LSU Press to Publish Book on Sherman and the Confederate Home Front
Sherman’s War on Women A Study of Home Front Hostilities on Shermans March Baton Rouge —Lisa Tendrich Frank’s book The Civilian War, to be published in April 2015, 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 a...
