Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front by David Williams

Abstract

Reviewed by: Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front by David Williams Scott A. MacKenzie Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front. David Williams. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8814-6631-7. 284 pp., cloth, $35.00. The causes of Confederate defeat continue to attract scholarly attention. Debate rages between the external force and internal collapse schools of thought. Valdosta State historian David Williams's Georgia's Civil War aims to add that vital state to the discussion. Expanding on his previous work on the Georgia-Alabama home front, he examines the impact of the war via the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" perspective. He argues that deteriorating conditions at home motivated widespread desertions to the point that Georgia became practically ungovernable. Despite this sound approach, Williams makes some critical errors that undermine his thesis. His failure to engage the broader literature and treatment of Georgia as a homogeneous unit limits the book's potential to address the bigger questions surrounding the Civil War's effect on southern society. Williams stumbles in his introduction with an absurd claim. "For more than a century and a half," he writes, "historians have often ignored the South's home front difficulties" (xi). This statement flies in the face of the superb literature on this topic. Worse, he cites as source material the same books that he claims ignored the topic, including the multiauthored Why the South Lost the Civil War, Michael P. Johnson's Towards a Patriarchal Republic, and Mark Weitz's A Higher Duty. Bizarrely, he omits Mark Wetherington's Plain Folk's Fight, which, along with Weitz's work, counters his claims about internal collapse. The closest Williams comes to a historiographical critique is a biting comment on Gary Gallagher's Confederate War. His failure—and that is the right description here—to place the book within the larger scholastic community creates a missed opportunity. The extent of this oversight becomes apparent in the book's body. Williams treats Georgia as a homogenous unit. He fairly claims that planters' obsession with cotton production exacerbated wealth disparities and corrupted its democratic institutions. Yet, he cites raw electoral numbers to show how close the secession vote was instead of showing regional variations. Despite an initial enthusiasm for war, the home front fractured soon after the men left for the front. Williams bombards the reader with numerous examples of discontent among Georgians of all classes, races, and genders. He makes effective use of citizen letters to the governor and newspaper editorials that complained about rising prices, taxes, impressment, and conscription. The planter-led government both refused to help and proved to be powerless even when it tried. Governor Joseph Brown won reelection in 1863 for his promises to help the lower classes but only maintained planter rule. The arrival of Union armies in 1864 hit Georgia at her weakest. Their presence, Williams argues, turned unrest into virtual anarchy throughout the state. As before, however, [End Page 392] there is no regional nuance in his analysis. Desertions began almost immediately and became pandemic. Williams could have used them to engage Weitz's study of regional variations in desertion patterns, which would have shown a more nuanced view of the problem. Using Wetherington's study would have shown how the ability of some white Georgians to cohere across class lines during the war. At times, Williams's narrative appears repetitive, but the multiplicity demonstrates his point about the extent of the discontent. His treatment of a unitary Georgia, sadly, undermines many of his arguments. His conclusion mirrors the weak introduction. Williams discusses Georgia's postwar status in an epilogue. Like before, the state appears as a homogenous unit. Citing mostly secondary works, he maintains the same argument that planters remained in power by exploiting poverty and racism—segregating poor whites from blacks, denying the latter voting rights, combined with tenancy, company towns, and debt peonage to keep most Georgians under control. In addition, planters created the Lost Cause narrative to paper over wartime divisions. Offering little new to the discussion on the Civil War home front or Reconstruction, his routine conclusion should disappoint many readers...