Yankees A'Coming: One Month's Experience During the Invasion of Liberty County, Georgia, 1864-1865 (review)

Book Reviews99 ating unprecedented interdependence in America, it was also creating two distinct societies—a North and a South—totaUy unlike one another in type of production and ideals. They stiU might have lived together, under some tension to be sure, had not one been dedicated to a slave labor system that challenged Ce other's concepts of a Christian, democratic, and progressive order. It was the tragedy of America that "in the normal struggle for power in a government ruled by majorities, sectional interests became graduaUy tangled with basic differences and values. Conflicts were thereby lifted to the level of ideologies and civilizations." This resulted in a seU-conscious North and a seU-conscious South, each struggling for control of the nation, each convinced that defeat would chaUenge its way of life, each accepting the doctrine that the end justifies the means. Here Mr. Craven returns to his views stated so often in his writings of the past, but never has he—or anyone else—analyzed the growing sectional conflict in more graphic or understandable terms than in the present volume. He sweeps away much of the detaü, for this is no factual treatment of issues and events from 1830 to 1860. But the meaning of every episode is clear. It wül always remain difficult to understand why war came to America in 1861, but Mr. Craven has come as close as any other historian to understanding it. This time he employs such current terms as One World, iron curtain, fellow traveler, co-existence, and poUcies of encirclement. Cold wars, he shows, have much in common, demonstrating again that human nature and human institutions have persistent qualities, and that the understanding of one struggle can help society to understand others. Norman A. Graebner Urbana, Illinois. Yankees A'Coming: One Month's Experience During the Invasion of Liberty County, Georgia, 1864-1865. By Mary Sharpe Jones and Mary Jones MaUard. Edited by HaskeU Monroe. ("Confederate Centennial Series," No. 12; Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Confederate Publishing Company . 1959. Pp. 102. $4.00.) of all classes who suffered from the Civü War, Southern women bore die heaviest burden. They were forced to tend die crops, to care for young and large families, to weadier die loneliness and anxiety for loved ones on die battlefields, to improvise food and clothing from the rawest of elements, and to watch hopes fade with the dream that was The Lost Cause. For the women of eastern Georgia, however, another oppression added to their misery. Early in November, 1864, General William T. Sherman and 60,000 seasoned Federal veterans moved out of an Adanta in flames and swept across the state toward Savannah and the sea. As residents along Sherman's march painfully learned, this was no ordinary müitary advance; this was a new concept of war in action—one brutal, devastating, and chaotic in comparison to its predecessors. Sherman took die war where he knew 100CIVIL WAR history it would hurt die Soudi: to its vital organs, die heart of die homelands. Burning and looting every müe of die way, die Federals created psychological havoc witii Confederate troops in die fields of Virginia and Tennessee. That "Cump" Sherman's new dieory proved successful is borne out by die large numbers of Georgia and Carolina troops who left Confederate armies —with or without permission—to see to the safety and well-being of their dependents back home. Mary Sharp Jones and her daughter Mary Jones MaUard were two of die innocent victims of tiiat blue military tornado. Their joint diary, written at die famüy plantation, "Montevideo," a few miles soutiiwest of Savannah, is a record of six week's suffering at the hands of Federal marauders. In vivid detaü is described die daily raids and growing privations, die patiietic sorrow at livestock seized, furniture destroyed, family heirlooms stolen, and slaves forcefuUy carried off into "emancipation." The journal also shows that the major responsibüity for die wanton destruction of eastern Georgia lay not so much with Sherman (who administered Savannah widi amazing judiciousness ) as with his irresponsible cavalry chief, Judson Küpatrick, who both approved and participated in the piUaging of the interior. Professor HaskeU...