War Work: Labor During the Civil War

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Saturday, May 6, 2023  10am-1pm

Location

Details

War Work: Labor During the Civil War

May 6, 10 am – 1 pm, Free

City of Raleigh Museum, 220 Fayetteville St., Raleigh

Historians Dr. David Zonderman, Dr. Christopher Graham, and Kaitlin O’Connell explore what labor went on off the battlefield. Entrenchments, quartermasters, and African American labor have been often overlooked as the essential factors that made the war work. These lectures explore the support network that supported soldiers in the field and ultimately decided victory and defeat. This event is free and open to the public. The City of Raleigh Museum is located at 220 Fayetteville St., Raleigh. For more information contact the museum at (919) 996-2220 or email CORMuseum@gmail.com. This event is sponsored by the North Carolina Humanities Council and the Friends of the City of Raleigh Museum.

Presenters:

Stressed Out Supply Chains: North Carolina Wartime Struggle for Supply – Dr. Christopher Graham, American Civil War Museum, Richmond, VA.

White women and enslaved black men served as the backbone of the system that sustained North Carolina's Civil War military. Some of the work they performed had long been practiced in the slave south; some of the work was new for everyone involved. All of it was subject to the politics and policies of industrialists and politicians.

"Without Negro Labor, I Cannot Do It" : What Black and Indigenous Laborers in Wilmington Tell Us About the Civil War - Kaitlin O'Connor, Ft. Fisher State Historic Site

Wilmington, N.C. was the principal port city in the state during the Civil War. From the earliest days of war, Confederates forced free and enslaved African Americans as well as Indigenous Americans to build and maintain fortifications in and around Wilmington. By studying this labor system, we learn more about white Southerners' expectations of racial hierarchy and the agency of these people exploited by the Confederacy.

Fighting on the Home Front: Workers and the Civil War – Dr. David Zonderman, N.C. State University

This talk will offer an overview of workers--black and white, men and women, North and South--the labor they performed, the ways they adapted to changing technology and working conditions, and their efforts to organize and protest wages that never kept up with rapidly rising wartime inflation.