A month after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the beginning of hostilities between the Union and the newly formed Confederacy, Columbia, the female personification of the United States, slumbers peacefully amid the tumult. S.J.A.'s poem "Not Dead" (1861), printed in Harper's Weekly, the leading periodical of the day, begins with an epigraph taken from a "motto on a New York banner"-a flag most likely designed and produced by local women for a regiment: "The Union is not dead but sleeping." 1 Through the "dark night of wickedness" caused by the rebellion, the people of the North must guard both "our Union and our liberty." S.J.A. calls on "each soldier's arm to grasp the sabre," since only the return of "each star by traitor bands disgraced"-each seceded state-will allow the Union to "joyously" awake from her slumber and "never sleep again." The personified Union's slumber and intact state promise hope for future reconciliation and reunion but also warn of her vulnerability and need for protection. These characteristics make S.J.A.'s womanly Union representative of a wartime trope ubiquitous in print and visual culture on both sides of the conflict. Analogous female personifications of the Confederacy and, more often, individual states appear in Southern periodicals and illustrations; despite their similarities to Northern counterparts, they serve categorically opposed rhetorical purposes. While Columbia, traditionally interchangeable with the goddess of liberty, represents the Northern states and the hope of reunifica
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