ABSTRACT
In 1863, as battles raged on distant fields, a newspaper editor in the central Georgia town of Milledgeville was more concerned about the war at home. In an essay discussing the many ways in which white Southerners were working against the Confederacy, the editor wrote: “We are fighting each other harder than we ever fought the enemy” (Williams, Williams, and Carlson 164). Samuel Knight agreed. After touring southwest Georgia in the late fall and winter of 1863–64, he wrote to Governor Joe Brown of “strong Union feeling” in that part of the state. Knight concluded that white Southerners were “as bitterly divided against each other” as they ever had been against Northerners (Williams 1).
