Civil War North Research Articles

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

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. 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 [End Page 210] 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: “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. In Pennsylvania, these...

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

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

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

Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North ed. by Robert M. Sandow, and: Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era by Grant R. Brodrecht

Reviewed by: Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War Northed. by Robert M. Sandow, and: Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Eraby Grant R. Brodrecht David Graham Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North. Edited by Robert M. Sandow. Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher. The North's Civil War. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Pp. xii, 310. $65.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7975-3.) Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Era. By Grant R. Brodrecht. The North's Civil War. ( New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. Pp. [vi], 278. Paper, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7991-3; cloth, $140.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-7990-6.) The Fordham University Press series The North's Civil War has provided stellar scholarship on the northern Civil War experience for many years. While the Civil War–era South lures many social and cultural historians, as well as scholars of memory studies, Fordham University Press continues to highlight important work on the Union and its multifaceted war effort. Two of the most recent contributions to the series maintain this invaluable tradition and drive Civil War scholarship forward. Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War Northedited by Robert M. Sandow and Our Country: Northern Evangelicals and the Union during the Civil War Eraauthored by Grant R. Brodrecht provide insight on several understudied aspects of the American Civil War. Taken together, these two books demonstrate exciting developments underway in the field of Civil War history. In Contested Loyalty, editor Sandow presents ten thought-provoking essays by some of the most talented Civil War historians writing today. The essays examine the significance of the concept of loyalty to different groups of people during and after the war. The essays underscore the notion that loyalty did not mean one thing. Rather, how people interpreted the concept of loyalty during the war depended, in part, on their position in society. One of the strengths of this collection is its clear elucidation that the idea of loyalty during the war was complicated. Each essay serves as an individual case study of how the varied interpretations of loyalty "played out in everyday life" (p. 8). Several essays also point to the limits of national loyalty. By highlighting voices of dissent, the authors show that loyalty was not simply accepted by all in the North. Most Civil War scholarship on loyalty centers on the Confederacy. The essays featured in Contested Loyaltyseek to correct this imbalance, and they do so effectively. The necessity of this research is made even more apparent when the ubiquity of the term loyaltyduring the Civil War era is uncovered. Loyalty was on the lips of many in the North, and the frequent debates over the term warrant further investigation. The essays are roughly organized into thematic groups. The first three essays look at loyalty in the context of national and state politics. Two authors connect the concept of loyalty to the legacy of Reconstruction. The third essay, by Jonathan W. White, provides an enlightening glimpse into the meanings of loyalty through a discussion of the debates in the Pennsylvania legislature about compensation for Confederate raids. The next two chapters explore the understudied topic of college education and its impact during the Civil War era. Sean A. Scott provides a different interpretation of northern Protestant clergy in [End Page 697]his essay, arguing that not all clergymen fit into the categories of loyal and patriotic. The next group of chapters focuses on conversations about loyalty and their implications for notions of labor. This section includes Judith Giesberg's important challenge to the narrative of unquestioningly supportive northern women. Giesberg analyzes northern women's pursuit of improved pay and job security as evidence that northern women's loyalty to the Union cause was not as simple as the traditional narrative suggests. The final section of essays examines the impact of race and ethnicity on loyalty, with the perspectives of Irish Americans and protests by African American Union regiments serving as case studies. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is its powerful demonstration that...

Contested Loyalty: Debates Over Patriotism in the Civil War North

Contested Loyalty: Debates Over Patriotism in the Civil War North

“You Have No Flag Out Yet?”: Commercial Connections and Patriotic Emotion in the Civil War North

The outbreak of civil war in 1861 prompted a great outpouring of patriotic feeling among northern communities. Eager to satisfy their consumers’ desire to express that feeling, entrepreneurs across the Union produced a huge variety of new goods and repackaged old ones, offering citizens the chance to demonstrate their patriotic devotion. But such purchasing prompted questions about the authenticity and depth of feelings expressed in these ways. This article probes how Americans in the North used the rise of commodified patriotism to test the relationship between emotion and market relations. It examines how northerners used this moment to draw new boundaries between their transactions and themselves. In conclusion, the article argues that this story demonstrates that the collective management of emotions was an important means of defining the scope of the market, and in charting these efforts, it offers a new approach for evaluating the development of capitalism in the United States.

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

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

The curious case of Catherine Mary Hewitt and U.S. Major General of Volunteers John Fulton Reynolds: bodies, mourning the dead, and religion in the era of the American Civil War

ABSTRACTAt the time of his death at the Battle of Gettysburg, General Reynolds was the highest-ranking Union officer killed in the American Civil War. The return of the General’s body from the battlefront represented an uncommon feature of a war noted for its industrial scale and for the casualties it produced. How loved ones grieved Reynolds illustrates mourning practices among middle- to upper-class women in the Civil War North and underscores the centrality of death in nineteenth-century America. The death of Reynolds also occasioned the introduction of Reynolds’s sisters to the General’s secret fiancée, a Roman Catholic convert. Writers have attributed the clandestine nature of the engagement, and the General’s reluctance to introduce his fiancée to family, to Catherine Hewitt’s Roman Catholicism. But Catholics in the North received greater accommodation in mainline Protestant society than previously imagined, and the many kindnesses that the Reynolds family showed Hewitt point to an increasing acceptance of Catholics among Protestants in established social settings. Finally, Reynolds’s loved ones mourned him in religious and Victorian overtones, but it is not altogether clear that for them religion functioned as the predominant paradigm from which they elicited a transcendent meaning of the General’s death. In this local context, the responses of Reynolds’s loved ones to his death suggest the waning of religious belief in the era of the American Civil War.

Houses Divided: The Cultural Economy of Emancipation in the Civil War North

This essay examines late-antebellum portrayals of Irish servant women in popular culture and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society’s (PAS) wartime correspondence with northern employers eager to obtain access to southern freedpeople. In these sources, white northerners filtered their characterizations of women’s bodies and behaviors through ideologies of gender and race to create submissive and transgressive social types representing ideal and less-than-ideal workers. These declarations about workers, yoked to the northern argument that emancipation was both an act of benevolence and a period of necessary instruction for black southerners in the habits and practices of wage labor, propelled northern benevolent associations, armies, and the state to forge a transportation network that they hoped would ensure the flow of workers northward. This network proved short-lived, ultimately foundering on a lack of funding and employers’ and employees’ mutual disappointment with each other. And yet, because of their wartime cultural work, employers could pivot to a position of even greater strength over white and black workers in the political economy of wage labor.

“Like a Dark Cloud”: Loyalty, Virtue, and War in Western Virginia, 1861–1863

“Like a Dark Cloud”: Loyalty, Virtue, and War in Western Virginia, 1861–1863 Charles R. Welsko In January 1861, a printed circular from Samuel Woods announcing his candidacy to represent Barbour County at the Virginia Secession Convention made its way through the local community. The lawyer, an emigrant to Barbour County twelve years earlier from Maine, had a simple message. The Constitution, that sacred document “made by the patriots and sages of the revolution, to secure equal rights to all the States,” had been “trampled under foot by most of the nonslaveholding States.” From that abuse, predominately stemming from the North’s reluctance to return escaped slaves and prohibiting the extension of slavery from expanding westward, western Virginians, along with the rest of Virginia, had a choice to make. Civil war, he argued, loomed over the nation “like a dark cloud of desolation and national ruin,” compelling Virginia to demand the preservation of her rights. If the federal government failed to maintain those rights through a compromise including amendments to the Constitution preserving states’ rights, Woods asserted it would be necessary for all Virginians to prioritize their “allegiance” to the state of Virginia, abandon the Union, and join the Southern Confederacy. Through this circular, Woods affirmed that his primary loyalty rested with the state of Virginia, over that of the Federal Union. By mid-April 1861, Woods and eighty-seven other Virginians confirmed that interpretation of allegiance by voting to support secession, which pushed the Old Dominion into the Confederacy.1 Woods was not alone in his use of the term loyalty, as competing notions of allegiance dominated the discourses of western Virginians from Lincoln’s election through the creation of West Virginia as the thirty-fifth state in the Union.2 Secessionists and Unionists alike used the idea of loyalty as a means of referencing their relationship to the conflict, as well as a lens through which they viewed their friends, family, allies, enemies, communities, and nation. As Woods foretold, the dark clouds that hovered over America’s future [End Page 45] in the winter and spring of 1861 brought forth a bitter spell of civil war and destruction. For western Virginians, that war brought its own foreboding portents in the form of conflicting allegiances that generated intense and derisive sentiments that hung over the region throughout the war.3 A wide and impressive breadth of scholarship already chronicles much of the interconnected history of secession, unionism, and West Virginia statehood.4 This article seeks not to supplant those narratives but rather to flesh out newer understandings of how, during those events, individuals conceptualized the meaning and nature of loyalty. In any civil war, competing notions of loyalty and treason are common. As William Blair has recently acknowledged, it is difficult not to find mention of treason (and inversely, loyalty) in newspapers or personal correspondences during the war years.5 It should come as no surprise then that examinations of loyalty are nothing new among historians, and regional studies have produced varied approaches to this subject. For scholars of the Civil War North, defending a specific socioeconomic, political, or ethnic subgroup of the population has been a common trend. They argue that such groups (often Northern Democrats or “Copperheads”) were in fact loyal elements of society intentionally misrepresented for political or economic gain.6 Comparatively, in examinations of loyalty in Southern or border states, historians place the focus more on categorizing and explaining the complex factors that drove individuals to support unionism or secessionism.7 Historians of Appalachia and the divided communities in eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, and western Virginia have similarly stressed the complexity of factors that drove men and women into Unionist or Secessionist camps. For these Appalachian historians, everything from place of birth to partisan background, economic orientation, kinship, and religion have helped explain the loyalty of their subjects.8 Collectively these historians have offered us broad and insightful interpretations of loyalty, astutely explaining how specific parts of the American public experienced or divided along the lines of competing allegiances. Yet, as Blair’s recent study of Northerners’ conceptualizations of treason demonstrates, our discussion of loyalty has room to expand. For western Virginians...

“Wrestling at the Gates of Death”: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post–Civil War North

“Wrestling at the Gates of Death”Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Nonvisible Disability in the Post–Civil War North Sarah Handley-Cousins (bio) On the night of June 17, 1864, Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain walked anxiously among his sleeping soldiers. They were outside of Petersburg, Virginia, preparing for a major attack against the Confederate city’s fortifications. Something was bothering the colonel. He was no stranger to warfare—he had been in the hardest of the fights at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, but something about this place felt different. “I had a strange feeling that evening, [a] premonition of coming ill,” Chamberlain later wrote. “A dark shadow seemed to brood over me, dark wings folding as it were . . . and wrapping me in their embrace.”1 His unnerving premonition proved true. The next afternoon, he led his men in an attack against Rives’ Salient on the heavily fortified Confederate Dimmock Line around Petersburg. The fight quickly became intense. His staff scattered in the action; many lay wounded. The corps moved forward and came upon wet, marshy land that would be difficult to cross. He lifted his sword in one hand and the flag bearing the Maltese Cross of the Fifth Corps in the other, using them to motion his men to the left. As he held the flag and sabre aloft, a minié ball smashed into him, traveling through his right hip to the left, crushing his bones and cutting into his bladder and urethra. Blood pooled around his feet. Stunned, he braced himself with the flag and sword as his men passed, until the loss of blood brought him to his knees. Removed to the division hospital, Chamberlain believed he was a dead man. Surgeons located and cut out the ball, but there was little else they could do. Chamberlain urged the surgeons to leave him aside and put their efforts toward the other wounded soldiers and officers filling the hospital. The surgeons agreed. Chamberlain asked for pen and paper in order to write a bloodied last letter to his wife Fanny, then lay back to wait for the end.2 But the end never came. Chamberlain survived that long night, though it seemed impossible even to him: “I never dreamed what pain could be and not kill a man outright.” After six months “wrestling at the gates of [End Page 220] death,” he returned to the front of his brigade.3 He served out the remaining year of the war, was promoted twice for bravery, and left the army in 1865 as a brevet major general. When Chamberlain returned to his civilian life at the war’s end, he was the very picture of a citizen-soldier. The former college professor was charming, handsome, and intelligent, but perhaps most importantly, he was a war hero. In addition to his action at Petersburg, his leadership had helped win the Battle of Gettysburg, and was crucial in the war’s final battles in the Appomattox campaign. During his three years in the army, Chamberlain was wounded six times and seriously ill twice. He returned quickly to the field each time, and his bravery and dedication helped him to rise through the ranks. When the war ended, he used his reputation to win four years as the governor of Maine, followed by twelve years as the president of Bowdoin College. Chamberlain was adored among Civil War veterans and regularly served as a featured speaker at commemorations and encampments. This carefully constructed heroic public image, however, obscured a troubling dimension of the general’s life. Hidden beneath his blue uniform and fine suits, the wound from Petersburg quietly tortured Chamberlain. Because of the damage to his urethra, he initially required a catheter, which created a fistula near the base of his penis that never healed. It leaked urine constantly and left him susceptible to chronic bladder and testicular infections that caused him, in his own words, “unspeakable agony.”4 He underwent surgery in 1883 to close the fistula; he barely survived, and his symptoms—including the fistula—soon returned. Over the next thirty years, recurring infections plagued Chamberlain’s self-described “weak spot,” often leaving him incapacitated.5 A pension examiner noted in 1893 that...

Peter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene, and Scott Manning Stevens, with foreword by Adam Goodheart. Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. vii+193 pp.; 90 color illustrations, figures, exhibition checklist, index. $35.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPeter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene, and Scott Manning Stevens, with foreword by Adam Goodheart. Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. vii+193 pp.; 90 color illustrations, figures, exhibition checklist, index. $35.00.Mary Niall MitchellMary Niall MitchellUniversity of New Orleans Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 49, Number 4Winter 2015 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/684452 Views: 35Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (review)

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North (review)

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War NorthPeter JohnBrownlee, SarahBurns, DianeDillon, DanielGreene, and ScottManning Stevens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North Peter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene, and Scott Manning Stevens. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.This beautiful coffee-table sized (8 Zi x 10 lA in.) book accompanied a 2013-2014 joint exhibition by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Newberry Library. In six chapters, it examines issues raised by one hundred sepia-and-white or color illustrations taken from ephemera (letters, broadsides), publications (sheet music, periodical clippings, magazine engravings), photographs, and art (sculpture, oil paintings).Every American schoolchild knows that, at the war's inception, the North enjoyed industrial superiority; it also had propaganda superiority because of its art academies, galleries, publishing houses, and pictorial papers. Nowadays we are used to Matthew Brady's eloquent photographs, but, in the 1860s, most Americans got their images ofqfrom the popular press: Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper's Weekly, New York Illustrated News, and the like. Home Front deserves credit for treating popular culture with respect.Take the evolving interrelationship of the cotton and slavery. An 1861 Vanity Fair political cartoon Principle vs. Interest shows John Bull bargaining with Jefferson Davis over a shipment of cotton; meanwhile an African slave, in the background, tries to escape from a cotton bale in which he is almost entirely encased. The economic-political puns are delicious. Although Britain officially banned and abhorred slavery on moral principle, slave-produced cotton generated insatiable consumer interest. So while John Bull hypocritically expresses his warmest sympathy for the slave, he evades personal responsibility for profiting by helping to continue slavery: really, one cannot know friends in trade (17). That same year, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper featured the illustration Morning Mustering of the Contraband, showing the strategic wartime value of freed slaves: they deny the Confederacy the profit of slave labor, perform tasks that allow more soldiers to join the Union Army, and convey useful intelligence about Confederate troop movements. However, they are still objectified with the label contraband. By 1868, several years after the war's conclusion, Samuel Coleman's oil-on-canvas Ships Unloading dramatizes the new citizen status of the former slave. Stevedores, one black and two white, work for wages side by side on the docks as they handle free-labor cotton. …

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union

Faith, Loyalty, and the Limits of Neutrality in the Crisis of the Union April Holm (bio) Timothy L. Wesley. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013. xi + 273 pp. Notes and index. $45.00. Just as Abraham Lincoln famously asserted that slavery was “somehow” the cause of the Civil War, historians of nineteenth-century American religion have reached a consensus that religion, particularly evangelical Protestantism, is somehow essential to a complete understanding of the conflict. The exact mechanism of that “somehow,” however, remains difficult to define. Over the past twenty years, historians have taken on the challenge of formulating a satisfying and complete account of the connection between the pervasive religiosity of the nineteenth-century United States and the great political and military upheaval of the era. Historians agree upon the centrality of evangelical Protestantism to nineteenth-century American culture.1 Americans North and South interpreted the traumas of war and its aftermath through this evangelical Protestant lens. The Civil War era saw a religious people using their faith to make sense of an all-consuming military, political, and interpersonal struggle. As George Rable writes in his recent synthesis, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples, “many people on both sides of the conflict turned to religious faith to help explain the war’s causes, course, and consequences.”2 Both Northerners and Southerners, Rable argues, saw Providence at work in the drama of secession, the ordeals of the battlefield, and the revolution of emancipation. Still, many questions about the war and religion remain unresolved. Historians of religion and the Civil War grapple with two categories of questions. One category seeks to identify the role religion played in the war itself, from secession to emancipation: did religion affect secular events? A second line of inquiry asks how the war affected American religion: did secular events fundamentally alter the American relationship with the divine? A subset of this latter line of inquiry concerns how the war affected the lives of people of faith—specifically clergy, active church members, and the denominations to [End Page 655] which they belonged. Timothy Wesley takes up these problems in his thought-provoking and ambitious volume, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War. Wesley begins with the observation that antebellum clergy could influence millions. Preachers, he writes, were “the most politically determinative force within affiliated American Christianity, the only members of the greater church family who exercised significant yet immediate authority over others” (p. 42). Patriotic civilians, church leadership, and secular authorities recognized this powerful potential influence. Consequently, ministers acquired heightened political significance during the Civil War. Observers from all three groups monitored clergy to ensure loyalty to the Union. They expected and enforced patriotic messages from the pulpit. Wesley argues that the narrative of a monolithically pro-war and pro-Union Northern clergy has obscured the number of ministers in the North who strongly opposed such “political preaching.” Supporting his argument with evidence from church records, religious periodicals, and military documents, Wesley draws three conclusions: that white Northern ministers did not uniformly support the government; that, nevertheless, the boundary between church and state was much more porous in the Civil War era than historians currently assume it was; and finally, that the censure of nonpolitical preachers constitutes an important untold part of the story of civil liberties in the era. The book is a welcome contribution to the growing body of work on religion during the crisis of the union. Wesley draws attention to an overlooked point of conflict between religion, politics, and church and state in American history. His work prompts instructive new ways of thinking about civil liberties, loyalty, and the divide between the moral and the political in the fraught atmosphere of the Civil War North. The Politics of Faith during the Civil War is structured both chronologically and thematically. Wesley begins with a discussion of the familiar political events of the 1850s and concludes with the end of the Civil War. The first two-thirds of the volume primarily concern white Northern clergy and their struggles over religion and politics in the time of war. Wesley admirably includes clergy from outside the evangelical Protestant mainstream...

Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North

Review of: Home Front: Daily Life in the Civil War North, by Peter John Brownlee, Sarah Burns, Diane Dillon, Daniel Greene, and Scott Manning Stevens

The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance by Richard A. Sauers, Peter Tomasak (review)

Reviewed by: The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance by Richard A. Sauers, Peter Tomasak Robert Sandow (bio) The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance. By Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2013. Pp. 240. Cloth, $35.00.) In The Fishing Creek Confederacy: A Story of Civil War Draft Resistance, Richard A. Sauers and Peter Tomasak take a microhistorical approach to northern wartime dissent and its suppression. While focused on rural communities in north-central Pennsylvania, the narrative illustrates broader patterns of protest across the Union. Republican editors coined the term “Fishing Creek Confederacy” to exaggerate and vilify antiwar sentiment in northern Columbia County. The label suggested both an organized anti-government conspiracy and prosouthern sympathies—concepts associated with “Copperhead” Democrats. Previous scholarship frequently echoes Democratic rhetoric, depicting men arrested by the government as martyrs of civil liberty. Consequently, military authorities appear villainous and authoritarian. Tomasak and Sauers seek to present “the truth behind the draft resistance in Columbia County” (xiii). Scholars of the Union home front have long documented the internal discord that arose. As early as 1928, Ella Lonn lifted the veil of northern patriotism to expose widespread opposition in Desertion during the Civil War. By 1960, Frank L. Klement’s The Copperheads in the Middle West anchored an expanding genre of midwestern political studies tracing Democratic resistance to ideological and economic roots. The theme is also central to Jennifer L. Weber’s more broadly focused Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (2006). Additionally, studies published in the shadow of Vietnam link opposition to the inequities of the draft, including Eugene C. Murdock’s One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (1971) and James W. Geary’s more highly analytical We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War (1991). Most recently, Mark E. Neely Jr. has done much to frame the debate over wartime civil-military relations as well as the impact of partisan politics. His landmark The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (1991) largely absolves Lincoln’s military of partisan influence in administering flawed conscription and civil liberties policies. Yet in The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (2002), Neely argues that intense partisanship hindered the war effort and heightened fears of “treason.” In explaining Columbia County’s draft resistance, Sauers and Tomasak offer an orthodox view. They point to military failures and controversial policies of emancipation, the suspension of civil liberties, and especially conscription. They stress that political partisanship nourished discontent and resistance. The text generally sympathizes with soldiers and federal [End Page 316] officials enforcing unpopular draft laws. The authors find little evidence for abuse of power or political motivation. Republicans may have exaggerated the threat of Democratic opposition, but many believed the threat to be credible. As for opposition, the authors argue that organized resistance failed to materialize. Even the military expedition’s commanding officer declared the rumors “a grand farce” (56). Regardless, widespread grassroots dissent did exist. The book refers not just to heightened debate, confrontations, and informal meetings but to an amorphous “system of home defense” devised by local men to avoid the draft (119). As a form of material evidence, the authors conjecture that a ruined foundation atop North Mountain may have served as a “fort” for area deserters. More could be done to contextualize the nature, extent, and significance of draft resistance in Columbia County. The narrative suggests that Columbia County, while staunchly Democratic, was not a scene of widespread antidraft violence or above-average levels of draft evasion. Neither state nor federal conscription elicited significantly more than partisan condemnation. In July 1864, a veteran named James Robinson was shot leading a nighttime raid to arrest deserters and draft evaders. The authors conclude that he had no official capacity connected to the Provost Marshal General’s Bureau. His wounding (but not death, which came months later) along with “reports of widespread draft resistance” justified military operations (xii). It would be instructive to learn more about community-based politics and patterns of resistance. The Fishing Creek Confederacy has many strengths. It...

Paths to Reconciliation: Northern Intersectional Romances of the Civil War Era

Paths to Reconciliation:Northern Intersectional Romances of the Civil War Era Megan L. Bever (bio) In the autumn of 1860, young Millicent Halford left her home in Massachusetts to live with relatives on a central Kentucky plantation, where she served as a governess for her young cousins and witnessed firsthand the evils of slavery. Appalled by the violence of the institution, she helped an enslaved woman escape the family plantation. When civil war wreaked havoc on Kentucky and engulfed the plantation in its chaos, Millicent's cousin Frederick Leeson reluctantly enlisted in the Confederate army. Although Frederick fell in love with Millicent, she rejected his advances, vowing never to become the wife of a slaveholding Confederate. After being seriously wounded, Frederick awoke to find his former slave nursing him back to health. The experience transformed him; he immediately freed his slaves and deserted the Confederate army. Back at home, guerrillas destroyed his plantation and his mother died. In the midst of tragedy, Millicent and Frederick married and lived happily ever after under the Union flag.1 The fictional love story of Millicent Halford, published in 1865, was one of many intersectional romances that appeared in novels and literary magazines in the Civil War North. Authored by Martha Remick, this novel would have caught readers' attention with its similarities to Uncle Tom's Cabin. In addition [End Page 32] to the familiar plot elements of Kentucky plantations, Yankee abolitionists, escaping slaves, and redeemed southerners, Remick's novel contained an additional facet—civil war. Aptly set in divided Kentucky, the novel pitted Union-loving Millicent against Confederate Frederick, and through their struggle, readers could work through the meanings of unionism and reconciliation. Periodicals such as Harper's Weekly, Flag of Our Union, and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper published many similarly themed intersectional romances during the war. The broad circulation of these periodicals allowed northern authors to shape public opinion about the conflict as the intersectional romances allowed authors to condemn secession and slavery while presenting the possibility of sectional reunion through sacrifice and loyalty to the Union.2 That intersectional romances served as a metaphor for the sectional conflict in the popular literature of the nineteenth century is well-known to historians. In the decades preceding the Civil War, scholars have found that white southern women wrote fictional romances between northerners and southerners to call for an end to sectional political discord while at the same time defending the South's agrarian society (and slavery).3 Likewise, studies of the postwar decades have shown that intersectional romances increasingly promoted sectional reconciliation.4 Intersectional romances published [End Page 33] Click for larger view View full resolution The novel featured star-crossed lovers Millicent Halford, a Yankee, and Frederick Leeson, a Confederate, who could not marry until Leeson deserted the Confederacy, freed his slaves, and became a flag-loving unionist. Courtesy of https://openlibrary.org/books/o62342o759M/Milicent#Halford. [End Page 34] during the war, however, have received less attention, though scholars have shown that both northerners and southerners used intersectional romances to work through the regional and constitutional meanings of the war.5 Three novels and twenty-six short stories, appearing in popular periodicals from 1860 to 1865, confirm that white northerners employed the metaphor of romance to discuss the divided nation, border tensions, and the meaning of citizenship, but they went a step further by offering suggestions about how loyal Americans could promote national reunification and reconciliation. Unlike the lovers in pre- and postwar stories, who served as a metaphor for the North and the South, the lovers in wartime romances represented the Union and the Confederacy. The divisions, in short, were political more than geographic.6 These stories also differed from their postwar counterparts in that the masculine North was not always pitted against the feminine South. Scholars such as Kathleen Diffley, David Blight, and Nina Silber, have demonstrated that in postwar romances, the southern woman was reconciled to the northern man, symbolizing northern power and southern submission.7 But stories published during the war were not structured in this way. To be sure, the North, or, more accurately, the Union, was always victorious, but nearly half the stories featured...

Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation by Caroline E. Janney David E. Goldberg Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. ix, 464.) Since its publication more than a decade ago, David Blight’s acclaimed Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory has gone for the most part unchallenged by scholars of Civil War memory. In the years that have followed, an exhaustive list of works have expounded upon, consolidated, and sometimes subtly questioned Blight’s assertion that Americans learned to forget the war by learning to forgive. Through monument building, plantation tours, and even marriage, citizens in the North and South chose to disregard the “hard hand of war” by embracing the sentimental notions of valor, heroism, and sacrifice. While Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation examines many of these now familiar ritualistic and commemorative public sites, hers is the first comprehensive reassessment of Civil War memory. Spanning the first seventy-five years of the postwar period, she investigates the painstaking efforts Americans undertook to refuse the sentimentality of reconciliation. Remembering the Civil War is most impressive for its ability to unpack terms that have now become so synonymous with one another that they have seemingly lost all appropriate historical connection to their time. While many scholars have often used the terms “reunion” and “reconciliation” or “race” and “slavery” interchangeably, those who undertook the work of memorializing and debating the war did not. Reunion, Janney reminds us, was accomplished rather quickly, first in 1865, and later consolidated during Reconstruction. Yet, while former soldiers returned to commemorate past battles, their returning did not mean that they reconciled the war’s most divisive political disputes. According to Blight and others, reconciliation triumphed because many Americans learned to embrace a shared commitment to white supremacy, which helped neutralize sectional animosities and political differences. Janney challenges these assumptions by carefully surveying the pervasiveness of Unionist sentiments well into the twentieth century. Indeed, Remembering the Civil War extends the plot of Gary Gallagher’s recent book The Union War and Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by examining the diverse ways that Northern citizens retained the emancipationist legacy of the [End Page 94] Civil War despite their lingering support for Reconstruction and civil rights by the late nineteenth century. In countless ceremonies and dedications, former Union soldiers made clear that the demise of slavery was both the objective and achievement of the war, a triumph that could not be expunged despite the inescapable Northern commitment to white supremacy. Janney’s book also provides an opportunity to remember that debates over the Civil War’s meaning were as much between blacks and whites as they were between North and South. The ways in which Northerners learned to embrace segregation without forgetting emancipation is critical to understanding not only the distinctions between race and slavery that Janney so aptly describes, but is also crucial to examining how segregation unfolded and operated in the post–Civil War North. While many scholars have stressed a continuous white supremacy in their characterizations of Northern style Jim Crow, Remembering the Civil War reminds us that de facto segregation—as both an idea and a practice—endured because of the savvy and clever ways white Northerners contained and manipulated the historical narrative in their attempts to control social relations and economic rights in the public sphere. Finally, Remembering the Civil War provides an opportunity to rethink how we approach historical memory. Historians interested in Civil War memory might do well to leave behind the more popular ceremonial sites that have become all too predictable in discussions of reunion and reconciliation. Indeed, one might conclude that battlefields, plantation houses, and monuments are only temporary political artifacts and locations that tell us very little about how most citizens retained the Civil War’s enduring meanings. Most often, at these places citizens and tourists confront the war’s political disputes and legacy in short encounters, while more sustaining debates about the conflict play out in...