A Longer Look at the Great Valley

Abstract

A Longer Look at the Great Valley Lindsey Bestebreurtje (bio) Edward L. Ayers. The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Press, 2017. xix + 576 pp. Figures, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. The ability to craft a compelling narrative about the past relies heavily on the ability to find diverse and engaging sources. The University of Virginia's "In the Valley of the Shadow" project provides historians with just this kind of robust source material on Americans' lived experience during the Civil War and its aftermath. First launched in the early 1990s under the leadership of William G. Thomas III and Edward L. Ayers, the digital archive documents two communities—Augusta County, Virginia and Franklin County, Pennsylvania—from the 1850s to 1870. Ayers's latest work, The Thin Light of Freedom, draws heavily from "In the Valley of the Shadow." It provides a close reading of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Augusta and Franklin from 1863 to 1902. In many ways this is the unofficial second part to his 2003 book, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, which explores Franklin and Augusta from 1859 to 1863.1 In this latest work he pushes beyond the chronological barrier of the archive, continuing to examine the local experience during Reconstruction through to the codification of Jim Crow in the early 1900s. In this narrative Ayers explores the concept of fluid boundaries in depth, a frequent theme in his body of work.2 Both counties are located within the Great Valley, the area between the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. This area straddled the divide between the United States and the Confederacy and was a location of frequent battles and skirmishes, changing hands many times. While certain elements of the two areas make them distinct, Ayers shows how they are in many ways representative of their respective regions in terms of social opinion, politics, and lived experience. In each chapter he uses personal vignettes to analyze shifting boundaries between North and South, armies and ideologies, and between enslaved and free, white and black, male and female, army and civilian. Each division is explored through the lenses of military strategy, soldiers' experiences, politics, and civilian life. Franklin County resident Rachel and her Union cavalrymen husband Samuel Cormany; Confederate Brigadier General John Imboden, who was stationed throughout [End Page 592] the Valley; and African-American soldiers Jacob, Samuel, Joseph, and William Christy, as well as their families back home in Franklin, are just a few of the individuals and families who populate this work. Crafting such a personal and detailed account of the final years of the Civil War and Reconstruction requires diverse sources. Ayers looks at diaries, letters, newspapers, census records, soldiers' records, Freedmen's Bureau reports, memoirs, photographs, and maps from the "Valley of the Shadow" project to provide a human perspective on the fighting and its aftermath. Ayers discusses these areas and their people on a seasonal, monthly, and sometimes even daily basis from the years 1863 to 1902, with special concentration on the years 1863 to 1869. This unusual periodization begins with the Confederate invasion of Pennsylvania. Throughout his book, Ayers focuses on the struggles of African Americans to secure social, political, and economic freedoms. White backlash to black civil rights actually created a more progressive legal reality for African Americans. Challenges first on the war front and then in politics pushed Democrats and former Confederates toward harder-line resistance to social progress for the formerly enslaved, which in turn pushed African Americans and Republican leaders to strive for even more reforms, even as racism continued.3 Unfortunately, these reforms were ultimately abandoned. Ayers also argues that his geographical and chronological focus, combined with a close reading of personal sources, reveals that the war's conclusion and the "remarkable advances of emancipation and Reconstruction were not … inevitable victories" (p. xxi). In fact, "the full consequences of the Civil War remained in doubt far into the conflict and through its prolonged aftermath" (p. xxi). By focusing on how individuals perceived events of the war and Reconstruction in real time, Ayers attempts to recapture the...