Showing posts with label Civilian Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Civilian Life. Show all posts

Friday, May 15, 2015

In The Review Queue: The Civilian War


by Lisa Tendrich Frank

The Civilian War explores home front encounters between elite Confederate women and Union soldiers during Sherman's March, a campaign that put women at the center of a Union army operation for the first time. Ordered to crush the morale as well as the military infrastructure of the Confederacy, Sherman and his army increasingly targeted wealthy civilians in their progress through Georgia and the Carolinas. To drive home the full extent of northern domination over the South, Sherman's soldiers besieged the female domain-going into bedrooms and parlors, seizing correspondence and personal treasures-with the aim of insulting and humiliating upper-class southern women. These efforts blurred the distinction between home front and warfront, creating confrontations in the domestic sphere as a part of the war itself.

Historian Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that ideas about women and their roles in war shaped the expectations of both Union soldiers and Confederate civilians. Sherman recognized that slaveholding Confederate women played a vital part in sustaining the Rebel efforts, and accordingly he treated them as wartime opponents, targeting their markers of respectability and privilege. Although Sherman intended his efforts to demoralize the civilian population, Frank suggests that his strategies frequently had the opposite effect. Confederate women accepted the plunder of food and munitions as an inevitable part of the conflict, but they considered Union invasion of their private spaces an unforgivable and unreasonable transgression. These intrusions strengthened the resolve of many southern women to continue the fight against the Union and its most despised general.


Seamlessly merging gender studies and military history, The Civilian War illuminates the distinction between the damage inflicted on the battlefield and the offenses that occurred in the domestic realm during the Civil War. Ultimately, Frank's research demonstrates why many women in the Lower South remained steadfastly committed to the Confederate cause even when their prospects seemed most dim.


About the Author

Lisa Tendrich Frank received her Ph.D. in history from the University of Florida. She is the author and editor of numerous works relating to the Civil War, including Women in the American Civil War and the forthcoming The World of the Civil War: A Daily Life Encyclopedia.

ISBN 978-0807159965, Louisiana State University Press, © 2015, Hardcover, 256 Pages, End Notes, Bibliography & Index. $42.50.  To Purchase the book click HERE.

Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Wood Measuring

Mr. Editor, Sir: Last November I became a resident of Davenport. Having occasion to buy wood several times at the wood-yards, I was satisfied that I did not get fair measure; that I did not get more than seven-eighths the amount I paid for.

A short time since I was pleased to learn that the City Fathers had taken measures to have justice done to the buyers as well as to the sellers of wood, by appointing City Surveyors and requiring all loads of wood to be measured and by so doing buyers would be less liable to have to pay for more than they receive.

Has the objected been accomplished? Last Saturday I bought a load of wood measured on the sled, and said to contain one cord; had it hauled home and thrown into my yard. It looked to me a small pile of wood to pay four dollars for, especially in these hard times; and four the purpose of satisfying myself I corded the wood, measured it, and found that I had been shaved just one eighth.

Now Mr. Editor, if this is an improvement on the former mode of being swindled, otherwise than having it done according to law you would oblige many citizens by pointing out the advantages gained.

MAIN STREET.

February 10, 1862.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Tuesday Morning, February 11, 1862, p. 1