The Civil War in Georgia: A New Georgia Encyclopedia Companion

Introduction

1 } 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 2 Introduction 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 constantly evolving; what began during Reconstruction has continued into the twenty-first century, and historians today are far more conscious of how memory—whether as public commemoration, individual reminiscence, historic preservation, or literary and cinematic interpretation —shapes the war’s multiple meanings. At the outset of the sesquicentennial these new historical perspectives allow us to appreciate the conflict as a complex and multifaceted experience for Georgians and for all Southerners—soldiers and civilians, men and women, blacks and whites. This book begins with an overview of the Civil War in Georgia, followed by articles arranged into three chronological sections. Subsections within the...