scholarly journals The Unfortunate Elite: Southern Women and Their Accounts of Sherman’s Army

2015 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heath Milo
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
William Tecumseh Sherman ◽  
Union Soldiers

This essay considers the actions of Union soldiers during their March to the Sea and through the Carolinas under the command of General William Tecumseh Sherman. It does so this through the lens of personal diaries kept by southern women who experienced the March first or second-hand. This essay argues that the elite women of the south did not experience conditions as harsh as they described, and that their accounts amount to a misrepresentation of the experiences of most southerners during the March.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
pp. 559-562
Author(s):  
E. Patrick Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Central Tension

The final chapter is anchored by a poem from Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, titled “Touch.” Johnson argues that the poem exemplifies a central tension of these narratives by Black, queer, Southern women: the homophobia of the South and these women’s commitment to making the region more hospitable for Black, queer life. He discusses the work of Black feminist scholars Evelynn Hammonds, Darlene Clark Hine, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham in publishing scholarship that rethinks strategies of survival, and stresses that Black. Queer. Southern. Women. follows in this intellectual vein. Finally, Johnson also offers a brief reflection on his subject position as a cisgender, Black, gay, middle-class academic from the South and the ways that this positionality shaped the work.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
E. Patrick Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Gay Men ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Primary Mode ◽  
Black Gay Men ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
Intellectual Foundations ◽  
Black Queer

This chapter introduces readers to the book’s research questions, interventions, intellectual foundations, and Johnson’s narrators. Here, Johnson explains the personal and intellectual impetuses for creating the work. He discusses how the book uses oral history to demonstrate Black, queer, Southern women’s constructions of their identities and casts storytelling as the primary mode through which his narrators theorize their lives. Most importantly, Johnson argues for the importance of studying sexuality in ways that move beyond identity and, instead, account for the polyvalent nature of desire. Lastly, this part of the book situates Black. Queer. Southern. Women.: An Oral History as the companion text to Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South.

scholarly journals Hospitality in Walt Whitman's Specimen Days

2018 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 67-82
Author(s):  
Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
The South ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Union Soldiers

This article explores the concept of hospitality in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (1882). The article is informed by a Levinasian reading of the concept since the main argument is that Lévinas’ interpretation of hospitality sheds light on Whitman’s years in Washington during the Civil War and his much debated relation with wounded soldiers. Lévinas’ phenomenology is centered on care of the Other, which leads to the question of how far the self’s personal obligation to respond to the other in need actually extends. Whitman wanted to create a persona that was meaningful and useful in the Civil War and he chose to be a nurse, or, as he called it in a poem, “the wound-dresser”. By writing about the Civil War, he would both put himself in the center of the historical moment and support Lincoln’s decision to fight the South. In Specimen Days he  wanted to write a memorandum of the war that rejected the ‘sanitized’ versions already circulating. He focused on Union soldiers, who were representative of the best American qualities in Whitman’s view and who endured the hardships of the war, the injuries, pain and death included, but he also described the Southern soldiers, who were the ‘ghosts’ of the Union during the Civil War.

To the Chattahoochee

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Earl J. Hess
Keyword(s):  
Peach Tree ◽  
The South ◽  
South Side ◽  
Union Soldiers ◽  
Chattahoochee River ◽  
The Way

William T. Sherman's conduct of the Atlanta campaign from the first week of May until he reached the Chattahoochee River by mid-July 1864 was highly successful. Relying on his railroad link with Louisville, Kentucky, Sherman refused to risk his men in repeated or heavy frontal attacks against the well-fortified positions Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston established at Dalton, Resaca, New Hope, Pickett's Mill, and Kennesaw Mountain. Although Sherman experimented with a few attacks along the way, most notably at Resaca and Kennesaw Mountain, his failure did not result in crippling losses like those suffered by Ulysses S. Grant at the same time in Virginia. Johnston's tendency to evacuate his strong positions at the slightest sign of Union flanking moves, or because his corps leaders thought those positions untenable, not only contributed to Sherman's success but tremendously increased the morale of Union soldiers to the point where they were supremely confidence in their leader and in the eventual success of the campaign. In contrast, when Johnston fell back across the Chattahoochee River on July 9, Confederate President Jefferson Davis lost all patience with his Fabian strategy in Georgia and came to the conclusion that he had to be replaced. Johnston failed to protect all the possible crossings of the Chattahoochee that could be used by the Federals. As a result, Sherman was able to secure two bridgeheads on the south side of the river, well north of its junction with Peach Tree Creek, in the days following Johnston's fall back.

A Great Social Problem

Men Is Cheap ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 177-206
Author(s):  
Brian P. Luskey
Keyword(s):  
Social Problem ◽  
Balance Sheet ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
The South ◽  
Free Labor ◽  
War Department ◽  
The North ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Hearts And Minds ◽  
Union Soldiers

The war for Union, Abraham Lincoln reasoned, would be won on its balance sheet as much as in the hearts and minds of its citizens. This was true both from the perspective of the War Department and individual northern households. Union soldiers—volunteers, draftees, and substitutes—poured from the North toward the South to vanquish the slaveholders’ aristocracy. The manpower that went into their killing and dying work produced the movement of thousands of white and black southern refugees to the households of white northerners. Recruiters, brokers, benevolent societies, and northern families—all believers that free labor could emancipate them—would try to seize the power, the capital, embedded in the labor of the men, women, and children fleeing to them. Doing so would help them win the war for Union.

A Dream or Nightmare of the Future?

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan Cardon
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
New South ◽  
The South ◽  
Southern Women ◽  
Foreign Markets ◽  
The Future

The book concludes with the 1907 Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition, which both reflected and refracted the hopes and dreams of the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial. It reflected New South desires for a society in which industrial capital flooded the South, opened foreign markets, and where a race hierarchy included African Americans in the region’s progress yet separated them within that society. But it also saw the refraction of their dreams in in which the vision of an ordered and prosperous South came unhinged in the fair’s financial disaster. Southern women were all but eliminated from participating, and African Americans’ dreams of inclusion in the region’s progress—albeit on the white South’s terms—now appeared a very dubious assertion. The Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition still represented the New South dream of a modern and imperial future, but for others, it was a nightmare.

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