Breaking the Heartland: The Civil War in Georgia ed. by John D. Fowler and David B. Parker (review)

The Civil War's sesquicentennial has inspired a number of events, projects, and publications focused on the war as experienced at the state level, with southern states of course taking the lead. The new scholarship generated will be among the most enduring of these contributions, with John Fowler and David Parker assuring that this will certainly be the case for Georgia by tapping into much of the best current work on the war in Georgia produced by some of the foremost scholars in the field. The result is a first-rate sampler of the ever more innovative and sophisticated approaches historians are taking to the war and the disruption and trauma it generated at almost every level of southern society.

There is not a weak link among the eleven essays presented here. Strikingly, only one makes military history its focal point—John Fowler's sharp historiographical assessment of the Atlanta campaign and the still debated impact of Joseph E. Johnston's and John Bell Hood's commands. Although Fowler argues that broad narratives of the war still fail to acknowledge how pivotal the campaign was in turning the tide of the war, one cannot begrudge the void here, given the fact that it allows room for fresh and varied work on other topics—most of which deal with the war at home and how Georgia's civilian populace—as communities and families, men and women, black and white, rich and poor—coped during four years of war, and in some cases, long afterward.

David Williams provides a succinct overview of a theme he has explored for much of the past decade—the multiple ways that and degrees to which class unrest, resentment, and resistance to the Confederacy and its policies pervaded much of Georgia society from the war's onset and through much of the state. Others play those themes out in more tightly focused ways, including Robert S. Davis, who meticulously chronicles the extreme divisiveness the war imposed on mountainous Pickens County, which only deepened after the war, so much so that even now, it's one of the few counties in the state with no monuments to either Confederate or Union troops. Keith Hebert assesses the extent to which Union occupation and harassment by bushwhackers exacerbated dissent and division among the local populace of Bartow County after Sherman's Atlanta-bound forces moved through in May 1864 and how the removal of occupation forces created a void that further exacerbated countywide anarchy and deprivation in the conflict's final months. Wendy Venet draws on the particular perspective of Atlanta merchant Sam Richards (whose diary she has edited) to provide a remarkably textured sense of the city's shifting political and social dynamics over the course of the war, until Richards and his family were among those Sherman deported.

Other essays focus on the war's impact on family and gender roles. Joseph Reidy provides a multifaceted analysis of how military mobilization destabilized both gender and racial roles in households and plantations throughout the state and how both created domestic power struggles that posed threats for some and opportunities for others. Jennifer Gross and Mark Wetherington offer very different takes on the plight of widows and orphans during and after the war. Gross traces legislative efforts to provide for Confederate veterans and their families during and after the war, arguing convincingly that such commitment to their welfare was basically an attempt to reestablish patriarchy, whether by buttressing veterans' ability to provide for their families or by allowing the state itself to take on that role for those widows and children deprived of their breadwinners. Wetherington presents a poignant case study of the plight of a Piney Woods yeoman family upon the loss of their husband and father and reveals how their experience reflects the class-based limitations on postwar recovery and...