Gendered rhetoric and black Civil War military recruiting

Historians rightly acknowledge the role that white women played in supporting both the Union and Confederacy on the home front and the front lines. Formerly enslaved women and their difficult transition while supporting Unionism remains an important historical issue that scholars examine. This article seeks to add to our understanding of the important wartime mobilization for northern African American women in various ways. It emphasizes that these women's familial and communal ties to northern United States Colored Troops enlisted men combined with a desire to reframe aspects of the nation's racial and gender ideology as the Union called African American men to war.