When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front.

When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front. By Jacqueline Glass Campbell. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xii, 177. $27.50, ISBN 0-8078-2809-2.)

In recent years, Civil War scholars have incorporated civilians into their examinations of campaigns and battle tactics, offering a more comprehensive look at the realities of life during this tumultuous period. Jacqueline Glass Campbell's When Sherman Marched North from the Sea continues this trend, using gender and geography to reinterpret the 1865 Union campaign from Savannah, Georgia, into the Carolinas. Campbell also examines the psychological aspects of the march from the sea, discussing its impact both on civilians and on the soldiers who participated. Campbell concludes that although William Tecumseh Sherman's campaign aimed to destroy civilian support for the Confederacy, in many cases it served as "the first stage in a process of rededication to Southern independence" (p. 69).

Campbell diverts her analysis from the well-known march to the sea across Georgia and instead examines the lesser-known Carolina campaign. This focus makes sense militarily because "Sherman himself saw the campaign of the Carolinas as crucial and a great deal more difficult than his all-but-unobstructed advance through Georgia" (p. 4). Campbell argues that as the terrain and winter weather became less hospitable and as Confederate women became more vocal, Union soldiers' desire for vengeance against those they saw as having caused the war intensified. In South Carolina, this growing frustration resulted in widespread looting, burning, and general destruction. By comparison, Campbell asserts, populations in Georgia and North Carolina fared better at the hands of Sherman's troops.

This work illuminates a multiplicity of female experiences and voices. Primarily, Campbell explains how the Union campaign demonstrated to many ardent white Confederates that Union troops were "fiends" (p. 90). This spirit was often shared across class lines, leading Campbell to a reinterpretation of morale in North Carolina. Whereas Sherman and some recent historians have interpreted bread riots and letters of discontent addressed to Governor Zebulon Vance to be expressions of Unionism, Campbell effectively explains how these actions resulted instead from shared expectations of a southern moral economy. Slave women had, unsurprisingly, a different and yet equally complex experience. Campbell details the double-edged sword that African Americans faced with the arrival of Union troops: they expected, and often initiated, freedom, but they also experienced disappointment when their personal property and even their bodies were violated by looting soldiers.

Sherman's march has had far-reaching effects on the image of Confederate women and on the creation of Lost Cause mythology. Union actions during this campaign, Campbell observes, led Americans to see Sherman as "the personification of Yankee atrocities, and [southern] women ... as his long-suffering victims" (p. 103). As a result, the active participation of female Confederates has been erased in popular memory. Campbell hopes this lapse is temporary, and along with a growing body of literature, her book has confronted one of many misleading legacies of the Lost Cause.

Florida Atlantic University 

LISA TENDRICH FRANK