New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Perspectives on the Union War ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon Matthew Mason (bio) New Perspectives on the Union War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. Pp. 256. Cloth, $125.00; paper, $35.00.) This is an unusually cohesive edited collection, speaking to one over-arching theme: the many faces of the Union cause in the American Civil War. The editors’ own previous pathbreaking work on this theme and the contributors’ tight connections to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia make the thematic unity unsurprising. But less guaranteed was the high quality of the essays across the board, and the wide variety of viewpoints on the Union cause that they represent. The collective and individual excellence of the essays takes two important forms. First, although they range widely in subject matter, they all make key contributions to the volume. Even essays that seem like the answer to the question, Which one of these things is not like the other?— like Tamika Y. Nunley’s exploration of the Civil War career of free black Washington, D.C., fixture Elizabeth Keckly or Michael T. Caires’s essay on Salmon P. Chase’s pursuit of a national banking system—add key elements to the book’s whole picture. Second, they all make important interventions in other historiographies. For instance, Frank J. Cirillo’s discussion of Abby Kelley Foster’s and Stephen Foster’s wartime careers seeks to qualify the idea, associated most strongly with James Oakes, that the war was antislavery for Republicans from the beginning. Jack Furniss’s close attention to Horatio Seymour’s political appeal seeks to focus wartime northern political history less on voters’ reactions against the Republicans than on their positive support for Democrats. D. H. Dilbeck applies the much-studied Francis Lieber’s [End Page 414] ideas to questioning the “dark turn” in Civil War historiography. Even Peter C. Luebke’s essay, which at its outset seems like the least significant historiographical foray because he examines the regimental histories that Gallagher uses to such effect in his Union War (2011), ends up speaking effectively to the massive literature on postwar memory. The volume shines unprecedented light on the wide range of political viewpoints housed in the big tent that was the Union war. The editors begin their laudably brief and insightful introduction with William Tecumseh Sherman’s statement that “the National Feeling . . . assumes various shapes, but always comes back to that of Union” (1). The shapes represented here include the views of radical abolitionists, free African Americans, Democrats both Protestant and Catholic, Republicans of all factions, and veterans of various political stripes. And the issues with which they were concerned also ran a full gamut; as Caires phrases it, “concern for Union” included but “extended far beyond the political sphere or the battlefield” (160). These essays display the depths of division over fundamental questions within that broad Unionist persuasion. So, for instance, we see Furniss’s Seymour and Jesse George-Nichol’s Edward Bates asserting that a conservative approach to the war dictated a limited, cautious strategy, while Dilbeck’s Lieber insisted that “the more vigorously wars are pursued, the better it is for humanity. Sharp wars are brief ” (144). And all but the most conservative of these Unionists embraced the idea of emancipation in the abstract, but as Furniss puts it well, “questions of timing and method were critical” for all of them (79). Another major point of variance was the degree to which these characters thought of the war to preserve the Union as an end in itself or as a means to some other end. The Fosters, for example, “cast their patriotism as support not for the Union as it was but for the Union as it should be,” entirely free of the stain of slavery (10). Salmon P. Chase and his supporters wielded Unionism to tar opponents of the national banking system with the brush of “South Carolina treason” (177). Likewise, Keckly and her collaborators sought to leverage the war to advance the rights of African Americans both free and...