The Civil War in Georgia

A New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion

John Inscoe

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780820339818, 9780820341385
• eBook ISBN: 9780820341828
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

Georgians, like all Americans, experienced the Civil War in a variety of ways. Through selected articles drawn from the New Georgia Encyclopedia (www.georgiaencyclopedia.org), this collection chronicles the diversity of Georgia's Civil War experience and reflects the most current scholarship in terms of how the Civil War has come to be studied, documented, and analyzed.

The Atlanta campaign and Sherman's March to the Sea changed the course of the war in 1864, in terms both of the upheaval and destruction inflicted on the state and the life span of the Confederacy. While the dramatic events of 1864 are fully documented, this companion gives equal coverage to the many other aspects of the war—naval encounters and guerrilla war­fare, prisons and hospitals, factories and plantations, politics and policies— all of which provided critical support to the Confederacy's war effort. The book also explores home-front conditions in depth, with an emphasis on emancipation, dissent, Unionism, and the experience and activity of African Americans and women.

Historians today are far more conscious of how memory—as public commemoration, individual reminiscence, historic preservation, and literary and cinematic depictions—has shaped the war's multiple meanings. Nowhere is this legacy more varied or more pronounced than in Georgia, and a substantial part of this companion explores the many ways in which Georgians have interpreted the war experience for themselves and others over the past 150 years. At the outset of the sesquicentennial these new historical perspectives allow us to appreciate the Civil War as a complex and multifaceted experience for Georgians and for all southerners.

A Project of the New Georgia Encyclopedia; Published in Association with the Georgia Humanities Council and the University System of Georgia/GALILEO.

THE CIVIL WAR IN GEORGIA

The Civil War
in Georgia

A NEW GEORGIA ENCYCLOPEDIA COMPANION

EDITED BY John C. Inscoe

A Project of the New Georgia Encyclopedia

Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council and the University System of Georgia/GALILEO

THE UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA PRESS Athens & London

Published in 2011 by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

© 2004–11 by the Georgia Humanities Council and the University of Georgia Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Erin Kirk New

Set in New Baskerville Std by Graphic Composition, Inc., Bogart, Georgia

Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for

permanence and durability of the Committee on

Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

15 14 13 12 11 P 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The Civil War in Georgia : a new Georgia encyclopedia companion / edited by John C. Inscoe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-4138-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-4138-X (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8203--3981-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8203-3981-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Georgia—History—Civil War, 1861–1865.

I. Inscoe, John C., 1951–

E559.C5 2011

975.8'03—dc22 2011009442

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

OVERVIEW: The Civil War in Georgia

SECTION 1: Prelude to War

Slavery

BOX: Wanderer

Georgia in 1860

Sectional Crisis

BOX: Georgia Platform

Secession

State Constitution of 1861

Milledgeville

BOX: Old Governor’s Mansion

SECTION 2: The War Years

MILITARY ACTIONS

Fort Pulaski

Union Blockade and Coastal Occupation

BOX: CSS Savannah

BOX: USS Water Witch

Naval War on the Chattahoochee River

Guerrilla Warfare

Andrews Raid

Black Troops

Battle of Chickamauga

Atlanta Campaign

Battle of Resaca

Battle of Pickett’s Mill

Battle of Kennesaw Mountain

Sherman’s March to the Sea

BOX: Griswoldville

Wilson’s Raid

Capture of Jefferson Davis

BOX: Confederate Gold

Civil War Photojournalist: George N. Barnard

MILITARY SUPPORT

Georgia Military Institute

Confederate Hospitals

Industry and Manufacturing

Atlanta as Confederate Hub

BOX: Roswell Mill Women

Prisons

Andersonville Prison

HOME FRONT

Newspapers

BOX: The Countryman

Unionists

Desertion

Dissent

Women

BOX: Nancy Harts Militia

Welfare and Poverty

Emancipation

Sherman’s Field Order No. 15

SECTION 3: The War’s Legacy

POSTWAR IDENTITY

Reconstruction

Lost Cause Religion

Confederate Veteran Organizations

United Daughters of the Confederacy

COMMEMORATIVE SITES AND ACTIVITIES

Cemeteries

Confederate Monuments

Cyclorama

Fitzgerald

Stone Mountain

Civil War Heritage Trails

National Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus

Civil War Centennial

Georgia Civil War Commission

Reenacting

Archaeology

LITERARY AND CINEMATIC PERSPECTIVES

Journals, Diaries, and Memoirs

Slave Narratives

Macaria

“Marching through Georgia”

On the Plantation

The General

Gone With the Wind (Novel)

Gone With the Wind (Film)

The Great Locomotive Chase

The Andersonville Trial (Play) and Andersonville (Film)

Jubilee

The Wind Done Gone

Fictional Treatments of Sherman in Georgia

Selected Bibliography

Contributors

Index

THE NEW GEORGIA ENCYCLOPEDIA, an online multimedia publication, is a project of the Georgia Humanities Council in partnership with the University of Georgia Press, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO, and the Office of the Governor.

The NGE provides an accessible, authoritative source of information about people, places, events, historical themes, institutions, and many other topics relating to

• the arts

• business and industry

• cities and counties

• education

• folklife

• government and politics

• history and archaeology

• land and resources

• literature

• media

• religion

• science and medicine

• sports and recreation

• transportation

www.georgiaencyclopedia.org

Acknowledgments

There is no scholarly endeavor as inherently collaborative in nature as an encyclopedia. That is certainly the case with this volume, as it is for the larger online project from which it is drawn, the New Georgia Encyclopedia (www.georgiaencyclopedia.org). Kelly Caudle, the NGE’s project manager and managing editor, and Sarah McKee, the project editor, should by all rights have been listed as coeditors of this volume, given their input in every phase of its development and implementation. The three of us worked closely in determining what content to include, how to organize it, and how to adapt it from our online site to this print version. Sarah deserves special credit for her careful oversight of every phase of the process; her creativity and good judgment are evident throughout, most notably in the brief excerpts scattered throughout the text, which we hope lure readers back to the many other relevant articles in the NGE.

There are many others, of course, who have contributed to the creation of this book. First and foremost, we thank the more than sixty contributors—including established scholars, students, and history enthusiasts—for their carefully researched and thoughtful entries covering myriad aspects of the Civil War in Georgia. We also thank Stephen Berry, an associate professor of history at the University of Georgia, for shepherding the students in a 2009 graduate class through the writing of several articles, which provide depth and variety to this presentation of Georgia’s Civil War story.

We are deeply grateful to the NGE’s fact checkers, most of whom are university reference librarians, who have helped to ensure that the information presented in these entries is as accurate and reliable as possible. In particular we would like to recognize Kristin Nielsen and Patrick Reidenbaugh of the University of Georgia Libraries, both for their efforts to complete the fact checking of new entries so that they could be included in this book and most especially for their longtime dedication and invaluable contributions to the encyclopedia as a whole.

We are grateful to Nicole Mitchell, the director of the University of Georgia Press, for her enthusiastic support of this volume, as well as for the NGE itself over the past decade. She offered welcome advice and direction, as well as copious patience, during the process of revising and organizing our online content into a book manuscript. It was a pleasure to work with Jon Davies, as he shepherded us efficiently and with good cheer through this volume’s production. We appreciate the input at various other stages of production by his colleagues Erin New, Kathi Morgan, John Joerschke, John McLeod, and Pat Allen, as well as the good work of cartographer David Wasserboehr.

And finally, we offer our sincere appreciation for the contributions of our project partners, the University System of Georgia/GALILEO and the Georgia Humanities Council. In particular, we thank GALILEO director Merryll Penson and her staff, whose technical guidance and support are essential to the success of the NGE. We are also grateful to the Georgia Humanities Council, the copublishers of this book and enthusiastic champions of the NGE. Council president Jamil Zainaldin and vice president Laura McCarty have been integral to every aspect of developing and implementing the New Georgia Encyclopedia, as well as this volume.

Introduction

Georgians, like all Americans, experienced the Civil War in a variety of ways. With the exception of the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863, the state avoided major military conflict until 1864, when for nine months Union general William T. Sherman’s troops moved across Georgia to devastating effect, pushing slowly and painfully toward Atlanta, and then more rapidly toward Savannah and the coast. The Atlanta campaign and March to the Sea changed the course of the war, as John Fowler notes in the overview essay that opens this book. Both events had a direct impact on national politics (particularly on U.S. president Abraham Lincoln’s reelection) and, perhaps more debatably, on Southerners’ continued commitment to the Confederate cause. Sherman’s incursion also left a legacy that was far more traumatic and indelible for the state than would have been the case had the war come to an end earlier, as many assumed it would.

Yet, long before Sherman made his appearance, the people of Georgia felt the hard hand of war, and in ways that had little to do with invading armies or battlefield clashes. Naval encounters and guerrilla conflicts characterized the early years of the war in Georgia, while the prisons and hospitals, factories and plantations on the state’s home front provided critical support to the Confederacy. The historian F. N. Boney succinctly describes the state’s significance to the Confederacy in his book Rebel Georgia: “As Virginia dominated the upper South, Georgia was the cornerstone of the deep South. These states were the two essential Confederate bastions; if either crumbled, the war was lost.” Finally, just as the institution of slavery was central in bringing on the war, so too did its demise at the end of the war play an integral role in shaping Georgia’s postwar society. The liberation of nearly half the state’s wartime populace, more so than any other aspect of Southern defeat, created an economy that was radically different from the antebellum order that Southerners had gone to war to uphold.

These are the stories told here. Through selected articles from the New Georgia Encyclopedia (www.georgiaencyclopedia.org), this book reveals Georgia’s experience of the war, on both the battlefield and the home front, and demonstrates how activity in the state proved vital to the Confederacy as a whole. The content and arrangement of these articles also reflect the new ways in which the Civil War, a defining event in Southern, indeed, U.S., history, has come to be studied, documented, and analyzed.

The Civil War is understood and chronicled very differently in 2011, the beginning of its sesquicentennial, than it was in 1961, the beginning of its centennial. For much of the twentieth century, historians focused largely on the military aspects of the war. As military scholars are quick to remind us, war is first and foremost defined by battles, campaigns, and military strategies. These topics, along with biographies of generals and other military leaders, both Union and Confederate, dominated Civil War scholarship for decades. Such works joined those by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote, whose masterful, multivolume narratives were largely military in focus, as well as those by Emory University historian Bell Wiley, who wrote two celebrated studies of the common soldier’s experiences: The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (1952).

The content of this book reflects not only such traditional military examinations of the war but also the significant expansion of Civil War studies since the centennial. Recent scholarship explores the nonmilitary facets of the war years in greater depth and variety, putting considerable emphasis on such topics as home-front conditions, emancipation, dissent, Unionism, gender roles, and guerrilla warfare. Another recent trend is an increased focus on how Americans, and particularly Southerners, remember and commemorate the war. The Civil War’s legacy is cons...

Table of contents

• Contents