Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the US-Mexico Borderlands

Reviewed by: Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War Marc Egnal Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War. By Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 362. Cloth, $45.00.) The Civil War was not only fought on the battlefield. It was also a clash in the realm of ideas, as leaders, both North and South, sought to convince individuals in their own sections, in the opposing region, and in the world at large of the righteousness of their cause. Coauthors (and brothers) Nicholas and Peter Onuf state, “Our purpose in Nations, Markets, and War is to illuminate the critical conceptual developments in Western liberal thought that enabled Lincoln to see the crisis of the union as an epochal struggle for the new nation’s soul” (4). They want to examine the ideas “that enabled Americans to think themselves out of the old union and into two separate and hostile nations” (181). Despite its worthy goals and the insightful analyses of particular thinkers, the Onufs’ book does not succeed in relating the evolution of Western thought to the American Civil War. The first part of the book, less relevant for Civil War historians, examines European thought from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. In five chapters, this section analyzes writers such as Hugo Grotius, David Hume, Emmerich de Vattel, Thomas Hobbes, and, particularly, Adam Smith. These pages present a great deal of information on views of civilization, concepts of progress, the emergence of “liberalism,” and the idea of a nation. But Nicholas Onuf, who wrote this section, makes little effort to link these chapters to the overall goal of understanding the Civil War. More broadly, these chapters too often lack coherence or a clear argument. Making sense of this section, even on a sentence level, is frequently tough sledding. Readers must wrestle with statements such as, “In Foucault’s account, resemblances come in many forms, but in Renaissance discourse, four forms of ‘similitude’ dominate,” or, “If faculties translate into rights in [End Page 311] the relations of equals they translate into property when considered on their own in relation to everything else in nature” (113, 132). The second part, written chiefly by Peter Onuf, looks at American thought from Thomas Jefferson to the Civil War, although a chapter reflects again on the influence of Adam Smith. Here the lines of influence between writers and those involved in the sectional clash are shorter. Still, the links often remain vague. These chapters present thoughtful essays on Smith as a moral historian and Jefferson’s views of nationhood but do not show how such views influenced exchanges in the 1850s. Discussions of Pennsylvanian Henry C. Carey and South Carolinian William Henry Trescot are valuable and seem more pertinent, because these individuals were also participants in the conflict. But again the impact these writers had on the larger debate is not always clear. Many northerners rejected Carey’s advice, just as southerners often spurned Trescot’s counsels. Part of the difficulty the Onufs face lies in the need to ground intellectual discourse, the focus of their work, in political and social realities. One assertion the authors make repeatedly is that “the American Civil War was the first fully modern war; there would have been no war had the North and South not been modern nations” (18). But this statement is puzzling, particularly since the Onufs describe the North and South as “modern nations that commanded the loyalties and lives of their peoples” (4). If this depiction is questionable for the North, it certainly does not hold for the Confederacy, where large areas were disaffected and at least one in five individuals who took up arms joined the opposing side. More plausible would be the contention that a modern nation (as they define the term) was the result rather than a cause of the Civil War. The task the Onufs have set for themselves is ambitious and potentially of great value. The two authors, both accomplished scholars, have read a vast array of treatises, pamphlets, and other primary sources. But the final product is unsatisfactory. Despite its length and breadth...

This dissertation examines how Black Iowans and Kansans fought for the right to serve as soldiers during the Civil War and used their military service to claim equal citizenship rights during the Civil War era. In doing so, they helped reconstruct the meaning of citizenship in their states and throughout the nation and defined the meaning of freedom for themselves and their communities. Midwestern states like Iowa and Kansas were at the forefront of the debate over the issue of the westward expansion of slavery and debates concerning Black emigration and citizenship rights. As such, to better understand the national debate over these issues, it is necessary to understand how such debates played out in these border states. As free territories and then states bordering the slave state of Missouri, White Iowans and Kansans feared the emigration of both enslaved and free Black people and passed Black laws that denied Black men and women basic citizenship rights such as voting, militia service, judicial rights, and even exclusionary laws meant to prevent the emigration of Black people. Black people and their White allies pushed back against these discriminatory laws through petitions and colored conventions claiming their rights as citizens by citing the previous military service of Black men during wars like the Revolutionary War as evidence of their earned birthright citizenship. During the Civil War, Black Kansans and Iowans petitioned for the right to serve as soldiers to prove once again their worthiness as citizens. The First Kansas Colored Infantry was the first Black regiment to see combat during the Civil War and helped pave the way for the organization of other Black regiments throughout the nation by refuting through their brave actions prevalent nineteenth century American racist stereotypes used to deny Black men the right to serve in the military and from exercising citizenship rights. After winning the right to raise Black regiments, Black activists worked to recruit Black men in several states, including Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Arkansas, Minnesota, and also Indian Territory. Military service profoundly affected Black Iowa and Kansas soldiers, their families, and Black communities. Black soldiers learned various skills from their service like reading and writing, discipline, and how to advocate for their rights and that of their communities. In addition, soldiers were also instrumental in building community infrastructure such as schools, churches, and orphanages necessary for the social and economic uplift of Black communities after the war. Black soldiers also developed lasting bonds with comrades during their service that they maintained after the war and utilized as they moved to the same Midwestern communities and founded and joined the same churches, fraternal orders, and other social institutions. During and after the war, Black soldiers, their families, and community activists used the political capital of Black military service to argue for the repeal of Black Laws, education rights, and suffrage rights in Iowa and Kansas. Black soldiers created new lives for themselves and their families in Midwestern communities with these newly won rights. This dissertation builds upon the work of historians such as Donald R. Schaffer and his more general examination of the postwar lives of Black veterans and the effects of military service on their transition to civilian life by providing a more focused regional approach through the examination of Iowa and Kansas. It further builds upon the work of historians such as Elliott West and Leslie Schwalm and the expanding “Greater Reconstruction” historiography that calls for the study of Reconstruction’s effects on all regions of the nation, especially the West. This study does so by utilizing military pension records and other primary source materials from the National Archives as well as various newspapers and archival records from Iowa and Kansas archives to reconstruct the lived experience of Black soldiers, their families, and their communities and better understand the social and political effects of emancipation and Reconstruction in Midwestern states like Iowa and Kansas. By examining petitions, state and national colored convention minutes, and newspaper editorials utilized by Black soldiers and activists, this study shows Black military service's vital part in the rhetorical battle to secure the recognition of Black citizenship rights in the Midwest. This research breaks new ground by emphasizing the crucial role Black soldiers, their families, and communities played in the Midwest's radical transformation during the Civil War and Reconstruction era as well as their contributions to the advancement of Black suffrage rights nationally. In particular, Black veterans in Iowa were at the forefront of the effort to secure Black suffrage rights in the state. They helped to make Iowa the first Northern state after the Civil War to recognize the suffrage rights of Black men. Both Iowa and Kansas veterans were leaders in national organizations like the Colored Conventions movement and the Colored Soldier’s and Sailor’s League and personally petitioned members of Congress and the President of the United States to pass legislation guaranteeing Black veterans equal bounties and pensions and to pass the 15th Amendment to the Constitution. In addition, this study calls for further analysis of the postwar lives of other Black veterans and their communities and the effects of military service in their efforts to secure equal rights and shape the meaning of freedom in other parts of the nation.

Reviewed by: The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict by Andre Fleche Christopher Childers The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. Andre Fleche. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8078-3523-4, 224 pp., cloth, $39.95. Andre Fleche has written a book that truly delivers on its promise to enhance our understanding of the Civil War in an international context of revolution, nationalism, and nationhood. He compares America's second revolution—a concept Charles and Mary Beard first posited—to the revolutions of Europe, illustrating how northerners and southerners drew inspiration from the legacy of 1848. As Fleche points out, with the massive influx of European immigrants arriving on American shores in the 1850s came the ideas that had driven the cause of Old World democratic revolution. Historians have recognized how the North and South drew legitimacy for their respective causes from the contested meanings of the American Revolution. The United States and the Confederate States found inspiration in the War for Independence, but they applied different lessons from that conflict thanks to competing notions of nationalism. Fleche adds to this body of scholarship by tracing the development and manifestation of American nationalism—in its northern and southern versions—alongside the European impetus for self-government. According to Fleche, the Confederacy located its right to revolution and the rationale for a new union in the European nationalist legacy. The Union, however, drew a far different lesson from the revolutions of 1848; they portrayed the Confederates as aristocratic slaveholders seeking to halt human moral progress, much like the aristocratic rulers who crushed the spirit of progressive revolution in Europe. The northerners' Civil War drew from the wellspring of European [End Page 390] resistance to privilege and overweening power to repel the specter of the slave power. Accordingly, German and Irish immigrants, among others, faced a choice in 1861: support the Confederacy's struggle to "affirm the rights of self-determination for all peoples" or oppose a "slaveholding aristocracy dangerous to the civil liberties of all mankind" (38). Fleche persuasively argues that northerners and southerners developed competing notions of nationalism in an international context. Though he does not explicitly state as much, questions of nationalism and states' rights that had lingered in Americans' minds since the Confederation era, and that the Constitution had left unanswered, remained and led to discord by the eve of the Civil War. Long before 1861, northern intellectuals had looked toward creating a consolidated nationalist state, whereas southerners looked at consolidation as a Yankee leviathan that would consume the genius of American politics—state sovereignty. Fleche adds immeasurably to our understanding of the nationalist debate by explaining how both sides found legitimacy for their beliefs in the history of European revolution. Northerners believed that without consolidation the United States would descend into a confederation of petty states. Southerners, however, embraced the confederation model as a safeguard for their peculiar institution, which had facilitated the rise of King Cotton and by the 1850s had become tightly woven into the social, cultural, and economic fabric of the South itself. Whereas northern consolidationists saw confederation as a weak and outmoded form of American nationalism, southern states' rights proponents saw consolidation as an attack on liberty, racial unity, and class harmony. Fleche makes perhaps his greatest contribution to a deeper understanding of Civil War causation and nationalism by showing how North and South legitimized their opinions in the context of European consolidation versus decentralization. Fleche's most tenuous link between American and European revolutionary thought rests in his discussion of race. He takes care to note that unionists who called for an end to slavery rarely championed civil rights for African Americans. Unionists may well have "believed that the defeat of the 'slave-holding aristocracy' would enable the world's free workers to prosper as small landholders," but would African Americans join the proletariat's westward march? (5). Fleche notes throughout his book that northerners—whether recent immigrants or multi-generational Americans—sought the defeat of an elite white adversary rather than black equality, but the question of where African Americans as...

The Anglo-American War of 1812 was fought between two literate populations sharing a common language. It began in mid-1812, and although ended by a peace treaty signed on 24 December 1814, active operations continued until the treaty had been ratified in Washington, and news had reached the various theatres, including the Indian Ocean. While the British treated it as a mere sideshow to the Napoleonic conflict, to be quickly forgotten, for Americans it was the defining event of an era, one that generated numerous deeply partisan accounts to sustain domestic agendas long after the origins, aims and outcomes of the conflict had faded from memory. Above all, the Americans created the illusion of victory in a ‘Second War of Independence’ to sustain the Republican Party. This mythology would shape the development of divergent sectional and national cultures in the era before the Civil War.

Reviewed by: Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U. S.—Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser Robert Wooster Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U. S.—Mexico Borderlands. By William S. Kiser. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022. Pp. 262. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In this, his fifth book published since 2011, William S. Kiser continues to burnish his reputation as a prodigious researcher, productive writer, and keen analyst of the mid-nineteenth century southwestern borderlands from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Using an impressive variety of manuscripts, official documents, English- and Spanish-language newspapers, and secondary books and articles, Kiser demonstrates the often-overlooked significance of northern Mexico to the American Civil War and Greater Reconstruction (meaning the imperial struggles for hemispheric dominance as well as the fate of slavery and the former Confederate states). The weight of the evidence is indeed overwhelming: countless Confederate and Union political officials, army officers, diplomats, and [End Page 585] rogue leaders envisioned the northern borderlands of Mexico as a means of furthering their national and personal ambitions, more often than not through such "irregular diplomacy" (7) as fantastical schemes, filibustering, bribes, tariffs, and secret personal deals. By 1864, the occupation of much of the region by Emperor Maximilian I's imperialists only increased the potential stakes, as the French presence promised even more meaningful opportunities for a Confederate resurgence. As Kiser rightly insists, however, "the localized nature of borderlands diplomacy" (28) greatly complicated the dreams of outsiders. State governors Ignacio Pesqueíra (Sonora), Luis Terrazas (Chihuahua), Santiago Vidaurri (Nuevo León), and Albino López (Tamaulipas) stubbornly sought to maintain their local sovereignty while continuing to further their own personal interests as they balanced official and unofficial diplomacy with the external forces. Bandits, smugglers, and non-state regional strongmen such as Patricio Milmo, Juan Cortina, Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio also sought to exploit these rivalries through financial machinations and open warfare to further their own causes, which invariably featured a greater emphasis on local rather than national interests. To transform the complex variety of ingredients into a comprehensible narrative, Kiser sensibly organizes his work into five chapters: one on the pre-Civil War diplomacy that had shaped the region; one each on the Mexican northwest (Chihuahua and Sonora) and northeast (Nuevo León and Tamaulipas) before mid-1863; and one for each of these regions following the French intervention. A concluding essay seeks to bring borderlands diplomacy into the present day. Built upon the foundational publications of historian Jerry Thompson along with Kiser's own studies, Illusions of Empire makes the strongest case in print for the importance of Mexican diplomacy to the United States during the Civil War era. Furthermore, it offers important analytical opportunities for Texas historians beyond the southwestern borderlands. Traditional scholars, including this reviewer, have tended to compartmentalize the complicated experiences of the Lone Star State in the mid-nineteenth century into segmented time periods and regions. That research has been invaluable in establishing a basic narrative. But a deeper understanding of the Texas past now requires something of a paradigm shift. Rather than shaping our investigations around unique eras like the antebellum years, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and approaching our studies from the perspective of separate regions—the South and the Confederacy, the American West, and the southwestern borderlands—we need to begin the more complicated but infinitely more rewarding task of emphasizing, as Kiser suggests, a "more expansive vision" (7) of the interconnectedness of these experiences. [End Page 586] Robert Wooster Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (emeritus) Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga's War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 is an important work of synthesis and original research concerning Anglo-American, European immigrant, and Mexican relationships on the US-Mexico borderlands. African Americans and Native Americans are also included in the study; however, the former receives limited attention and the latter are depicted as villains in the way of economic progress.González-Quiroga inserts his work within the historiographical debate over whether the Anglo-American and Mexican relationship was mainly one of conflict or cooperation. David Montejano's Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (1987) is the standard for grappling with this question. Montejano used an economic paradigm to understand shifting race relations over time and geography. Ranching economies led to more harmonious relationships and farming led to harsher ones. Eventually, a merchant and consumer economy helped end Juan Crow segregation. For González-Quiroga, binational trade and unity in subduing Native Americans through “cooperative violence” led to pragmatic relations that were ruptured at times by Anglo-American racist violence against Mexicans. Cooperative violence also occurred during rebellions and foreign invasions. Eventually, by 1880, both nation-states gained further control over the border regions, which allowed for binational economic integration and led to greater harmony between both groups.Gonzáles-Quiroga untangles the socioeconomic, political, and racial history of the borderlands through nine chapters using both a chronological and thematic approach. He follows a standard Texas history chronology, following the Texas Secession Movement, the Republic of Texas Era and War of North American Aggression of 1846–48, 1850s statehood, the US Civil War and French Intervention, and the defeat of Native Americans by 1880.Chapters 1 and 2 examine the tumultuous period of 1830–48, with the related conflicts of the Texas rebellion and the United States invasion of Mexico. Through diligent investigation, Gonzáles-Quiroga finds many examples of political and economic cooperation between Anglos and Mexicans that contrast with studies that solely focus on conflict. Chapters 2 and 3 examine strengthening ties between both groups during the 1850s, and chapters 4 and 5 look at how both the Civil War and the French Intervention led to cooperative violence in both conflicts as well as the cross-border economic opportunities that arose from the conflicts.The last three thematic chapters focus on the period of 1868–80. In “A Most Violent Decade,” González-Quiroga examines both state-sanctioned and extralegal violence to describe the period of the 1870s. He centers his description as an economic competition for land and cattle between Anglos, Mexicans, and Native Americans. He rightly notes labeling Mexicans as cattle thieves was a trope to justify violence and theft against them as noted by the Comisión Pesquisidora. González-Quiroga's use of the commission's research and findings is an important corrective to the historiographical distortion of the Cattle War / Skinning War trope that discursively hides the state-sanctioned violence against Mexicans in the Nueces Strip. As Armando Alonzo's Tejano Legacy (1998) has shown, statistical data concerning Mexican economic dominance bears out that most of the wealth in the late nineteenth century was held by Mexicans. Despite the violence, migration to the border region increased as González-Quiroga describes in “Between Hate and Harmony,” with population growth of US citizens in Mexico and Mexicans nationals in Texas. The final chapter, “Pacification and Economic Integration,” describes Porfirio Díaz's recognition of the United States after the Revolution of Tuxtepec (1876), a military defeat of Native Americans that led to the development of a transnational railroad network connecting both nations’ expanding economies.As noted in the introduction, the main weakness of González-Quiroga's work is his depiction of Native Americans as obstacles to economic progress because they are never afforded the same complex analysis given to Anglo-Americans, European immigrants, and Mexicans. Nonetheless, this book provides a nuanced examination of conflict and cooperation between Anglo-Americans and Mexicans that is often missing in other works.

Reviewed by: Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War Northed. by Robert M. Sandow, and: Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Eraby Grant R. Brodrecht David Graham Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North. Edited by Robert M. Sandow. Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher. The North's Civil War. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 310. $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7975-3.) Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era. By Grant R. Brodrecht. The North's Civil War. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Pp. [vi], 278. Paper, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7991-3; cloth, $140.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7990-6.) The Fordham University Press series The North's Civil War has provided stellar scholarship on the northern Civil War experience for many years. While the Civil War–era South lures many social and cultural historians, as well as scholars of memory studies, Fordham University Press continues to highlight important work on the Union and its multifaceted war effort. Two of the most recent contributions to the series maintain this invaluable tradition and drive Civil War scholarship forward. Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War Northedited by Robert M. Sandow and Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Eraauthored by Grant R. Brodrecht provide insight on several understudied aspects of the American Civil War. Taken together, these two books demonstrate exciting developments underway in the field of Civil War history. In Contested Loyalty, editor Sandow presents ten thought-provoking essays by some of the most talented Civil War historians writing today. The essays examine the significance of the concept of loyalty to different groups of people during and after the war. The essays underscore the notion that loyalty did not mean one thing. Rather, how people interpreted the concept of loyalty during the war depended, in part, on their position in society. One of the strengths of this collection is its clear elucidation that the idea of loyalty during the war was complicated. Each essay serves as an individual case study of how the varied interpretations of loyalty "played out in everyday life" (p. 8). Several essays also point to the limits of national loyalty. By highlighting voices of dissent, the authors show that loyalty was not simply accepted by all in the North. Most Civil War scholarship on loyalty centers on the Confederacy. The essays featured in Contested Loyaltyseek to correct this imbalance, and they do so effectively. The necessity of this research is made even more apparent when the ubiquity of the term loyaltyduring the Civil War era is uncovered. Loyalty was on the lips of many in the North, and the frequent debates over the term warrant further investigation. The essays are roughly organized into thematic groups. The first three essays look at loyalty in the context of national and state politics. Two authors connect the concept of loyalty to the legacy of Reconstruction. The third essay, by Jonathan W. White, provides an enlightening glimpse into the meanings of loyalty through a discussion of the debates in the Pennsylvania legislature about compensation for Confederate raids. The next two chapters explore the understudied topic of college education and its impact during the Civil War era. Sean A. Scott provides a different interpretation of northern Protestant clergy in [End Page 697]his essay, arguing that not all clergymen fit into the categories of loyal and patriotic. The next group of chapters focuses on conversations about loyalty and their implications for notions of labor. This section includes Judith Giesberg's important challenge to the narrative of unquestioningly supportive northern women. Giesberg analyzes northern women's pursuit of improved pay and job security as evidence that northern women's loyalty to the Union cause was not as simple as the traditional narrative suggests. The final section of essays examines the impact of race and ethnicity on loyalty, with the perspectives of Irish Americans and protests by African American Union regiments serving as case studies. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its powerful demonstration that...

Reviewed by: Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality by Judith Giesberg Brie Swenson Arnold (bio) Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. By Judith Giesberg. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 152. $29.95 cloth; $19.99 ebook) While historians have directed substantial attention to the influence of gender in nineteenth-century America, much remains to be uncovered and explained about the history of sexuality during the Civil War era. In this slim volume, Civil War women's and gender history expert Judith Giesberg offers the first scholarly examination of the erotica and pornography circulated among U.S. Army soldiers during the Civil War and connects this story to its antebellum roots and postwar implications. The volume is based on presentations given by Giesberg as part of the Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era in which leading scholars discuss topics that "chart new directions for research in the field and offer scholars and general readers fresh perspectives on the Civil War era" (frontispiece). In four chapters that span a fifty year period bridging the antebellum, Civil War, and postbellum periods, [End Page 538] Giesberg shows how the Civil War "bisected" two critically important moments in American sexual culture and "antipornography activism" (p. 100). Chapter one details the antebellum proliferation of erotic publications (made possible by such things as advances in printing and distribution and the prevalence of antislavery literature containing scenes some found titillating) as well as "transatlantic attempts to control … circulation" of erotic materials (p. 9). The sexual culture of the antebellum North contributed to "a wartime explosion of porn," which, as chapter two details, was quite evident in U.S. Army camps (pp. 13–14). Giesberg resourcefully mined the Congressional record, postal laws, court-martial proceedings, regimental order books, letters, newspapers, publishers' circulars, and private as well as public archival collections of erotica to show how yellow-covered novels, cartes de visite, stereographs, and many other items made their way into the camps. Documenting "the sexual culture of the camps" and considering U.S. military policy and congressional action with regard to erotica yields insights into the ways "pornography helped to sustain" midcentury gender roles and gendered spaces (pp. 10, 37, 57). Chapter three focuses on the "profoundly unsettling" Civil War military experiences of Anthony Comstock, the famous crusader for and namesake of postwar anti-obscenity laws (p. 62). Indeed, Comstock "provides the key link between a wartime concern about pornography and the postwar antipornography campaign" (p. 10). Chapter four follows the "postwar surge of interest in … stabilizing a gender order that the war had upset," which came to include legislative measures that sought to regulate marriage and crack down on pornography (p. 84). Though such measures originated in wartime concerns about protecting male soldiers from pornography, they ultimately also suppressed access to birth control and abortion. This volume is a significant contribution to Civil War and nineteenth-century gender and sexuality studies that many will want to consult (though, by nature of its subject matter, it is best suited to mature rather than general audiences). It sheds more light on the sexual lives of Civil War soldiers and the war's critical role in antiobscenity [End Page 539] campaigns and legislation. It speaks to broader questions about the influence of the war on reform movements, gender roles and systems, the expansion of the federal government, and the growth of state intervention in Americans' everyday lives, as well as the ways in which legacies of the war continue to reverberate in the present. In taking sexuality seriously—as a method of analysis and an area meriting study—and in assessing its substantial role in the lives of individual Americans, the Civil War, and the nation, this path-breaking study raises important questions that will assuredly inspire additional work and conversations about the still surprisingly understudied history and significance of sexuality during the Civil War era. Brie Swenson Arnold BRIE SWENSON ARNOLD is associate professor of history at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She is the author of articles on gender and sexuality in the print and political culture of the...

£24.50 and $40.00, £12.75 and $20.00 softback Paul Robert Magocsi Ukraine: A Historical Atlas 1986 University of Toronto Press Toronto 62

The term 'Civil War', which is now used most commonly to describe the military events of 1861-1865 in the USA, only gradually became the predominant signifier of the conflict. It represented a compromise between Northerners who had formerly talked of the 'War of the Rebellion' and Southerners who claimed to have fought 'The War for Southern Independence' or 'The War Between the States' (which is still used, mostly in the ex-Confederacy). The term 'Civil War' abstracts a relatively civilized conflict - when regular armies fought each other - from the guerrilla strife that preceded in 'Bleeding Kansas' and that followed throughout the South as terrorists were able to wear down the Union troops protecting African-Americans and persuade the North to withdraw its occupying forces from the ex-Confederacy by 1877. 'The Era of Racial Violence, 1854-1877' is a far more useful phrase and period for framing the critical events which shaped racial and sectional relations in the United States than a self-congratulatory 'Civil War', which stresses a heroic 'brothers' conflict' between equally honourable sides as the central event of American history. Such conceptual rethinking is especially urgent now that neo-Confederate sympathizers are again glorifying the South's presumably 'Lost Cause'.

Total War and the American Civil War ReconsideredThe End of an Outdated “Master Narrative” Wayne Wei-Siang Hsieh (bio) Despite the transnational turn in American history, American historians still tend to put our national history at the center of world history, which exaggerates both our virtues and vices.1 Harsh critiques of Civil War violence as harbingers of twentieth-century brutality share with Whiggish narratives the unproven assumption that the American Civil War forged a fulcrum point not just for American history, but for the modern world.2 Until recently, most military historians have generally seen the Civil War as the opening chapter of what historian Roger Chickering has called a “master narrative,” in which modern weapons, combined with the mass mobilization of society, prolonged the war, encouraged “strategic stalemate,” and engulfed civilians politically and military. This narrative places the Civil War at a crucial way station in a new era of industrial violence that inexorably leads to Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and a doomed present. From this perspective, the “total wars” of the twentieth century mark an apex of violence that had its wellsprings in the American Civil War.3 This grand story has seriously distorted Civil War scholarship. It feeds into a narrative of American exceptionalism that places the Civil War–era United States at a pivot point of world history culminating in the “American Century.” It both exaggerates American influence on later events and obscures some of the most important aspects of Civil War violence, especially the war’s connection to the demise of chattel slavery and its particular combination of lethality and limitation.4 To use one straightforward measure, the butcher’s bill of the Napoleonic period calls into question the common assumption among Americanists, recently expressed by Drew Gilpin Faust, that the Civil War “introduced a level of carnage that foreshadowed the wars of the century to come.”5 For example, at the climactic “Battle of Nations” at Leipzig in 1813, Napoleon commanded 177,000 men, while the Allied forces mustered over 250,000 [End Page 394] in opposition, excluding 140,000 nearby reinforcements. The French suffered 68,000 casualties, and the Allies lost at least 50,000 men. These totals exceeded the size of some entire Civil War field armies.6 Even the epic battle of Gettysburg saw 30,100 Federal and 27,125 Confederate casualties during the entire campaign, out of 112,700 deployed personnel in the Army of the Potomac and about 80,000 men in the Army of Northern Virginia.7 To put this another way, the initial Allied forces at Leipzig outnumbered both Union and Confederate armies combined, while French casualties alone exceeded the sum of both American armies’ losses. Furthermore, if the cultural and political turn toward total war had begun during the French Revolution, as is argued by David Bell, then the Civil War’s place in the master narrative only further weakens.8 This narrative answered a real need to explain the Civil War’s increasing levels of violence, but it also obscured the limits placed on Civil War violence by a wide variety of actors and forces, and the historical significance of those limits. It also served as perhaps the most important intersection of military and social history in Civil War studies, because it connected military operations with important social changes, including emancipation, changing gender roles, the mobilization of the home front, and important cultural changes, while still placing the Civil War at a crossroads of world history.9 The narrative remains influential and resilient, even as some historians such as Chickering have raised serious questions about its premises. American historians can also find useful models and points of comparison in recent work by European historians to better understand the dynamics of Civil War violence. Bell’s analysis of how the Napoleonic experience transformed Enlightenment reform into a romantic glorification of violence may help explain the inseparable connections among emancipation, nationalism, and state violence during the Civil War. Isabel Hull’s work on the army of Imperial Germany provides a methodological model for military and nonmilitary historians alike. Hull chronicles how a specific military culture elevated violence into an irrational end in itself and created total...

Reviewed by: Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation. by Mark F. Bielski William B. Kurtz Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation. By Mark F. Bielski. Philadelphia and Oxford, Eng.: Casemate, 2016. Pp. xvi, 296. $32.95, ISBN 978-1-61200-358-0. Recent scholarship on ethnic Americans during the Civil War has understandably focused on the two largest groups, German and Irish immigrants. Polish Americans, estimated as numbering perhaps 30,000, have received comparatively little attention due to their small numbers and the difficulty of working with Polish materials. Thus Mark F. Bielski offers a welcome take on the Polish Civil War story in his new book, Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War: Divided Poles in a Divided Nation. Whereas many recent studies of other ethnic groups are geographically constrained, Bielski's study is evenly divided between four Polish Confederates and four Unionists, with another switching sides during the conflict. Bielski argues that a "tradition of freedom and liberalism," forged in wars and revolutions fought to defend Poland, deeply influenced Polish Americans' participation in the Civil War, leading some to support southern independence while others sought to uphold the Union (p. xiv). The author helpfully puts his story into the larger context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Polish history as well as the previous military service of Polish heroes such as Thaddeus Kościuszko and Casimir Pulaski in the American Revolutionary War. Bielski's nine men represent different generations of Polish immigrants, from Adam Gurowski, who fought in the 1830–1831 rebellion against Russia, to Valery Sulakowski, who was a veteran of the 1848 revolutions, to Peter Kiołbassa, who grew up in a Catholic Polish settlement in Texas. All of the men (except Kiołbassa) were of aristocratic background, with most of them leaving behind published memoirs or having received their own biographical treatment from previous historians. Many were ardent nationalists who either fought against foreign rule of a divided Poland or who lectured or wrote in support of Polish independence in the United States. Bielski uses these elite men as representative examples of the roughly 1,500 Confederate and 5,000 Union soldiers of Polish ancestry who fought in the Civil War. For historians, the usefulness of Bielski's book comes in his compiling this collective biography of Polish American men from a variety of sources, including Polish language materials. The book's long contextual passages and its lengthy discussions of military battles, however, indicate that it is primarily [End Page 696] meant for the general reader or Civil War enthusiast. For example, in his lengthy description of the battle of Brice's Crossroads in 1864, Bielski loses sight of the Polish Union officer, Joseph Kargé, instead spending too much time explaining the mistakes of his commander, Samuel D. Sturgis. Also, the beginning of the book suffers from a considerable amount of repetition of basic historical and biographical information, and Bielski includes long quotations from other historians instead of paraphrasing them. Finally, the portrait gallery on the back cover is misleading; it may be unclear to a general reader that not all of the men pictured (such as Edwin M. Stanton and Nathan Bedford Forrest) were Polish. Sons of the White Eagle in the American Civil War, in short, is a useful study of nine extraordinary Polish Americans during the Civil War intended for a general audience. The book leaves many important questions unanswered. How typical were these nine men's experiences compared with those of other Polish Americans during the war? Did other Polish Americans, both men and women, share their liberal, democratic, and nationalist values? Why did Catholicism play a major role in so few of the men's lives? How did Polish involvement in the Civil War influence future waves of lower-class Polish immigrants later in the century? The answers to such questions will go a long way toward a more complete understanding of the meaning of the Civil War in Polish American history. William B. Kurtz University of Virginia Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Reviewed by: Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, and: The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine Andrew L. Slap Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War. By Margaret Humphreys. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. 197. Cloth, $40.00.) The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine. By Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein. (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 2008. Pp. 419. Cloth, $95.00.) Considering the amount of scholarship on the Civil War, historians have [End Page 429] given relatively little attention to Civil War medicine. The lack of coverage does not correspond with its importance, however; of the approximately three million soldiers in the American Civil War, over 620,000 died, and hundreds of thousands of others only lived after suffering through wounds and disease. Most historians probably have little knowledge of modern medicine, let alone nineteenth-century medicine, and have thus been hesitant to explore fully its impact on the Civil War. Thus it is nice to see a couple of new works that focus on Civil War medicine. Margaret Humphreys is well trained to provide insight into the medical history of the Civil War, with both a medical degree and a PhD in history from Harvard. Her subtitle, The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, suggests that she will tackle an even more challenging aspect of Civil War medicine, but this is a misnomer. Acknowledging that other historians have already "described the high mortality rates black soldiers suffered due to disease during the war, and chronicled their shabby treatment at the hands of the Union army," Humphreys states, "This narrative builds on the work of these and other scholars but uses new archival materials to deepen our understanding of northern physicians' view of the black body" (xi). Approximately half of this volume focuses on white doctors' views of black bodies and, unsurprisingly, finds that what "emerged from the war reinforced the general idea that black men were weaker than whites and more prone to disease" (56). Difficulty dealing with the concept of race, though, mars the analysis. For example, Humphreys does a poor job of disentangling the class and race elements in the account of a white officer (15–19). Her section on the biology of race is particularly disappointing, since she seems well positioned to discuss how group genetics plays a role in disease but is different from the social construction of race that most people use. She goes after Barbara Fields and the social construction of race for a page and then explains the difficulty modern medical researchers have with the concept of race, concluding that "they are being told that there is no way to scientifically define their study population. This flies in the face of common sense, and most just ignore it. People know whether they are black or white or Chinese, and how they self-report is what matters" (40, 43). How do people know what race they are, and is self-reporting scientific? In the other half of Intensely Human, Humphreys writes, "the reasons for high black mortality rates, described briefly by earlier historians, are made clear … by close studies of particularly morbid environments in St. Louis, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Texas" (xi). Unfortunately, the author [End Page 430] does little to expand our understanding of high mortality rates for African American soldiers. This may stem partly from her apparent unfamiliarity with some of the literature on the subject, such as Andrew L. Black's "In the Service of the United States: Comparative Mortality among African-American and White Troops in the Union Army," Journal of Negro History (1994). Historians have studied many of the toxic components that created high mortality rates for black soldiers. Former slaves, who constituted the majority of black soldiers, started the war "with the worst possible combination of backgrounds": they shared the white rural soldiers' susceptibility to infectious disease and the white urban soldiers' lowered resistance (8). Then two incorrect racist assumptions, that all blacks would have more resistance to tropical diseases and that they would be less effective at fighting than whites, led the Union military to disproportionately station black...

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Even though, the American Civil War is considered as a seminal event in the history of the United States, there are not many empirical studies examining economic conditions of the Union and the Confederate states. Even though, economic conflict is not considered to be a cause of the Civil War, economic conditions after the war were vastly different in the Union and the Confederate states. The purpose of this study is to analyze the economic outcomes of individuals in the Confederate states and the Union states before and after the American Civil War using census data for 1860 and 1880. Our goal is to analyze the improvements in the occupation income scores. Since the slaves were freed, we also examine whether there was a reduction in the farm households.