Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War ed. by Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites

Abstract

Reviewed by: Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War ed. by Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites Lynn Kennedy Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War. Edited by Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites. UnCivil Wars. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. Pp. viii, 306. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5634-1; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5631-0.) The household in nineteenth-century America was not only the site of familial relationships but also a central unit of economic and social organization; it thus provides an ideal lens through which to understand larger events and meanings. Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War explores the diverse ways the Civil War household shaped the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. Fundamentally, the edited collection suggests how the household and battlefield became intertwined, emphasizing "the reality [End Page 342] that households were both the sites of war as well as the basic social structures that underlay the Confederate and Union armies, polities, and economies" (p. 3). The inclusion of both northern and southern households further provides insight into the persistence of shared national values and into the complexity of relationships and loyalties created during this conflict. Organized into four sections, the essays survey the various functions of the household as a provider of emotional and material support, a basis for claims to social and political status, and a site of social challenge and control. Part 1 takes a psychological focus, considering how the private household relations of three well-known historical figures—Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant—shaped their public behavior. Joan E. Cashin focuses on how the material spaces of the various households in which Lincoln resided reflected her broader experiences. Joseph M. Beilein Jr. argues that extant historiography has bifurcated Lee into either a general or a man, but that in fact these two elements of his identity cannot be separated. Brooks D. Simpson's essay suggests how extended kinship networks complicated household relations for Grant. The essays in Part 2 explore the connections that ordinary people, men and women, northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, drew between their households and the war. Jonathan W. White investigates the dreams of home recounted in the letters of soldiers, and how such dreams suggested the central role the household played in soldiers' lives, both consciously and unconsciously. These dreams provided both physical and emotional comfort to the soldiers and could also become a means for expressing anxiety around separation from their families. While White's work focuses on the psychological sustenance offered by the household, LeeAnn Whites's essay examines the essential material supplies that households contributed to the war. Both goods and money moved back and forth between the household and the battlefield. Whites also demonstrates how this supply chain maintained household inequalities in the war, as soldiers depended on what their families could send, and those whose households could not sacrifice such provisions undoubtedly suffered from the lack. Julie A. Mujic's work on Wisconsin households uses the letters written to state politicians to show how women responded to the war's disruptions "by shifting the place of the household, by flexing it and expanding it outward to encompass the battlefield" (p. 102). Even as women volunteered to send supplies and bring the caregiving function of the household to the soldiers, they expected the state to facilitate this interaction, thus using the exigencies of war to reframe the household's relationship to the state. Part 3 goes beyond emotional or material connections to explore the literal merging of the household and the battlefield, resulting in significant displacements and disruptions. Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that the forced removal of southern households in the path of the Union army was a deliberate military strategy "to blur distinctions that typically separated civilians from enemy combatants" (p. 138). Margaret Storey explores the flipside of this strategy, with the wives of Union officers setting up households in occupied territory. Such disrupted and constructed households both became symbols of the Union's control over this territory that went beyond a battlefield victory. Andrew K. Frank provides another...