Air Date: 113007
Subject: Civilian Reactions to Sherman’s March through the Carolinas
Book: When Sherman Marched North from the Sea: Resistance on the Confederate Home Front
Guest: Jacqueline Glass Campbell
Summary: Jacqueline Glass Campbell speaks with Gerry about how Confederate women in the Carolinas reacted to Sherman’s march north from Savannah in early 1865.
Brett’s Summary: Jackie Campbell is an interesting scholar. She is originally from Scotland and became interested in the Civil War by reading Gone With the Wind at age 15. She is a Social Historian who believes firmly that you cannot simply ignore battles completely like many Social Historians do. She said she tries to include what is happening militarily in her writing to put the social events in their proper context.
Campbell’s research showed her many times that Southern diaries and letters speak of the terrible Yankees while at the same time conceding the Yankee who was detailed to guard their home is a nice enough fellow. Campbell also found that after Federal soldiers had ransacked their area Southern women’s dedication to the cause only grew. She postulated that Southern women had a much harder time coming to terms with Confederate defeat than Confederate soldiers did. Campbell also looks at how African-American women were affected by this march. Obviously they had a different viewpoint as current or former slaves. The last item touched on was whether or not Sherman’s march was “Total War”, and Campbell believes this was very much NOT an example of “Total War”. She asked people to consider what Sherman’s army could have done and then compare it to what the actual damage was. She believes a line was clearly drawn between soldiers and civilians and that the Civil War was a Victorian war fought on Victorian principles.
Civil War Talk Radio airs most Fridays at 12 PM Pacific on World Talk Radio Studio A. Host Gerry Prokopowicz, the History Chair at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, interviews a guest each week and discusses their interest in the Civil War. Most interviews center around a book or books if the guest is an author. Other guests over the years have included public historians such as park rangers and museum curators, wargamers, bloggers, and even a member of an American Civil War Round Table located in London, England.
In this series of blog entries, I will be posting air dates, subjects, and guests, and if I have time, I’ll provide a brief summary of the program. You can find all of the past episodes I’ve entered into the blog by clicking on the Civil War Talk Radio category. Each program should appear either on or near the date it was first broadcast.
Check out more summaries of Civil War Talk Radio at TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog.
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