The American Civil War reached into almost every household in the country between 1861 and 1865, including of course the First Household, the White House. Th is building has been the epicenter of cultural and political struggles over many issues, and some of them involved the controversial First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln. Her travails had a lot to do with the house itself and, more broadly, with her attitudes toward material objects and the consumer culture of her day. The building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has much to recommend it as a public monument, for it is spacious and grand....

In the antebellum South, every man belonged to a household. Over the past few decades, scholars of gender, race, and class have worked to return men to their households with deep running historical consequences. However, for all of this work, some Southern men have not yet been restored to their appropriate social location. Many of the so-called great men still seem to exist outside the basic social, economic, and political unit of the antebellum South, the household, somehow unmoored to the foundation of their society. Robert E. Lee is perhaps the best example of these detached men, floating at the...

Sometimes solving major problems in one’s public life resolves tensions in one’s private existence. Such was the case for Ulysses S. Grant during the American Civil War. At the beginning of the conflict, Grant was still trying to secure his future amid a series of struggles to make ends meet. At the same time, he wrestled with the consequences of having been born into an antislavery household presided over by a demanding and hypercritical father who all too often kept his eye on the main chance and of having married into a proslavery household where his wife delighted in the...

Whether awake or asleep, soldiers thought of home. Indeed, more than anything else, Union and Confederate officers and enlisted men dreamed about their loved ones. “Last night I dreamed of being at home as I often do and sweet were the kisses what I took all around,” wrote a New Yorker to his wife. A thirty-six-year-old Virginian similarly told his sixteen-year-old sweetheart that he had “som mighty good dreams about you.” Such dreams of home were often sweet and romantic, but sometimes they focused on mundane things that soldiers missed. A Wisconsin soldier wrote to his mother from the Pine...

Mrs. C. L. Morgan of Sylvester, Wisconsin, wrote to her state’s governor, Edward Salomon, on March 31, 1863. She implored him to consider the condition of wounded soldiers who were “unable to bear the fatigue, and hardships of camp life.” Morgan insisted that military officers and army surgeons agreed that “home is the only spot where they can be restored to health” but that bureaucratic red tape prevented the soldiers’ return into the households that would restore their vitality. She requested that Governor Salomon figure out a way around the obstructive policies that caused some soldiers to languish in hospitals,...

In May 1863 John Smith, a local postmaster and dry goods merchant in Plains, Ohio, decided to do his friends and neighbors a favor by hand delivering their mail to them instead of waiting for them to pick it up in his store as was customary. Smith knew that many of these families were waiting with concern to hear from their brothers, sons, and husbands who were far off fighting for the Union cause in the Civil War. He perhaps considered it part of his patriotic duty to walk the extra mile for the members of his community who were...

When Union troops bombarded the “rebellious city” of Atlanta in the summer of 1864, they did so knowing that it was filled with civilians, what one soldier called “a Great good many inoffensive ones.”¹ The presence of civilians, with their homes and property, shaped how Yankees understood how “our shell had torn the city to pieces considerable.” U.S. soldiers blamed Confederates for the presence of the civilians because “Hood never gave orders for the noncombattants to remove.”² Th e civilian population did little to dampen the troops’ wholehearted joy at taking the city, as U.S. soldiers rejoiced that “the rebs...

In the early fall of 1863, General James B. McPherson hosted “the event of the season” at the Balfour House on the corner of Cherry and Crawford Streets in Vicksburg, Mississippi. An elegant brick home with a commanding view of the city and river below, it boasted “sun parlors, conservatories, fountains, and large spacious rooms.” McPherson held the ball to honor the wives of Union officers who had traveled down the Mississippi River to winter in the recently conquered city. Among them were a number of young women, recently married to their fiancés after Vicksburg fell, who arrived at the...

In late 1861, hundreds of Creek and Seminole families left their homes in Indian Territory and formed a pan-Indian refugee community on the Deep Fork River at the eastern side of the Creek Nation. Th ere, they united with families from several other Indian nations who found themselves with a similar need for safety. The Indians established temporary homes and campsites, performed ceremonies together, and gathered supplies that could help them survive the winter. Like many other Civil War refugees, these families fled their homes without a clear sense of direction or organization. They were not fleeing to join loved...

When Major General William Tecumseh Sherman captured Atlanta on September 2, 1864, offi cials in charge of the Confederate prison system worried that his army would march into the heart of Georgia and liberate U.S. prisoners of war held in stockades at Macon and Andersonville. They issued orders to move the captives to Savannah and Charleston, but neither city had facilities ready to house several thousand prisoners. Because there was no single commander over Confederate prisons, there was no effective communication between officials governing prisoners of war and military officials defending the two coastal cities, for whom the unexpected arrival...

Perhaps no one homefront can be termed “typical,” but that of Orange County, North Carolina, presented a combination of factors that help us understand the connections between the Civil War, Southern homefronts, emancipation, and Reconstruction households. Orange County’s diverse population featured mostly yeoman farmers interspersed with planters, business entrepreneurs, professors, lawyers, enslaved African Americans, poor whites, and free people of color. Long before the Civil War, a lively interracial subculture with complex social and kinship ties had emerged that contradicted the dominant Southern ideal of white families and enslaved African Americans governed by benevolent white patriarchs in a system decreed...

Between 1861 and 1865, approximately 750,000 men died in the American Civil War, leaving behind some 200,000 widows and many more grieving mothers and sisters. Th e Civil War unleashed both a staggering amount of grief and a staggering display of it. “There were so many ladies there, all dressed in deep mourning,” Lucy Breckinridge said of a Virginia party in December 1862, “ that we felt as if we were at a convent and formed a sisterhood.” As Breckinridge implied, women were often brought closer by grief. Death deepened their common bond and highlighted the peculiar burdens of their...

One Southern veteran recalled, “They [Southern soldiers] kissed their loved ones goodbye and marched forth in all the grandeur and splendor of southern youth and manhood.”¹ The very act of marching off to war and leaving their households and families provided Southern men a prime opportunity to cement their masculine status among their family members, their peers, and their community. Southern men used the war to aggressively defend their manhood. Marching into battle, standing shoulder to shoulder with a fellow man, and fighting in an honorable manner (which excluded running away or a cowardly capture) emerged as routine opportunities for...

The first-ever U.S. census, taken in 1790, only lists the names of heads of households, most of whom were men, with their dependents enumerated but unnamed below them. The 1850 census lists every free man, woman, and child in America; the enslaved are counted but remain nameless on a separate schedule. Th e 1870 census is an expansive list of Americans; there is only one schedule and all persons are named.¹

State bureaucracy can care about people for right and wrong reasons. Hitler’s Germany was ruthlessly precise about who was who. However, this simple snapshot of the census—of how...