Under the Restless Wings of an Army

Abstract

This chapter focuses on how Confederate women converged the stories of the home front and battlefront in their letters, diaries, and journals. They frequently blamed men, particularly Union soldiers, for the war they experienced on the home front, despite the fact white, Confederate women rarely experienced deliberate violence from and received protection from the Union Army. The same could not be said for enslaved women or black women refugees, who frequently suffered deliberate harm. Race and class informed Southern women’s gendered experience of the war. William Tecumseh Sherman was a frequent recipient of Confederate women’s ire.