Look Away! by William C. Davis

Author:William C. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

Rumors that Yankees were taking old men and young boys and arresting them to send north to an uncertain fate might have been untrue, yet they led to great unrest among sons and fathers in uniform. 74 Some stories proved to be unbearable, none more so than the plight of the women who worked in the textile mills at Roswell, Georgia. When Sherman’s columns approaching Atlanta came upon Roswell, they destroyed the mills, which were producing cloth for Confederate uniforms, and then for reasons never adequately explained, arrested several hundred of the women and deported them and their children first to Nashville and later to Louisville, where they had no choice but to hire themselves out to stay alive. Some never managed to return to their homes, others were forced into prostitution to live, and a few simply died, leaving husbands in perpetual anguish and confusion at their fates. 75 In Milledgeville, Georgia, after Confederate authorities abandoned the town and almost all of the men were away in the army, the convicts in the local penitentiary got out to terrorize the remaining women, burning buildings, stealing livestock, pouring sorghum on the ground, and even stealing the children’s clothing. The people had to ask advancing Yankees for protection. “Nearly every woman in the county is ruined,” grieved Mrs. M. C. McCombs. “The men used them as they pleased.” One woman was driven insane after repeated rape, and apparently a few others died as a result of the brutality. 76 The necessity of catching and bringing to military justice men demoralized by such strains on their families spread its own malaise in the army. Colonel David C. Glenn, once attorney general of Mississippi, served on the military court in the Third Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia, but by October he had had enough, complaining that “trying and shooting Confederate soldiers from one year to another is more than my disposition would stand.” 77

In Georgia, the imperious Governor Brown, who was disinclined to negotiate with anyone when it conflicted with his view of his sovereign authority, was finally forced by exigency to come to a compromise with alien citizens of Atlanta to grant them exemption from state conscription in return for their agreeing to form a company of their own to try to protect such unfortunates, while in Jefferson County, not far from the South Carolina border, citizens were so fearful of their inability to “subdue any insubordination at home” that they asked to have the enlistment age for local defense units lowered to just fourteen. Somehow they thought that arming children, along with some dog packs, would cow their insolent Negroes, who no longer feared the women. 78

No palliative worked in the end, and right until the last days community unrest grew steadily as a direct function of the ability or inability of authorities to provide security and stability and to stave off fear. In August, as Union forces readied to an attack on Mobile, Alabama, the Confederate commander of

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