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

In the past fifteen years, gender has received welcome attention in the study of Sherman’s March. Like Jacqueline Glass Campbell and others working in this vein, Lisa Tendrich Frank places women at the center of her narrative in The Civilian War, and she takes this analysis still further by arguing that gender scripted what she terms the “domestic battles” waged between Union soldiers and Confederate women in homes across Georgia and the Carolinas (3). Frank calls for readers to reexamine the march as “a gender-specific military campaign” and to recognize the political importance of elite women’s spatial and material world (10).

The Civilian War focuses on slaveholding women and draws effectively from a rich source base of their diaries and letters as well as those of William T. Sherman, his men, and Confederate soldiers. Covering both the March to the Sea and the Carolinas campaign, Frank organizes the book as “a series of experiences” as women prepared for, endured, and reflected upon the march (15). These elite women confronted contradictory understandings of their roles in the war. As Frank persuasively demonstrates, their devoted (and clearly political) work on behalf of the Confederacy since secession confirmed their stake in the new nation, and they articulated a Confederate womanhood that celebrated their weaving together of femininity and fervent nationalism. Perversely, though, from their perspective, Sherman exploited their support of the war effort to legitimize targeting women as enemy combatants, a strategy that, in rejecting protection for their gender, incensed southern women.

For Frank, more than a general campaign against morale and resources, Sherman’s March was explicitly planned and executed as “domestic warfare” against elite women (4). The Civilian War at times risks overstating this argument and minimizing other strategic aspects of the campaigns, and yet Frank succeeds in convincing readers of the central role women in the march played “both as targets and as participants” (9). This is most clearly illustrated in her recounting of the confrontations themselves, the strongest point in the book’s narrative. Vividly described by southern women and Union soldiers alike, these domestic battles entailed soldiers’ invasion of domestic spaces, which Frank characterizes as feminine, with casualties including the material goods that marked women’s femininity, domesticity, and class and racial privilege. The destruction of pianos, a centerpiece of nineteenth-century parlors, appeared to earn women’s particular ire, and chemises and other undergarments snatched from bedrooms also garnered special mention as representing the violation of a woman’s most intimate personal spaces and belongings (and implying a sexual threat as well).

Too often missing from The Civilian War’s accounts of these confrontations are the other civilians who may have been present, especially enslaved African Americans. The latter’s frequent absence from the narrative may depict clearer lines of dispute than actually occurred on farms and plantations across Georgia and the Carolinas. Instead, Frank emphasizes the irreconcilable divide specifically between Union soldiers who perceived “secesh women” as “she-devils” and elite women who in turn viewed them as “demons.” The effect is to add weight to the argument that Sherman’s March redoubled women’s devotion to the Confederacy rather than reducing it. “There is no word in the English language strong enough to express our hatred and contempt for an enemy so degraded,” she quotes one woman (124). So effective is Frank’s presentation of women’s vehemence that one wishes she connected it more directly to the Lost Cause, which would so long revere Confederate women’s personal sacrifices, if not their political participation.

Frank introduces a new wrinkle in her epilogue by suggesting the emasculation of Confederate soldiers, able neither to prevail on the battlefield nor to protect their homes and families, may have been the real consequence of Sherman’s March, a compelling assertion that may have been better incorporated...