Civil War North Research Articles

The Union's Culture Industry

Abstract: The cultural history of the Civil War North has flourished since the turn of the twenty-first century. Scholars have impeccably analyzed wartime texts and images to clarify Northern citizens' and soldiers' shared ideological and emotional commitments. Yet, these historians have not fully reckoned with the interconnected nature of culture production in genres such as blackface minstrelsy, lithography, illustrated newspapers, photography, and theater through which Northerners made, circulated, used, and experienced culture commodities. This economic system of culture production often created or illuminated social conflict and ambiguous cultural meaning. The culture industry, a concept that has animated debate among historians of popular culture for decades, holds great potential for Civil War historians to open new perspectives on the experiences of Union soldiers and citizens and the ways they did cultural work to make the meanings of class and self-making, race and emancipation, gender and the household, and the war itself.

REFLECTION OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR IN THE FIRST CZECH IMMIGRANT PERIODICALS IN THE USA

The topic of the paper is the image of the American Civil War North versus South in the first periodicals published by Czech immigrants in the USA. The paper begins with a brief description of the mass emigration from Bohemia and Moravia to the USA between 1848 and 1914, and outlines the methodology applied in the paper and the corpus of material that formed the basis of the analysis that informed the text. It also provides an overview of the first Czech-language periodicals/newspapers published in the USA in the 1860s. This is followed by excerpts from newspaper texts illustrating the reflection of the North versus South Civil War in the Czech immigrant press. From the documented excerpts, it is clear that Czechs were continually interested in the American Civil War and, having gone through a difficult experience of oppression themselves in their old homeland, rejected slavery. Therefore, after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, they sympathized with the Union. In contrast, they saw Confederate secession as a threat to freedom and democracy, the values they valued most in America.

The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North by Paul D. Escott

The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North by Paul D. Escott

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North

Escott, The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North

Escott, The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North

Sarah Handley-Cousins. Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North.

S<scp>arah</scp> H<scp>andley</scp>-C<scp>ousins</scp>. <i>Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North</i>.

The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North

At the leisure end of a career in letters that has featured more than a dozen scholarly monographs, Paul D. Escott, Reynolds Professor of History Emeritus at Wake Forest University, offers an analysis of white supremacy in the Civil War–era North, a topic devoid of enjoyment, presented in the spirit of civic engagement. “Problems must be acknowledged in order to be solved,” Escott insists, and his timely and concise account shows that extreme racism persisted and gained even amid the tremendous racial progress of the 1860s (p. 7). The Worst Passions of Human Nature considers the history of racist ideas within the chronological boundaries of secession and the war years. Escott plumbs the opinions of newspaper editors, intellectuals and authors, including those peddling racial “science,” Democratic party officials, and even racist Republicans, whom Escott, the author of a recent profile of conservative Lincolnite Montgomery Blair, tags as advocates of colonizing...

The Pleasure of the Parlor: Mocking the “Home Guard” in Civil War Visual Culture

Abstract Responses to the formation of home guards in the Civil War North used a humorous visual vocabulary that played off the gender expectations of prewar periodical, literary, and artistic culture. Humorists and artists made fun of the men who chose to stay at home by linking them with the feminine space of the parlor. Using a painting by Thomas Hicks titled The Home Guard, along with other war-era images of home guards, this article argues that the satire lampooning home guards as weak and cowardly was dependent on codes of gender that stressed masculine action. These images used the home front as the de facto location of gendered struggles during war, responding to perceptions that men tied to domestic spaces were feminized. The home guard and other more clearly satirical images of men who stayed at home suggest that a generation of men had been raised to be pampered by feminine protectors. Hicks mocks certain men who chose to stay at home and not fight during the war; his work exposes gendered assumptions that reveal postwar concerns about traditional masculinity. Together, these works suggest a shift in understandings of gender and the fear of a feminized culture in the aftermath of the war.

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North

“Makers of loyalty”: recruiting propaganda in the Civil War North

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of propaganda to promote enlistment in the Union military during the American Civil War. The concept of propaganda offers historians of the Civil War a useful framework for understanding the means by which power structures and community pressure manifested in Northern recruitment. In addition to arguing for the importance of these power dynamics, this article explores Union recruiting propaganda as an unstudied body of media in its own right, assessing its origins and major themes. This research offers insights for scholars interested in Northern mobilization, soldier motivation, the Union cause, and communication/media history.

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins

Reviewed by: Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins Peter C. Luebke (bio) Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. By Sarah Handley-Cousins. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. 186. Cloth, $39.95.) When one thinks about Civil War casualties, one inevitably thinks about the piles of limbs outside of battlefield hospitals. The amputee with the empty sleeve draws attention as the epitome of the horror of war. But the amputee also presents an unambiguous figure, one whose broken body [End Page 292] self-evidently displays dedication to the cause. What about the thousands of soldiers who experienced other wounds? With Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North, Sarah Handley-Cousins takes an expansive view of wartime injuries and disabilities, charting a variety of harms. Soldiers, veterans, and the government struggled to define disability. They also grappled with who was worthy of government assistance and how much of it they should receive. In Bodies in Blue, “disability” serves as a concept that overlaps with masculinity. American masculinity in the nineteenth century meant “the ability to command one’s body and use it in labor to maintain independence” (3). Injury and illness threatened the ability of soldiers to control their bodies, which in turn undermined their ability to maintain independence through labor. Thus, during the war and after, the idea of disability remained imbricated with ideas of masculinity and who properly counted as a man. Handley-Cousins traces these struggles in six chapters. The first two chapters consider who possessed the authority to determine disability. The first chapter charts how the War Department, facing a manpower crisis, conceived of “disability as a continuum of degrees” and created the Invalid Corps, renamed the Veteran Reserve Corps in 1864 (18). The Veteran Reserve Corps, besides keeping bodies in uniform, aimed to give injured soldiers productive work, thereby keeping them off the pension rolls. The next chapter uses court-martial records to show how the men contested that officers had the “power to legitimize disability” (44). Unsurprisingly, officers and surgeons prevailed, with decisions often hinging on the perceived moral character of the enlisted soldier. How Union authorities sought to understand injury and illness through the creation of the Army Medical Museum provides the topic for the third chapter. Here, Handley-Cousins looks less at disability and more at how Union doctors appropriated bodies to serve their ends. Doctors claimed soldiers’ bodies in order to expand medical knowledge of war wounds, with specimens on display at the Army Medical Museum. Handley-Cousins maintains that the museum demonstrated how “Union doctors turned the bodies of soldiers into government property” (69). The fourth and fifth chapters look at disability after the war. The fourth chapter considers Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who suffered a grievous wound during the siege of Petersburg. The injuries to his hip, bladder, and penis afflicted him until they ultimately took his life in 1914. Unlike the missing limbs of amputees, Chamberlain’s wound remained private, which in turn made it difficult for him to receive a disability pension. The example of Chamberlain challenges notions that disability had to be visible. The fifth chapter appraises how the Pension Bureau judged soldiers against [End Page 293] an idea of masculinity and penalized those who failed to fit that ideal. As in the war, government authorities’ views of what disability looked like trumped those of the soldiers themselves. Finally, Handley-Cousins examines, in her sixth chapter, the invisible disability of wartime-related psychological trauma. Using case studies of several soldiers, Handley-Cousins demonstrates that suffering extended beyond the veterans themselves to their families. She also shows how psychiatric care often centered on restoring productivity to disabled veterans, which in turn rehabilitated their manhood and could facilitate their release. Indeed, “war trauma was not simple or static” (123). The chapters open interpretive space, but they also raise important questions about the scope of the book itself. Handley-Cousins focuses her discussion on white male soldiers, although brief references to African American soldiers and other people of color hover around the margins. Observations such as “Blackness itself was a kind of disability in ante-bellum America” and...

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins

Reviewed by: Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins Jane E. Schultz Sarah Handley-Cousins. Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. xiii + 187 pp. $39.95 (978-0-8203-5518-4). Sarah Handley-Cousins’s Bodies in Blue is as much about the pressures that compelled Civil War veterans to conform to ideal forms of manhood as it is about the material consequences of illness and wounds on human flesh. In a solidly researched analysis of data from the Medical and Surgical History of the War (1875–88) as well as a poignant reading of case files, court proceedings, and letters, Handley-Cousins attests to the double bind that acted like a tourniquet on the [End Page 129] lives of many disabled soldiers: the soldier compromised by war wounds or chronic illness resulting from service was thought undeserving of a pension if he believed it was his due, whereas those whose stoicism kept them from seeking help managed to exemplify the qualities of ideal manhood, of “bearing their suffering with fortitude” (p. 40).1 Bodies in Blue continues the work of a number of disability historians by enlarging definitions of disability to include the perils of mental and physical illnesses not generally visible in public.2 Indeed, “soldiers, civilians, and institutions grappled with disorders that did not easily fit into existing cultural narratives of manhood and sacrifice” (p. 2). The fourth of the book’s six chapters is devoted to the postwar travails of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Bowdoin College rhetoric professor and hero of Gettysburg’s Little Round Top, who at Petersburg sustained a bullet to the hip, which, passing through his body, wrought havoc on his ureter and bladder. To say that he bore the pain ever after scarcely does it justice. Undergoing multiple surgeries from 1864 to 1883 that attempted repair of urological function (even as Mainers elected him governor), Chamberlain hid constant pain and discomfort from others. Handley-Cousins’s deft reading of his private papers shows the costs of passing as able-bodied. Not only did the missile, which rendered him impotent and unable to properly urinate, compromise his marriage, but the Pension Bureau’s rejection of his appeal for additional support in the 1890s literally added insult to injury. He died in 1914 of wound infection, having borne fifty years of misery under a self-imposed gag order. It wasn’t much better for less luminary soldiers, even those with amputations. Handley-Cousins observes that despite being symbols of the war’s collective catastrophe, amputees constituted only 7 percent of the Union’s disabled harvest. The disabled might land in the Veteran Reserve Corps (VRC), but many felt stigmatized by being labeled invalids and having to don light blue uniforms, separating them from regimental comrades. What awaited them postwar was the cultural belief that their missing appendages consigned them to failures of strength and self-sufficiency—debilities perceived as conduits to pauperism. Black soldiers could not even qualify for the VRC; if disabilities leveled them, they went back to their segregated USCT units.3 As the nineteenth century wore on and conservatives tired of a pension system that they believed was indiscriminately generous and riddled with fraud, veterans who insisted they were unable to work due to traumatic war injuries of [End Page 130] body or mind were accused of relinquishing their manhood. Of particular note were frequent vetoes of pension bills by President Cleveland, who thought little of men psychologically traumatized by service—even those who committed suicide. Such attitudes were the legacy of surgeons and high-ranking officers who, by mid-1862, had determined that rheumatism, the nineteenth-century term for osteoarthritis, could not prompt a disability discharge. Even Roberts Barthalow, an elite surgeon, took a dim view of patients who complained of heart disease, a condition he thought feigned by malingerers. Among the most disturbing aspects of Handley-Cousins’s analysis is her consideration in chapter 3 of Army Medical Department administrators’ assumption that soldiers’ bodies were their property. When Surgeon John Brinton, a University of Pennsylvania and Jefferson Medical College graduate, was authorized to collect specimens...

Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North ed. by Robert M. Sandow

Reviewed by: Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North ed. by Robert M. Sandow Asaf Almog Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North. Edited by Robert M. Sandow. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8232-7975-3. 310 pp., cloth, $65.00. What did loyalty to the nation mean for Northerners during the American Civil War? Edited by Robert Sandow, Contested Loyalty joins recent attempts to complicate analyses of wartime nationalism. Scholars have traditionally focused on questions of loyalty in the Confederate side. The tendency emanates from the "Appomattox Syndrome," described in Gary Gallagher's phrasing in the volume's preface (x). In other words, the losing side, containing the losing narrative, was seen as the side whose willingness to fight needed an explanation. However, in recent years increasingly more studies have probed into the construction of modern nationalism in the North as well. The volume's ten essays follow this literature by examining contests over the meaning of national loyalty in various geographic, social, and ethnic contexts. [End Page 152] Melinda Lawson's opening essay looks at the place the moral duty of loyalty played in the thought of three men: abolitionist Wendell Phillips, Radical Free Soiler (and later Republican) George Julian of Indiana, and Abraham Lincoln. The nontrivial decision to place men such as Phillips and Lincoln together to begin with is the essay's most intriguing aspect. Phillips had called for disunion, immediate abolition, and racial amalgamation for several decades. Conversely, Lincoln never publicly wavered from complete fidelity to the Union. His views on race and slavery also appear vastly different from Phillips's. Lawson's explanation for her initial choice is that all three believed that the American Revolution's egalitarian principles negated slavery, and all three faced the dilemma of the justification of war to preserve these ideals. While Phillips consciously used agitation as a political means to save the Republic, only war convinced Julian to accept general emancipation as synonymous with the goal of the Union's preservation. Most problematically, Lawson states that "there were limits to Lincoln's embracement of the Union" (39). She demonstrates these limits by pointing to Lincoln's firm opposition to slavery's expansion, shown in his stance on the Kansas-Nebraska Act and subsequent politics. However, limits imply a willingness to question the Union rather than simply present an opinion about its proper course. Is there evidence of such questioning by Lincoln? In Lawson's usage of the term, Daniel Webster could be regarded as an antislavery politician whose embracement to the Union had limits. The volume's other essays move away from the national prism, and several of them demonstrate the degree to which the administration and its representatives identified loyalty exclusively with support for the war's aim of restoring the Union and punishing the rebels. Matthew Warshauer's essay discusses the ideology of Peace Democrats in wartime Connecticut. According to Warshauer, the movement reflected the perseverance of a "deeply held party ideology, a Jeffersonian conservatism" that persisted throughout the Union, across temporal and geographical boundaries (57). The movement, Warshauer argues, defies a monolithic portrayal of war opponents as residents of the Lower North. Indeed, the party's Connecticut chapter remained competitive throughout the antebellum years and during the war itself. Warshauer identifies two main principles of Copperhead ideology: first, Peace Democrats opposed the war qua war, because of its damage to life and economy. In addition, they emphasized the constitutional principles at stake: the sovereignty of the Southern states, including that over their slaves, explicitly guaranteed by the Founders. Republican action and rhetoric, Peace Democrats argued, enhanced the risk of Federal despotism. Copperhead ideology persuaded many in Connecticut, whose electoral votes Lincoln carried by a narrow margin in 1864. More importantly, Warshauer states, Democrats throughout the Union had a lasting influence: [End Page 153] "Historians can ultimately judge the Democrats wrong in their views on race and humanity, but their views on constitutional authority and states' rights versus a powerful federal government have continued to rage in American society" (73). Warshauer emphasizes that Peace Democrats were ultimately loyal to the Union, despite continued charges of treason...

The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North by Paul D. Escott

The Worst Passions of Human Nature: White Supremacy in the Civil War North by Paul D. Escott

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins

Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North by Sarah Handley-Cousins

Sarah Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. 204. $39.95 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsSarah Handley-Cousins, Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019. Pp. 204. $39.95 (cloth).James MartenJames MartenMarquette University (USA) Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 106, Number 1Winter 2021 A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/712030 Views: 31Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North

Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North

Union, Loyalty, and Patriotic Sacrifice in the Civil War North.

<i>Union, Loyalty, and Patriotic Sacrifice in the Civil War North</i>.

Introduction: Conservatism in the Civil War North

Introduction: Conservatism in the Civil War North

Politician in Uniform: General Lew Wallace and the Civil War by Christopher R. Mortenson

Reviewed by: Politician in Uniform: General Lew Wallace and the Civil War by Christopher R. Mortenson Rachel K. Deale Politician in Uniform: General Lew Wallace and the Civil War. By Christopher R. Mortenson. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 283. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8061-6195-2.) Christopher R. Mortenson’s Politician in Uniform: General Lew Wallace and the Civil War argues that political general Lew Wallace made important political and military contributions to the Union war effort. According to Mortenson, Wallace was a “temperamental officer” who vehemently longed to see military action and be remembered as a war hero (p. xi). Despite having early success, by the war’s end Wallace had failed to attain the glory he desired. Mortenson attributes Wallace’s failure to his inability to respect authority, follow orders, get along with professionally trained officers, and keep his personal ambitions in check. Wallace’s ambition led to his removal from the battlefield and placement “on the shelf” for a more political role (p. 97). Despite partially redeeming his military reputation at the battle of Monocacy in 1864, he was never able to fully mend the bad relationships he formed with Edwin M. Stanton, Henry W. Halleck, and Ulysses S. Grant. Nevertheless, Wallace’s political work helped him win favor with the Abraham Lincoln administration. For the rest of his life, Wallace held a grudge against West Point–trained [End Page 181] officers because he “believe[d] that some sort of West Point conspiracy led by Henry Halleck had derailed his military career” (p. 198). As a result, Wallace died without recognizing his faults and understanding how his own ambition led to the end of his military career. As a boy, Wallace frequently rebelled against his father’s authority. Mortenson attributes Wallace’s rebellious spirit to losing his mother at the early age of seven. In the nineteenth century, mothers were responsible for helping boys “bridge the gap” to manhood (p. 10). As Mortenson sees it, the absence of Wallace’s mother contributed to Wallace’s aggressive nature as an adult. Even though his father quickly remarried, Wallace rejected his stepmother. As a result, Wallace “grew to embrace notions of manhood that seemed more martial or rough, rather than restrained or gentlemanly” (p. 10). Although his father wanted him to become a lawyer, Wallace wanted a life of adventure and glory. In fact, one wonders if Wallace’s disdain for West Point officers stems from his relationship with his father, who was a West Point graduate. Like the men Carol Reardon writes about in With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (Chapel Hill, 2012), Wallace thought that he was just as qualified for military service and leadership positions as the professionally trained officers from West Point, even though he obtained his commission through political means. A veteran with modest experience in the U.S.-Mexican War, Wallace demanded that his superiors treat him as an equal. Yet Wallace’s strong desire for glory, fame, and honor naturally put him at odds with the West Point–trained officers who emphasized respect for authority, discipline, and order. Mortenson argues that Wallace’s “attitude problem” is best explained through a gendered lens. He applies Amy S. Greenberg’s definitions of “restrained” and “martial” masculinities and Lorien Foote’s conception of “gentlemen” and “roughs” to show that Wallace’s understanding of what it meant to be a man put him at odds with the manhood taught at West Point (p. 6). While West Pointers “embraced a more restrained, gentlemanly, and communal manhood,” Wallace leaned “toward the martial and rough notions” of masculinity (pp. 7, 191). While there have been several Lew Wallace biographies published recently, Mortenson’s contribution is the most comprehensive: it addresses Wallace’s upbringing, military career, successful recruiting, aborted peace mission in Texas, role in the case of the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspirators, and service as the court president of the military commission conducting Andersonville prison commandant Henry Wirz’s trial. Overall, Mortenson’s biography provides a clear examination of Wallace’s actions, decisions, and contributions on and off the battlefield...