The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict ed. by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault Cecily N. Zander (bio) The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict. Edited By John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault. ( Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2021. Pp. 246. Cloth, $40.00.) In The Long Civil War, an arsenal of Civil War historians take on the challenge of defining (and redefining) the boundaries of the long Civil War era. Editors John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault dedicate the work to Randall M. Miller, whose contributions to the field have ranged from histories of slavery and Reconstruction to those of religion and the home front. Matching Miller's dedication to examining the depth and breadth of the field, volume contributors explore such diverse topics as abolition and colonization, soldier motivation and political rhetoric, the war's historical legacy, and the memory of the conflict; they stretch as far forward in time as Dwight David Eisenhower and Walt Disney in their efforts to show just how expansive the long Civil War era can be. Alongside the editors' desire to broaden the chronological scope of the Civil War era, Smith and Arsenault seek to "chart the variety of uses of the Civil War in contemporary culture" (3). Their project, they argue, reflects how expanding the war's temporal range helps historians to see "the maturation of its historiography" (5). The resulting ten essays, therefore, add historiographical significance to topics that were previously considered outside the traditional Civil War–era framework. Summaries of three of the ten essays will serve as representative of the volume and its relevance to multiple ongoing debates in the larger field of Civil War history. [End Page 129] Raymond Arsenault's essay on Walt Disney's historical films from 1946 to 1966 expands the history of the Civil War era into the realm of American studies. In this twenty-year period, Arsenault writes, Disney hoped to gain some financial solvency for his ailing studio by producing films that presented an "imaginative form of popular history" (198). Eschewing historical complexity for stories that imagined history as a boyhood adventure, and in pursuit of narratives that sounded notes of triumph, Disney avoided assigning winners and losers, leaving films such as The Great Locomotive Chase (1956) to depict both Union and Confederate soldiers as heroic, fighting for equally noble causes. Arsenault's work thus adds a new layer of understanding to the relationship between Civil War memory and popular culture, especially as they relate to the ideology of reconciliation. Paul A. Cimbala's essay on the officers who served in the U.S. Army Veteran Reserve Corps (VRC) should be essential reading for military historians. Cimbala's treatment of the corps, which was composed of men who could not fight because of combat injuries but were healthy enough to provide auxiliary support to Union armies, highlights the complicated politics that surrounded Civil War military service. Cimbala reveals an intriguing facet of the corps' duties that deserves further study: many of the VRC's officers remained in the army after the war and transitioned to work in the Freedman's Bureau during Reconstruction. These soldiers, Cimbala writes, "understood that the war would not be over until they had secured the fruits of victory" (66). This commitment to Reconstruction and emancipation set such officers apart from most of their comrades in arms, who did not embrace abolition readily (beyond its usefulness as a war measure), and identifies the VRC as a cohort to be taken seriously in studies of soldier politics and motivation. In her timely essay on the political rhetoric of suicide in the antebellum South, Diane Miller Sommerville adds a new dimension to scholarship on the politics of disunion and the degree to which Americans experienced secession as a visceral and wrenching trauma. The essay is a reminder of how nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation as an exceptional symbol of democracy and liberty—a topic receiving just consideration in a variety of new works. Sommerville, however, reminds readers that one of the roles of the historian is to examine how words functioned and became freighted with extreme emotion...