Joseph and Harriet Hawley's Civil War: Partnership, Ambition, and Sacrifice

(Hardback)

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This 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 Josephs regiment was stationed. From that bold beginning, she spent the next three years as a visitor at field hospitals, a teacher at freedmans schools, a wartime journalist, a ward nurse, and her husbands 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 womens physical and emotional dependency. While Joseph struggled for recognition and promotion in the brutally competitive environment of Union military politics, Harriet shrewdly used her own personal contacts with power brokers in Hartford and Washington to protect his interests and those of his men. And as the terrible realities of the Civil War pushed them both to the brink of physical and emotional collapse, Harriet and Joseph remained committed to the cause and found ways to sustain their devotion to both Union and emancipation in the very worst moments of the conflict.

Reviews

Joseph 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 mens actions in politics and battle or on womens home front experiences. This is not the case with Teeds engagingly written, sophisticated, and thought-provoking portrait of Joseph and Harriet Hawleys 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

Author Bio

Paul E. Teed is professor of history at Saginaw Valley State University.