Confederate Homefront: Montgomery during the Civil War

Abstract

Confederate Homefront: Montgomery during Civil War. By William Warren Rogers, Jr. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 209. Preface, illustrations, acknowledgments, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) William Warren Rogers' Confederate Homefront makes a valuable contribution to emerging picture of life behind Civil War's battle lines. It will be especially prized by those interested in social world ardent Confederates made for themselves in areas safe from federal occupiers. The book considers history of Montgomery, Alabama from eve of in 1860 to surrender of city to Union troops on April 13, 1865, three days after Lee's capitulation at Appomattox. While paying attention to regional differences within South, Rogers views Montgomery as a fairly representative example of experience of Confederate townsfolk. He consistently contrasts veneer of normality that Montgomerians strove to maintain with the lacerating forces of war that stripped lacquer from any romantic notion of and revealed its unvarnished reality (pp. 152-153). Yet perhaps more remarkable than war's destruction of secessionist dreams was determination of white Montgomerians to fight on long after military events had made defeat a foregone conclusion. For all of its typicality, Montgomery stood out as first capital of Confederacy. In heady spring of 1861, a spirit of optimism and occasionally foolhardy overconfidence came to town along with new government's legislators, soldiers, and myriad hangers-on. Rogers shows how deficient resources of Montgomery-a city by nineteenth-century standards but one with only 8,843 people in 1860-combined with better known military and political factors to convince Jefferson Davis to move his government to Richmond after Virginia seceded. Montgomerians enjoyed a safety from combat that most other southerners envied. Nonetheless, as a state capital and transshipment point between eastern and western theaters, Montgomery was an important strategic site for Confederate effort. Decreasing resources and growing demoralization of local population progressively undermined ability of Confederate administrators to manage city's hospital and supply services. The Union blockade and Confederate impressment of civilian property crippled trade in cotton and other goods that had made antebellum Montgomery a commercial boomtown. …