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When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front. By Jacqueline Glass Campbell. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. 192. Cloth, $27.50.)
This slim, engaging volume combines gender and military history in retelling the story of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman's march, not to the sea, but his less familiar one north from the sea into the interior of the Confederacy. Beginning in Savannah, his "Christmas gift" to President Abraham Lincoln, Jacqueline Glass Campbell follows this army through the Carolinas, ending with the peace treaty that Sherman negotiated with Confederate general Joseph Johnston. Each short chapter combines narratives, vignettes, and analysis in clear and often sparkling prose.
Campbell situates the main actors here-Northern soldiers and white and black civilians, men and women-within both geographic and psychological space, plumbing their actions and perceptions during and after the campaign. Her work joins a rich new body of work that challenges the classic separations of home and battle front, notably Joan E. Cashin's collection of essays The War Was You and Me (2002). Like these writers, Campbell finds the battlefront and home transforming each other, often in...