Tracing Battles over Buildings in the Civil War South

Bethany Bell is a PhD Student in the history department at the University of Virginia. She is also the 2024 recipient of Rose Library’s Dana White Graduate Fellowships for Research in Atlanta History, which supports research into the the development, history, culture, social movements, and politics of Atlanta.

In 1864, during the fourth year of the U.S. Civil War, a union general named William Sherman led his 60,000 man army to camp at the Georgia plantation of a confederate legislator named Joseph B. Jones. While there, one of Sherman’s officers had a conversation with an enslaved woman named Louisa. The officer said that the army was not going to burn down the Jones house which may have been a surprise to Louisa as Sherman had become infamous for his scorched-earth tactics. Louisa told the officer that the Jones’ house should be burned down because of all the cruelty that had been enacted toward enslaved people in order for the house to be built. My research deals with the intersection of slavery and the built environment in the U.S. South. I was interested in uncovering more about the history of Louisa, the Jones’ plantation, Sherman’s Atlanta campaign, and the built environment of the south during the Civil War, in general. I came across mentions of a document about the history of the Jones’ mansion, which eventually did burn down in 1901. Eventually I discovered that the Jones papers were held at the Stuart A. Rose Library which made conducting research there a natural next step in my overall research journey.  

The Joseph B. Jones papers proved to be very fruitful in two ways. First, I located a mention of the enslaved woman, Louisa, in 1866. This was important because I wanted to locate her after the Civil War. I found this mention of her, and her child Sam, in a document forming a labor contract between numerous newly emancipated people and their former enslaver turned employer, Joseph Jones. This is an important part of telling the story of the landscape of slavery and bondage as it shows how Black southerners remained tied to plantations even after emancipation. In the account of Louisa during the Civil War, she hadn’t just advocated for the Jones’ house to be burned down, she had also asked if she could leave with the union army and her request was denied. Being able to locate her two year later in the same place from which she had tried to escape was an important discovery for my ability to piece together her story and the larger story that I’m trying to understand and tell. Also in this collection, I found some really compelling documents written in the mid-20th century  by descendants of the Jones family. They write extensively about their sense of pride in the plantation built and operated by their ancestors. Some of these writers were part of a historical society that actually met in one of the antebellum houses. They wrote that “the stately, white-columned manor house…tells the thrilling story of the fabulous days of the feudal south.” Even writing in 1950, the authors didn’t shy away from explicitly depicting an idyllic vision of the south as “the dream of the Big House, the broad acres of cultivated land, of slaves and servants…” This connection between the distant past, the near past, and the present is also important for my work as I consider the role of the built environment of slavery in public history and public memory today.  

Two separate collections of Civil War soldiers’ correspondence also proved valuable for my research. In these collection, amidst their descriptions of daily life as soldiers in the union army, I found many references to the landscape of the south during wartime. These soldiers described the material and symbolic meanings of tents, plantations, and southern cities under siege. Often they wrote with a sense of curiosity and amazement about the size and scale of some of the larger plantations they encountered in Tennessee and Georgia. Sometimes they write with sympathy toward the places they occupied mourning the destruction of the aesthetically impressive homes. Other times they write with a sense of righteous vengeance that these places were being destroyed. This myriad of thoughts and feelings about and experiences in the southern landscape during the Civil War adds important nuance and character to my research.  

Overall, the documents, letters, and soldier correspondence I found in the Stuart A. Rose Library at Emory gave me fresh perspectives on the lives entwined with the Southern landscape during the Civil War, particularly through stories like Louisa’s and the soldiers’ impressions of the plantations. Visiting this collection opened up a fascinating view into the ways the physical and symbolic spaces of the South shaped and were shaped by people’s lives—revealing the rich layers of history and memory that continue to influence how we understand these sites today.