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

In what has become a familiar trend in scholarship on the Civil War South, David Williams presents a lively analysis of all the causes of strife on the Georgia home front. Through research in newspapers and manuscript collections and by poring through decades of historical writing, Williams synthesizes a large reservoir of scholarship and draws important conclusions. First, voters exhibited a serious reluctance, manifested in the statewide voting on secession. With only a narrow margin, the state's leaders took the people into a war that did not have a groundswell of support. Williams finds a significant Unionist presence from the beginning of war in 1861, and the Unionists undermined Confederate efforts for the next four years.

Next, Williams shows that class conflict between white plain folk and planters became the linchpin of a host of issues such as the draft and service in the army, desertion, the scarcity of food, inflation, confiscation, a rise in poverty, and other serious war-related maladies. All of these growing problems pushed thousands of white Georgians into some form of active or passive resistance to Confederate authority. While slavery and dependence on cotton production remained key motivations for upper-class support for the war, the callous management of war policy itself blinded officials to the suffering of their neighbors. Oftentimes it was the protests of women that proved how bad things had become at households across the state. Most actions of the state and county governments did more to divide the population or to cause outright harm than to rally the people against advancing Union armies.

In mountainous regions of the state, a horrible civil war between so-called Tory resistance and regular Confederate soldiers derailed any attempt at successful prosecution of the war there. Governor Joe Brown, himself from north Georgia, made a name for himself resisting Confederate conscription and the arbitrary actions of President Jefferson Davis in Richmond. Yet Brown, as the author makes clear, instituted a statewide draft and signed into law capricious policies that drove plain folk away from the war effort.

Another key group, the state's large slave population, played an important role in Georgia's defeat. Slaves hid deserters and made bold dashes for freedom. The book's examination of the war along the Sea Islands explains how effective the recruitment of black troops became for the Union cause. These new soldiers proved essential in the raids and destruction of coastal communities.

From the mountains to the coast, Georgia presented a bleak picture of a society hardly unified, unorganized for the scope and scale of warfare at hand, suffering when invasion came, and completely divided by animosity between rich and poor. Then the clash between large Union and Confederate armies across north Georgia in 1863 and 1864 tore open festering wounds. Williams finds that General William Tecumseh Sherman's march became much more destructive because personal property became targeted for pillage by the large number of poor Georgians who had joined the Union ranks.

The all too brief epilogue explains developments during Reconstruction and the rise of what the book calls the religion of the Lost Cause. Williams projects his thesis forward past the Civil War era, and his last words prove as intriguing as those in the rest of the book. Deeper research into the state's varied regions, which was not an aim here, should reveal even more evidence of how a divided Georgia contributed to its own defeat.