woman even used her willow-weaving skills to create “a beautiful and ornate body for her baby carriage.”
Despite white women’s willingness to endure hardship through innovation, by the end of 1864, Hague remembered that the inhabitants of southern Alabama “were caged up like a besieged city.” The South was “hemmed in,” and “[n]ot one tenth of the government tithes of grain and meat, west of the Mississippi River, could reach us; the blockade was all around, the Federal army’s tents were pitched on Southern soil; detachments of the Union army were invading the narrowing space of territory…and laying waste the country through which they marched.” With no provisions, Hague and her fellow Alabamians waited for the inevitable end of the war.