This is the seventh essay in an occasional series. Previously: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6

Requiem for a Culture

Part 7: The Traitresses of Roswell

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

— William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III (page 80 in the Vintage paperback edition)

In the annals of the American Civil War, the story of the women of the Roswell cotton mill in Georgia is relatively obscure. I had never even heard of the incident until just a few days ago, when a talk was given at a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

In July of 1864, during the march on Atlanta, Union General Kenner Garrard burned the mills at Roswell in northern Georgia. The cotton mill in Roswell had been producing fabric for Confederate uniforms, plus tent cloth and other products destined for military use.

The next day, under General Sherman’s orders, General Garrard arranged for the deportation of about 400 civilians, most of them women and children. The women had worked in the mill, and were thus judged by General Sherman to have committed “treason”. They and their offspring were carried by wagon to Marietta, where they were loaded onto railroad cars and shipped north, first to Nashville, and then to Louisville. From there they were deported across the Ohio River into Indiana. Whatever processing they underwent after that was rudimentary; they were basically abandoned, and left to their own devices.

An undetermined number of the deportees died in transit under horrific conditions, and more died after arrival. Almost none of them are known to have ever made it back home, and there are very few records of what became of them.

During their travels they were guarded by Union soldiers, who were probably less bestial than Hamas mujahideen in the treatment of their charges, but still… One may assume that Union soldiers who were suffering from “sexual emergencies” took advantage of the opportunity presented by all those teenage girls in their care.

Also, given the privation those girls were to face in Indiana, it wouldn’t be surprising if many of them joined the ranks of the world’s oldest profession.

Why is it that there are so few historical accounts of what happened to the Roswell women?

The deportees were largely Scots-Irish, the descendants of immigrants who came to western Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia beginning in the early 1700s, and then migrated south along the Appalachians. In other words, they were the poorest of poor whites, commonly known as hillbillies or white trash. My guess is that they were illiterate, or nearly so, and thus never wrote any letters to their relatives back home. No journals or memoirs — they just disappeared into the poverty and chaos of southern Indiana, and were lost to history.

Before I get to more detailed information about the deportation of the mill workers from Roswell, I’d like to touch briefly on the absurd notion that by working in the mill they had committed “treason”.

It reminds me of a conversation I had a couple of years ago while manning a booth for the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Members in period uniforms with muskets had set up a mock encampment with a tent, etc., and next to it were selling Confederate-related merchandise from a small pavilion, which is where I was working.

One young white man came by the booth with a chip on his shoulder, and obviously wanted to argue with us. He wasn’t a Northerner. He was probably a transplant from further north in Virginia, but not a Yankee. I reported on the conversation not long after it happened, in the first post of this series:

Visitor: “I just want to know why you people think it’s a good idea to do this, to pay respect to traitors.”

Baron: “We’re here to honor our ancestors, who fought to defend the Commonwealth of Virginia. We were invaded, you know — just like Ukraine was invaded by the Russians.”

V: “But Ukraine is different. It was invaded by the forces of a completely different country.”

B: “Exactly. And Virginia was sovereign until 1865. Did you know that? It considered itself a sovereign state. You can see it in the printed materials from the time: ‘The Sovereign Commonwealth of Virginia’. Union troops came up the Shenandoah Valley, torching the fields, requisitioning food and supplies, and taking prominent citizens hostage for the good behavior of their fellow townsfolk. We were invaded, and we were defending ourselves.”

V: “Well, I have an ancestor who fought, and I don’t want to honor him. I don’t know anything about him, and I don’t want to know, because he was a traitor.”

It’s a peculiar idea, that someone who resists the invasion of a sovereign state might be considered a traitor to the invading country. Imagine, for example, a war between Prussia and the Kingdom of Saxony. Saxony was an independent, sovereign state until 1871, when it became one of the states comprising the newly-formed German Empire. Prior to 1871, if Prussia were to invade Saxony, it would be the duty of every able-bodied adult Saxon male to take up arms and resist the invader. If Prussia won the war, it might annex Saxony, or turn it into a vassal state owing fealty to the King of Prussia. But nobody involved, whether Prussian or Saxon, would have considered a Saxon who fought back against the Prussians to be a traitor to Prussia. The idea would have been ludicrous, and would never have been entertained.

The same is true of any Virginian who resisted the invasion of his sovereign state between 1861 and 1865. Or should be true, but we live in a degraded age in which language has been torqued beyond belief, and the ability to think logically about this and similar matters has atrophied.

The North won the war, and therefore got to write the terms of political arrangements afterwards. Among those terms was this: any citizen of the sovereign South who dared to resist Northern aggression was retroactively to be identified as a TRAITOR to an entity that didn’t exist before 1865. Dig it?

The paragraphs below are excerpted from “Charged With Treason: The Plight of the Roswell Women” from the American Civil War Forum:

At the time of the American Civil War, the four hundred women employed by the Roswell Mills were mostly of Scottish-Irish descent. As the mill increased in production, so did the number of people living in the area, but once the war was in full swing, the leading families of Roswell fled in advance of Sherman’s army, leaving the fate of the mills and their employees in the hands of Federal forces. Innocent civilians were left to fend for themselves and receive the entire brunt of Sherman’s wrath and vengeance.

Looking for a way to get his army across the Chattahoochee and thus into Atlanta, on July 6, 1864, Sherman sent General Garrard back upstream with orders to capture Roswell. In Garrard’s report to Sherman, he relayed that, “there were fine factories here. I had the buildings burnt, all were burnt. The cotton factory was working up to the time of its destruction, some 400 women being employed.” On July 7, 1864, Sherman wrote to General Garrard, “I repeat my orders, that you arrest all people, male and female, connected with those factories, no matter the clamour, and let them foot it under guard to Marietta, then I will send them by cars to the North.”

Thus the Roswell women were charged with treason and deported from the only homes they had ever known.

[…]

The women of the Roswell Mills and their children were kept in the open town square in the blistering heat of a Georgian July, before they were forced to march to Marietta. Roswell’s whiskey stores found their way into the hands of the Union guards and from that time on and during their escort to Marietta, the young girls of Roswell lived in a continual nightmare.

In 1860, forty per cent of the women living in Roswell were seventeen years old and younger. Therefore, at the time the Roswell Mills were burned to the ground, almost half of the population consisted of young girls on the cusp of womanhood. Along the way to Marietta, many of the women were forced to ride behind the cavalry men, which they hated. One Illinois soldier wrote home, “The employees (Roswell Mills) were all women and they were really good looking. We always felt that we had a perfect right to appropriate to our own use anything we needed for our comfort and convenience.” One Union officer found it necessary to move his troops a mile away from the women in order to control his men.

A northern newspaper correspondent reported on the deportation of the Roswell women, “Only think of it! Four hundred weeping and terrified Ellens, Susans, and Maggies, transported in springless and seatless army wagons, away from their loves and brothers of the sunny South, and all for the offense of weaving tent-cloth.”

The Roswell women suffered immensely during their long journey to Marietta and once they were deported their hardships continued. Some women did find employment in factories while others found themselves starving in the streets with their children. One newspaper published articles begging citizens (The Women Will Howl, M.D. Petite) to come to the aid of the Roswell refugees, while the governor of Indiana wrote to the Secretary of War, pleading for assistance and complaining of large numbers of destitute Southern refugees, living homeless in the streets. Other Roswell women died of disease, starvation, and exposure.

I wonder how many of the above women were forced into ***** in order to survive, or how many bore children by Union soldiers as a result of their “escort” to Marietta?

Union Lt. Col. Jeremiah Jenkins, replying to a Columbia woman who accused him of making war on women and children, “The women of the South kept the war alive and it’s only by making them suffer that we can subdue the men.” This may be the most revealing statement of Sherman’s march to the sea.

[…]

Upon this news reaching the North, a New York newspaper wrote, “It is hardly conceivable that an officer bearing a United States commission of Major General should have so far forgotten the commonest dictates of decency and humanity…as to drive four hundred penniless girls (some pregnant) hundreds of miles away from their homes and friends to seek their livelihood amid strange and hostile people. We repeat our earnest hope that further information may redeem the name of General Sherman and our own from this frightful disgrace.” Sherman said that the women were “tainted with treason and are as much governed by the rules of war as if in the ranks. The whole region was devoted to manufactories, but I will destroy every one of them.”

As an aside, the Civil War Picket makes the interesting assertion that there were in fact some men deported along with women and children:

Union troops rounded up 400 of the Ivy Woolen and Roswell mill workers (a contingent that included 87 men — some soldiers, some deserters), and then added those who worked at the Sweetwater Creek mill, which had also been captured, for a total of nearly 600 people. Five hundred were women and children.

The women who were deported from Roswell have merited little mention in most historical accounts of the war, but at least they now have a monument dedicated to them, thanks to the Sons of Confederate Veterans:

The SCV does an excellent job of recovering and preserving some of the lesser-known stories of the War for Southern Independence, among its many other estimable activities.

If you have at least one identifiable ancestor who served in the Confederate armed forces, and also have at least marginally positive feelings about the CSA, I recommend that you track down a camp in your local area and apply for membership. SCV camps are thick on the ground in the Old South, for obvious reasons, but there has been an extensive diaspora of Southerners in the past 159 years, so that the SCV can also be found in Northern states, and even in places like California and North Dakota.

The story of the Roswell women is horrific, but that’s the sort of thing that happens during wars. All wars.

Which doesn’t imply that there was any moral justification for the action, but rather that it serves as an example of why the North — which means, by extension, the current bloated tyrannical hegemonic federal government of the United States of America — lacks any claim to the moral high ground.

The women and children of Roswell were deported in order to make sure that Washington D.C. could dictate what the Southern states might and might not do, in perpetuity.

Some moral high ground.

Additional reading:

• Explore Georgia
• The New Georgia Encyclopedia
• Creative Loafing
• The Civil War Picket
• The Wikipedia article doesn’t have very much information.