#watching the confederacy slowly clue in to the fact that this was going to be harder than they had bargained for..... oops....!

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

But as men entered military service, the talk about protecting women began to shape a new, war-born relationship between citizens, subjects, and the state. Confederate citizens of all sorts readily subscribed to the view that the Civil War was a defensive war waged for the protection of hearth, home, and womanhood. State officials subscribed to it, too, or at least said that they did. Citizens thus not unreasonably expected that military deployment would be shaped by, or at least accommodate, those social goals. But therein lay the problem. For men took their role as protectors of women seriously. From the first, the nature of the call to arms seemed to authorize a very local notion of defense-literally home protection-that made the task of military mobilization all the more tricky. In the innocence of the early months, before the staggering requirements of the war hit home, most volunteers worked on the assumption that service would be local and short term, allowing them to fulfill their obligations both to their family and to the Confederacy. "We are composed mostly of married men of families," the Magnolia Rifles of Randolph County, Georgia, explained to the governor. "We want a place in our own state and feel that 12 months will be best for us and our families." Men expected war and military service to accommodate the farming cycle and their customary obligation to support and protect their dependents.

But already by May 1861 the Confederate War Department was facing up to the task of building a national army and authorized enlistment of as many as four hundred thousand men, not for twelve months as previously, but for three years or the duration of the war. The idea of a truly national army stirred up enormous resistance as men faced service out of their own locality and even out of the state. In Georgia men complained about being forced to go too far." Once the Confederacy started mobilizing for war, it wasn't long before white men began to feel that the protection of womanhood was at odds with military service, the private duties of husband and father antagonistic to the political obligation of the citizen-soldier. "It is the greatest dilemma that mankind can feel to leave a family in ... destitute condition," one enlisted man with a sick wife and three small children wrote his governor in 1862. "Still I know there is a great obligation resting on me to shoulder arms in defense of my country.""

Caught in the dilemma of conflicting private and public obligations, men turned the problem back to the state, demanding the reciprocity implicit in freemen's obligation to serve. The quid pro quo was widely understood. Jacob Blount of Attapulgas, Georgia, put it to his governor: "Sir," he wrote, "I am willing to defend my country but I as well as all other men want my wife and children protected." In calling repeatedly on state governors and the Confederate president and secretary of war to fill their shoes at home, new soldiers both expressed and deepened their vision of women as objects of protection. For if politicians and state officials cast women as objects of male protection (as the responsibility of their husbands), those men called to military service insisted on a more even exchange. In offering their military service to the state of South Carolina (as proof of their allegiance), two different groups of free blacks asked "only that if ordered off... our wives and children will be taken care of & provided for."

stephanie mccurry, confederate reckoning: power and politics in the civil war south