While we wait for the next speaker, you can also watch all their award to Conference Coverage you can watch all of our Civil War InstituteConference Coverage online. Us your thoughts and connect with us on facebook. This is American History tv, only on cspan3. To introduce to you lisa tendrich frank. She is an independent historian, editor, and writer on all issues related to the american civil war. She is based out of tallahassee, florida. She studied at the university of florida where she received her phd. She did her phd under one of the Great Southern historians. Birchame is her chum wyatt brown. He had an incredible career, his most important book entitled so honor. Southern she has a very impressive publication record, or most recent book released by else you and the title, the civilian war, confederate women and Union Soldiers during shermans march. We have talked a lot about original research and those historians who love to dig into the archives. Thats book is full of primary research. She will reveal to us new dimensions of shermans march. You will hear the voices of women that are often overlooked. It is my pleasure to introduce lisa tendrich frank. [applause] prof. Frank thank you for that wonderful introduction. Thank you to the Civil War Institute for inviting me today. Thank you to all of you who came up here on a sunday morning to hear about my research on confederate Union Soldiers. I always enjoy talking about it, and it is enjoyable for me to discuss it with a knowledgeable i is and vicinity of ground. Knowledgeable audience and the vicinity of how the ground. Most of us can imagine the burning of atlanta and columbia, the turning up railroads, and destruction of vacations. Perhaps on account of shermans bluntness have thrived in popular memory. Perhaps none more than war is hell. Converters saw this campaign differently than many other features of the campaign. Bedrooms,ntering smashing cannons, and reading private diaries. His is an assault on conventional gender norms and is the heart of my research. I will start by introducing a few of the more prominent and representative voices. The first is the architect and overseer of the campaign, Union General willam sherman. 1864, he vowed to make georgia hell. He noticed early in the war that the entire south, man, woman, and child are against us, armed and determines. Acknowledging all confederates as enemies, he signaled his willingness to bring the war ,ome to the confederates directly into southern homes. Beginning with his capture of atlanta and eviction of civilians, and his continued l sherman and his soldiers invaded the homes of wealthy confederates, those people they blamed for the war, in the hopes that a violation of the domestic space would encourage the surrender of southern women and their soldier husbands, fathers, brothers, friends. Or confederate women can they recognize this would be designed to it than on their big repeatedly railed against an enemy who did not recognize domestic boundaries. On the contrary, in 1865 letter to his wife, sherman explained that the confederates regardless just as the romans did the goths. The parallel is not unjust. The other perspective is that of wealthy slaveholding women, those who personally encountered soldiers. Like most elite women in South Carolina, Mary Leverett did not see eye to eye with Union Officers very often. Agencys event, she expressed ideas about the union asion that carlisle parallel those of her sworn enemy. She explained that her family in columbia had faced an ordeal unmatched by anything they had experienced before and something they could never prepared to encounter, invasion of their home by Union Soldiers. Although technology it was widely reported that terms were private property respected, women and children unmolested, she wanted her children to know that those terms were a sham. They had disregarded the prohibitions about women and their possessions and had instead pillaged. The destruction of her private property to all forms. Soldiers smashed open desks and broke open doors with axes, but they have also entered the feminine inner sanctum of the home, the bedroom. She was horrified that they had crept under the bed and mortified that they did not even leave for a second suit of underclothes. They also confiscated many seemingly trivial domestic items, which made her personally feel the sting of the raid. They left with the comb and broke up in my work box and stole my scissors. When she appealed to Union Officers were help, they taunted her and showed her the old statehouse flag with a look of exultation. Her day continued with repetitions of the same rights as riotous scenes. She tried to keep calm. She was determined they should not see she was afraid. Throughout shermans march, similar scenes of soldiers invading domestic scenes occurred. Deemed yankee demons destroyed domestic property. , suspense that transpired around her, including as the houses burned down one after another, terrified women and children rushed to the asylum for safety, surrounded by those yelling devils who tore open their trunks and gave to negroes. Even the columbia ladies asylum, a place of literal century, offered little protection. Soldiers taunted and hassled the women who fled there. Cursing and screaming up and down, swearing they were going to blow the asylum that. The 500 terrified women who took shelter in the asylum feared for their lives. One woman reportedly died of fright. Other women to do the woods for the ones fork to safety. Ladies, one of you go into your city to warm yourself . Leverett and many of her peers in the war and the confederate cause through the prism of the unions dishonorable behavior and their personal shame. Justified then invasion of homes as an effective wartime tactic and a just punishment of treasonous behavior, slaveholding women came to different conclusions. They desperately tried to spread the word about the outrage in columbia. Our men must know how we have been treated. Leverett appealed to a sense of honor and manliness with the assumption that the knowledge of the treatment of confederate would invigorate southern soldiers. If they give up, or their knees shake, i will not cap and is not them asogs not count men, but as dogs who deserve to die. When asked if she was ready to give up, she responded no, it would make us more determined and drive any man into the field. It was a good thing for us. When yankee soldiers suggested that southern men needed to come home and take care of their families, she disagreed. She said the women would take selves, thatr she was willing to suffer and bear calamity. Stories like this one, told frequently by confederate women and confirmed by Union Soldiers, build the historical record of shermans campaign. These details support one another. Union soldiers run about these incidents with pride and joy. Those who brought war on the country deserve all the curses and allegations the people can pour out. Shermans march through georgia and the carolinas, confederate women and union men faced off in domestic confrontations. The personal stories of these confrontations are critical to understand the war and its results. The most revealing elements of the campaign are found in the domestic skirmishes that took place in slaveholding womens parlour and bedrooms. Soldiers march brought into the homes of the enemy as partcreating personal battles between yankee men and those they deemed southern sinners. These battles shape the outcome of the war. Its historical legacies and the fate of the nation. Let me return to the standard outline of the campaign. Sherman took Union Soldiers under his command to set up to crush the confederacy possibility and will to continue its war rebellion. After capturing and occupying atlanta, georgia, union troops began marching east in november. At the end of the march to the sea and a brief occupation of savannah, they continued their campaign into the carolinas at the beginning of 1865. I the time the campaign ended near durham station, sherman assessed it inflicted more than 100 million in physical damage and acknowledged he had earned the scorn of confederates for civilianach to the population. Having secured the surrender of john smith, the union proclaimed the march a success. The campaign had for field fulfilled its goals, to break the will of confederates and to destroy the material and Human Resources supporting the rebel military. Todays talk is designed to get us to rethink the connection between these goals. Between the breaking of the will of the confederates and the destruction of resources. Rather than focus on the material world, my examination focuses on the personal reaction of southern women to the invasion. Throughout the campaign, shermans troop marched through the lower part of the south, purposely cutting through farms and plantations. This chosen path of destruction which commanders designed to target the families and households of the lower souths wealthier slaveholders and political leaders lead to interactions between northern soldiers and delete sub and elite southern women. To look at took aim the class and gender. So was it was with wealthy, slaveowning women. Although they generally avoided physical contact with these found Union Soldiers countless ways to strike at femininity and livelihood. Shermans men lived off the land. They also lived off the households they invaded. They confiscated supplies of wealthy southerners in their path and destroyed of much of what they could not take with them. This assault went far beyond foraging for food and burning supplies. Union soldiers ravage the interiors of the homes they andred, went into bedrooms other areas. Verbally assaulted women, threatened rape and unleashed a direct assault on domestic life on the southern home front. In those instances, these actions formed part of the plan that sherman and his troops articulated prior to and justified throughout the campaign. One that would assert the aggressively masculine power of the union over the passively feminine south. Stoodslaveholding women at the center of shermans campaign through the heartland. Throughout the campaign, Domestic Workers tactics shake the behavior of northern soldiers. Sherman and his men marched out of atlanta with the intention of punishing the slaveholding class who, in their minds, caused the word war. The enemies they faced were primarily wealthy women whose defeat required tactics appropriate to their station and sex. This meant more than dismantling railroads and burning fields. It meant attacking the various manifestations of light elite byale slaveholding privilege waging a civilian war specifically designed for the gender of class and class, sherman hoped to destroy slaveholding womens desire to continue supporting the war. He continued this Campaign Even though he recognized his capture of savannah did little to the female civilians who he said remained bright as ever. For their part, confederate women face the enemies on their own terms, responding with specifically feminine forms of defiance. Working with assumptions about wartime standards of respectability and how they imagined Union Soldiers would treat them and their bodies, these women defended themselves and their properties from what one woman described as a hellish crew, no place, no prison is sacred from their. The campaign against elite women required cruelty nor vindictiveness, it did not target innocent women. Sherman direct it his men to slaveholding women because he understood they had, in part, brought the war to the union and had sustained the confederate war effort. Sherman in the Union Leadership recognized elite white womens roles in initiating southern rebellion. When the war began, slaveholding women encouraged men to enlist in the army and in cap them on the battlefield with supplies and letters of support. Continue their continued dedication through material and moral support became increasingly problematic as the union worked to hasten the war to an end. As shermans men approached the city, the women of columbia, South Carolina held a fundraiser to fund the war effort. Elite women were hardly disconnected from the war effort. Commanders, the u. S. Made the home front and it slaveholding female inhabitants an important part of the battle plan. Philip sheridan brought the war directly to women in the Shenandoah Valley well sherman worked to bring the war home to elite women in georgia and the carolinas. He recognized if you were dealing with a hostile female population and treated it as such. After he captured atlanta, he felt the civilians, most of whom were william women and children. Hed knowledge them is the enemy and refused to be lenient on account of their gender. Sherman made clear his appreciation of white southern womens dedication to the confederacy and their involvement early in the conflict. Explaining to his brother that the entire south, man, woman and child are against us, arent and determined. Slaveholdingived southern women as confederates, rebels and enemies and treated them accordingly. Surprisingly, many historians of shermans march overlook this. Scholars frequently discussed civilians, but these civilians too often appear in narratives and interpretations as stories of personal interest rather than historical importance. Civilians are in the way of shermans war, but they are not considered a part of his way of war. , thest narratives occasional skirmishes with confederate soldiers which happened less frequently as the Campaign Group longer received more attention than the more common interactions with female civilians. Bringing gender and the experience of elite women to the forefront of an interpretation of shermans march provide a new way for historians to understand the damage. This offers an alternative to scholars will struggle to understand the extent of the damage and have engaged in what turns into a social science debate over how much visible damage occurred. Rather than count destroyed homes or literally assessed damages, in my work i demonstrate how gender norms turn typically overlooked acts into insults and psychological attacks. Elite confederate women generally understood as normal the destruction of factories and the freeing of enslaved people. Whenr affronts occurred Union Soldiers took axes to pianos, stole private diaries, paradedhina sets around mockingly in wedding gowns and otherwise took acts towards bedrooms, private dangers bedroom chambers and other things. One confederate woman raged the yankees had no respect whatsoever for a ladys private room. Women accepted some acts as wartime realities and viewed others as evidence of yankee barbarics. Approach counters even as it embraces recent assessments of shermans march that appointed to the ways the campaigns physical destruction has been overstated. As much as sherman to care declared he would smash things to the sea, the soldiers did not burn every town, tear up every railroad or ransacked every home. Atlanta woodburn but this can fly great would burn. Sherman waged war on the home front, but in a restrained manner. Mark grimsley and perhaps the of the march, he waged more than total war. Is flexiblelogy enough to include operations aimed at the destruction of economic resources, forced evacuations or confiscation of property. Addition, it captures the idea of tactics that result in the erosion of the enemys will to resist by deliberately subjecting the population to the pressures of war. Others have conflated the lack of widespread burning with the lack of direct engagement of the civilian enemy. In doing so, they dismiss as inconsequential civilian and military reports of domestic destruction. One distinguished scholar had even concluded that in general, shermans army treated southern civilians well. Although admitting that muchans troops destroyed of South Carolina, this emphasizes that Union Soldiers did not set fire to georgians homes. There is an exception. Except in the case of prominent confederates whose homes universally received the torch. Do not deny that many southerners in georgia and the carolinas escape with their homes and private property intact. I look at these prominent georgians whose homes were in fact attacked. Many scholarly attempts to portray a less damaging campaign ignore the ways that sherman and his troops burned their way through the south. The study of the physical degree of damage to buildings does not set apart the psychological injunction visited on the home front. The scholars dismissal of feminine complaints of destruction, the loss of their wedding gowns and other domestic items as frivolous and inconsequential minimizes the importance of what women experienced at the hands of enemy soldiers. Although not directly tied to the fighting of the confederate war, the ransacking on the slaveholdings womans private letters with infinitely tied to an attempt to destroy her confidence in and support for the confederacy. , the typical reassessment of the damages focused on the masculine effect of the march. The loss of what scholars call the economically valuable items such as crops and buildings. However, bringing gender to the forefront reveals a more complicated story. It mayh at first glance seem like confederate women were upset over the loss of frivolous items, they more precisely expressed their anger over shermans troops knowingly destroying those items that does defined white female privilege. Such actions demonstrated Union Soldiers have little regard for the presumed respectability of elite slaveholding women. Union soldiers did not scatter handkerchiefs to the wind. To their elite female enemies, these items represented a crossing of boundaries that was unforgivable. Although contemporary observers and modern scholars have tirelessly discussed the destructive war or hard war privilegesesearch gendered ambition in particular. I explore the way gender structure restrains tactics. Sherman designed his campaign to destroy the southern landscape and to assert northern domination over the south. Few historians acknowledge the centrality of slaveholding southern women and domesticity of union tactics. Instead, most foc