Of all the difficulties that the women of the northern home front faced during the American Civil War, perhaps the most trying and lasting was the separation from their spouses, brothers, fathers and sons. These separations could range from months to eternity. Though each woman handled the emotional trials of war differently, there were always the ever-present shared feelings of anxiety, dread and grief. President Lincoln summed up these emotions in a letter of condolence to Lydia Bixby, a northern mother who was believed to have lost her five sons in the Civil War(1). In this letter Lincoln so elegantly wrote:


“I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save.
“I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom”(2). 


As the Civil War soon became the nation’s bloodiest war, most women, as well as their children, in the North had to come to terms with the fact that about a whole generation of young men had been slaughtered.
Some attempted to justify this slaughtering. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “one whole generation might well consent to perish, if, by their fall, political liberty & clean & just life could be made sure to the generations that follow”(3).  In the beginning women felt a sense of pride when their husbands or sons enlisted. However, women were soon writing to their husbands, asking them to request furloughs. Nothing could be done though. The women of the North had to carry on with their everyday tasks and pray that their men returned safely to them. The new, added factor of the camera let the northern civilians actually view the battlefields of the war for the first time, which was just one more thing that increased their despair(4).































Prior to the Civil War, death in the North was very personal and familiarized. Usually an older family member would die in his or her home, surrounded by his or her family who had a chance to say their last good-byes(5).   However, death during the Civil War was often painful and lonely. Nonetheless, resilient and determined, mothers and wives would often board trains and head south to dig up their soldiers’ bodies, bring them home and give them a proper burial. Sometimes northern women would squander away all the savings they had left on these trips, but as the bodies of the fallen soldiers were all the women had left of their prewar families, they did anything they could to regain some bit of normalcy.



Once more Lincoln showed that he was not blind to the sacrifices the citizens of the Union were making each and everyday when he remarked on Thanksgiving Day 1863 that Americans should pray for “all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged”(6).  There were very few indeed who were spared from any of these categories. Though the mourners and sufferers may at times have grown tired and weary of the war, they, just like their solder counterparts, remained firmly loyal to the Union to the very end. They turned President Lincoln’s words into actions when he stated in his Gettysburg Address in November 1863 that “from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain”(7).

To most women, the soldiers did not die in vain. Through their bravery, courage and bloodshed the country was able to be reunited and made whole once more. The soldiers fought for freedom and unity, and their wives, mothers and sisters remained loyal to them and supported them in whatever ways possible.



(1)Stokesbury, A Short History of the Civil War, 256.

(2)Stokesbury, A Short History of the Civil War, 256.

(3)Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 77.

(4)Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 77.

(5)Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front, 75.

(6)James Marten, Civil War America: Voices From the Home Front (New York City: Fordham University Press, 2003), 271.

(7)Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front 77.