If you read letters that confederates wrote home, you will find that they thought they were defending their homes.
Was not Sherman’s march to the sea an invasion where a
path of destruction was wrought that lasted for 100 years.
Sherman’s march was at the end of the war and at that point they may have been defending their homes but that’s unlikely since the bulk of them were far north of Georgia marching with Lee.
They surely thought that they were defending their homes because they early on bought into the propaganda that the yankees were weak and without the will to fight so early on they didn’t worry about any union invasion. They were fighting for the myth of states rights. They made the first moves and attempted to take Washington, that failed.
If it weren’t for a string of political, inept generals on the union side the rebellion might have been put down much earlier. Then there was McClelland, the southern sympathizer, the MacArthur of his time. It took a while for the north to finally figure out that they needed generals who would fight like Grant and Sherman.
Sherman’s “destruction” was vastly overplayed by the south. His path was necessarily very narrow since he left his supply train behind. The fires that burned Atlanta were mostly set by retreating confederates to deny the union any usable materials. When the union army entered Atlanta, it was already burning. I seem to recall that on the 100th anniversary of Sherman’s march there were magazine articles that noted how the “path of destruction” had been mostly rural and that the few cities affected had quickly recovered, by the beginning of the 20th century. In 1964, Atlanta and other southern cities were booming centers of commerce and had been for years. Certainly not 100 years to come back.
Hood took his army away from the front of Sherman, refusing to defend the south from Sherman.
This was after Hood burned Atlanta.
What ever Hood was doing, it wasn’t defending southern homes.
It is also important to note that southern men were conscripted. They had been required to join their state’s militia. As members of the militia they were required to go on slave partrols, for the benefit of the wealthy that owned slaves. The states were required to provide soldiers to the Confederate armies, and they sent their soldiers as a conscript mass.
Some soldiers, after being wounded, were sent home, where they were again conscripted into the state militia, and again provided, while on convalescent leave, to the Confederacy to fulfill the quota of soldiers. Those poor souls, after their convalescent leave was up would have been serving in one unit while listed as a deserter in another, by the pretended authority of their state government.
The pretended confederacy was about enslavement of blacks, but also about enslavement of whites to support the institution of slavery, as well as by slave catchers whose business was kidnapping followed as necessary by bribery of judges to create papers that made people slaves. By contrast, rich white slave owners, if they owned enough slaves, got a deferment from conscription.