Caldwell County’s “Little Rebel”

“For all the hardships on the home front, support for the war was still strong enough in the spring of 1862 to allow the original companies raised in Caldwell to easily refill their ranks. Avoidance of the stigma of being drafted and the desire to bond with friends and relatives who had been the first to enlist played a major role in drawing older men into the army.

But at least as important was the fear of being seen as an effeminate coward by the young women, nearly all of whom were impassioned Confederates. In addition to sewing and weaving clothes for the troops and sending off packages of food, household items, and bandages, young women served as the Confederate army’s most effective recruiters.

Laura Norwood, [Walter Lenoir’s] twenty-one year [old] niece, took pride in referring to herself as a “little rebel.” She was among the young women who presented a company flag to the Caldwell Rough and Readys when they left Lenoir for the war. Writing Walter in April 1862, she assured him that “never will I be defeated, never, under the Sun!” For her and countless other young women, the war was a heroic adventure in which the “generous, the brave, the self-denying, self-forgetting, the fearless, the true-hearted, the daring, the unyielding to temptation, in a word the True!” risked all in the defense of country and loved ones. She need hardly have added that no coward could ever claim her love.

[Other Southern women] found reason enough to steel themselves when they read or heard of Yankee atrocities committed on Southern soil. Unlike Laura, Walter’s sister Sarah was a reluctant Confederate at the onset of what she called this “cruel war.” But her nephew Nathan Gwynn, home recuperating from a wound in the winter of 1862, convinced her of the need to endure whatever sacrifices were called for. “It makes my heart ache and my blood boil to hear Nathan tell about those Yankees!” she wrote Walter. “I could not believe the newspapers! But I have to believe him! Surely our army would not do so, in the Northern States. They would not harm the women and children and destroy the churches.!”

(The Making of a Confederate, Walter Lenoir’s Civil War, William L. Barney, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 69-70)
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Caldwell County’s “Little Rebel”