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 Lawrence Kreiser (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. $40.00 cloth) The introduction to this collection of ten essays is worth the cover price alone, for its insightful discussion on the "Long Civil War." John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault argue that, well into the twentieth century, scholars attempted to almost buttonhole the fighting that raged between 1861 and 1865 into a tight chronological and thematic focus. The postwar ended when the nation's [End Page 332] calendar flipped to 1878, and the struggle for civil rights culminated with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. Only relatively recently, however, have historians recognized that the Civil War continues to define American society. That is not a cause for dismay, as if the war is too complex and contradictory to fully understand. Rather, The Long Civil War offers the opportunity for a more nuanced understanding of twenty-first-century Americans as a nation and people. According to Smith and Arsenault, the volume's essays demonstrate how "the Civil War and its wide-ranging consequences and implications remain a yardstick that can be used to measure the American experience. The essays illustrate how historians can accommodate and integrate ambiguity, selective memory, and the power of myths and symbols in their assessments of the war's geographic, temporal, and thematic importance" (pp.12–13). The persistence of antebellum questions on race into the Civil War and beyond is the focus of the first two essays. Daniel Kilbride writes on the interchange between American missionary work and imperial ambitions in Liberia and today's Nigeria. Stanley Harrold argues that the abolition lobby reached its greatest success when proslavery congressmen most aggressively attempted to counter it during the late 1830s and early 1840s. Paul Cimbala and Diane Miller Sommerville analyze the influence of the Civil War on individual participants in the next two essays. Cimbala details the motivations and expectations of Union officers in the Veteran Reserve Corps, while Sommerville demonstrates that the changing rhetoric of "political suicide," especially in the South, provided contemporaries a new framework for understanding the war's severity. Biographical essays on Emory Upton, a Union officer, and Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, a well-known southern historian, are the next two contributions. James Hedtke argues that Upton's writings on military science survived his own death through self-violence and influenced the development of the modern American military. John David Smith details the connections between Phillips's service as a nonmilitary [End Page 333] staff officer at Camp Gordon, Georgia, a segregated military base during World War I, and his academic writings. The ongoing controversies over historical memory form the basis for the last four essays. James Horton and Lois Horton write on the changing perceptions of Abraham Lincoln among Black Americans, and Stephen Whitfield on the continuing resonance of the Confederacy among many white southerners. During the mid-twentieth century, the legacy of the war on the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, and the nostalgic—and commercial—portrayal of the blue and gray in the historical movies of Walt Disney are discussed by, respectively, Michael Birkner and Raymond Arsenault. The Long Civil War is a pleasure to read. The essays highlight continuing ways to understand the influence of the nation's most critical domestic crisis, as well as new avenues for innovative scholarship. Lawrence Kreiser LAWRENCE KREISER, JR. teaches history at Stillman College. He is the author of Marketing the Blue and Gray: Newspaper Advertising and the Civil War (2019) and coeditor of The Civil War and Popular Culture: Memory and Meaning (2014). Copyright © 2021 Kentucky Historical Society