Sentimental bonds: Suffering, sacrifice and benevolence in the Civil War North

"Sentimental Bonds" examines the meanings that Civil War Northerners invested in suffering, sacrifice and benevolence and the way these meanings changed over the course of the century. Throughout the war, sentimental narratives idealizing soldiers' sacrifices and civilian benevolence constituted the primary means through which Northerners made sense of their suffering. While scholars tend to dismiss these narratives as inaccurate depictions of reality, I argue that sentimentality played a crucial role in shaping the culture and politics of the era. In particular, I examine the ways that sentimentality affected wartime mobilization, helped to define gender roles and forged national identity.;Asserting a form of nationalism that gave domestic ties a crucial political significance, benevolent women claimed that the sentiments generated by their voluntary endeavors maintained soldiers' civilian attachments, thereby resolving the threat that militarization posed to men's civic and moral identities. Whereas wartime benevolence enabled women to claim a new form of civic identity, it was also crucial in justifying the Union war effort. Facing harsh foreign and domestic criticism over the nature and conduct of the war, sentimental testimonials to Northerners' unstinting benevolence helped to reinscribe the virtues of democratic republicanism. At the same time, Northern writers produced countless narratives celebrating the exemplary behavior of wounded soldiers as an embodiment of the Union war effort---narratives that I argue enabled injured soldiers to conceptualize suffering as a continuing form of civic participation. By the late nineteenth century, however, I show how both male and female Civil War memorialists came to repudiate sentimentality and the model of gender relations that it entailed.;This study demonstrates the central importance of sentimentality in framing the experiences of both men and women. In addition, it offers a revised interpretation of both wartime voluntarism and gender relations. Challenging the association of voluntary efforts with state centralization and social control, I argue that most volunteers were primarily concerned with the moral oversight of Union troops. Moreover, I examine the way Northern women viewed their war-work less as a chance to thwart gender conventions than as an opportunity to assert the public importance of sentimental domesticity.