Civil War Missouri Women

A footnote from history by Stephanie Grace Whitson
      When you travel, do you pay attention to highway signs intended to lure you to historic sites, or do you drive on by? After decades of traveling Interstate 70 in Missouri Missouri, I finally took time to follow signs that led me to the Oliver C. Anderson House and to a Confederate Cemetery

Photo taken near
Higginsville, MO

. I learned that in the years preceding the Civil War, slaves worked plantations along the Missouri River a short (to me) distance from Kansas City.  
      A slave state, Missouri never officially seceded from the Union, but many of its citizens wanted to do just that. The population included passionate abolitionists like Elijah Lovejoy of St. Louis and equally passionate slaveholders whose plantations dotted the countryside of what was then called "Little Dixie." Because of the citizens' divided loyalties, Missouri actually had two state governments for a brief time in 1861. 

Women working in a Missouri munitions factory.

      The more I learned, the more I wondered, "what about the women? How did all of this impact their daily lives? What was it like? How did they cope?" Missouri women worked in munitions factories. They took over farms when their husbands and brothers marched off to fight. They organized a fair that raised over half a million dollars "for the cause."

Adaline Couzins

Adaline Couzins became a nurse (one of few to receive a pension after the war). She collected supplies, searched for the wounded on battlefields, and nursed them on hospital ships. Highly regarded for both her skills as a nurse and her fearlessness in the face of danger, Couzins was shot in the knee during the Battle of Vicksburg.

Margaret McClure, loyal Confederate

Margaret McClure was just as fiercely loyal to the Confederacy as was Adaline Couzins to the "other side." Accused of several illegal (in officially Union St. Louis) acts, including helping to distribute Confederate mail to distributing contraband goods, Mrs. Couzins was confined to her St. Louis home, which was converted to the Chestnut Street Prison for women who had committed "acts of disloyalty." McClure was eventually banished to the south and spent the rest of the war in exile. After the war, Mrs. McClure returned to St. Louis where she became the first President of the St. Louis chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. 
      If I'd lived in Missouri in the 1860s, what would I have done? Would I have risked my home or my life for the cause? For which cause? Learning about the women of the past always makes me thankful that I am a woman of 2015. Thankful for many things. As I write this post, my smartphone tells me that the high today will be 5 degrees. Five. I think about Margaret McClure in the dead of winter, trying to keep warm in her home-turned-prison. Of Adaline Couzins walking a battlefield strewn with suffering men. I take a break to put on a pair of socks. My feet are cold. The thermostat is only keeping the house in the 60s. Oh, Margaret ... Oh, Adaline ... how did you bear it.
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Stephanie Grace Whitson celebrated her 20th year as a published novelist in 2014. Her spring 2015 book, Daughter of the Regiment, tells the story of two neighbors, Irish Maggie Malone (inspired by women like Adaline Couzins) and plantation mistress Elizabeth Blair, who are forced to face their differences when war comes to Lafayette County, Missouri. Learn more about the book at http://tinyurl.com/ourvswq and more about Steph at www.stephaniewhitson.com