New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Sarah Jones Weicksel, "A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era" (UNC Press, 2026)

·55 min·3 clips

A tin type of Charlie Wheat was stolen, recovered, and tied to battlefield looting at Antietam.

1. New Books in Military History speaks with Sarah Jones Weichsel about A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era. 2. Miranda Melcher hosts the conversation, and Weichsel appears as the historian and material culture scholar behind the 2026 UNC Press book. 3. The episode asks how clothing can explain the Civil War as a conflict about war, emancipation, labor, and social order. 4. Weichsel says the project began as a study of looting, but archival sources kept pointing her toward clothing-related disputes. 5. She cites a formerly enslaved man claiming a stolen hat, union soldiers tearing an elite Southern woman’s dress into strips, and a Black U.S. soldier surviving by putting on civilian clothes. 6. Those examples led her to argue that clothing was a contested object before, during, and after the war. 7. The book treats clothing as a ground on which the Civil War was fought, not just as background detail. 8. Weichsel links clothing to questions about patriotic fervor, slavery’s collapse, the incorporation of formerly enslaved people, and women’s household economics. 9. She says clothing grounded those abstract anxieties in material form. 10. Women’s work making uniforms turns out to be political, not just domestic. 11. In the South, elite women often claimed credit for sewing, but Weichsel says enslaved women were frequently doing the actual work. 12. She gives the example of a woman who said she did not know how to sew but had sent shirts for soldiers after learning from an enslaved woman named Lulu. 13. At the Schuylkill Arsenal in Philadelphia, wives and daughters of soldiers argued that sewing work should count as public welfare. 14. In Roswell, Georgia, more than 400 women and children worked in textile mills producing gray woolen cloth for the Confederacy at full capacity in 1864. 15. Sherman decided the mills were a liability, destroyed them, and sent the women and children north to Tennessee, Ohio, and Indiana. 16. Weichsel emphasizes that the women were charged with treason, even though they were not ultimately tried. 17. She also describes a wartime clothing culture built around brass buttons, brass insignia, and gold braid. 18. Her phrase "brass manhood" captures how uniforms signaled patriotic allegiance, virility, and military rank. 19. The interview is a detailed, interview-driven historical discussion with close attention to objects, labor, and military bureaucracy. 20. Listeners interested in Civil War material culture, women’s labor, and clothing history will get the most from it.

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