Bushwhacker Belles : Exploring Gender, Guerrilla Warfare, and the Union Provost Marshal Records

Abstract

The objective of this study is to illuminate the stories of women involved with guerrilla warfare in Missouri during the Civil War by creating a website that will collectively draw on primary and secondary source materials to provide the first comprehensive historical study in a public forum of Missouri's female guerrillas. Much of the source material is drawn from the Union Provost Marshal Records. Included in the case files of Missourians accused of disloyalty are letters, testimonies, prison records, and banishment orders. Other source material used to identify these women and their activities come from newspapers, memoirs by guerrillas, census records, and county histories. The website will collectively display and evaluate these documents. Biographical information and scanned documents will be the foundation of the website, serving as an online archive. The website will include an evaluation of the experiences of women in Civil War Missouri in the form of an essay focusing on the findings from the Union Provost Marshal Records. The archival materials found on the website will contribute to future humanities scholarship on female guerrillas, women's experiences during the Civil War, and the conflict in Missouri. This website will include primary documents that previously have not been displayed in one unified locations. Currently a majority of the materials related to female guerrillas are located at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. and various institutions in the state of Missouri. Scanning the documents and placing them all in one location online will allow users to easily access these materials in one place. The audience for this project will be historians -- professional and amateur members of the public, and students, who are interested in many fields of history, including the Civil War, the war in Missouri, guerrilla warfare, William Clarke Quantrill, gender studies, military history, and legal history. The website is geared towards users with levels of education from the secondary level to professional scholars. Users can access this site and use the material for their own research interests, but can also gather information from the essays and biographical sketches. The significance of this online digital exhibit is to provide primary source materials that show female guerrilla activity in Missouri but also to understand female agency during the Civil War. In the further reading section, users can find scholarly secondary materials to assist them in their research of guerrilla warfare, the Civil War, Missouri during the Civil War, and women's wartime experiences.