- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Part I Children and the Sectional Conflict
- 1 “Waked Up to Feel”
- 2 “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go”
- 3 “What Is a Person Worth at Such a Time”
- Part II Children of War
- 4 A “Rebel to [His] Govt. and to His Parents”
- 5 Thrills for Children
- 6 “Good Children Die Happy”
- 7 Children of the March
- 8 Love in Battle
- Part III Aftermaths
- 9 Caught in the Crossfire
- 10 “Free Ourselves, but Deprived of Our Children”
- 11 Reconstructing Social Obligation
- 12 Orphans and Indians
- Part IV Epilogue
- 13 Preparing the Next Generation for Massive Resistance
- Documents: Through the Eyes of Civil War Children
- “I Hope by My Next Birthday We Will Have Peace in Our Land”: Carrie Berry Endures the Fall of Atlanta
- “A Strenuous and Tragic Affair”: Life on the Northern Home Front
- “The Threshold of a New Year”: High School Journalists Weigh In on the Civil War
- “Sports in the Days of the Sixties”: War and Play
- “De drums wus beatin’”: Caroline Richardson Meets the Yankees
- “A Momentous and Eventful Day”: Freedom Comes to Booker T. Washington
- “Born in the First Smoke of the Great Conflict”: Hamlin Garland’s Father Comes Home
- Questions for Consideration
- Suggested Readings
- About the Contributors
- Index
Children of the March
Children of the March
Confederate Girls and Sherman’s Home Front Campaign
- Chapter:
- (p.110) 7 Children of the March
- Source:
- Children and Youth during the Civil War Era
- Author(s):
Lisa Tendrich Frank
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
This chapter examines how Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas in 1864–65 created and clarified the meaning of the war for elite Southern girls. It explores both the social experiences that slaveholding girls faced during the invasion and the ways in which these experiences often became manifested as postwar anger and the fodder for the Lost Cause mythology. During the march, these privileged girls witnessed what they considered Yankee “depravity” and thereby found justification for secession and other decisions previously made by Confederate adults. Their firsthand experiences—and the ways in which adults explained these experiences to them—also provided elite Southern girls with ample material to later edit, dramatize, and craft into the Lost Cause interpretation of the war.
Keywords: American Civil War, elite Southern girls, Union army, Lost Cause, Confederates, secession
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- Title Pages
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction
- Part I Children and the Sectional Conflict
- 1 “Waked Up to Feel”
- 2 “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go”
- 3 “What Is a Person Worth at Such a Time”
- Part II Children of War
- 4 A “Rebel to [His] Govt. and to His Parents”
- 5 Thrills for Children
- 6 “Good Children Die Happy”
- 7 Children of the March
- 8 Love in Battle
- Part III Aftermaths
- 9 Caught in the Crossfire
- 10 “Free Ourselves, but Deprived of Our Children”
- 11 Reconstructing Social Obligation
- 12 Orphans and Indians
- Part IV Epilogue
- 13 Preparing the Next Generation for Massive Resistance
- Documents: Through the Eyes of Civil War Children
- “I Hope by My Next Birthday We Will Have Peace in Our Land”: Carrie Berry Endures the Fall of Atlanta
- “A Strenuous and Tragic Affair”: Life on the Northern Home Front
- “The Threshold of a New Year”: High School Journalists Weigh In on the Civil War
- “Sports in the Days of the Sixties”: War and Play
- “De drums wus beatin’”: Caroline Richardson Meets the Yankees
- “A Momentous and Eventful Day”: Freedom Comes to Booker T. Washington
- “Born in the First Smoke of the Great Conflict”: Hamlin Garland’s Father Comes Home
- Questions for Consideration
- Suggested Readings
- About the Contributors
- Index