A massive five-sided edifice, Fort Pulaski was constructed in the 1830s and 1840s on Cockspur Island at the mouth of the Savannah River. Built to protect the city of Savannah from naval attack, the fort came under siege by Union forces in early 1862 and was ultimately captured on April 11.

Following the War of 1812, the U.S. government began planning a system of coastal fortifications to defend the nation’s coast against foreign invasion. Because Savannah was the major port in Georgia, navy officials recognized the need for a fort on Cockspur Island to protect the city from attacks coming...

The battle between ship and shore on the coast of Confederate Georgia was a pivotal part of the Union strategy to subdue the state during the Civil War. U.S. president Abraham Lincoln’s call at the start of the war for a naval blockade of the entire Southern coastline took time to materialize, but by early 1862 the Union navy had positioned a serviceable fleet off the coast of the South’s most prominent Confederate ports. In Georgia, Union strategy centered on Savannah, the state’s most significant port city. Beyond Savannah, Union forces generally focused on securing bases of operation on outlying...

As part of the Union naval strategy to blockade Southern ports during the Civil War, the U.S. Navy closed access to the Chattahoochee River system at Apalachicola, Florida, on June 11, 1861, and maintained its coastal presence there for the remainder of the war. In response, the Confederate navy built both a steam-powered gunship, the css Chattahoochee, and an ironclad, the css Jackson (also known as css Muscogee), to descend to open seas and break the blockade. However, the shallow coastline, the Chattahoochee’s unpredictable flow, and a series of management and engineering mishaps prevented the enemies from engaging in battle...

Guerrilla warfare in Georgia during the Civil War often took place in sparsely populated regions where Unionist or anti-Confederate sentiment created divisions among the civilian population. In many cases Unionist and Confederate neighbors clashed for control of their communities. In other instances guerrillas operated against major field armies. Confederate guerrilla activities affected the policies of Union general William T. Sherman, pushing him to adopt harsh retaliatory measures to protect his railroad supply lines as he moved through Georgia in 1864. In the final stages of the Civil War, guerrilla activities became an acute problem for areas in which civil authority...

The Andrews Raid of April 12, 1862, brought the first Union soldiers into north Georgia and led to an exciting locomotive chase, the only one of the Civil War. The adventure lasted just seven hours, involved about two dozen men, and as a military operation, ended in failure.

In early spring 1862 Northern forces advanced on Huntsville, Alabama, heading for Chattanooga, Tennessee. Union general Ormsby Mitchel accepted the offer of a civilian spy, James J. Andrews, a contraband merchant and trader between the lines, to lead a raiding party behind Confederate lines to Atlanta, steal a locomotive, and race northward,...

More than 3,500 black Georgians served in the Union army and navy between 1862 and 1865. Enlistment occurred in two distinct phases, beginning on the federally occupied Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina in 1862–63 and resuming in northwestern Georgia and southern Tennessee in mid-1864, during the latter stages of the Atlanta campaign.

The arrival of Union warships prompted Confederate forces to evacuate Georgia’s coastal islands during February and March 1862. With the surrender of Fort Pulaski in the Savannah harbor on April 11, the state’s coast fell under Northern control, and Georgia slaves began making their way...

The Battle of Chickamauga, the biggest battle fought in Georgia, took place September 18–20, 1863. With 34,000 casualties, it is generally accepted as the second bloodiest engagement of the war. The campaign that brought the Union and Confederate armies to Chickamauga began in late June 1863, when the Union Army of the Cumberland under Major General William S. Rosecrans advanced southeastward from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, against the Confederate Army of Tennessee, commanded by General Braxton Bragg. Rosecrans’s goal was to capture the city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, an important rail junction and gateway to the Deep South. Through a series of...

The “Atlanta campaign” is the name given by historians to military operations that took place in north Georgia during the Civil War in the spring and summer of 1864.

By early 1864 most Confederate Southerners had probably given up hopes of winning the Civil War by conquering Union armies. The Confederacy had a real chance, though, of winning the war simply by not being beaten. In spring 1864 this strategy required two things: first, Confederate general Robert E. Lee’s army in Virginia had to defend its capital, Richmond, and keep Union general Ulysses S. Grant’s forces at bay; and second,...

Fought on May 14–15, 1864, the Battle of Resaca was the first major engagement of the Atlanta campaign. Situated on the north bank of the Oostanaula River approximately seventy-five miles northwest of Atlanta, Resaca was located on the strategically important Western and Atlantic Railroad. The fighting at Resaca demonstrated that the outnumbered Confederate army could only slow but not stop the advance of Union forces into Georgia.

Following its November 1863 defeat at Chattanooga, Tennessee, the Confederate Army of Tennessee retreated thirty miles to the southeast and encamped in Dalton, Georgia, for the winter. General Joseph E. Johnston assumed...

The Battle of Pickett’s Mill was among the more decisive encounters of the Atlanta campaign during the Civil War. In May 1864 the Confederate army successfully prevented Union general William T. Sherman’s troops from occupying Dallas, in Paulding County, which Sherman sought as a strategic base of operations as he moved toward Atlanta. The battle was the bloodiest to that point in the campaign and by all accounts delayed Sherman’s eventual capture of Atlanta by at least a week.

Today, the Pickett’s Mill Battlefield Historic Site is one of the most thoroughly preserved and interpreted Civil War battlefields in the...

On June 27, 1864, Kennesaw Mountain, located in Cobb County about twenty miles northwest of Atlanta, became the scene of one of the Atlanta campaign’s major actions.

One month earlier, Union major general William T. Sherman led a force of three armies from Chattanooga into Georgia. His objective was the destruction of Confederate general Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee. Johnston hoped to prevent his army’s annihilation while protecting his supply and communications center at Atlanta. He frustrated Sherman by conducting a masterful defensive strategy, entrenching his army across Sherman’s path and forcing the Union armies into either a frontal...

The March to the Sea, the Civil War’s most destructive campaign against a civilian population, began in Atlanta on November 15, 1864, and concluded in Savannah on December 21, 1864. General William T. Sherman abandoned his supply line and marched across Georgia to the Atlantic Ocean to prove to the Confederate population that its government could not protect the people from invaders. He practiced psychological warfare; he believed that by marching an army across the state he would demonstrate to the world that the Union had a power the Confederacy could not resist. “This may not be war,” he said,...

In mid-March 1865, as the Confederate States of America struggled through its final days, Union major general James Harrison Wilson began a month-long cavalry raid that laid waste to much of the productive capacity of Alabama and Georgia.

In a war where cavalry troops were underutilized, frequently mixed with infantry troops, or simply relegated to hauling supplies and delivering mail, Wilson’s approach to warfare was innovative: he used his 13,480 horsemen, without any infantry troops, in lightning quick raids against the productive centers of the Deep South. Much of the area from central Mississippi to central Georgia remained relatively unscathed,...

In early May 1865 the Confederate States of America was greatly disorganized, largely because of the frenetic events of the previous month. General Robert E. Lee had surrendered the Confederate armies at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia, and most Americans believed the Civil War was over. The assassination of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C., by John Wilkes Booth and other sympathizers with the Southern cause, cast suspicion over many in the Confederate government. Though still intact, the government was largely ineffective.

President Jefferson Davis still retained hopes for the future of the Confederacy. Privately, he harbored a desire...

A pioneer of nineteenth-century photography, George N. Barnard is best known for his work during the Civil War as the official army photographer for the Military Division of the Mississippi, commanded by Union general William T. Sherman. His images, first published in 1866 as a limited collector’s edition entitled Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign (and reproduced here courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division), record the destruction left in the wake of Sherman’s Atlanta campaign and subsequent March to the Sea.

Barnard, a Connecticut native, began producing daguerreotypes (the first photographs commercially available to the public) around...

Established in Marietta and opened to students in July 1851, the Georgia Military Institute (gmi) was the principal source of education for new engineers and teachers in the state during the decade prior to the Civil War. Originally funded by private subscription and donations, gmi began its official relationship with the state in 1852, when the legislature chartered the school and presented it with muskets, swords, and a battery of four cannons. Although gmi began with only three instructors and seven students, it quickly attracted a large number of cadets from Georgia’s wealthiest families. Between 1853 and 1861, gmi’s student...

During the Civil War, Confederate military medical authorities established general hospitals behind the lines in at least thirty-nine cities and towns in Georgia, though many of them remained at a particular location for only a short time.

There were two types of hospitals during the Civil War. Field hospitals accompanied the armies, treating the sick and wounded first before sending those needing lengthier care to the general hospitals behind the lines, often at some distance from the front. Each general hospital had a staff, preferably of a size appropriate to its bed capacity. This staff included surgeons and assistant surgeons,...

The manufacturing might of the North during the Civil War often overshadowed that of the South, but the success of the Confederate war effort depended as much on the iron of its industry as the blood of its fighting men. Over the course of the war, Georgia, known as the antebellum “Empire State of the South,” became an indispensable site for wartime manufacturing, combining a prewar industrial base with extensive transportation linkages and a geographic location secure for most of the war from the ravages of enemy armies. Manufacturing gunpowder, munitions, textiles, and a vast array of other essential materiel,...

At the time of the Civil War, Atlanta boasted a population of almost 10,000 (one-fifth of whom were slaves), a substantial manufacturing and mercantile base, and four major railroads connecting the city with all points of the South. It was neither Georgia’s capital nor the largest city in the state, but it was energetic and thriving.

After the outbreak of war in spring 1861, Atlantans volunteered and formed the bulk of the twelve companies of infantry from Georgia. Casualties soon occurred. The city’s two main newspapers, the Intelligencer and the Southern Confederacy, honored nearly a dozen Atlantans who had been...

Georgia was home to a number of Confederate prisons during the war years. Though dwarfed by the shadow of notorious Andersonville Prison, there were fifteen other facilities in the state. These ranged from well-constructed fortifications, such as county jails, to makeshift installations, such as wooded areas patrolled by armed guards surrounding prisoners. Prison sites were usually selected for their proximity to major transportation routes. Georgia was relatively distant from the battle lines for most of the war, which made it prime ground for incarcerating captured Union soldiers. Conditions at these prisons usually depended on the Confederacy’s military fortunes. Toward the...

In February 1864 a Confederate prison was established in Macon County, in southwest Georgia, to provide relief for the large number of Union prisoners concentrated in and around Richmond, Virginia. The new camp, officially named Camp Sumter, quickly became known as Andersonville, after the railroad station in neighboring Sumter County beside which the camp was located. By the summer of 1864, the camp held the largest prison population of its time, with numbers that would have made it the fifth-largest city in the Confederacy. By the time it closed in early May 1865, those numbers, along with the sanitation, health,...

Georgia citizens in the nineteenth century relied on newspapers to keep them informed about what was happening outside their own towns and counties. The state could boast a few literary, religious, and agricultural magazines, but newspapers were by far the more important news source. They took on added significance during the Civil War, providing to Georgians not only information about the breakdown of the Union and the four-year conflict that followed but also a venue through which vital issues were debated before a broad reading public.

As the nineteenth century began, Georgia had only five newspapers—two in Savannah, two...

Historians of the Civil War have only recently begun serious study of Unionists, an often overlooked group of white Southerners who played a substantial part in sowing discontent and undermining the Confederate war effort. Unionists found themselves living in a new nation, the Confederacy, to which they chose not to give their allegiance. While their numbers in Georgia (or in any other Southern state) are uncertain, much about Unionist presence and activity in the state has come to light in recent years.

One of the challenges for historians of wartime Unionism in the South lies in the secrecy surrounding Unionist...

Desertion plagued Georgia regiments during the Civil War and, along with other factors, debilitated the Confederate effort. Deserters were not merely cowards or ne’er-do-wells; some were seasoned veterans from battle-hardened regiments.

The most significant wave of desertion among Georgia soldiers occurred from late 1863 through 1864 in the wake of the Battle of Chickamauga and Union general William T. Sherman’s Atlanta campaign. The proximity of the army to soldiers’ homes following those battles, Sherman’s advance through the state, and Georgians’ sense of duty to alleviate the social and economic hardships endured by their families and communities encouraged Confederates to abandon...

The Civil War home front in Georgia, far from reflecting unity in a common cause, was rife with conflict and dissent. Though the state was largely spared the impact of invading armies until late in the war, social and economic divisions set Georgians against one another in ever worsening internal conflicts that undermined support for the Confederacy well before the war’s end.

Southerners, including Georgians, were not united in their support for secession. Although, according to historian Michael P. Johnson, more than half the popular vote for delegates to the Georgia Secession Convention of 1861 went to candidates who initially...

During the Civil War, women across the South took on new roles to support their families and the Confederacy. Women in Georgia proved no exception. The war provided elite white women with opportunities to take part in the public sphere. They often voiced their opinions about events, and they filled roles previously held by men. For poor white women, the war proved less liberating, as the demands of the war and economic hardship created major challenges in supporting themselves and their families. By 1865 the war and emancipation had also transformed the lives of African American women.

The interest in...

Georgia’s civilian population felt the effects of the Civil War nearly as soon as soldiers left home to fight. As the war progressed, those on the home front faced growing shortages of food, salt, cloth, and cash. Governor Joseph E. Brown and the state’s legislators were acutely aware of increasing deprivation, and they responded with a series of measures designed to prevent starvation and suffering. The nineteenth-century attitude toward welfare was that it should be provided as needed but should not be excessive, for fear of encouraging “idleness” and dependence upon the government. Georgia’s wartime welfare expenditures, however, contrasted with...

Emancipation did not come suddenly or easily to Georgia. The liberation of the state’s more than 400,000 slaves began during the chaos of the Civil War and continued well into 1865. Emancipation also demanded the reconfiguration of the full range of social and economic relations. What would replace slavery was unclear. Former slaves, ex-slaveholders, and the Northerners responsible for enforcing freedom had their own ideas about what the future should bring. Struggles between those competing visions punctuated emancipation in Georgia. In waging those battles, however, black people and white laid the foundations for a new social order. Though fragile and...

On January 16, 1865, Union general William T. Sherman issued his Special Field Order No. 15, which confiscated as Federal property a strip of coastline stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, to the St. John’s River in Florida, including Georgia’s Sea Islands and the mainland thirty miles in from the coast. The order redistributed the roughly 400,000 acres of land to newly freed black families in forty-acre segments.

Sherman’s order came on the heels of his successful March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah and just prior to his march northward into South Carolina. Radical Republicans in the U.S. Congress,...

As a defeated Confederate state, Georgia underwent Reconstruction from the aftermath of the Civil War in 1865 until 1871, when Republican government and military occupation in the state ended. Though relatively brief, Reconstruction transformed the state politically, socially, and economically.

As the Civil War ended in early May 1865, Georgia’s Confederate governor, Joseph E. Brown, surrendered to Union authorities and was paroled. After attempting to convene the Georgia General Assembly, however, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned in the District of Columbia.

Brown left behind a war-ravaged state, devoid of civil order and fast approaching chaos. Politically rudderless and economically...

Near the end of the Civil War, women from Columbus began to care for soldiers’ graves. One of them, Lizzie Rutherford, proposed an annual observance to decorate graves, inaugurating Confederate Memorial Day. Thirty years later one of the Columbus women compared their work to that of Mary Magdalene and the other women who came to Christ’s grave. This seems overblown but is really apt, for what the women in Columbus were engaged in was no less than a new form of Southern religion. Historians refer to this as Lost Cause religion, which was interdenominational and functioned as a culture religion....

Confederate veteran organizations were formed to alleviate and address many of the challenges facing former soldiers and their communities in the aftermath of the Civil War. The objectives of these organizations included burying and commemorating dead soldiers; caring for cemeteries; providing aid to widows, orphans, and indigent veterans; and preserving the Confederate interpretation of the war’s history (often referred to as Lost Cause ideology).

These organizations later served an important social function by helping veterans maintain ties to those with whom they had served, both through reunions and through such magazines as Confederate Veteran, which was founded in Nashville, Tennessee,...

The Georgia division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (udc) was formed on November 8, 1895. Initially, the udc worked both to maintain the beliefs of the Lost Cause, a heroic interpretation of the Civil War that allowed Southerners to maintain their sense of honor, and to build monuments in honor of Confederate heroes. Its members also aimed to preserve Southern culture. The organization rapidly grew to include chapters in almost every town across the state, and it connected many middle- and upper-class white women across the South with one another.

On September 10, 1894, Caroline Meriwether Goodlett, from...

Both during and after the Civil War, Georgians faced the task of burying the Confederate and Union soldiers who died within the state’s bounds. Many of the fallen were later reburied either in existing cemeteries or in new ones specifically dedicated to Civil War soldiers. Nearly every sizable cemetery in Georgia contains individual graves of Confederate soldiers or veterans who died after the war was over, and several have entire sections devoted to Civil War dead. A few cemeteries hold only Confederate soldiers killed in the war; the Confederate Cemetery at Resaca was the first of these to be established...

Confederate memorials honor Georgians who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and are located across the state, in both large cities and small communities. One of the earliest Confederate memorial services was held in April 1866 at Columbus, marking the beginning of a national movement to honor the war’s dead, both Confederate and Union.

Most memorials are monuments or markers, but others take different forms. Confederate memorials in Georgia include the beautiful depictions of Georgia’s military leaders and battles in the stained-glass windows at Rhodes Hall in Atlanta, as well as the carving on Stone Mountain of Robert...

“Cyclorama” is the name given to the huge, late-nineteenth-century painting depicting the Civil War battle fought July 22, 1864, east of Atlanta. Housed in Atlanta’s Grant Park and owned by the city, the Cyclorama is a national tourist attraction and cultural treasure. It is one of only two cycloramas in the United States, and at 42 feet tall and 358 feet in circumference, it is the largest painting in the country.

Cycloramic murals—building-sized paintings hung circularly for viewing from the inside—were a European innovation of the late nineteenth century. Frenchman Paul Philippoteaux supervised the painting of a cyclorama...

Fitzgerald, the seat of Ben Hill County, is located in the heart of south central Georgia, twenty-five miles northeast of Tifton. Settled in 1896 by a land company under the direction of Philander H. Fitzgerald, the town is best known as a place of reconciliation among Civil War veterans. Fitzgerald, a former drummer boy in the Union army, had become a pension attorney with a thriving practice in Indianapolis, Indiana. His interest in the welfare of his fellow veterans was well documented in the publication of the widely read weekly newspaper American Tribune. Through his involvement Fitzgerald conceived the idea...

Stone Mountain, located in DeKalb County about ten miles northeast of downtown Atlanta, is the largest exposed mass of granite in the world. A town at the base of the mountain bears the same name. Before 1800, Native Americans used the mountain as a meeting and ceremonial place. Stone Mountain emerged as a major tourist resort in the 1850s, attracting residents of nearby Atlanta and other cities. The carving of a Confederate memorial on the side of the mountain attracted national and international attention during the twentieth century. Today, Stone Mountain is a tourist attraction that draws approximately 4 million...

The nonprofit organization Georgia Civil War Heritage Trails (gcwht) chronicles the Civil War era through historic driving routes and interpretive markers, patterned after Virginia’s “heritage tourism” initiative. gcwht, a tax-exempt corporation founded in 1999 and led by volunteers from throughout the state, works to raise public awareness of existing preservation opportunities while providing scenic and cultural benefits to those who follow its trails.

Another goal of gcwht is to stimulate economic development in Georgia. With funds awarded by the federal government under the Transportation Equity Act for the Twenty-first Century, and with the support of scores of local communities, gcwht...

The National Civil War Naval Museum at Port Columbus, formerly the Confederate Naval Museum, is the only institution in the nation dedicated to telling the little-known maritime story of the Civil War. This 40,000-square-foot facility located on the Chattahoochee River in Columbus opened in 2001 and features the remains of two original Confederate Navy ships, along with full-scale reproductions of parts of three other famous Civil War ships and numerous artifacts. Port Columbus is operated as a public-private partnership project between the City of Columbus and the Port Columbus Civil War Naval Center, Inc., a private nonprofit organization. The first...

Between 1961 and 1965 the state of Georgia took part in the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. Following the lead of the federal government, which had established the Civil War Centennial Commission in 1957, Georgia created in 1959 a state commission, which subsequently encouraged local communities to carryout commemorative events in their areas. The commission’s goals included using the anniversary as a means for education and reflection on the war and its legacy, as an opportunity for the collection and preservation of materials and documents related to the war, and as a vehicle for encouraging cultural...

The pastoral landscape of north Georgia served as the arena for contending Union and Confederate armies in one of the Civil War’s most decisive and crucial campaigns during the summer of 1864. Many of the bloodstained fields and forests where those Americans fought and died have long since given way to the bulldozer’s blade and are now marked by interstate exits, residential neighborhoods, fast-food restaurants, and other commercial facilities.

The Georgia Civil War Commission, formed by the General Assembly in 1993, coordinates the planning, preservation, and promotion of structures, battlefields, and other sites that are associated with the Civil war...

Reenactments of the Civil War are the most popular and widely known form of Civil War public commemoration in Georgia. Reenacting is a loosely organized hobby in which men and women dress as Union or Confederate soldiers or civilians to stage re-creations of Civil War battles, encampments, or marches. The hobby also offers fellowship, fun, and education to its participants and to its audiences. There are perhaps 2,000 active Civil War reenactors in Georgia. Additionally, many of the estimated 35,000 Civil War reenactors in the United States and 3,000 abroad visit Georgia to participate in reenactments.

As an organized hobby,...

Archaeology offers a unique perspective on the Civil War, allowing archaeologists and historians to look at this defining event from a material perspective.

In reconstructing the material context of the war, archaeologists study three main components: artifacts, features, and sites. Artifacts are man made objects, such as bullets, pipe fragments, or uniform buttons. Features are similar to artifacts in that they are created by human hands, but unlike artifacts they cannot be physically separated from the landscape. Examples of features include a military trench or the remains of a soldier’s fire pit. Sites are defined as locations that contain a...

In Patriotic Gore (1962), his classic study of Civil War literature, the literary critic Edmund Wilson asked, “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–1865 in which so many people were so articulate?” Historian Louis Masur later made the same point, stating that “the Civil War was a written war,” one in which hundreds of participants and observers “struggled to capture the texture of the extraordinary and the everyday.”

Georgians were certainly among those for whom the war became a “written war,” and their accounts of what they experienced or observed took the form of...

One of the most valuable sources available for understanding the experiences of slaves in the American South is the testimony that they themselves produced in a variety of ways, both during and long after the existence of the “peculiar institution.” These testimonials, generally referred to as slave narratives, include memoirs and autobiographies written by fugitive slaves who fled to the North and were assisted by abolitionists with the publication of their stories, as well as twentieth-century oral interviews with elderly former slaves that recorded their memories of life during slavery and the circumstances of their emancipation either during or after...

Macaria; or Altars of Sacrifice, the third novel by Columbus native Augusta Jane Evans, was published in 1864, during the Civil War. The book served as propaganda for the Confederate cause and helped to redefine the role of Confederate women during the war. Macaria became a best seller in the Confederacy, with 20,000 copies in circulation by the war’s end, and secured Evans’s status as a leading female Southern writer. Northern generals banned the book for fear of its sympathetic Southern message taking hold among Union troops.

Evans believed that a primary purpose of literature was to provide moral instruction,...

“Marching through Georgia” is one of the best-known songs of the Civil War. Composed by Henry Clay Work and published soon after the war ended in 1865, it commemorates Union general William T. Sherman’s march from Atlanta to Savannah in the fall of 1864. The song became very popular in the North and sold more than 500,000 copies in the first twelve years after its publication.

Work, a Connecticut native living in Chicago when the war broke out, was a printer by trade as well as a self-taught musician. In 1861 he signed a contract to produce sheet music for...

On the Plantation: A Story of a Georgia Boy’s Adventures during the War (1892), written by famed New South journalist and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris, is a fictionalized memoir of Harris’s adolescence during the Civil War. It is both an idealized portrait of plantation life on Turnwold, the estate of Joseph Addison Turner in Eatonton (Putnam County), and a sanitized treatment of the war. Purchased by publisher S. S. McClure in New York for $2,500, the narrative was first serialized in several national newspapers, beginning in 1891. A year later On the Plantation appeared as a book published by D....

The General, released in 1927, is a classic silent film directed by and starring Buster Keaton, one of the major comic filmmakers of the silent era. It was one of several films loosely based on the Andrews Raid of 1862, a key event of the Civil War in Georgia.

On April 12, 1862, Union raiders staged a daring seizure of a Confederate train pulled by the General, a locomotive traveling north from Big Shanty (present-day Kennesaw, in Cobb County) toward Chattanooga, Tennessee. The raiders’ dramatic trek toward Union lines was marred by setbacks; they ultimately abandoned the train and were...

Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Georgia, Gone With the Wind, occupies an important place in any history of twentieth-century American literature. Dismissed by most academic literary critics for being uneven, flawed, and conventionally written in an age marked by literary experimentation, and attacked by some cultural commentators as promulgating racist myths and undermining the very foundations of its basically feminist paradigm, the best-selling novel of the twentieth century continues to withstand its detractors.

Upon its publication, reviewers drew comparisons with William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Margaret...

Few films are so closely identified with a geographical region as Gone With the Wind is identified with Georgia and the Civil War South. The 1939 adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel, produced by David O. Selznick, featured such well-known actors as Clark Gable (Rhett Butler), Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Wilkes), and Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes), and made a star of actress Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O’Hara). It remains one of the most popular and commercially successful films ever made. Its main theme, from the Max Steiner score, is recognized throughout the world. In its use of color, scene design, and...

The Great Locomotive Chase is an action-adventure film produced by Walt Disney in 1956. To date it is the last of several films depicting the Andrews Raid of 1862, which took place in north Georgia during the Civil War.

On April 12, 1862, Union raiders staged a daring seizure of a Confederate train pulled by the General, a locomotive headed north from Big Shanty (present-day Kennesaw, in Cobb County) toward Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the Union lines. The Disney film was produced nearly thirty years after The General (1927), a silent-film version of the story by comedian Buster Keaton, and offers...

A play, The Andersonville Trial, and two television films, The Andersonville Trial and Andersonville, have focused on the most notorious prison camp of the Civil War.

In 1959 dramatist Saul Levitt wrote his award-winning play The Andersonville Trial, which was produced that same year by William Darrid, Daniel Hollywood, and Eleanore Saidenberg. The play recounts the trial of Captain Henry Wirz, the Swiss doctor who commanded the Confederate garrison at Andersonville. Eleven years later, in 1970, George C. Scott, a cast member in the original Broadway production of Levitt’s play, directed a critically acclaimed film adaptation also entitled The Andersonville...

Margaret Walker’s novel Jubilee, published in 1966, is one of the first novels to present the nineteenth-century African American historical experience in the South from a black and female point of view. The winner of Houghton Mifflin’s Literary Fellowship Award, the novel is a fictionalized account of the life of Walker’s great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, who was born a slave in Dawson in Terrell County and lived through Reconstruction in southwest Georgia. It is based on stories told to Walker by her maternal grandmother. Walker herself was not a Georgian by birth. Born in Alabama, she spent most of...

Few novels have captured the popular American imagination more strongly than Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 book, Gone With the Wind. Its sweeping, romantic story of the South and the Civil War has entranced readers since the day of its publication. Many readers, however, especially African Americans, have complained that the novel demeans the role of blacks and that its portrayals of such characters as Mammy and Prissy are racist stereotypes. For them, Gone With the Wind has little to tell us about the real experiences of African Americans in the South during and after the Civil War.

In 2001 Alice Randall,...

The presence of Union general William T. Sherman in Georgia during the Civil War has inspired numerous novels. These fictional accounts, some obscure and some quite prominent, have centered on characters caught up in either the Atlanta campaign, during the spring and summer of 1864, or the subsequent March to the Sea, in the late fall of that year.

Perhaps one reason that these events have attracted so many novelists is that both the campaign and the march involved interactions among many different types of people, including soldiers and civilians, Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, and the rich and...