Center for the Study of the American South

Thavolia Glymph
Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies and History
Duke University

“Gender, Race, War, and Violence: The ‘Disappeared’ of the Civil War”
Tues., Mar. 25
3:30 p.m.
Royall Room
George Watts Hill Alumni Center
Carolina campus

The James A. Hutchins Lectures are presented with support from the UNC General Alumni Association.

This talk is about death and dying in the Civil War, violence and injuries, memory and disremembering. It is about battlefield fatalities. Its subjects, however, are not soldiers. They are women, enslaved and fugitive slave women who, escaping slavery in the midst of war, sought refuge and freedom within Union-held territory in the Confederate states. Tens of thousands, instead, were re-enslaved. Untold numbers were murdered by Confederate regular and irregular forces. For many, rather than places of safety and freedom, contraband camps and U.S. government-sponsored plantations often became killing grounds. The atrocities and hardships suffered by black soldiers in the Civil War have been well-documented by scholars and filmmakers as in the film, Glory. The story of female suffering in the Civil War South is a narrative of white female suffering and has formed a major theme in the historiography. The story of black women in the war remains largely untold, disremembered, and silenced. Enslaved women in the Civil War represent, in several senses of the term, the Civil War’s “disappeared.” This talk recounts their experience of statelessness and violence in the Civil War and explores why it forms no part of Civil War historiography.

Thavolia Glymph is the author of several essays on slavery, emancipation and the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction, economic history, and southern women. She is co-editor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1861, ser. 1, vol. 1; The Documentary of History of Emancipation, 1861–1867, ser. 1, vol. 3; The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South and Essays on the Postbellum Southern Economy. Her current writing and research focuses on southern women in the transition from slavery to freedom and the formation of an Afro-American women’s radical culture in the postbellum South.