Deportation of Roswell Mill Women
In July 1864 during the Atlanta campaign General William T.Sherman ordered the approximately 400 Roswell mill workers, mostly women, arrested as traitors and shipped as prisoners to the North with their children.
There is little evidence that more than a few of the women ever returned home. On July 5, seeking a way to cross the Chattahoochee River and gain access to Atlanta, Brigadier General Kenner Garrard's cavalry began the Union's twelve- day occupation of Roswell, which was undefended. The next day Garrard reported to Sherman that he had discovered the mills in full operation and had proceeded to destroy them, and that about 400 women had been employed in the mills. On
July 7 Sherman replied that the destruction of the mills "meets my entire approval." He ordered that the owners and employees be arrested and charged with treason, elaborating, "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, under guard, to Marietta, whence I will send them by [railroad] cars, to the North. .. . Let them [the women] take along their children and clothing, providing they have a means of hauling or you can spare them."
The women, their children, and the few men, most either too young or too old to fight, were transported by wagon to Marietta and imprisoned in the Georgia Military Institute, by then abandoned. Then, with several days' rations, they were loaded in boxcars that proceeded through Chattanooga, Tennessee, and after a stopover in Nashville, Tennessee, headed to Louisville, Kentucky, the final destination for many of the mill workers. Others were sent across the Ohio
River to Indiana.
First housed and fed in a Louisville refugee hospital, the women later took what menial jobs and living arrangements could be found. Those in Indiana struggled to survive, many settling near the river, where eventually mills provided employment. Unless husbands had been transported with the
women or had been imprisoned nearby, there was little probability of a return to Roswell, so the remaining women began to marry and bear children.
The tragedy, widely publicized at the time, with outrage expressed in northern as well as southern presses, was virtually forgotten over the next century. Only in the 1980s did a few writers begin to research and tell the story. Even then, the individual identities and fates of the women remained unknown.
"Destruction of New Manchester, Georgia: The Story Behind the Ruins at Sweetwater Creek State Park", by Monroe M. King
"North Across the River - A Civil War Trail of Tears" by Ruth Beaumont Cook
"The Lost Cause: The Standard Southern History of the War of the Confederates"," by Edward A. Pollard, Chapter 37
"The Story of the Confederate States" by Joseph T. Derry, Part 3, Section 3, Chapter 3 & 4
"The South Was Right" by James R. Kennedy and Walter D. Kennedy, Chapter 4
"Truths of History" by Mildred L. Rutherford, Chapter 10.
"Reports of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman", Official Records (War of the Rebellion)-- SERIES I--VOLUME XXXVIII/1 [S# 72] MAY 1-SEPTEMBER 8, 1864.--The Atlanta (Georgia) Campaign. No. 1.--U.S. Army, commanding Military Division of the Mississippi
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)-- SERIES I--VOLUME XXXVIII/5 [S# 76] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN, FROM JULY 1, 1864, TO SEPTEMBER 8, 1864.--#4
Official Records (War of the Rebellion)-- SERIES I--VOLUME XXXVIII/5 [S# 76] UNION CORRESPONDENCE, ORDERS, AND RETURNS RELATING TO OPERATIONS IN THE ATLANTA CAMPAIGN, FROM JULY 1, 1864, TO SEPTEMBER 8, 1864.--#5
RICHMOND [VA] WHIG, January 4, 1864, p. 2, c. 1
Yankee Atrocities—Ladies in Irons.
The Yankees under Gen. Wild made a raid into Camden and Pasquotank counties, North Carolina, with white and negro troops. He caused a Confederate soldier to be hanged near Elizabeth City under the plea that he was a guerilla, notwithstanding the latter are commissioned and recognized by Gov. Vance as a part of the State force of North Carolina. One of his negro soldiers was captured by our men, and he took two ladies, Mrs. Weeks and Mrs. Munden of Elizabeth City, and held them as hostages for the safety of this African.—Capt. Elliott, of the guerillas, was notified by Wild that the ladies would be treated as the negro was treated, even to hanging. They were kept in handcuffs until taken to Norfolk, where they are kept in prison, under a negro guard. We state, on the authority of a member of Congress from North Carolina, that when the ladies were taken to Norfolk, the arms of one of them was bleeding from the tightness of the cords with which they were bound. Is there no means by which the cowardly monster can be captured, and no measure by which the abolition demons may be made to regard the ordinary usages of civilized warfare?
