Women in the Civil War – The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable

Brave Buckeye Women in Blue: Ohio Women Soldiers in the Civil War

By Brian D. Kowell
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in October 2024.

No one knows the exact number of women soldiers who served in the American Civil War. Historians DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, who chronicled 240 women in uniform in their book They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War, estimate that over 400 served North and South. The American Battlefield Trust estimates that the number could be as high as 700 women who served in uniform. “The full extent of women’s participation as armed combatants in America’s bloodiest and most costly conflict will never be known with certainty,” wrote Blanton and Cook, “because women soldiers fought for the most part in secrecy.” Some followed their husbands or sweethearts off to war, some escaped from domestic abuse or poverty, and others served for patriotic reasons. Many women soldiers hailed from Ohio.¹

The Nancy Harts

By Al Fonner
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in February 2025.

On April 17, 1865, fresh off the capture of Fort Tyler, Union Colonel Oscar H. La Grange led a force of 3,000 cavalry to LaGrange, Georgia. Did the colonel find it curious that the town bore his name, or vice versa? Still more curious, I am sure, was that initially there was no Confederate opposition to prevent his entry into the town until the colonel came face to face with some 40 women in line formation just outside of the town at the LaGrange Female College. The women were bedecked in ruffled skirts and floral hats and armed with a variety of old muskets and flintlocks that likely saw better days during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. So befuddled was Colonel La Grange that he was quoted to remark that the women arrayed before him “…might use their eyes with better effect upon the Federal soldiers than their rusty guns (Horton, 14).” It looked as if the colonel had a fight on his hands after all. So who were these stalwart Southern belles standing valiantly against the Yankee invaders?

Clara Barton and Clevelander John J. Elwell: A Civil War Romance

By Dennis Keating
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2025, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in March 2025.

In my book Cleveland and the Civil War, I mention the relationship formed in 1863 between Clara Barton and Clevelander John J. Elwell (pp. 43-44). Born in Massachusetts, Barton moved to Washington City and was employed in the U.S. Patent Office. When the Civil War broke out, she volunteered with the Union Army, first bringing medical supplies after battles beginning with First Bull Run and then also nursing wounded soldiers at Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. She became known as “The Angel of the Battlefield,” but she did not join the official Union nurses corps headed by Dorothea Dix.

An Angel from Richmond, the 2nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry and the Long Path of Discovery

By Thomas M. Cooper
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in December 2024.

The biographical details of our ancestors emerge slowly, and perhaps this is a good thing. History needs to marinate some events over time so that their meaning can be understood by the living, in deeper, broader contexts. This is especially true for wartime histories involving trauma and the years required to remember-and-resolve. This is one of the reasons we study these periods and come together to talk about them.

A Civil War Actress’ Most Daring Role

By David A. Carrino
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in March 2024.

It’s been said that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and this is most definitely true in war. Knowledge of things such as troop strength and position can be very dangerous for the side whose troop strength and position become known to the enemy, and the Civil War provides a number of examples of this. For instance, the fortuitous finding of Robert E. Lee’s Special Orders No. 191, which are now known as Lee’s lost orders, prompted even the glacially slow and agonizingly cautious George McClellan to step out of character and boost his coefficient of aggressiveness, at least until the time that he came to battle. Because of the critical importance of knowledge about the enemy, the Civil War has some instances when clever ruses were employed to deceive the enemy with fake information, such as John Magruder on the York-James Peninsula and Nathan Bedford Forrest at Cedar Bluff, Alabama (and elsewhere).

When 1 Is Greater Than 620,000

By David A. Carrino
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2024, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in January 2024.

Everyone who labored through grade school arithmetic is familiar with the mathematical signs for greater than (>) and less than (<). Students are required to do many simple arithmetic problems just to drill into them what each of those signs means. If students were presented with the equation “1 _ 620,000” and asked to fill in the blank with the correct mathematical sign, they would have to give “<” as the answer in order to be given credit for responding correctly. But in one circumstance, the equation “1 > 620,000” is correct, and that circumstance is hauntingly described in a poem and in a story based on the Civil War.

The Case of Lucy Bagby: The Last Fugitive Slave

By Brian D. Kowell
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2022, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in November 2022.

The saga of Sara Lucinda (“Lucy”) Bagby begins in Richmond, Virginia. In 1850 Virginia’s population of 1.12 million people included 479,000 slaves, seven-year-old Sara Lucinda (“Lucy”) Bagby among them. The slave trade in Virginia was far and away the state’s largest industry, and in Richmond the traffic in slaves surpassed all other areas in the state. In 1850 more than 80,000 men, women, and children were sold in the Virginia slave markets.¹

Famous Women Spies of the Civil War

By Daniel J. Ursu, Roundtable Historian
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2022-2023, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was the history brief for the May 2023 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable.

General Longstreet, a corps commander in the Army of Northern Virginia, was well known for having dependable intelligence from Southern spies, for example, in the pivotal Battle of Gettysburg from perhaps his most famous spy, Henry Thomas Harrison, or simply “Harrison” as known in Civil War folklore. Harrison’s work helped crystallize the Confederates’ understanding of Union corps positions and shaped General Lee’s strategic thinking at the Battle of Gettysburg. This led Lee to have his own forces converge in the vicinity of the town of Gettysburg. Longstreet’s use of spies at that battle is arguably even more important, since Jeb Stuart’s cavalry had failed General Lee on his knowledge of Union troop positions. That said, because the May 2023 meeting of the Cleveland Civil War Roundtable featured a presentation that focused on the exploits of women during the Civil War, that meeting was an appropriate time to recall the work of women spies in both the North and South, who were plying their spy craft with sometimes dramatic results. This history brief examines three such famous women.

Lee’s Daughters, Part 6

By David A. Carrino
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved

Part 6 of a 6-part article about the daughters of Robert E. Lee

The Lee Family Deprived of Arlington

“The Memories of Those That to Us Rendered It Sacred”

After the Civil War, the Lee family had two significant encounters with Arlington. The first occurred in June 1873, when Mrs. Lee visited the place that had been her home for 53 years, from the day she was born until she was forced to leave it in the face of an imminent occupation by an enemy military force. Mrs. Lee had written to a friend in 1868 of her desire to visit Arlington and acknowledged, “The longing I have to revisit it is almost more than I can endure.”

Lee’s Daughters, Part 5

By David A. Carrino
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2017, All Rights Reserved

Part 5 of a 6-part article about the daughters of Robert E. Lee

Mildred Childe Lee

Birth and Childhood

Mildred Childe Lee, who was born on February 10, 1846, was the fourth daughter and the seventh and youngest child of Robert E. and Mrs. Lee. Mildred was named after Robert E. Lee’s younger sister, Catherine Mildred (Lee) Childe. At a young age, Mildred displayed such a lively and effervescent personality that Lee nicknamed her Precious Life. Even when Mildred became an adult, Lee referred to Mildred in his letters as Precious Life or sometimes simply as Life. Like her older sisters, Mildred was born at Arlington. At the time of her birth, Lee was stationed at Fort Hamilton in New York City, and he remained there after Mrs. Lee and the children went to Arlington for Mildred’s birth. In a letter that Lee sent to his wife shortly after the family left Fort Hamilton, he wrote about his feelings of separation. “I am very solitary, & my only company is my dog & cats.” Lee did not see his youngest child until several months later when he went to Arlington to rejoin his family. Lee had only a few days to spend with the family’s most recent addition before he departed for Mexico and his first experience in combat.