Lefty In Roswell

You all have in all probability heard of the Trail of Tears, when the Cherokee Indians were sent from North Carolina and Georgia to Oklahoma by strength in the 1800′s.

You may also know, in particular if you are from the South, of the great devastation and death caused by the Civil War, and how people’s homes were burned or they were forced out of them so that they could be occupied by the Union army.

But very few people know the story of another forced exile and a dissimilar kind of devastation caused by the Civil War in Roswell, Georgia and the former town of New Manchester.

In 1864, at least 400 and perchance as a heap of as 700 mill workers, almost all women, black and white and their children, were arrested as traitors and shipped North by force, and very few of them ever made their way back home. Those husbands and sons who made it through the war returned home to Roswell to find their families gone, and no way of knowing where.

It was July, and the Atlanta Campaign was in full swing, General Sherman burning and slashing his way to Atlanta and his March to the Sea. Seeking a way to cross the Chattahoochee, General Kenner Garrard begun his twelve-day occupation of Roswell, which was altogether undefended. Everyone except the mill-workers had fled the city. The mills, two cotton mills and a woolen mill, remained in operation, making cloth for uniforms and other military needs, like rope and canvas.

The day after Garrard arrived, he sent a message to Sherman that he had came upon the mills and was in the procedure of demolishing them. Sherman messaged back that the destruction of the mills met his “entire approval.” He then added,

“I repeat my orders that you arrest all people, male and female, connected with those factories, no matter what the clamor, and let them foot it, underneath guard, to Marietta, whence I will send them by [railroad] cars, to the North. THE POOR WOMEN WILL MAKE A HOWL…Let them [the women] take along their children and clothing, supplying they have a means of hauling or you may spare them.”

Then, a day later, he added, “Whenever the people are in the way, ship them to a new country north and west.”

The women and a few men who were too old or too young too fight and all the children were rounded up and marched, under guard, the ten or so miles to Marietta and brought to the abandoned Georgia Military Institute. Along the way, Garrard added more people who seemed to be “in the way.”

General George H. Thomas wrote to Gen. Sherman, “The Roswell factory hands, 400 or 500 hundred in number, have arrived in Marietta. The most of them are women. I may only order them transportation to Nashville where it seems hard to turn them adrift. What had best be done with them?”

Sherman replied, “I have ordered General Webster at Nashville to dispose of them. They will be sent to Indiana.”

There was another factory in the town of New Manchester on Sweet Water Creek due west of Atlanta where the women were also transported. But that city was burned to the ground and never rebuilt, so the women never returned and their fates have been lost.

From Marietta, they were loaded into boxcars, given various days’ rations, and taken, not knowing where they were going or what their fate was to be, to Louisville, Kentucky, where galore were unloaded, while a good deal of others were taken throughout the Ohio River into Indiana.

One woman who worked in the Roswell Mill was transported along with her mother and her grandmother, who were likewise mill workers. On the journey, her mother and her grandmother both died. The grandmother had been so feeble that she had been transported aboard the steamship to be shipped all over the Ohio in a rocking chair.

In the beginning, the women in Kentucky were fed and housed by a Louisville refugee hospital, but then they were left to find living quarters and employment on their own. The ones in Indiana was struggling from the beginning, taking whatsoever work they could find. They were uneducated and knew not one thing but mill work, and most who pulled through at last found employment in the Kentucky and Indiana mills. There was very little possibleness that they would get home, and most were illiterate and could not write to any person to let them recognise where they were.

These women were “the enemy,” and, peculiarly in Indiana, the towns along the river were overrun. Many of the women passed from physical life from disease, which reached epidemic proportions, and others of starvation or exposure.

Eventually, not knowing if their husbands were alive or dead, galore of the women who pulled through remarried in the North. In the South, men came home from the war to find their wives and families missing, and presumed them dead, and remarried.

Some few of the women did make it back. One such case was that of Adeline Bagley Buice.. She had been pregnant when she was shipped away, and it took her five years to get back to Roswell with her daughter, only to discover that her husband had given her up for dead and remarried.

It was not until 1998 that the Roswell Mills Camp No. 1547, Sons of the Confederate Veterans,began a project to undertake to distinguish the victims and locate their descendants. Intensive publicity and exploration led to a lot of of the descendants being located, for the most part in the North, and most of the mill workers were identified. In 2000, the city of Roswell erected a monument to the women who were exiled from there.

How does one warrant making war on women and children? How does one ever warrant it?

“War is Hell,” Sherman said.

“The women of the south kept the war alive–and it is only by making them suffer that we may subdue the men,” said Jeremiah Jenkins, a Union Lt. Colonel.

The sad thing is that the howl of the women, deafening as it much have been, resounded for so short of time through the years. How may a lesson be learned, if the stories are not told?

Lefty In Roswell Picture

Lefty In Roswell Picture

Lefty In Roswell Pic

Lefty In Roswell Photo