 not talking about the Civil War solution for this evening and then he will present the 1816 program in October in Hancock. Hancock doesn't know about this yet. But I'm here at Banymore together on a monthly basis to coordinate the Humanities Council events here in the Valley so we'll take the bullet on this one and I'm sure we will find women in the civil war interesting. 16 if anybody wants to... I should if anybody wants to leave you know, go ahead and have a talk on the law of women in the civil war and this is practically my 600th talk in Vermont and I've never done this before. So if you want to bear with me the women talk is brand new. I haven't given it as many times as I've given the 1816 talk but 1816 is not in my head enough to give it without those. There's not a lot of quotation there. I hope that you'll find this of interest and if you don't I don't blame you one bit. We'll do the best we can here and see what we can produce but I am sorry about this. It's not my usual style. I am not any younger but I don't think that's the problem. Well, I think I know this but anyway I will keep it to myself. It's certainly not a local problem. December 6, 1859 a sunny morning in the Champlain Valley. A train pulls into the Virgin Station from Rutland. On board is the casket of the abolitionist John Brown. Four days before he had been hanged at Harper's Ferry, Virginia for trying to start a slave rebellion in the south. Accompanying the casket was his widow Mary Day Brown who grew up on the Vermont border in Grandville, New York. The casket was placed on a wagon and driven six miles down to the shore of Lake Champlain to the ferry landing and on it would go up into the Adirondacks to the Brown farm where John Brown's body would be buried. Hundreds of people, probably thousands lined the six mile route to watch the passing of the famous John Brown's body. Sitting up on the wagon was the widow and people along the way wept when they saw her feeling so sad for her and well they should have because she was going home to a farm. The Browns had 20 children. It was going to be a hard roll. Little did the women who watched the sad passage know that in less than two years they would, many of them would be in the same predicament. The Civil War was made inevitable by John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, Virginia because the Confederacy began to arm. But it had been a long time coming in Vermont. The slavery issue had burned bright since the Constitution of our Republic was adopted in 1777, the first to outlaw slavery in any way in this hemisphere. Partly as a consequence of that in 1834 the great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison spoke in Middlebury and founded the Vermont Anti-Slavery Society as part of his American Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison did a very clever thing when he established his anti-slavery groups. He allowed women to join them and women were really banned at that time from almost any political organization. And soon there were 90 chapters in Vermont and women were outnumbering men in those chapters. They had something with a little power. Of course women knew something about slavery. They knew something about slave wages, did they not? In Norwich, Vermont in 1843 Norwich women formed an abolition society stating in their Constitution believing slavery as it exists in this nation to be a direct violation of the law of God. Among the founders of the Vermont Anti-Slavery Society were Rowland and Rachel Robinson of Ferrisburg, Vermont, Quakers. Their house stopped on the Underground Railroad. They hid slaves at their farm called Rokabee. One of the people helped William Lloyd Garrison spread the word about slavery throughout Vermont was Orson Murray of Brandon an abolitionist who people really didn't seem to like. He kept getting in trouble at his speeches. Speaking in Randolph Center Murray got booed and threatened. He decided it was time to leave but the crowd blocked his way and it looked like he was going to get beat up. But Rachel Robinson was there and she took him by the arm and led him out of the church and he got away safely. She was a tough cookie, I'll tell you. In Plymouth, Vermont the most famous person to come from Plymouth before you know who, incidentally Coolidge was our second best president to come from Vermont. Axis Sprague, the most famous resident of Plymouth, she went all over the world conducting seances. She was a spiritualist known throughout the world. She spoke all over the East and United States as well. And she was an abolitionist at a meeting in Providence she said, horrible indeed is the necessity that compels the poor Negro to fly like a hundred deer to the land of kings for that freedom which he cannot find amid the land of the free and the home of the brave. Axis Sprague died in 1862 of the Civil War just really getting going, promising to return. She's buried incidentally right behind Calvin Coolidge and the gravestone says she'll be back. Nobody's seen her yet, but I wouldn't be surprised. Probably the most powerful anti-slavery woman in Vermont was Clarina Howard, a native of West Townsend down there Brattleboro. She grew up to marry a Baptist minister and moved to upstate New York. Then she divorced it. That was rare in 1840 in return to Vermont and married George Nichols of Brattleboro who published a local paper. And she turned it into an anti-slavery paper. And then she moved to Kansas, bloody Kansas. And she started a paper in Kansas that attacked slavery and that was dangerous in Kansas. She came back to Vermont briefly and spoke to the legislature. The first woman who ever spoke to the Vermont legislature, which was all male. And they booed her and jeered her, but she kept on going till the end. She was stopped. Stomped and jeered as she tried to spoke. Next year she came back from Kansas to Washington and opened an orphanage for the children of escaped slaves. And she became a friend of Mary Lincoln and Susan B. Anthony and Mary Lincoln gave her gifts and thanks for what she had done. Before the Civil War, Vermonters, many of them got a good look at Southerners. Vermont was filled with spring houses. Resorts where people came to take the waters of the mineral springs. Among them was Clarendon Springs. A local woman wrote of the Southerners who came every year to escape the Southern heat. Of the Southern clientele a few dowager ladies, an occasional woman with a few children, a smattering of dashing young men who rode well, played cards and danced well. But by the far the largest percentage were charming affected young women with a trunk full of beautiful clothes and as far as the natives could see a head full of butterflies, giggles, incomprehensible chatter and nonsense. They might have a maiden aunt in tow and always a mammy are made to supervise everything. Slaves, you see. In Pittsburgh in 1856 Samantha Kelly went to Alabama to teach school. A local she grew up in Pittsburgh and off she goes. As soon as she's 18 she goes to Alabama. Teach school. Teaching black children. She found a town that would allow her to teach black children. It's amazing. There were parts of Alabama that were fairly pro-north. Listen to what she writes in her diary. Know how miserable warm this day in this room is. Finished reading Uncle Tom for the second time this morning. I read it with intense increased interest. Many of the expressions that were new and strange when I read it before are now strangely familiar. Oh slavery. And I a native new Englander and I'm living in the midst of it. Talk about courage to teach Uncle Tom's cabin in Alabama, my God, to blacks. In Peacham the Johnson family a family of abolitionists. Oliver worked for William Lloyd Garrison. His sisters Martha and Caroline went to North Carolina to teach the children of freed slaves as the Civil War began. Martha died there. I should mention in Danville Sally Stevens gave birth to a son in 1794 Thaddeus. A cripple kid grew up to become the most powerful member of Congress during the Civil War. Thaddeus Stevens, chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, financed the Civil War for Lincoln. Always said it was his mother's influence that made him the remarkable man he was, a great opponent of slavery. So the war came with the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. War fever settled on Vermont. Vermont women immediately got involved. Certainly early on got much caught up in the spirit. War meetings were held in almost every town throughout the state to encourage enlistments in Brookfield. A local newspaper reported every time a man rose to enlist the house broke forth amid applause and cheering. This is that church by the floating bridge. Then the governor began to make all manner of inducements to get the men to enlist. He even offered to give any man who would enlist his choice of the girls in the church to kiss. In Guilford a notice advertising a war meeting at the outset of the war began with women invited. So unusual you see they had to put that on the posters. I mean it just wasn't done. In Bristol a war meeting May 15th, 1861 the local paper a procession led by 25 ladies carrying the national standard march to the town hall. In Wheelock in the Northeast Kingdom women gathered in the town hall right after Fort Sumber to make a huge American flag. 60 feet wide my god I don't know how it ever flew in the wind. With ready fingers wrought their country's emblem though the ruthless hand of secession had sought to efface 11 stars from the constellation of its fluid blue. All the blue in faith they placed the star for every state in Rochester. Mrs. Chester Pierce in the house facing the green over here. According to the Rutland Herald early in the war the ladies of Rochester manufactured and furnished first each soldier who went from Rochester a pocket handy. Filled with materials that would allow them to sew and do mending. Now Rochester sent 196 men to the Civil War so that was quite a number of these little devices. They're little kits that I actually have one of them at home. And the men began going to war. Here all of Cheney a farm wife in Stowe writing to her daughter over in New Hampshire about the beginning of the war. Last Monday her father took Edwin to the center and enlisted for the war to where he must go and said he should go. If father did not give his consent for him to go the first chance he got he would sneak away. It comes pretty hard for your father to give him up. He has made so much calculation for him to stay at home. It is strange what makes the boys want to go to war. If the boys hated to go as bad as we hated to have them there would not be much fighting done could there. All four of her boys went to war all four came home safely. But you see in that letter you begin to see and we'll see it through this talk. There's a tone to what the women say about the war that's much different than what the men. They know they sense you know something horrid is coming and it's going to land much of it in their laps. Mary Jane Ackerman Gray of Bristol, New Hampshire saw her husband enlist. Then she put her four sons and three daughters in a buckboard and moved north to Canaan, Vermont and bought a house. So her boys wouldn't have to serve. She thought she was in Canada. She was two miles short. When she found out and the border was sort of ill-defined then. When she found out she saw that house moved over the border bought another house, stayed till the war was over, went back to New Hampshire, kept her sons out of the war. Brattleboro was the site of the great Civil War camp in Vermont. Many of the regiments that went to war formed up there. This poem appeared on the front page of the Brattleboro Reformer when the 4th Vermont Regiment left for war from the camp. Written by a local girl named Mary Tyler. Slowly and listen in here through that, through that different perspective. Slowly through the misty street comes the measured tramp of feet. And a thousand forms sweep by going forth to winter die. Stepping to the roll of drum down the darkening street they come. Ready each to bear his part to resign it may be life eager but to join the strife. Will they tread the homeward track? Lord in mercy bring them back. Mary Estie was a child when the war began. Late in life she gave a series of lectures in Brattleboro on the Civil War era. Brattleboro would be the site not only of the big camp but of the biggest Civil War hospital, three in Vermont. She said looking back on the war. But few weeks passed when the war began when in my early home we did not have guests there who came to say goodbye to a son or a brother. Some good women in our village were nurses. How much they did and how many lives they saved we can never tell or realize. It was a great relief to the people of Brattleboro whose homes are on canal and main streets. For before the hospital was built nearly every house had a sick soldier in it. The games of the children on the street during those years partook of the war spirit. Amputating arms and legs, carrying each other on stretchers. That sounds about right. Nationwide two organizations formed with chapters throughout the north to raise money and to make goods for the soldiers. The Sanitary Commission and the Christian Commission. Vermont women in most town associated with one or the other. In Waitesfield the society was organized auxiliary to the Christian Commission. And many army supplies prepared by bands of devoted women were shipped to the front. In Vernon in 1858 the Vernon Women's Home Missionary Society had formed. When the war began it began making things for the soldiers. Meeting in a farmhouse on Houghton Hill. Incidentally the Home Missionary Society in Vernon still meets and still meets in that house. Middlebury the Women's Relief Corps met at the Congregational Church. In Woodstock married column of the wife of the United States Senator. James, a Senator, a Jacob column organized relief efforts in her house. In Barnett two houses from the Congregational Church lived Miss Laura Moore. Town history states that she worked tirelessly providing items for the soldiers. And that history says in each village in the town women made warm garments for the men in the field and delicacies for the sick and wounded. The women drove from farm to farm collecting money, collecting goods. The war meetings went on and Addison. Lucy Ann Rose writes in her diary last Friday on Snake Mountain. A recruiting officer held a war meeting. Cousin Marvin Clark says he would like to go. His aunt does not like to hear about it. But Albert did go and now we all pray for it. Clark was killed at Gettysburg by an exploding artillery shell just before Pickett's Charge. And Vermont at the time of the Civil War there existed, this is amazing, more than 30,000 farms. What do we have today? 500? I think? 30,000. The great home front dramas were played out on the farms. So much of the burdens fell on the women. Some families could not afford a hired man, most couldn't. And so it was up to the old men, the women and the children. The able-bodied men, so many of them were gone. Early in the war, Hiram Spencer from Newark, in the northeast kingdom, wrote to his wife Angelina. Spencer in the 10th Vermont Regiment. Be as careful as you can and get along as easy as you can. So I get home and then I will try to help you. So you won't have to work so hard. I should like to go home, but I can't. Things are now, I've got to work for Uncle Sam. Letters from the home front, letters from the home front are rare. The soldiers read them, threw them away, most of them. They had so much stuff to carry. Letters from the soldiers are, there are thousands of them at UVM and the H.S. And there's another factor, of course. The women were so busy they didn't have time to write many letters. In Orange Vermont, Royal Flanders left his wife, Anna, and six sons in a mountain cabin and enlisted. He came home on leave in 1863. And when he left again, his wife was pregnant. She wrote to him that she was destitute. I want money very bad for the children are perfectly shirtless. But he stayed until war's end. He could have come home earlier. He stayed until a war's end. He stays at home for a month, goes back to Brattleboro to work as a nurse in the hospital. Then when he goes back, she's pregnant again. This will be eight kids. In six months, he comes home for good with chronic diarrhea and dies in a month. And she's left with, well, it'll be about to be eight kids. Within a year, she is in an insane asylum. But in a year, she recovers, comes home, raises the eight kids, and every one of those kids became a success. I mean, the boys were selectmen and the trustees and the women had large and very good families. It must have been an amazing woman. But in Crosbury, John Paddleford left wife, Carolyn, to run the farm. She wrote him, it has been frozen most of the time, though it is thawing today. I'm quite alone accepting grandmother and the baby and Jenny. Oh, how I wish you was by my side. She went on to talk about the high price of oats, the good work of the hired man, and the purchasing of a new horse that she named Abraham Lincoln. Sergeant Dutton Sillsby, Company B13, Vermont, left his wife, Marinda Brown, over in Moretown with seven children. They had a hired man. He writes every day early in the war. She only writes, takes three weeks to write the first letter. Biddy, she's busy and he's mad about it, but you know, she's busy and he is. He sends this letter home early on. I need some gloves. And if you have not time to knit them, you would better send me some good lined buckskin ones. There. She writes him on October 17th. We have engaged Oscar Bailey. He will work for $18 for one month and then work for his board through the winter. November 12th, that's almost a month before she writes again. Everything is still in the girl's quiet and I can think. I hardly had time this evening for Oscar is so rattle headed. That in spite of all my sober feelings, he will keep me laughing. And I hardly know which I am the most provoked at. Him for being so nonsensical or at my self for being so foolish as to laugh at it. But you know my weaknesses. But I assure you that though I laugh ever so much as does not drive you from my thoughts. November 14th, I love this one. I suppose before this you have heard of General McClellan's removal from office. There seems to be some dissatisfaction with management of affairs. More than I have ever seen before. The 6,000 men that went off to war and you were one of them were supposed to end this thing. I tell you, Dutton, when you left home, I thought it might accomplish some good. I'm not so sure anymore. That's right on. You see, McClellan has screwed up the whole war. Right on. And then she adds, I'm busy today on account of butchering. Yesterday I let the girls go to school for the first time in three weeks. Wow. In East Montpelier, Hannah Pitkin wrote for the Abbey Hemingway's Vermont history. In the vigor of young manhood they went, one and another who were household treasures. Perhaps the last news was seen on the battlefield or taken prisoner. And then the long months elapsed. At last came the fearful, died at Andersonville. So three military hospitals opened in Vermont. Brattleboro, Montpelier, Burlington. The Vermont Watchman, the newspaper in Montpelier reports. 1862 we are soon to have amongst us the brave boys who have been disabled by wounds and disease while nobly fighting battles for their country. We shall be one of Sheets pillowcases, blankets, pillows, comforters. Send to hospital surgeon, William B. Casey at the pavilion. Two weeks later, Casey has a letter in the same paper. In behalf of the sick and wounded, I thank you. Everything we ask for has come. Amazing. Some women, mostly officers, went to war with their husbands. Among them was Mary Farnham from Bradford. Her husband was second in command of the 12th Vermont Regiment. They were part of the 2nd Vermont Brigade destined to fight at Gettysburg. First morning that Mary was in camp with her husband, she writes in her diary. When I opened my cabin door such a splendid scene I never held before. 20 fires were burning, 600 of more men hurrying about. Beyond glowed the blood-red tint of mourning. She knew what was coming. In Georgia, Vermont, 18 years before the Civil War began, Elizabeth Ellen Joy was born. When she was 18, she went to Washington. A beautiful young lady. And that, an Austrian nobleman, named Constantine Alexander Johann Nepplemont, Prince Somsom. And she got the title Princess Somsom. He gave her a fine horse and she became a sight in Washington, writing that wonderful horse around the city. And she was, some said, the most beautiful woman in Washington. And she became rather famous. Eventually she joined her husband at the front and worked as a nurse in the hospitals. And she and her husband got to know the Lincolns. And Mary Lincoln hated her because she was good-looking. And Mary Lincoln was the most jealous woman I've ever encountered in all of history. She could not stand to have another woman look at her husband and this young lady. Anyway, she did a lot of good, taking care of soldiers. After the Civil War, she and her husband went into Mexico, got into the Mexican Revolution. He was killed. She ended up destitute in Europe. There should be a book about her. In Winchester, a Middlebury farm girl married Reverend Warren Winchester, pastor of the Bridport Cargatial Church in 1848. He became an Army chaplain assigned to a hospital in Washington. Soon he sent for Mary and their four children, three girls and a boy. They were fine singers and soon after they got into Washington, they gave a concert in the hospital where he was chaplain. She wrote to her parents that little voices all blended with the rest and many a brave soldier had to wipe his eyes. Soon after the concert, four-year-old Nellie complained of an earache. And Sorth wrote, a doctor diagnosed diphtheria and she was dead within two weeks. And then her two sisters died of diphtheria and the boy got the same thing but somehow survived. In Eden in June 62, George Emory enlisted in the 11th Vermont, leaving behind Mary, his wife Mary Bell and six kids. She soon went to Washington to be with it. He was soon captured and died at Andersonville Prison. She and her children had nothing. They were on the streets. She went to the 11th Vermont commander. He gave her two jobs as a laundress. She and the kids filled two jobs and they made it to the end of the war and came back to Vermont. Gettysburg is fought. Mary Fuller recalls a Brattleboro. The young women were the ones to solicit in different parts of the village. One friend, a schoolmate and I had our part of the side of the brook. And I remembered we collected $100 in an hour after Gettysburg. A Chester historian said the Chester Soldiers Aid Society reported in 1863 on its year's production. 17 sheets, 171 towels, 68 pounds of dried apples, 83 pairs of perch, 18 quilts, 18 pair of socks, 19 pillowcases, 20 pairs of slippers, rags, bandages, lint and one pair of mittens. My God. In Island Pond, Susan Aldrich's husband died in 1852, leaving her with five children. Three of them enlisted in 1862. Two of them were dead within four months. The other came home a cripple for life. During the war, living by herself, she built herself a new house, which still stands in Island Pond. After the war, she was a guest of honor at the war reunions in Island Pond at the Grand Art of the Republic meetings. That was rare. Morristown Corners, widow Gates, lived near the Hamlet with a son and daughter. Her son enlisted at 14 as a drummer boy. She had a daughter who died soon after he left. She went to Washington to see Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to bring him home. She couldn't manage the fire. Stanton would not see her. So she went to the White House. She said she knocked on the door of the White House. Lincoln saw her and sent a note to Stanton, send that boy home. People got by by helping each other in Waterville, Vermont, northern Vermont. Mrs. H Beard, Mrs. Curtis Beard, whose husbands have gone to war, have harvested corn raised on their farm and had a husking bee and invited eight or 10 women to the neighborhood and hussed out 40 bushels. In West Fairleigh, Nancy Miles Kimball started a knitting business connected to a Boston company and hired 40 local women who needed, badly needed employment. In Peacham, Edwin Palmer died of wounds in the battle of the wilderness while it wore his daughter and wife, moved into people's houses, made new clothes for them, and then moved on to another house and did the same thing. That's how they supported themselves. As the state hospitals filled the need for nurses increased, we don't know how many Vermont women were nurses, probably about 200. Harriet Hingson lived in Northfield. She was a nurse at the Montpelier Hospital. There she met Clark Holmes, a wounded private. They were soon married. He died 10 years after the war. She lived to be 102, dying in 1945, probably the last surviving Civil War veteran. She was fond always of reciting the 23rd Psalm. Yay, though I walked through the valley. June 1861. Dorothea Dix, once a crusader for mental health and prison reform, a Massachusetts woman met in Washington with War Department officials who accepted her offer to recruit female nurses in hospitals around Washington. Dorothea Dix. Some 9,000 women would serve as nurses in the federal hospitals. 3,000 under Dix's oversight. In the south, another Massachusetts woman in the hospitals established in the south as the armies began to conquer parts of the south. The woman running the hospitals down there was Mary Livermore of Massachusetts. After the Civil War, William Tecumseh Sherman said of her, she ranks me. That's quite an admission for Sherman who had a massive ego. Remember the name, remember the name Mary Livermore. It's gonna pop up in just a few minutes here. Listen to this. Dorothea Dix established strict standards for her nurses. Recruits must be between 35 and 50, matronly in appearance and with habits of neatness, order, sobriety and industry. Wages of $12 per month. Little attention paid to medical experience or training. She was flooded with applications throughout the north, but later in the war when the fighting got worse in 1864, they were short of nurses and Dorothea Dix dropped the requirement that the women not be attracted. No more matronly, you know. They'd take anybody they could get. Amanda Colbert, a global farm girl from up in the kingdom, followed her brother Henry to war in the 3rd Vermont. She threw up throughout the war assisting in operations at the front, driving an ambulance. When requested, she kept soldiers valuables in her tent. One night a soldier tried to steal him and she shot him. Both she and her husband came home safely. Not only did the hospitals increase the demands for goods from the women, but the soldiers themselves were demanding. Families sent boxes to the front and railroad service was so good that even meats, turkeys, just cooked turkeys would usually get to the soldiers before they spoiled. I mean, it was amazing. That rail service is better than it is today. Private Jonathan Blaisdale, 11th Vermont, rode home to Cambridge to his home in Cambridge. Send some dried apples, some butter and cheese, and I will send some money. As soon as I get some, I want about 75 pounds of sugar. Of course, maple sugar. And I can sell it for 50 cents a pound. I want you to send a little can of molasses and a little bottle of Camp Four, a pair of boots, some horseradish and some vinegar to put in it. Send it as soon as possible. You know, as if the things weren't busy enough at home. Captain Edward Horton writing to Chittenden to his wife, I received the box I got yesterday. The pies in the oysters were spoiled. The play had gone out of the oysters. The oyster juice had run in the pies and they were all jammed up and mostly moldy. Still the demands for goods increased from the hospitals. In 1864, the Burlington Ladies Relief Association made 84 haversacks, 164 shirts, 168 drawers, 185 towels, 30 sheets, and 42 quilts. My God, that's a lot of work. The normal friend of mine, now no longer with us, Tom Bassett, a Burlington historian, wrote, for the first time individualistic Vermonters were cooperating in a huge public collective enterprise which proved its merit by helping win a great war. The immensity of the resources focused to this end. The complicated, extensive and large scale logistics in the size of the labor force dwarfed all previous efforts. The people of Vermont had never been and never would be so unanimous about anything. Factories were busy as they never had been. Mills in Bridgewater, Woodstock, Winooski, Ludlow, many other towns produced wool for blankets and uniforms. Increasingly, the mills were staffed by women and dormitories were built, where the women were very closely watched. They couldn't go out by themselves and there's a dormitory still stands in Woodstock across from the recreation center. The recreation center was the mill. In Luhnenberg, a young girl named Suva Thomas left home to work in the Willow Mill in Lowell, Massachusetts. She came on sick in 1862 to her mother Ida and soon died. It was rough work. Boston Post 1864, this is a tough one. The young girl, neatly though plainly dressed, was arrested by a police officer for improperly soliciting men on the street. When taken to the station house, she admitted the charge but said she was compelled to adopt that course of life or starve. She came from Vermont with her mother and sister because they could find no employment there. That's probably true. You see, the mills are filled. On the farms, the straining priest. Lucia Brown in Williston wrote in her diary, April 14, 1863. Now she's living by herself. She's divorced two husbands. The first one ran off to the gold rush and the second one just disappeared. She divorced them both. She wrote, I am this for noon and went to the lady's aid society. I want to sow and do all I can for the soldiers. She wrote and then she wrote, you know, the more I see of men, the more I like dogs. Hannah Grant Blind's husband was a waggoner in the second Vermont. Left five kids, an aging mother and grandfather with his wife and when he got home, he said she looked better than what he left but it's hard to believe. Listen to this, on November 3rd, 1861, it rains and blows terrible and we have our wood to draw down out of the woods. She's writing to him. It seems as if we should all freeze to death. My wood is poor stuff. I have no money yet. Nothing I can borrow. I have worked so hard, I am almost dead. Tonight, daughter began to cry and I could not stop her. And when night comes, baby will begin. Pa ain't here to hold her. I get out of patience with them sometimes and if you can get discharged, come home. I should think you would better do that and you'll do more good taking care of your little family. November 24th, the children are all sick with cold. I was up last night with Francis. He coughed very hard. He is no better tonight. Ida has a very hard cold but has not had any fit yet. Epilepsy probably. My health is pretty good for me, only tired to death tonight. I work like a dog all day long. Captain Edward Horton writing to Chittenden. Once again, the oysters came and everything is muddy. There he goes again. George Randall enlisted as a musician in the 4th Vermont, from Glover, Vermont. Finally came to the Brattleboro Hospital sick. His wife, Emma, went to Brattleboro to help care for him, leaving her two children with her sister, Percy Stone, and her four children. She returned with George to recover at home. Within three weeks, three of those children were dead from the disease brought home by her soldier husband. I mean, Fairhaven. February 10th, 1864. The ladies at Fairhaven are doing noble work for our brave volunteers. Last Tuesday, under the auspices, under the auspices, a festival was held at the town hall. The contributions consisted of tableaux vivants of rare excellence. Tableaux vivants were, the ladies would, and some of the men, would dress up in costume and create on a stage a famous scene from history, a famous painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, okay? And the men would put on uniforms, you know, and they'd put a boat up there, and everybody would get in position, like the painting, and then they'd open up the curtain and for ten minutes, everybody would hold stock still, and then they'd shut the curtain and they'd set up another one. They'd do maybe ten a night. It was like the closest they had to movies, I guess, I don't know. They're terribly popular. Middlebury, 1864. The Middlebury Register, writing of the town of Leicester. We have not had a wedding in town this winter. Something rather strange. The young men have all gone to war. In Brattleboro, Mary Fuller, the memory of those four awful years seems to those who live through them like a dreadful dream. How often some of our own dead were brought back here for burial. The military funeral, a flag draped coffin. The muffled drums will long be remembered. And at last, of course, it did end. April 12th, 1865, a huge Middlebury celebration. Loads of fair women and brave men in the triumphal procession, which traversed the streets with banners flying. In Manchester, reservations made the previous summer. For Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary, were canceled. Abraham Lincoln, of course, had been shot. In Montpelier, the former First Lady of the Confederacy, Marina Davis, came to Montpelier for the summer. People did not like her. That's easy to understand. In Strafford, Janet Flanders, married 15 years to Oliver Bacon before the war. He died in the Battle of Newburn in 1863. She lived until 1933. They never remarried saying that she never found a man worth my pension. Had she married, she'd have lost $8 a month. In 1866, women in Woodstock, the women in Woodstock, Willow Mill, went on strike. They marched downtown to Woodstock's best restaurant at what's now the Woodstock Inn on that location. Went into the dining room. All ordered the most expensive meal on the menu and charged it to the male owner, Solomon Woodward. I remember Solomon Woodward's daughter. She lived to be 106. She got married 20 years after the Civil War. The marriage lasted 10 days. She came home saying that her husband had been in polite. They were married again, 106. Nathaniel Burbank of Walden, veteran of the Navy. After the war, granddaughter Irene remembered, grandpa was a dear old man. Grandma used to listen to his stories, but after a while told us kids, war wasn't as glorious as he made it sound. There's that different perspective, you see. In Chittenden, 1907, the noise post of the Women's Relief Corps formed to help care for families who lost men in the war and aging veterans. It went on until the last veteran died in Chittenden in 1932. In Chelsea, Clara Bixby Searle's husband died at Andersonville. She lived 50 more years. She had a memorial stone erected in the Chelsea cemetery that said, God is marked every sorrowing day and numbered every secret tear. On August 12th, 1912, Coventry, the Northeast Kingdom, dedicated its Civil War Memorial. Newport Express covered the event. Teams and autos and pedestrians were seen entering from four and five routes leading into town. Nearly 2,000 people were on the grounds. The speaker was former Governor Josiah Grout, also a veteran of the Vermont Cavalry. I wish here to express the hope that sometime, somewhere in the most prominent place for national observation, the gratitude of our people will take form in the shape of a monument of the most lofty and enduring character in honor of and to the memory of the women of the Civil War, who at home in the hospital and on the field did so much in so many ways to encourage him who bore the brunt of the battle and to soften the severity of provations and to relieve the anguish and suffering of his hardships. That monument to my knowledge has never been built. Historian Tom Bassett concluded about the Civil War, Vermont women enlisted for the duration. Recently, a book has been published called They Fought Like Demons, written by two archivists at the National Archives. It's a book about women who passed themselves off as men and served in the Union armies. They estimate as many as 700 women got away with it. I think one of those women was a Vermonter. Her name was Elizabeth Niles. She came from Shaftesbury, Vermont, down in Beddington County. She and Martin Niles had just gotten married. When he enlisted in the 14th Vermont Regiment, she went with him as a man and served 10 months and came home and lived until 1912 moving to New Jersey. I'm trying to verify this, but the researchers at archives are cautioning me that they are careful researchers. But if this is true, and I think it probably is, we have at least one Vermont woman who fought at Gettysburg and participated in the defeat of Pickett's Charge, the most important moment on the battlefield in the entire Civil War. It is remarkable, but still not totally confirmed. Well, we near the end. On a winter day in 1870, a train pulled into the Montpelier station. There was a meeting being held in Montpelier of the Vermont Women's Suffrage Association trying to win the vote for women. It was an all-male organization. A lot of women came from out of the state to attend, or at least to watch it. Among them, from the train, stepped Julia Ward Howe, author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, written to the tune of John Brown's body. He has sounded forth the trumpets that she'll never call retreat, as Howe was getting her baggage. She looked down the platform and saw none other than Mary Livermore, one of the war's great nurses who Sherman had so praised. Howe hastened after Livermore, and as she got closer, she shouted, Oh, you big Livermore! They were old friends, and Mary put on a little weight, you know, and they met up, and off they went down the platform, arm in arm, off to war again for another cause, like the Civil War having to do with equality, fighting for the women's right to vote. Next year will be the 100th anniversary, the bicentennial of women's suffrage. They, the women, finally won another war for human equality. As we know, such wars never cease. Thanks for listening to the wrong speech.