“I’m a Radical Black Girl”: Black Women Unionists and the Politics of Civil War History
The history of southern women in the Civil War remains white-centered, mirroring wartime and postwar accounts that placed white women at the forefront of the battle for the home front. The politics of the “radical” women of Gonzalez, Texas, like the politics of the women Barkley Brown studies in Richmond, Virginia, was born on antebellum antislavery ground. Black women’s memories of past struggles and the sometimes damnable bargains enslaved people were forced to make concretely informed their wartime rebellion. The Civil War cast into sharp relief the character of the plantation house as a militarized space and enslaved women’s longstanding fight for freedom. Slavery had allowed enslaved people only cramped room to breathe, but in that narrow space they created and nurtured resistance and a sense of family and community that defied slaveholders’ desires that the black family exist principally as a unit for the reproduction of an enslaved labor force.
