War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era ed. by Joan E. Cashin

Abstract

Reviewed by: War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era ed. by Joan E. Cashin Christine E. Sears War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era. Edited by Joan E. Cashin. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [xiv], 263. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4320-5; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4319-9.) The ten authors in Joan E. Cashin’s pithily named War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era demonstrate the potential richness of marrying Civil War studies with material culture. The essays range from prewar to postwar, from pikes to lymph, and from personal belongings to landscapes. They aim to illuminate common soldiers’ experiences, women’s support of political ideology, and plain folks’ loyalty to the Confederacy. Some brilliantly show what the material turn offers. Others offer a less object-centric analysis, though they nevertheless extend our understanding of Civil War culture. Jason Phillips and Peter S. Carmichael tease out how the same objects conveyed different meanings to different communities. Phillips explores how the “things that captivated Americans when they anticipated civil war mattered” (p. 24). In 1857, John Brown commissioned pikes consisting of bowie knives affixed to hoe handles and shipped them separately to avoid detection. Bowie knives bespoke progress and expansion, while pikes were linked with the “overthrow of aristocracy” (p. 17). To Brown and his followers, pikes were the “harbinger of the modern insurrection” (p. 19). Secessionist Edmund Ruffin saw not pikes but spears wielded by savages who must be answered by southern white revolt. Relics collected at war’s end suggested how contemporaries “understood Union victory and the downfall of the Confederacy,” according to Carmichael in his chapter, “The Trophies of Victory and the Relics of Defeat: Returning Home in the Spring of 1865” (p. 201). Soldiers of both armies shredded an Appomattox apple tree into splinters because Robert E. Lee lingered long under the tree’s shade waiting for Ulysses S. Grant’s reply to his surrender. For Confederates, a tree sliver denoted “a sacred link to the incomparable Robert E. Lee” and proved that the soldier had stuck with Lee to the end (p. 204). For Union soldiers, the splinters paid “tribute to a complete and smashing victory” they earned in the Army of the Potomac (p. 203). Certainly, Carmichael’s impressive reflection on the “material culture of defeat,” which shows how war souvenirs collected in a “spirit of reconciliation” later stirred “feelings of white solidarity,” will interest many scholars (pp. 217, 218). Cashin looks at how white southerners laid claim to the legacy of the American Revolution through objects and landscapes. A surfeit of Revolutionary War artifacts changed how people interacted with those objects. In 1858, a farmer in South Carolina found and had repaired a British musket, which he then utilized. Cashin posits that the farmer and others who manipulated Revolutionary items did not respect those objects. This merits more [End Page 914] exploration. Perhaps the farmer felt a visceral connection to a Revolutionary past each time he raised that weapon. Sarah Jones Weicksel highlights conflict between refugees and white reformers over refugees’ living conditions in “Fitted Up for Freedom: The Material Culture of Refugee Relief.” Freedpeople asserted control over their built environment, constructing dwellings out of the mismatched materials available. Relief workers read the haphazard temporary housing as indicative of external and internal disorder. In “Nature as Material Culture: Antietam National Battlefield,” Lisa M. Brady and Timothy Silver trace Antietam’s landscape from the area’s prehistory to the National Park Service’s attempt to “stop time” at Civil War battlefields, “transforming the living, material world into static, cultural sites” (p. 54). The authors consider how the site shaped the battle and how the fighting strained the landscape “to its ecological limits” (p. 55). Other contributors use textual sources to reveal objects’ meanings. Earl J. Hess offers a needed corrective to the view that all nineteenth-century men had extensive experience with guns. In fact, few Union or Confederate soldiers were “gun-adept” (p. 104). Only the “gun-adept” forged bonds with their weapons; others were glad to ditch their weapons at war’s end. Ronald J. Zboray...