Civil War North Research Articles

Home front: daily life in the Civil War North

Home front: daily life in the Civil War North

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North

<b>The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North</b>

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North by Carol Reardon (review)

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North by Carol Reardon (review)

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North by Frances M. Clarke (review)

Reviewed by: War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North by Frances M. Clarke Megan Kate Nelson War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Frances M. Clarke. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-226-10862-9, 251 pp., cloth, $35.00. In this evocative and compelling study of the wartime literature of suffering and benevolence, Frances M. Clarke argues that in the midst of the Civil War’s many changes, “a great deal remained the same” (5). Despite skyrocketing casualty rates and evidence of cruelty on the battlefield and in POW camps, most northerners remained optimistic that the Civil War’s carnage could be redeemed. Northern soldiers who suffered in exemplary ways by exhibiting manly fortitude, selflessness, and mastery of their own pain—and the devoted work of volunteers (mostly women) who provided for and nursed them—would establish that the Union’s cause was morally superior and destined to prevail. Clarke organizes War Stories according to the different—and yet interwoven—narratives that white, middle-class, pro-Union northerners produced to affirm these ideals. She admits that focusing on this small group of writers “goes against the grain of much recent writing on the Civil War” that has emphasized cross-border interactions and popular literature (3, 5). But in her view, these civilians and soldiers were merely the most vocal of Union volunteers and their stories had enduring appeal; therefore, she contends, this group of writers spoke for and expressed the cultural beliefs of the majority of Civil War northerners. After presenting the cultural history of suffering in the first chapter, she moves on to a consideration of stories about Union officers’ heroic deaths, descriptions of the behavior of wounded enlistees, and accounts of northern voluntary efforts and their [End Page 122] effects on suffering soldiers. These initial chapters are fast-paced and eloquently written, but they do not offer any radically new arguments about the literature of wounded men. What they do present is a voluminous and convincing source base. Clarke evaluates all manner of written sources: poems, songs, essays, memorials, pension records, diaries, memoirs, newspaper articles, scrapbooks, and letters volunteers wrote from battlefields and hospitals. Her attention to soldiers’ diaries and letters and the goods that moved back and forth between battlefield and home front distinguishes her study; these sources ground her literary analysis in the material reality of the war. Using these sources, Clarke makes some of her more persuasive arguments: that a soldier’s family shaped his wartime experiences and that one of the central “labors of love” that northern volunteers undertook was to establish “invisible wires of sympathy” between the home front and the battlefield (100). These connections—nourished through gifts (with personal, handwritten notes attached) and volunteers’ domestication of hospitals through decor, landscaping, and diversions—induced soldiers to fight valiantly and suffer manfully. Volunteers believed that by strengthening these bonds, they were aiding the war effort in material, measurable ways and “performing vital political work” (110). These are valuable points, but it is in the last two chapters of the book that Clarke makes her most innovative arguments. In her discussion of voluntary organizations’ celebration of the Union “for its capacity to mobilize a virtuous citizenry and mitigate suffering,” she points out that much of this writing was intended for a European audience (114). To prevent British and French recognition of the Confederacy and to defend the Union from vicious attacks in the European press, the U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC) used a variety of tactics. It produced lavish and lengthy tribute albums, like Frank Goodrich’s The Tribute Book, explicitly for European audiences; it established sanitary commission branches in Paris and London and sent agents to lecture there; it engaged in a vociferous debate about the treatment of POWs on both sides; and it created a USSC exhibit at the Paris Expo in 1867. These activities, Clarke argues, were meant to portray northern voluntarism as a “monument to ‘free institutions,’ the sign of a humane, Christian community” that would undergird the new nation created by the carnage of the Civil War (139). This analysis reframes our understanding of the USSC and other voluntary organizations...

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North by Frances M. Clarke (review)

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North by Frances M. Clarke (review)

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North by Michael Thomas Smith (review)

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North by Michael Thomas Smith (review)

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (review)

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North (review)

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North.

Michael Thomas Smith's insightful new book raises important and provocative questions about Northern political culture in the 1860s. Smith revives an oddly neglected question: Why were wartime Northerners obsessed with fears of corruption and conspiracy? His response (because they had been raised in a culture steeped in the premodern ideology of republicanism) would have been self-evident a generation ago; today it is a striking claim that risks instant, eye-rolling dismissal but in fact demands careful consideration. Smith argues that at the heart of Northerners' overheated outrage surrounding ambitious and scheming war profiteers, generals, bounty brokers, bounty jumpers, and cotton traders lay a culture bred on republican fears of centralization, abuse of power, aristocratic privilege, and the “‘dissipations’ and ‘wanton extravagance’” that attended luxury and wealth (p. 19). Most recent historians have discarded republicanism as a useful interpretive tool, yet Smith finds too much otherwise irrational conspiracy rhetoric and too great a preoccupation with moral decline and its impact on civic health to ignore. He wisely refrains from rendering republican ideology a magic bullet, instead presenting a balanced and nuanced tapestry in which republicanism was interwoven with partisan politics, evangelical Protestantism, anxieties over economic development and urbanization, and fiercely contested ideals of manliness—all intensified by the pressures of a war for national survival. The result leaves the reader hard put to deny that republicanism continued to be a central facet of Northerners' outlook into the 1860s.

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North (review)

Reviewed by: The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North S. Chandler Lighty (bio) The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North. By Michael Thomas Smith. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. vii, 229. $35.00 cloth) Generations of historians have followed T. Harry Williams’s 1952 thesis in interpreting the Civil War as “the first of the modern total wars” (p. 2). McNeese State University professor Michael Thomas Smith, however, detects a paradox in describing the war as modern since many wartime Americans adhered to “elements of . . . premodern political philosophy” characterized by an “intense suspicion of corruption” (p. 2). Smith applies the word corruption in the nineteenth-century sense of the word to encompass any misuse of power that threatened economics, society, morals, or politics. Civil War Northerners rooted in republican values and ideology “were deeply fearful of the centralization of power . . . [and] consistently perceived its encroachment as dangerous corruption rather than welcome protection” (p. 10). Some vigilant Northerners would point to various scandals that cropped up in the Federal government as evidence of widespread corruption. While Smith considers most Civil-War-era corruption scandals as “overblown” and “bogeymen,” he interprets the very real fears of corruption as illuminating “key aspects of the values and beliefs central to Americans of this era—specifically, their attitudes towards republicanism and masculinity” (pp. 13, 175, 12). Smith illustrates his argument by assessing several Civil War corruption [End Page 113] scandals involving government contractors, political generals, recruitment fraud, wanton activity in the Treasury Department, and the cotton trade. These scandals, for some Northerners, threatened to undermine civic and societal virtues. The concern over government contractors stemmed from the sale of “shoddy” merchandise and the perception that they were war profiteers (a “shoddy aristocracy”), which was antithetical to prized mores of “self-sacrifice and . . . condemnation of greed” (p. 21). Political generals, like Benjamin F. Butler and John C. Frémont, were also lightning rods for corruption fears. Both generals had self-interested designs for political power that often were at odds with mid-nineteenth-century ideals of manhood such as self-restraint and disinterested benevolence. Smith concludes that for some Northerners, “The preservation of the republic . . . came to depend as much on keeping [men like] Frémont out of power as it did on defeating the Confederates” (pp. 93–94). Another unmanly group, bounty jumpers, oftentimes drew the ire of citizens who reviled them for their “greed, cowardice, and a lack of patriotism” (p. 127). Many of the scandals examined had a strong correlation between “private and public virtue”—when people failed to be virtuous in private life, Northerners questioned their ability to be virtuous in public life (p. 112). Smith offers the titillating accusations of sexual misconduct between male and female Treasury Department employees as an example. This hyperbolic scandal likely added fuel to the fire for Northerners who were already suspicious about Treasury policies, like issuing paper money, which encroached upon republican values. The cotton trade was another profit-motivated scandal that corrupted “anyone who had anything to do with cotton” and besmirched the reputations of otherwise upstanding leaders like political general Nathaniel P. Banks and even Abraham Lincoln (p. 161). The Enemy Within is concise, well-written, and provides a subtle critique of much standard historiography regarding the Civil War as a “modern” war. One notable, and inexplicable, omission from his secondary-source bibliography is Mark Wilson’s The Business of the Civil War (2006), which one needs to engage if one is to argue [End Page 114] that the Civil War was not a “modern” war. One gets the impression from Smith’s often all-inclusive use of “Northerners” that all Northerners harbored fears of corruption. However, his examples fail to conclusively show this. His evidence does show that there were some Northerners who cherished republican values, but he does not show that there were also Northerners who endorsed and rallied to the actions of the Federal government. It remains to be seen which group was the more populous or influential. In the end, The Enemy Within is a generally informative and entertaining monograph; the chapter on the Treasury Department scandal is original...

Review: War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North, by Frances M. Clarke

Review: <i>War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North</i>, by Frances M. Clarke

A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (review)

Reviewed by: A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War John Giggie (bio) A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War. By Sean A. Scott. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. 347. Cloth, $74.00.) How did Americans make sense of the Civil War and its revolutionary influence on society, including an unprecedented scale of death and destruction and the ending of slavery? Many leaned heavily on their faith for answers, shows Sean A. Scott in his impressively researched first book. Scott grounds his work in a carefully chosen place and people. He examines the "Civil War west," which he defines as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa (5). There he finds an eclectic [End Page 110] mix of foreign immigrants and transplants from the South and Northeast collectively bound together by a shared belief in evangelical Protestantism. While not the only religion in the region, it was the most popular and far-reaching, offering powerful "bonds of community and fellowship" (6). These "religious Northerners," Scott argues, merged a conviction in God's sovereignty with a profound conviction in America's status as a divinely favored nation to produce a supreme self-confidence over the meaning and outcome of the war and a lasting source of comfort. More precisely, they assumed that God favored them in the sectional controversy and willed the war to happen as a means of chastening the nation for its history of sinfulness and destroying the peculiar institution. Their blatant mixing of the spiritual with the political, however, contained unforeseen consequences. By branding God as pro-Union, aggressively seeking to Christianize the Yankee ranks, and relying on the national government instead of the church as the primary vehicle for establishing peace on earth, evangelical Protestants ultimately "trivialized religion by making it the handmaiden of politics" (266). They won the war but lost part of their souls in the process. Scott's work joins a growing literature on religion and the Civil War. Like recent monographs by Harry Stout, Mark Noll, Robert Miller, and George Rable, it shows that Americans widely depended on Christianity to interpret the war, infuse it with moral meaning, and find strength and consolation when it claimed loved ones. Scott breaks new ground, though, concentrating on the role of private piety in the lives of women and men on the home front. He is among the first to reveal just how strongly religion structured the daily lives of civilians in the Civil War west and framed their politics, relief efforts, family dynamics, and gender relationships. Specifically, Scott argues that previous scholars have underplayed the "personal and individualistic aspect of faith" when analyzing the reasons behind the wartime activities of religious northerners. When mothers and daughters struggled to explain the death of a family member or rushed to collect supplies, there was more behind their actions than a belief in popular ideas about domesticity. Rather, "devout women emphasized the value of prayer, the importance of spiritual growth, and the necessity of relying completely on God when suffering through trials" (72). Similarly, Scott finds that historians have also misunderstood the importance of religion in the motivations and actions of men living in the Civil War North. Rather than ceding the moral formation of their children to their wives, fathers played a central role in the development of behavioral standards in their families. They extended this duty to the battlefield, peppering letters [End Page 111] to family and friends fighting for the Union with ethical advice and admonitions culled straight from the Bible. As Scott writes, "The emphasis on maintaining religious devotion and preserving moral virtue as a demonstration of both physical and spiritual maturity remained a constant theme that Christian fathers stressed for soldiers of all ages and ranks" (140). Scott structures his book as a religious narrative that rises and falls with the events of the war itself. In doing so, he offers a fine model of how to balance spiritual and military histories. Frequently he uses turning points in the conflict to highlight key developments in the sacred thought of religious northerners, as when he compares President Lincoln's evolving understanding of the relationship between divine...

War stories: suffering and sacrifice in the Civil War North

The American Civil is often seen as the first modern war, not least because of its immense suffering. Yet unlike later conflicts, it did not produce an outpouring of disillusionment or cynicism, as most people continued to portray the war in highly sentimental and patriotic terms. While scholars typically dismiss this everyday writing as simplistic or naive, Frances M. Clarke argues that we need to reconsider the letters, diaries, songs, and journalism penned by Union soldiers and their caregivers to fully understand the war's impact and meaning. In War Stories, Clarke revisits the most common stories that average Northerners told in hopes of redeeming their suffering and loss - stories that enabled people to make sense of their hardship, and to express their beliefs about religion, community, and personal character. From tales of Union soldiers who died heroically to stories of tireless volunteers who exemplified the Republic's virtues, War Stories sheds new light on this transitional moment in the history of war, emotional culture, and American civic life.

With a Sword in One Hand &amp; Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

With a Sword in One Hand &amp; Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North

War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North

The Enemy Within: Fears of Corruption in the Civil War North

No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (review)

No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North (review)

Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction (review)

Reviewed by: Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction Andrew L. Slap Uncivil War: Five New Orleans Street Battles and the Rise and Fall of Radical Reconstruction. By James K. Hogue. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Pp. 288. Cloth, $45.00.) James K. Hogue tackles an important and timely subject in his book on violence in New Orleans during Reconstruction. While concentrating on “reappraising the nature of violent politics of Reconstruction,” Hogue ambitiously has many other goals. For instance, he argues that “not coincidentally, this era of state government backed by federal military occupation preceded one of the longest periods of unbroken one-party dominance in American history” (8). Unfortunately, he offers no support for this hypothesis, with only a few pages on post-Reconstruction politics and nothing past 1900. This failure is unfortunately symptomatic of the entire work. Uncivil War is a traditional political history of Reconstruction in Louisiana that mostly uses government records and secondary sources to cover well-trod ground. Given the title, surprisingly less than 10 percent of the book deals directly with the street battles. This limited treatment makes it impossible for Hogue to meet his goals of beginning “to rethink the meaning and nature of ‘battle’ itself” and “to reconceptualize both the fighting and the roles that different types of military forces played in its [Reconstruction] origins, development, and outcome” (4, 11). While finding sources for street battles can be hard, [End Page 209] Hogue does not employ all of the primary and secondary sources available. For instance, he visited the U.S. Military Academy Library but did not use its James Fornance Papers, which include the letters of an army lieutenant writing home about his participation in one of the book’s street battles. Hogue also never mentions several articles on the street battles, such as Donald E. Reynolds’s “The New Orleans Riot of 1866 Reconsidered,” Louisiana History 5 (Winter 1964): 5–27. Most of Uncivil War covers the political events in between the street battles. A failure to engage the relevant historiography dooms Hogue’s efforts to reappraise Reconstruction politics. He regularly creates straw men, referring to the positions of “many historians” or “modern scholars” while offering few, and many times no, examples or citations (14, 45, 52, 59, 113, 125, 169). At one point he refers to the interpretations of “recent scholars” and cites two books published in 1967 and 1982 (183). Hogue’s major straw man is the New Political History (NPH), as he repeatedly argues that “historians have all too often mistakenly tried to make Reconstruction’s origins, development, and outcome fit a model of stable, competitive party politics, articulated by the study of political parties, interest groups, voter mobilization, and election returns” (7, 9, 186). First, Hogue only cites Michael Perman’s work to assert the NPH’s dominance, never mentioning scholars like Joel Silbey, Michael F. Holt, or Richard McCormick. Second, historians have been attacking the NPH for over a decade—in the late 1990s the Journal of American History sponsored two roundtables challenging its paradigms. Finally, Hogue ignores the work dealing with Reconstruction political history outside the NPH, such as Heather Cox Richardson’s The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (2001). Hogue regularly fails to mention prominent works that bear directly on his study. While repeatedly discussing Ulysses S. Grant during Reconstruction, he never uses Brooks D. Simpson’s Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 (1991). Hogue spends several pages trying to place Louisiana’s Reconstruction political corruption in the broader context of nineteenth-century America without mentioning Mark W. Summer’s The Era of Good Stealings (1993). William L. Richter’s Army in Texas during Reconstruction, 1865–1870 (1987) would have provided a nice comparison with events in Louisiana. Lack of a firm historiographical grounding leads to significant interpretive errors. For example, Hogue asserts that “white militia officers of northern origin tended to have demonstrated an ideological devotion to the radical [End Page 210] wing of the Republican Party . . . by their service with black...

So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control in the Civil War North

So Lonesome I Could Die seeks to historicize the emotional effects of war by analysing debates over how to manage and treat nostalgia in the Civil War North. At this time, both physicians and laypeople viewed nostalgia (or homesickness) as a deadly disease that might kill a man outright, but more frequently precipitated or exacerbated other illnesses. Focusing on the emotional distress caused by soldiers' detachment from homes and families, this diagnosis stands in contrast to modern conceptions of war trauma, which emphasize the impact of participating in or witnessing horrific violence. Whereas the diagnosis of nostalgia generated little controversy in the mid-nineteenth century, there was no such consensus over the proper treatment of homesick troops. According to certain physicians and military leaders, the best curative lay in turning soldiers' thoughts away from home through harsh discipline and active combat. Yet, there were also many in the North who believed in the medical, military, and political value of promoting, rather than repressing, strong domestic feeling in the Union ranks. Wartime debates over the treatment of nostalgic men suggest that even as some held up the detached warrior as a model, others continued to emphasize the primary importance of domestic ties in creating ideal soldiers and virtuous citizens.