A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South
By Jonathan Dean Sarris
(October 2008 Civil War News)

Illustrated, map, notes, bibliography, index, 256 pp. 2006. University of Virginia Press, P.O. Box 400318, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4318, cloth $55, paper $22.50 plus shipping.

Reviewer: Richard M. McMurry
Richard M. McMurry's latest book (edited) is An Uncompromising Secessionist: The Civil War of George Knox Miller, 8th (Wade's) Confederate Cavalry.

Review:
In recent decades students of the Civil War have devoted much effort to expanding our understanding of the conflict in the Mountain South — the Appalachian region extending from Virginia into northeastern Alabama. This fine book adds substantially to our knowledge of that area in general and of North-Central Georgia in particular.

Jonathan Sarris focuses on Fannin and Lumpkin counties. The former is on the Georgia-Tennessee border and usually looked to the Volunteer State for its economic development and for such outlets to the world as it enjoyed.
Lumpkin is one tier of counties south of Fannin, separated from it by a ridge, and usually looked southward toward the rest of Georgia. A gold rush in the 1820s and 1830s brought relative prosperity to Lumpkin and to its county seat Dahlonega.

Both counties initially rallied to the Confederate cause. Many men entered the 1st, 2nd, 11th, 52nd and 65th Georgia infantry regiments or Phillips Legion. In 1862, however, the pressures of war, especially conscription, led to increasing disaffection in the mountains.

This feeling was greater in Fannin than in Lumpkin, and it was not too long before increasing numbers of citizens lost faith in and withdrew support from the Confederate cause. They wanted to protect their communities from outside forces (many of them Confederate) that threatened their way of life.

Attempts to suppress this growing anti-war, anti-Confederate sentiment touched off what amounted to a vicious civil war in the two counties. State and Confederate forces came into the area to enforce conscription and other policies.

The turmoil grew worse, and many anti-Confederate men in the area joined the 1st Georgia State Troops —the only white Union unit raised in the state.

These divisions continued in one form or another into the postwar years and were reflected in the two counties’ politics, veterans’ ceremonies, schools, writing of history, memories of the war years, and other areas.

Readers interested in one or more of the military units listed above can learn much from this book — if not about the units themselves, then about the communities from which they came.

All Civil Warriors would do well to think about what Sarris can teach us concerning the myth-making that shaped so much of the history of the war as written before about 1960 and which still plays such a large role in the popular understanding of the conflict.