"Sympathy and Retribution: Climates of Widowhood and the American Civil War"

Meaghan M. FritzNorthwestern University “Sympathy and Retribution: Climates of Widowhood and the American Civil War” This paper investigates climates of sympathy and retribution that followed the intentional massacre of... [ view full abstract ]

Meaghan M. Fritz

Northwestern University

“Sympathy and Retribution: Climates of Widowhood and the American Civil War”

This paper investigates climates of sympathy and retribution that followed the intentional massacre of over 300 African American Union soldiers at the battle of Fort Pillow. Northern outrage over this tragedy materialized most visibly in the passing of the 1864 amendment to the Pension Act, which sought to give the widows and children of Black soldiers the same pension benefits as those of whites. I argue that early iterations of the law implied recognition of enslaved widowhood at a time when enslaved marriage went entirely unacknowledged by the state. The legislation was partly inspired by a widowed woman, Mary Booth, who received national acclaim when she traveled to the battlefield to reclaim the body of her husband, a Major who fell at Fort Pillow with many of the African American soldiers under his command. In a moving ceremony, Mary presented the survivors of her husband’s regiment with the flag, “red and clotted with human blood,” that they had protected during battle. Turning the sympathetic climate cultivated by her actions to activist ends, Mary called on Abraham Lincoln to campaign for African American women’s rights to pensions, and insisted that the government legally recognize marriages formed in slavery. This paper reads the 1864 amendment, the texts depicting Mary Booth’s complicated advocacy, and the literary legacy of Civil War pensions for African American women, seen most notably, perhaps, in Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes, to explore how climates of sympathy and retribution coalesced around the widow during the Civil War.