The Civil War is often remembered as Union versus Confederacy, states rights versus enslavement, brother versus brother. A collection of battles strewn across the country from Gettysburg to Atlanta and many more in between.
Men marching off to war as done so many times before in history, but what about the people left at home? What did they do during a time of chaos and war? How did Gwinnett handle the war brought right to their backyard?
Gwinnett was mostly a rural farming community of almost 13,000 people in 1860, where basic needs and survival were met by working the land. Most of Gwinnett could not afford to enslave another human to work for them and instead depended on having large families and community support to survive. When the war began, no one anticipated it being long and assumed the men would at least be home in time to bring in the harvest…