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The study of Confederate troops, generals, and politicians during the Civil War often overshadows the history of noncombatants—slave and free, male and female, rich and poor—threatening obscurity for important voices of the period. Although civilians comprised the vast majority of those affected by the conflict, even the number of civilian casualties over the course of the Civil War remains unknown. Wallace Hettle’s The Confederate Homefront provides a sample of the enormous documentary record on the domestic population of the Confederate states, offering a glimpse of what it was like to live through a brutal war fought almost entirely on southern soil. The Confederate Homefront collects excerpts from slave narratives, poems, diaries and journals, along with brief introductions that examine the circumstances and biases of each source. Bearing witness to the lives of marginalized groups, narratives by women navigating complex webs of loyalties and former slaves resisting and escaping the Confederacy feature prominently. Hettle also focuses on lesser-known aspects of the war, such as conscription, draft evasion, and the development of Union military policies that helped bring about the demise of slavery. Reflecting recent work by Civil War historians, Hettle includes numerous documents that focus on the role of Christianity in justifying the Confederacy’s increasingly destructive moral and ideological position in the war. He also examines the guerrilla war on the southern homefront and the plight of black and white refugees, adding new insights into the destructive impact of warfare on the lives of civilians. The first documentary history to foreground the experiences of Confederate civilians, he Confederate Homefront illuminates the overlooked lives of noncombatants in the Civil War and bears witness to the traumatic final years of the institution of American slavery.
The study of Confederate troops, generals, and politicians during the Civil War often overshadows the history of noncombatants—slave and free, male and female, rich and poor—threatening obscurity for important voices of the period. Although civilians comprised the vast majority of those affected by the conflict, even the number of civilian casualties over the course of the Civil War remains unknown. Wallace Hettle’s The Confederate Homefront provides a sample of the enormous documentary record on the domestic population of the Confederate states, offering a glimpse of what it was like to live through a brutal war fought almost entirely on southern soil. The Confederate Homefront collects excerpts from slave narratives, poems, diaries and journals, along with brief introductions that examine the circumstances and biases of each source. Bearing witness to the lives of marginalized groups, narratives by women navigating complex webs of loyalties and former slaves resisting and escaping the Confederacy feature prominently. Hettle also focuses on lesser-known aspects of the war, such as conscription, draft evasion, and the development of Union military policies that helped bring about the demise of slavery. Reflecting recent work by Civil War historians, Hettle includes numerous documents that focus on the role of Christianity in justifying the Confederacy’s increasingly destructive moral and ideological position in the war. He also examines the guerrilla war on the southern homefront and the plight of black and white refugees, adding new insights into the destructive impact of warfare on the lives of civilians. The first documentary history to foreground the experiences of Confederate civilians, he Confederate Homefront illuminates the overlooked lives of noncombatants in the Civil War and bears witness to the traumatic final years of the institution of American slavery.
More than one hundred and fifty years after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, the Civil War still occupies a prominent place in the national collective memory. Paintings and photographs, plays and movies, novels, poetry, and songs portray the war as a battle over the future of slavery, often focusing on Lincoln’s determination to save the Union, or highlighting the brutality of brother fighting brother. Battles and battlefields occupy us, too: Bull Run, Antietam, and Gettysburg all conjure up images of desolate landscapes strewn with war dead. Yet the frontlines were not the only landscapes of the war. Countless civilians saw their daily lives upended while the entire nation suffered. Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North reveals this side of the war as it happened, comprehensively examining the visual culture of the Northern home front. Through contributions from leading scholars from across the humanities, we discover how the war influenced household economies and the cotton economy; how the absence of young men from the home changed daily life; how war relief work linked home fronts and battle fronts; why Indians on the frontier were pushed out of the riven nation’s consciousness during the war years; and how wartime landscape paintings illuminated the nation’s past, present, and future. A companion volume to a collaborative exhibition organized by the Newberry Library and the Terra Foundation for American Art, Home Front is the first book to expose the visual culture of a world far removed from the horror of war yet intimately bound to it.
In Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front, Timothy B. Smith examines Mississippi's Civil War defeat by both outside and inside forces. From without, the Union army dismantled the state's political system, infrastructure, economy, and fighting capability. The state saw extensive military operations, destruction, and bloodshed within her borders. One of the most frightful and extended sieges of the war ended in a crucial Confederate defeat at Vicksburg, the capstone to a tremendous Union campaign. As Confederate forces and Mississippi became overwhelmed militarily, the populace's morale began to crumble. Realizing that the enemy could roll unchecked over the state, civilians, Smith argues, began to lose the will to continue the struggle. Many white Confederates chose to return to the Union rather than see continued destruction in the name of a victory that seemed ever more improbable. When the tide turned, Unionists and African Americans boldly stepped up their endeavors. The result, Smith finds, was a state vanquished and destined to endure suffering far into its future. The first examination of the state's Civil War home front in seventy years, this book tells the story of all classes of Mississippians during the war, focusing new light on previously neglected groups such as women and African Americans. The result is a revelation of the heart of a populace facing the devastating impact of total war.
Describes the internal conflicts, hardships, and violence that afflicted the Confederacy during the Civil War.
In 11 essays, Civil War scholars throw light on war violence that happened far from the battlefields of the South, often between members of the same family or community. Among the topics are guerrilla war and extralegal violence in a north Georgia community, east Tennessee unionists during the war a
First published by the University of South Carolina in 1952, Ersatz in the Confederacy remains the definitive study of the South's desperate struggle to overcome critical shortages of food, medicine, clothing, household goods, farming supplies, and tools during the Civil War. Mary Elizabeth Massey's seminal work carefully documents the ingenuity of the Confederates as they coped with shortages of manufactured goods and essential commodities—including grain, coffee, sugar, and butter—that previously had been imported from the northern states or from England. Creative Southerners substituted sawdust for soap, pigs' tails and ears for Christmas tree ornaments, leaves for mattress stuffing, okra seeds for coffee beans, and gourds for cups. Women made clothing from scraps of material, blankets from carpets, shoes from leather saddles and furniture, and battle flags from wedding dresses. Despite the Confederates' penchant for "making do" and "doing without," Massey's research reveals the devastating impact of war's shortages on the South's civilian population. Overly optimistic that they could easily transform a rural economy into a self-sufficient manufacturing power, Southerners suffered from both disappointment and hardship as it became clear that their expectations were unrealistic. Ersatz in the Confederacy's lasting significance lies in Masseys clearly documented conclusion that despite the resourcefulness of the Southern people, the Confederate cause was lost not at Gettysburg nor in any other military engagement but much earlier and more decisively in the homefront battle against scarcity and deprivation.
This book comprehensively covers the wide geographical range of the northern home fronts during the Civil War, emphasizing the diverse ways people interpreted, responded to, and adapted to war by their ideas, interests, and actions. The Northern Home Front during the Civil War provides the first extensive treatment of the northern home front mobilizing for war in two decades. It collates a vast and growing scholarship on the many aspects of a citizenship organizing for and against war. The text focuses attention on the roles of women, blacks, immigrants, and other individuals who typically fall outside of scrutiny in studies of American war-making society, and provides new information on subjects such as raising money for war, civil liberties in wartime, the role of returning soldiers in society, religion, relief work, popular culture, and building support for the cause of the Union and freedom. Organized topically, the book covers the geographic breadth of the diverse northern home fronts during the Civil War. The chapters supply self-contained studies of specific aspects of life, work, relief, home life, religion, and political affairs, to name only a few. This clearly written and immensely readable book reveals the key moments and gradual developments over time that influenced northerners' understanding of, participation in, and reactions to the costs and promise of a great civil war.
The Civil War has historically been viewed somewhat simplistically as a battle between the North and the South. Southern historians have broadened this viewpoint by revealing the “many Souths” that made up the Confederacy, but the “North” has remained largely undifferentiated as a geopolitical term. In this welcome collection, seven Civil War scholars offer a unique regional perspective on the Civil War by examining how a specific group of Northerners—Midwesterners, known as Westerners and Middle Westerners during the 1860s—experienced the war on the home front. Much of the intensifying political and ideological turmoil of the 1850s played out in the Midwest and instilled in its people a powerful sense of connection to this important drama. The 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Law and highly visible efforts to recapture former bondsmen and women who had escaped; underground railroad “stations” and supporters throughout the region; publication of Ohioan Harriet Beecher Stowe’s widely-influential and best-selling Uncle Tom’s Cabin; the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854; the murderous abolitionist John Brown, who gained notoriety and hero status attacking proslavery advocates in Kansas; the emergence of the Republican Party and Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln—all placed the Midwest at the center of the rising sectional tensions. From the exploitation of Confederate prisoners in Ohio to wartime college enrollment in Michigan, these essays reveal how Midwestern men, women, families, and communities became engaged in myriad war-related activities and support. Agriculture figures prominently in the collection, with several scholars examining the agricultural power of the region and the impact of the war on farming, farm families, and farm women. Contributors also consider student debates and reactions to questions of patriotism, the effect of the war on military families’ relationships, issues of women’s loyalty and deference to male authority, as well as the treatment of political dissent and dissenters. Bringing together an assortment of home front topics from a variety of fresh perspectives, this collection offers a view of the Civil War that is unabashedly Midwestern.
Home front and battle front merged in 1865 when General William T. Sherman occupied Savannah and then marched his armies north through the Carolinas. Although much has been written about the military aspects of Sherman's March, Jacqueline Campbell reveals a more complex story. Integrating evidence from Northern soldiers and from Southern civilians, black and white, male and female, Campbell demonstrates the importance of culture for determining the limits of war and how it is fought. Sherman's March was an invasion of both geographical and psychological space. The Union army viewed the Southern landscape as military terrain. But when they brought war into Southern households, Northern soldiers were frequently astounded by the fierceness with which many white Southern women defended their homes. Campbell argues that in the household-centered South, Confederate women saw both ideological and material reasons to resist. While some Northern soldiers lauded this bravery, others regarded such behavior as inappropriate and unwomanly. Campbell also investigates the complexities behind African Americans' decisions either to stay on the plantation or to flee with Union troops. Black Southerners' delight at the coming of the army of "emancipation" often turned to terror as Yankees plundered their homes and assaulted black women. Ultimately, When Sherman Marched North from the Sea calls into question postwar rhetoric that represented the heroic defense of the South as a male prerogative and praised Confederate women for their "feminine" qualities of sentimentality, patience, and endurance. Campbell suggests that political considerations underlie this interpretation--that Yankee depredations seemed more outrageous when portrayed as an attack on defenseless women and children. Campbell convincingly restores these women to their role as vital players in the fight for a Confederate nation, as models of self-assertion rather than passive self-sacrifice.