Description
Book SynopsisThis book explores the remarkable partnership of Joseph and Harriet Hawley, a married couple from Connecticut whose lives were transformed by overlapping experiences in the American Civil War era. When Joseph became the colonel of the 7th Connecticut Infantry Regiment in 1862, Harriet ignored family advice and social convention, and travelled to Union military headquarters at Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, where Joseph's regiment was stationed. From that bold beginning, she spent the next three years as a visitor at field hospitals, a teacher at freedman's schools, a wartime journalist, a ward nurse, and her husband's informal advisor and publicist. Moving in and around the scenes of military action, she lived and worked in spaces usually reserved for men and took on responsibilities that implicitly challenged conventional understandings of women's physical and emotional dependency. While Joseph struggled for recognition and promotion in the brutally competitive environment of Uni
Trade ReviewJoseph and Harriet Hawley's Civil War is a thorough, gripping account of how Joseph and Harriet Hawley dedicated themselves to the Union, navigated the difficulties of war, remained true to one other, and developed an alliance that was both tender and shrewdly political. -- Matthew Warshauer, Central Connecticut State University
As Paul E. Teed points out, studies of the Civil War Era often center either on men’s actions in politics and battle or on women’s home front experiences. This is not the case with Teed’s engagingly written, sophisticated, and thought-provoking portrait of Joseph and Harriet Hawley’s marital partnership during the 1850s and 1860s. Driven by principle and ambition, both Joseph and Harriet went south during the Civil War, he as a Union army officer and she as a nurse and newspaper correspondent. -- Stanley Harrold, South Carolina State University
Table of ContentsChapter 1: The Hawley Family and Abolitionism Chapter 2: Politics and Marriage Chapter 3: The Winding Path to War Chapter 4: Return to the South Chapter 5: A Wartime Marriage Chapter 6: The Great Inexorable Duty Chapter 7: North from Olustee Chapter 8: Armory Square and Bermuda Hundred Chapter 9: Seeing It Out Epilogue: Contested Legacies
