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 Mark Grimsley New Perspectives on the Union War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Elizabeth R. Varon. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-0-8232-8453-5. 256 pp., cloth, $35.00. Most Northerners understood the Civil War as a conflict to preserve the Union. However, as this superior collection of essays maintains, they differed as to how to define the Union cause. Lincoln and his supporters, for example, saw emancipation primarily as a means to win the war. Critics on his political left saw the destruction of slavery as an end in itself. Moderates viewed the war as a contest against the Southern Slave Power and focused mainly on a quest for policies that would restore the Union on the loyal states' terms. Conservatives opposed both emancipation and the Lincoln administration's expansion of central government authority. They puzzled over how to support the Union government while opposing the president. Each of the eight essays in this collection explores one or more of these competing camps, and most do so through the lens of biography. Frank Cirillo uses an ardently antislavery couple, Stephen and Abby Foster, to make a fresh exploration of abolitionists who rejected a Union war as morally bankrupt—the Union, after all, had upheld slavery for its entire existence—and insisted upon a war for the complete liberation of enslaved Americans, full stop. Tamika Nunley examines the wartime career of Elizabeth Keckly, known primarily as Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress but also a skillful activist on behalf of black refugees and soldiers. Jack Furniss looks at New York politician Horatio Seymour, who attempted with much success to establish a moderate Democratic position of a loyal opposition that supported the Union war while being critical of the conduct of the war, as well as the machinations of the Radical Republicans. Will Kurtz examines the ways John Hughes, the Irish American archbishop of New York, and Patrick Donahoe, a prominent newspaper publisher, pointed to the valor of Union Catholic soldiers as a compelling argument against anti-Catholic nativism, while at the same time advancing a conservative vision that rejected the elision of a purely Union war into one that included the destruction of slavery. [End Page 316] Jesse George-Nichol assesses Attorney General Edward Bates, a former Whig from Missouri who waged a determined but ultimately losing battle to prevent the Lincoln administration from moving too far in its embrace of emancipation and in its willingness to wage a destructive war against the Confederacy. D. H. Dilbeck examines the German American jurist Francis Lieber's conviction that a successful Union war had to be a just war—a conviction that led him to prepare the rules of war now known as the Lieber Code. Michael Caires focuses on Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase, who presided over a fiscal revolution that centralized the Northern banking system in a successful bid to underwrite the immense expense of the Union war effort. The essay by Peter Luebke is the only one that departs from using a biographical lens. It examines dozens of postwar regimental histories to gain insight into the meanings that Union veterans assigned to their service in the salvation of the Republic. In their introduction to the volume, Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon argue that "taken together, these essays show a concept of 'Union' capacious enough to include a wide range of political agendas" (6). Loyal Americans nonetheless held in common three core convictions: that "affection rather than coercion should hold the Union together," that disunionism was "a lethal and highly contagious disease," and that slavery had to be removed "as the principal source of division—whether by compromise, reform, or revolution" (6–7). Gallagher and Varon are senior scholars with major reputations. The contributors, however, are without exception at the start of their careers (and closely connected to the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia). To be sure, three contributors have books either published or forthcoming, and one has edited a new edition of a regimental history originally published in 1896...