"Household War" by Frank and Whites

[Tom Bogar]

Just finished a new, and quite interesting collection of historical essays on the home front during the Civil War, Household War, edited by Lisa Tendrich Frank and Leeann Whites (Univ. of Georgia Press, 2020). Topics range from a very sympathetic treatment of Mary Lincoln’s unpreparedness for running the large executive mansion when her husband was elected president (in my mind the best essay), to a sane, rational justification for Sherman’s expulsion of all civilians from Atlanta (from the necessity built on his experience dealing with guerrilla warfare in the West, where those warriors blended in with the civilian population only to create havoc for Sherman), to an account of the thousands of Union prisoners who escaped from southern P.O.W. camps and were sheltered and fed by Unionist households as they made their way back to the Union lines. Other essays (there are 14 in all) deal with Union army wives establishing households in occupied southern homes, or boarding with southern women for the protection their occupying officer husbands afforded those southern women (with some fascinating anecdotes), and the home lives of Lee and of Grant. I learned a great deal reading it, and recommend it highly.