The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March by Lisa Tendrich Frank

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March by Lisa Tendrich Frank Megan L. Bever (bio) The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March. By Lisa Tendrich Frank. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. 256. Cloth, $42.50.) In The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman’s March, Lisa Tendrich Frank offers a detailed analysis of General [End Page 284] William T. Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Carolinas that puts gender at the center of the interactions between southern white women and northern soldiers. For too long, Frank contends, southern women’s experiences during Sherman’s March have been relegated to the margins as scholars have chosen instead to focus on the methods and limits of Sherman’s destruction. Frank continues the conversation about Sherman’s destruction by positing that his campaign was purposefully gendered and that ideas of femininity profoundly shaped the interactions between soldiers and southern women. Historians know that Sherman brought hard war to the southern home front, destroying Confederate resources and attempting to kill southern civilians’ will to fight. But Frank points out that because most white men served in the Confederate military, “civilian” overwhelmingly meant “women.” From the beginning, Sherman knew his campaign targeted slaveholding women and their homes, and he believed his treatment of southern white women was justified and necessary because he regarded them as enemies who needed to be defeated in order for the Union to win the war. Frank points to Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 67—through which Sherman evicted all women from Atlanta—as the most straightforward example of his campaign against female enemies. But she goes further, arguing that Sherman’s comments to his wife demonstrate that the general believed the concept of separate spheres precluded women from supporting the war effort publicly (he disapproved of women actively raising funds at Chicago’s Sanitary Fair of 1865). As Sherman understood it, southern slaveholding women surrendered their claim to feminine protection the moment they entered the public realm to support the Confederacy through their volunteer work. Thus, as his soldiers marched through the South, they targeted elite white women, destroying their household possessions and violating their private spaces, as a central—not peripheral—element of their strategy of subduing the Confederacy. Slaveholding women, for their part, perceived (correctly, in Frank’s view) that they were the focus of Sherman’s soldiers’ attacks. They were appalled when Union soldiers did not provide them the protections they believed should have been afforded to them as elite white women. But when faced with soldiers rifling through their bedrooms and parading around in their clothing, these women—although humiliated and shocked—remained resolutely Confederate. In fact, Frank argues, even as these women dreaded the threat of rape and violation of their homes that surely accompanied Sherman’s inevitable arrival, they found solidarity with each other and became increasingly patriotic. With no southern men to protect them, these women prepared for attack (some by arming themselves) and then [End Page 285] continued about their business of supporting the war effort, including hosting a bazaar in Columbia, South Carolina. Sherman expected these women to capitulate, but Frank argues that just the opposite happened: the more Sherman attacked slaveholding women’s homes, the more loyal to the Confederate cause they became. When discussing slaveholding women’s enduring support for the Confederate cause, Frank contributes to the long-running debate about whether southern white women lost faith in the Confederacy. Scholars such as George C. Rable and Drew Gilpin Faust have argued that Confederate women grew so exhausted by the war that they lost the will to fight for independence.1 Women, in this telling, undermined morale and hastened defeat. Others have challenged these interpretations, pointing out that when it came to Confederate women’s morale, location and class mattered a great deal. Most relevant in this case is Jacqueline Glass Campbell, who argues in When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front (2003) that southern white women became more loyal to the Confederacy after encountering Sherman’s army. Frank’s conclusions complement Campbell...