Confederate Officer Research Articles

The Southern Lady from Pedestal to Terra Firma: Isa Glenn's Southern Charm

The Southern Lady from Pedestal to Terra Firma:Isa Glenn's Southern Charm Veronica Makowsky Isa Glenn (1874–1951) is yet another acclaimed woman writer who disappeared from the male-created and male-dominated literary canon after the Second World War. In her case this patronizing devaluation was exacerbated by the patriarchal and racial values of many of the male stars of the Southern Renaissance. Donald Davidson, a Southern Agrarian, sneered: Into their realism of social history or satire come doctrinaire attitudes which are as unhealthy as the undue exaggeration of southern traditions for which writers of the older school have been blamed. They are imported, not native attitudes, and they cause one to reflect how poor an exchange scorn is for sentimentality. In the novels of Frances Newman [her fellow Atlanta native] or the lighter works of Isa Glenn, the deliberate puncturing of pretensions thought to be southern smacks of a paying-off of old scores: the southern woman, now intellectually as emancipated as her northern sister, takes a dig at the tradition that would have kept her in "woman's place." (201) Glenn was the recipient of this dismissive slap because she was a menace to the Old Order of the South, preferring "scorn" to the "sentimentality" surrounding the southern "lady." Even worse, she was a popular and successful threat since, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, her eight novels sold well and were critically acclaimed. They were advertised and reviewed in major newspapers and magazines throughout the country, often accompanied by interviews with or profiles of their elfishly diminutive and opinionated creator. In addition to the literary merits of her fiction, Glenn is noteworthy as a particularly fascinating, even extreme, example of artistic and personal creation and re-creation. As her experience widened beyond the South, Glenn learned that the southern lady was more than the attractive façade of racism and sexism. [End Page 289] She was its dupe and its victim, as Southern Charm (1928) demonstrates through the gradual enlightenment and liberation of the elderly Mrs. Habersham, the epitome of stultified and stultifying southern gentility, as she learns from the struggles of her daughters and granddaughter. Like Mrs. Habersham, Glenn emancipated herself, bit by bit, from the sentimental cage of southern ladyhood. Glenn's formative years were spent on the cusp between tradition and modernity. She was born into two old southern families of distinguished lineage with the obligatory links to George Washington and Confederate officers. She was also a daughter of Atlanta, Georgia, the exemplar of the modernizing South; indeed, she was the oldest child of one of its mayors, John T. Glenn. As a girl and young woman, Glenn tried to be at once the avatar of the southern debutante and leader of young Atlanta society while pursuing her interests in the visual arts, particularly painting and print-making, with the quixotic patronage of James MacNeil Whistler. She tried her hand at genealogy and society journalism. Glenn was always just a little too advanced, a little too clever, a little too much her own person to fit neatly into the expectations of Atlanta's elite young-adult set. She had a broken engagement with a rising young southern newspaper editor when she was twenty-three, but did not marry until she was almost thirty, quite late for her social station. Her husband, Army officer J. Bayard Schindel, not only got her out of Atlanta, but took her all over the world, from dusty army bases in the US West to the Far East. Through her travels, she learned that the South was a microcosm of the greater world: dominated by racism, colonialism, imperialism, and, of course, misogyny cloaked by paternalism. She continued to dabble with her printmaking as she attempted homemaking on the fly, moving constantly in service to her husband's career. After a stillbirth, she raised a son, Bayard Schindel, who remained in many ways the light of her life. As Carolyn G. Heilbrun points out in Writing a Woman's Life (49–50, 126), women of Isa Glenn's era did not follow the male model of a steady progression and development from early career to late...

Leviathan in Chains: The Short-Lived Federalization of the Ohio Penitentiary

Leviathan in ChainsThe Short-Lived Federalization of the Ohio Penitentiary Sarah E. Paxton (bio) Erected along the Scioto River in the burgeoning Ohio capital, the Ohio Penitentiary was one of the earliest American prisons. Built to house predominantly men, the Ohio prison hosted thieves, bar brawlers, murderers, and—from July 1863 to March 1864—Confederate prisoners of war (POWs). Captain John Hunt Morgan and his infamous raiders spent the early months of 1863 wreaking havoc through southern Ohio, leaving ransacked businesses, upset railroads, smoldering canal boats, and a horde of livid Ohioans in their wake. Due in no small part to local outrage and Morgan’s infamy, upon their capture, Morgan and many of his raiders were locked away in the Ohio Penitentiary rather than the nearby Camp Chase POW camp. Four months later, in an embarrassing turn of events for both the state of Ohio and the Union Army, Morgan and his men broke out of the Ohio Penitentiary and escaped back to the Confederacy. A great deal of scholarship has been dedicated to John Hunt Morgan, contributing to his renown and status as a Southern folk hero. Yet historians have glossed over the four months he spent incarcerated. While Morgan’s escape may appear to have meant little in the grand scheme of the Civil War, it was a tumultuous time in the history of the Ohio Penitentiary and the evolving relationship between state and federal authorities. Housing POWs, particularly Confederate officers, was an uncommon occurrence with little to no precedent to guide the ill-defined relationship between the military and civilian guards. The presence of POWs in the civilian prison created financial, bureaucratic, and [End Page 67] political conflicts that neither the Ohio Penitentiary nor the Union Army were prepared to handle, leading to several crucial security measures falling through the cracks. Despite what the folk tales told of the rebel prisoners’ cunning, it was the buildup of tension between military and penitentiary staff and a lack of a clearly understood authority within the prison that allowed Morgan to escape. The trepidation with which the federal government approached commandeering the Ohio Penitentiary, and its failure to actuate their control, was demonstrative of the uncertainty surrounding the centralization of the American State. In July 1863, the Ohio Penitentiary took responsibility for the rebel prisoners begrudgingly. When Morgan and his men had been captured following the raids through Ohio and its neighbors, Union general Ambrose Burnside was concerned that the existing POW camps, like Camp Chase, would be unable to hold the raiders. Fearing they would escape, Burnside turned to the governor of Ohio and requested they keep the POWs in the penitentiary, where he was sure they would be more secure. Governor David Tod and Ohio Penitentiary warden Nathanial Merion acquiesced but initially restricted the number of POWs they would accept to 30. Despite this limit, the number housed at the Ohio Penitentiary quickly grew to 70.1 From the beginning, no one was happy with the arrangement. While the military provided some of the supplies for the care of the raiders, most of their needs were to be covered by state funds intended for the criminal convicts. The strain on the institution’s finances was exacerbated further by the fact that the penitentiary was not allowed to use the raiders as contract workers, a common practice with their criminal convicts.2 The federal POWs were therefore a drain on the already tight and heavily scrutinized finances of the state-run penitentiary. There was also the issue of space. The prison had an original maximum capacity of 500 inmates, though the institution was nearly always at or above capacity, perhaps a reason that Merion requested their charges be limited to 30. Prisoner comfort was evidently a nonissue for the prison administration, and, as a result, the penitentiary remained a diseased and brutal warehouse for years. The original wooden cells were perpetually damp and had tiny windows that allowed in little light or air.3 Physicians noted the consequences of [End Page 68] this environment on the physical health of the prisoners, first voicing concerns over the conditions in 1850. The warden agreed with their assessment in 1855...

The Poe Shrine: Building the World's Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection

The Poe Shrine: Building the World's Finest Edgar Allan Poe Collection

“I Come from Georgia”: Andrew Cobb Erwin’s Southern Resistance to the Ku Klux Klan

Abstract During the 1924 Democratic National Convention, Will Rogers described the party’s deliberation on Saturday as “the day when I heard the most religion preached, and the least practiced of any day in the world’s history.” The Democrats had been debating over whether to officially condemn the Ku Klux Klan in the party platform. William Jennings Bryan ended his own address offering white supremacist support with an all-too-common appeal for the party to simply “return to Jesus” rather than condemn white supremacy. Among the flurry of religious rhetoric that week, one voice surprised the delegates. Just before Bryan, one son of a Confederate officer and former mayor of the Klan stronghold, Athens, Georgia, spoke. He looked small. His voice cracked. But when he spoke outside the stereotype of a Southern politician and against the KKK, Madison Square Garden erupted with both hisses and cheers. That day Andrew Cobb Erwin gave us a model of how to resist within a politically charged religious climate.

Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown

Reviewed by: Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America by Thomas J. Brown William B. Lees Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America. Thomas J. Brown. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-4696-5374-7. 384 pp., paper, $29.95. In a thorough and well-researched book, Thomas J. Brown seeks "to reframe a rich recent literature on Civil War Memory" (9). Growth of this literature has paralleled increased interest in heritage-related memory studies and a growing pushback to Confederate symbolism, racism, and violent hate crimes. Much of this literature has focused on Southern monuments espousing in word and symbol the Lost Cause narrative or "useful history" of the Civil War. This history negated Southern defeat, extolled values supported by the Confederacy, and supported resurrection of the antebellum social contract between former master and former slave in a Jim Crow world. Brown's goal, clearly established in his introduction, is not to refute the existing literature but to make a very compelling argument that Civil War monuments, irrespective of their location in the former Confederacy or the loyal Northern states, also mirror or in fact had a role in the militarization of the United States. In chapter 1, Brown considers emergence of the soldier monument in post–Civil War America after a decade or so of commemoration by stark and impersonal forms (such as the obelisk) generally placed in cemetery or square to acknowledge human loss in the absence of the body itself. An essential part of this chapter, though, is a review of the nation's earlier, post-Colonial rejection of honoring great leaders and military heroes, and the military state in general, that was not seen to befit the new republican form of government. He argues successfully that the rejection of the aristocratic model in our new nation is reflected on the antebellum landscape by a general lack of monuments to the common soldier or military leaders. Prior to the Civil War, the standing army was small, and concepts of citizenship, manhood, and [End Page 430] leadership were vested in civilian, and usually agrarian, pursuits. The huge losses of the war, however, with so many soldiers buried on distant and usually unknown fields, inspired a substitute in the form of an obelisk or stone, which soon was supplanted by a sculpture of a nameless common soldier. Chapter 2 discusses how these sculpted portraits of soldiers on perpetual picket duty remained nameless but evolve to represent the soldier as a model of citizenship; a mantle previously held by the likes of the farmer or blacksmith. Chapters 3 and 4 consider the broadening of the post–Civil War monumental landscape to include parallel themes of leadership and victory. Leadership monuments, which extolled the virtues and importance of Union and Confederate officers such as Lee and Grant and political leaders such as Lincoln and Davis, became more and more commonplace as the veterans, now in places of political and economic prominence, vied for a lasting place in the story of our nation's greatest conflict. Monuments extolling victory through grand arches and other forms long familiar throughout Europe were understandably more common in the north, but commemoration of victory (of perhaps a different sort) was no less sought out in the South—and to some degree, it was achieved there. In chapter 5, Brown presents a useful discussion of the conflation of Civil War commemoration with that of World War I, which often receives little attention in most studies of monuments of the former. Brown concludes his book with an epilogue focusing on a new iconoclasm resulting from increasing opposition to existing Confederate monuments starting in the Jim Crow era but escalating rapidly with racially charged events of the current century. This resulted in "the most important season of American iconoclasm since the destruction of the equestrian statue of George III in 1776" (283). Anyone interested in Civil War monuments as memory, especially those who think they have this figured out, need to read this impressive book. Brown's volume is at times tedious, and it dives deep into the art history aspects of monuments, but this is itself an oft-neglected value...

Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics by Matthew Fox-Amato

Reviewed by: Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics by Matthew Fox-Amato John Brooke Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics. Matthew Fox-Amato. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019. ISBN 978-01906-6393-3. 343 pp., cloth, $39.95. How can we "see" the experience of American slavery and the struggle to abolish it? Matthew Fox-Amato's Exposing Slavery presents a powerful argument: the sudden eruption of photography in 1839 allowed Americans of all walks of life to see themselves, and others, in quick constructions of self and situation. Almost instantly, daguerreotypes, tintypes, and photographs joined steam, cheap print and postage, and the telegraph in reconfiguring the relationship between self and society. Exploring a problem that has fallen "through the cracks between history, the history of photography, and art history," Fox-Amato argues that Americans North and South, free and enslaved, used the photograph to engage the contested place of slavery and race in late antebellum America (2). The four chapters and epilogue in Exposing Slavery present Fox-Amato's argument in simple clarity, exploring how slaveholders, slaves, abolitionists, and soldiers all used photography to present their own interpretations of race, slavery, and freedom. Chapter 1, "Policing Personhood," describes how slaveholders, in part responding to the domestic critique in Uncle Tom's Cabin, made images that reinforced the argument that slavery was a domain of "interracial intimacy and harmony" (67). These images of well-dressed slave nurses and white infants rooted in a religious "Madonna" motif and of trusted slave artisans reinforced the case that a benevolent slavery was a positive good for the union. Means of constructing images of subordination, portraits of slaves were also means to recovering valuable fugitive property. Slaves, too, were interested in photography. Chapter 2, "Enduring Images," offers a fascinating look at how slaves presented themselves in slaveholder portraits and how cheap photography was a vehicle for self-purchased presentation. Tintypes and daguerreotypes left behind, carried away, or mailed from a distance allowed slaves to see the faces of their kin lost in the slave trade, fundamentally "asserting the sociality and full humanity" in the face of their denial (102). So too, abolitionists black and white deployed photography for presentation of self. Chapter 3, "Realizing Abolition," stresses how photographic images served as talismans of membership in an embattled but virtuous minority cause, depicting both suffering white rebels and fugitives transformed. The themes of these first chapters echo in different registers through Exposing Slavery's perhaps problematic chapter on Civil War photography, "Domesticating Freedom." Here Fox-Amato's major protagonists are white soldiers, North and South, constructing their visions of race as the end of slavery loomed. Confederate officers sat with household slaves who were serving them at the front, in a gender reversal of the nurse-and-infant images: in time of war, race relations under slavery [End Page 418] were still intimate and harmonious. Given the resource differential, far more Union images were made, but these, too, present a form of domesticity. In another echoing reversal of the nurse-and-infant images, Union officers stood or sat in authoritarian poses before their tents, while "contraband" servants knelt or stood behind them in obedient postures. White Northern soldiers were the liberators, but African Americans were constructed as a subordinate and feminized caste. A Northern Jim Crow regime was being crafted and refined during the war for union and emancipation. Fox-Amato offsets this white domestication of freedom with a brief discussion of the imagery of black manhood and bravery. The photography of black soldiers clearly echoes themes of chapters 2 and 3, as black soldiers visually testified against the institution. However, this offset is unbalanced, and these echoes are undeveloped: we get twenty pages (185–205) and at least eleven illustrations of the domesticating freedom theme and five pages and four illustrations of the black manhood theme. Given the massive volume of photography of black soldiers, perhaps "black bravery" might have been a theme of a separate chapter, despite important recent work. (See especially Ronald S. Coddington, African American Faces of the Civil War: An Album [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2012...

The Lincolns: Retrospective Diagnosing Raises Questions Worth Pondering

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ProfessionalFull AccessThe Lincolns: Retrospective Diagnosing Raises Questions Worth PonderingMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:2 Jul 2019https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.6b17AbstractThe case of Mary Todd Lincoln’s involuntary hospitalization especially highlights the difficulty of retrospective diagnosis, say two psychiatrist-historians. Studying the putative psychiatric symptoms of Abraham Lincoln; his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln; and that of other historical figures raises fascinating and important questions about the nature of psychiatric diagnosis, how those diagnoses are viewed through various cultural lenses, and how they may change over time.So said psychiatrists David Casey, M.D., and his son Brian Casey, M.D., both of the University of Louisville, at the APA 2019 Annual Meeting session “The Melancholy of the Lincolns: What We Can Learn About Psychiatric Diagnosis Through the Cases of the President and His Wife.”This Currier & Ives lithograph depicts President Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln and their sons Robert (second from left) and Thomas.“The historical record may be incomplete or distorted, and the reporters may be biased,” said Brian Casey. “Manifestations of psychiatric disorders may change over time as cultures evolve—a concept that speaks to the culture-bound nature of syndromes.” And there is the problem of “reification,” which refers to the tendency to look for the familiar and attempt to fit an historical case into a contemporary paradigm.Given the problems with retrospective diagnosis, David Casey suggested that the contemporary historian/clinician can render only the most tentative judgments. “I propose that only a general, syndromal diagnosis is usually supportable,” he said.The father-son psychiatrists, both avid students of history, outlined the life stories of the Lincolns and what is known—or assumed—about their psychiatric symptoms. (David Casey is president of the Innominate Society of Louisville, a medical history society.)Lincoln experienced a harsh childhood on the American frontier with a father who was physically abusive and disavowed his son’s scholarly ambitions. Lincoln suffered several traumas including the death of his mother and a beloved sister. He is believed to have experienced at least two prolonged periods of depressive symptoms—one after the loss of his sister and a second after breaking off his first engagement to Mary Todd.He and Mary Todd Lincoln suffered the loss of a son, Edward, before he became president; and while they were in the White House—when Lincoln was presiding over a bloody civil war and the most tumultuous period in American history—they lost a second son, Willie. After her husband’s assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln suffered the loss of a third son, Thomas.The case of Mary Todd Lincoln, who was involuntarily committed to an Illinois psychiatric hospital after the assassination, continues to attract controversy. She had long been a flamboyant character, and she exhibited delusional and suicidal behaviors, especially following the assassination. She has been retroactively diagnosed by some with bipolar disorder.Independent of her symptoms, she was a controversial figure. The president’s wife was the daughter of a wealthy slaveholder, and she hosted the widow of a Confederate officer in the White House—for which she was widely condemned both in Washington, D.C., and throughout the North. Moreover, she had enemies in Congress who investigated her for spending lavishly on redecorating the White Hose. After Willie’s death, Mary held seances in the White House, inviting public ridicule.Mary was committed to Bellevue Place in Illinois in 1875 by her son Robert with the help of several doctors who testified to her insanity. She was released four months later to the care of her sister Elizabeth.Brian Casey said Mary Todd Lincoln’s case also has been viewed through the prisms of feminism and anti-psychiatry. More generally, her case raises the question: Can we really apply modern diagnostic constructs to historical figures?“Our diagnostic ideas also evolve over time,” he said. “Applying DSM-1, -2, -3, -4, or -5 criteria may yield different opinions as to whether Mary Todd Lincoln did or did not have bipolar disorder, and Emil Kraepelin’s concept of manic-depression came long after Lincoln’s death. Recent publications and depictions of Mary reveal as much about the authors as the subject—including the application of modern views on psychiatry.” ■ ISSUES NewArchived

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson

Reviewed by: Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson Tim Roberts Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson, eds., Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. 2013. 196 pp. $39.50. One challenge instructors of Civil War history face is to complicate students’ assumptions that the war pitted “The North” against “The South.” Important books have appeared emphasizing the significance of regional differences in the Civil War South.1 Likewise, scholars have sought to rekindle interest, first emphasized by Frederick Jackson Turner, in American regional history.2 But until the appearance of the book under review and a few recent monographs, little Civil War scholarship has focused on what people called “the Northwestern United States,” meaning the antislavery states west of Pennsylvania (2).3 [End Page 173] Union Heartland begins to rectify the situation by presenting seven essays that seek to identify what may have been unique about the Civil War’s impact on the most agricultural part of the Union. An important essay by R. Douglas Hurt provides detailed evidence about the extent and variety of the war’s boon to midwestern agriculture. Military demands for horses, hogs, and grains encouraged farmers (male and female) to expand land development and invest in laborsaving technology; the Civil War spurred northern industrialization by first expanding farming output. Another valuable essay is Brett Barker’s study of local Republican efforts to squelch Democratic war dissent through boycotts and acts of violence against antiwar newspapers. Barker’s point is that while official actions by the Lincoln administration to suspend northerners’ civil liberties may have been measured, as previously argued by Mark E. Neely, unofficial or vigilante censorship of the Democratic press was perhaps widespread and warrants further study.4 Three of the book’s essays show a variety of midwestern women’s wartime experiences. Ginette Aley emphasizes women’s sense of alienation over the departure and uncertain fate of husbands and fathers. She notes that while gender norms of the day generally “defined a woman’s life almost entirely” in terms of her family, women in remote areas of the North were particularly affected (126). Nicole Etcheson and J. L. Anderson then show different outcomes of midwestern women’s sudden solitary circumstances. Etcheson studies how soldiers’ wives who moved in with or near their husbands’ in-laws effectively remained subordinated to their husbands as a result. Anderson, meanwhile, emphasizes women’s new expressions of autonomy in managing farms and family because of “the vacant chair” (148). The book’s other two essays reflect how not all midwesterners were consumed by the war’s sacrifices of family or civil liberties, or even economic windfalls. Michael P. Gray describes the circus-like atmosphere of civilians’ enthrallment with Confederate officers imprisoned on Johnson’s Island near Sandusky, Ohio. Julie A. Mujic, on the other hand, studies University of Michigan students’ class essays, debates, and newspapers to explain how the (male) students rationalized their failure to join the Union military. For these students, “staying in school became the equivalent of fighting the rebels,” and their classes, they asserted, prepared them to lead the country in the anticipated murky postwar era (58). Mujic’s essay could benefit from an epilogue to trace whether any of the students she studied actually played public roles during Reconstruction, but her work shows another layer of [End Page 174] midwesterners’ reactions to war, in addition to the other “battles” elucidated elsewhere in this diverse and welcome collection. Tim Roberts Western Illinois University Macomb, Illinois notes 1. William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Daniel Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2014). 2. Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen Nissenbaum, and Peter S. Onuf, All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). As Aley notes, however, this book omitted the Midwest as a significant American region. 3. Jennifer Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the...

Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War by Catherine Clinton

Reviewed by: Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War by Catherine Clinton Angela Esco Elder Stepdaughters of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War. By Catherine Clinton. Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. Pp. xx, 144. $27.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-6457-0.) When Catherine Clinton received an invitation to deliver the seventy-third annual Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University, she was in the midst of several projects. Faced with the prospect of choosing just one to share, she ultimately decided that since "there was just the slightest hint that I might want to offer lectures on the topic of women … how could I resist revisiting the topic of southern women and the Civil War?" (p. xiii). This book is not simply the product of those lectures; it is also the result of a lifetime of research and thought on the topic and reveals a wartime female experience that was anything but monolithic. "I believe in taking every opportunity to afford women a platform, a place at the table—even if we don't like the menu," writes Clinton in her preface, warning that the book to come is not simply a reflection on the state of the field (p. xvii). The first chapter focuses on elite white women, the "band of sisters" who sacrificed for the Confederate war effort, wrote their way through the war, and often embraced blind patriotism (p. xv). Clinton traces the wartime experiences and writings of familiar nineteenth-century names including Mary Boykin Chesnut, Winnie Davis, Louisa McCord, Sarah Morgan, Sallie Pickett, Kate Stone, and Augusta Jane Evans Wilson. Clinton maintains that "the blood of the lash could not be whitewashed away by even the most eloquent of memoirists, and yet the band of sisters would die trying" (p. 39). In her next chapter Clinton turns to "impermissible patriots," white women defined by "their defiance rather than their accomplishments" (p. 41). These women tested gender norms and challenged societal expectations even as they expressed deep loyalty to the Confederacy. A driving force in this chapter is Loreta Janeta Velazquez, a woman who published a memoir claiming she fought as a Confederate officer, and historians' mixed treatment of her tale. This chapter is particularly thought provoking as Clinton manages to tie topics like the need for research on nineteenth-century dress reform to recent gendered language about Hillary Clinton and pantsuits. "Whatever their political and personal agendas," Catherine Clinton concludes, "scholars might reframe and recast Confederate women's defiant careers in more balanced terms, in order to recognize women who seized the opportunity to serve their country" (p. 74). The final chapter analyzes the history and implications of "Mammy," a "carefully cultivated" image replacing the real African American women who fought for and redefined freedom (p. 100). Clinton argues, "African American women have been absent not only from historical accounts of the Civil War but from any appreciation of its legacy for black women and the incredible transformations wrought" (p. 84). In addition to discussing the debate over which woman should appear on the twenty-dollar bill, vintage racist collectibles, the use of the term Mammy in Ireland, and the #SayHerName Twitter [End Page 990] campaign, this chapter studies the conflict between recognizing black women as historical actors and addressing "the mythical symbols of black womanhood whites have projected" (p. 93). Clinton cautions scholars against "replacing a caricature with an emblem" by creating historical work that presents "emancipated slaves as indefatigable heroes" without human flaw (p. 102). Clinton's writing is accessible and conversational, challenging readers with admonishments like, "We must not hold women in the past hostage to historical standards that keep them in the sidebars and footnotes, only including those who achieve status 'within a man's world'" (p. xviii). At under 150 pages this book is by no means exhaustive, though the footnotes offer a fairly comprehensive map of where this field stands. Clinton reminds us of the significant work that has been done as well as the significant work that remains to be done in original research, textbook publications, and college lectures. Those...

Judge Holly Bell: The Autobiography of Alabama’s Last Confederate Officer

Judge Holly Bell: The Autobiography of Alabama’s Last Confederate Officer

The Civil War Diary of Father James Sheeran: Confederate Chaplain and Redemptorist ed. by Patrick J. Hayes

Reviewed by: The Civil War Diary of Father James Sheeran: Confederate Chaplain and Redemptorist ed. by Patrick J. Hayes William B. Kurtz The Civil War Diary of Father James Sheeran: Confederate Chaplain and Redemptorist. Edited by Patrick J. Hayes. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2016. 584pp. $29.95. Although the study of religion during the U.S. Civil War has boomed over the last decade, scholars have focused on mainline and evangelical Protestants who dominated the country’s landscape both numerically and in social and intellectual importance. Civil War scholars seeking to understand the growing yet small body of Roman Catholic Americans (perhaps 10 percent of the total population in 1860) have faced a number of obstacles, from a basic ignorance of Catholic archives and their rich records to an extreme paucity of published primary sources. Thus Patrick J. Hayes’s new edition of the diary of Father James Sheeran, CSsR (1819–1881) is a welcome effort to make a major primary source on wartime Catholic life more accessible to historians and the general public. Although a previous edition was published in 1960 by renowned Catholic historian Joseph T. Durkin, SJ, only Hayes’s edition publishes the diary in full. Hayes admits that the manuscript diary used for this edition, which is located at the Redemptorist Archives of the Baltimore Province, may [End Page 89] not be written in Sheeran’s hand. Still, he argues persuasively that the words are Sheeran’s even if an amanuensis wrote out the surviving diary manuscript. Born in Ireland, Sheeran was married and had three children prior to his religious vocation later in life. Ordained a Redemptorist in 1858, Sheeran was assigned to Louisiana shortly before the Civil War. Despite spending most of his antebellum life in the North, Sheeran left New Orleans in August 1861 to serve as chaplain of the 14th Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment in the Confederate Army. Unlike most Catholic chaplains on either side, Sheeran left behind a detailed record of his activities in General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in a diary chronicling his experiences from the second half of 1862 through the last days of the Civil War. Sheeran’s diary is most useful for understanding the nature of a Civil War chaplain’s service, how the conflict affected civilians in Virginia, and Catholic life in the Old Dominion state. Although the American church had always counseled its priests to stay out of politics, the war provided space for the Irish American Sheeran to become not just a regimental chaplain but a full-fledged advocate of the Confederacy and its right to secession and national existence. Having sparred with anti-Catholic editors over parochial schools before the war, Sheeran was highly opinionated and quick to criticize anyone who crossed him. Sheeran frequently quarreled with Union prisoners, including Catholics, over the cause of the war. He denounced federal attacks on southern civilians such as the shelling of Charlestown, South Carolina, as “diabolical” (294). Like many southerners he blamed abolitionists for causing the war, writing, “Were it not for this fanaticism of the demonical Abolitionists of New England, this unholy and murderous war should never have taken place” (203–204). While Sheeran criticized Protestant bigotry wherever he found it, he himself was extremely anti-Protestant. For example, he refused to associate with other chaplains in Lee’s army, whom he denounced as “a parcel of excommunicated Heretics” (225). In addition to looking after the souls of Catholic soldiers, Sheeran was the moral policeman of his brigade, and was completely unafraid to correct the disrespectful or immoral behavior of any Confederate officer. He even chastised John McGill, the bishop of Richmond, for not doing enough to support Catholic schools. Finally, he publicly denounced Union General Philip Sheridan in print for arresting him without cause in late 1864. Even after his release, Sheeran personally berated Sheridan, whose hands were “stained . . . with blood, rapine and every species of injustice,” over his poor treatment of a Catholic priest. [End Page 90] In assessing the diary’s value as an accurate and contemporary window into Catholic life in Lee’s Confederate army, it is important to note it is...

Johnson's Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers by Roger Pickenpaugh

Johnson's Island: A Prison for Confederate Officers by Roger Pickenpaugh

Johnson's Island: a prison for Confederate officers

Johnson's Island: a prison for Confederate officers

Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable

Reviewed by: Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South by George C. Rable Paul Quigley (bio) Damn Yankees!: Demonization and Defiance in the Confederate South. By George C. Rable. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. 201. Cloth, $38.00.) Writing in her diary in early 1865, a white Georgian named Eliza Frances Andrews unleashed a veritable tirade against the northern enemy. Yankees “thwart all my plans, murder my friends, and make my life miserable,” she wrote. “Yankee, Yankee, is the one detestable word always [End Page 614] ringing in Southern ears. If all the words of hatred in every language under heaven were lumped together into one huge epithet of detestation, they could not tell how I hate Yankees” (95). Among the accomplishments of Damn Yankees! is almost exactly that: to gather together as many words of hatred as possible in order to reveal how Andrews and her fellow white southerners hated Yankees. If nothing else, readers are guaranteed to learn some new and highly creative ways to insult people. Yet Damn Yankees! is so much more than a repository of execrations. It is a masterfully executed work by one of our field’s most accomplished historians, a slim volume with broad implications for how we understand Confederate thought. Rable persuasively shows that language and imagery mattered greatly to the prosecution of the Civil War. They matter in every war. Across the world and through the centuries, as weapons and strategies have evolved, using words to vilify the enemy has been a constant feature of warfare. “Language matters,” Rable explains, “because descriptions of the enemy carry serious and sometimes deadly consequences for all concerned” (3). The more harshly we portray our enemies, the more severely we want to hurt them—and the less we want to reconcile after the fighting is over. These issues are especially consequential in civil conflicts. When fighting against former compatriots, the line demarcating us from them, good from evil, becomes more critical than ever. Confederates expended much ink detailing North-South differences. Sometimes they read those differences back into the past, back into the days of original settlement, when Cavaliers supposedly clustered in the South and Puritans in the North, and sometimes even further back, into the European past. Once one accepted that Yankees were historically a different race, it became easier to define them as subhuman—the type of people who would not only subscribe to dangerous “isms” such as feminism or abolitionism or socialism, but also resort to inhumane means of waging war in the effort to propagate those isms. The result was the frequent dehumanization of northerners in Confederate culture. One need only leaf through the pages of Damn Yankees! to find numerous examples that hover around a fine line between the quaintly amusing and the deeply disturbing. There is the civilian who states, “I rejoice when I hear of their slaughter by the thousands.” And there is the Confederate officer who reports that it was “doing my soul good” to see northerners’ “severed limbs, decapitated bodies, and mutilated remains” (102–4). Language is what justified, even generated, such callousness, and the results were nothing short of horrific. The power of antinorthern invective long outlived the war itself, going on to fuel southern resistance to Reconstruction. After defeat, [End Page 615] one South Carolinian reported, the Yankees “left me one inestimable privilege—to hate ‘em. I git up at half-past four in the morning, and sit up till twelve at night, to hate ‘em” (133). White women appear frequently in Damn Yankees! as key authors and disseminators of anti-Yankee insults. They were also the ultimate victims of Yankee perfidy. When Union soldiers invaded not just southern states but southern homes and bedrooms, they threatened the gender relations that white southerners had placed close to the center of their regional identity. Even the hint of sexual peril—let alone explicit allegations of rape—steeled southern hatred like little else. Little else, that is, except the threat of emancipation. Some of the most enlightening sections of the book emphasize racial disorder as a particularly menacing aspect of the northern threat. Of course, differing attitudes toward racial slavery, in...

THE CONFEDERATE AND THE FREEDMEN: BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL COMPARISONS FROM THE RECONSTRUCTION-ERA SOUTH

In 1999, the human remains, coffin, and associated artifacts of William Ayres Crawford, a Confederate colonel who died in Saline County, Arkansas, in 1874, was examined archaeologically. Comparisons to Crawford's biohistory are made to his contemporaries—African-American freedmen who lived and died in the 1870s and early 1880s and who were interred in Freedman's Cemetery in Dallas, Texas. The Freedman's Cemetery site was intensively studied archaeologically in the early 1990s. In the process, key disparities and similarities between a slave-holding confederate officer and people who experienced the horrors of enslavement are revealed.

Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War Ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson (review)

Reviewed by: Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War Ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson Michael Burns Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War. Ed. Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8093-3264-9, pp., 224 cloth, $39.50. In the Civil War era, the midwestern United States, contemporarily known as the Old Northwest or the Middle West, contributed greatly to the conflict. Numerous Union leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and William T. Sherman, came from the Midwest. The famed Union Iron [End Page 91] Brigade consisted entirely of regiments formed in three midwestern states. In addition, the region produced the wheat and corn that fed the Union armies that marched through the Confederacy. Despite these contributions to the Union war effort, Civil War scholars have paid little attention to the region’s home front. In this work, seven scholars focus on numerous aspects of the midwestern home front to gain a better understanding of what the region’s population experienced during the war. Previously, many historians examining the northern home front treated the region as a monolithic entity. Aley and Anderson, however, argue that the Midwest fails to fit into the established historical mold and that the region consisted of a mainly rural population that settled the region from both northern and southern states. The region’s cross-cultural and rural nature contributed to the population’s home front experiences. Throughout the volume, historians examine both traditional fields, like the region’s economy and politics, and new areas of interest, like Civil War prisons and soldiers’ families. Michael P. Gray’s examination of the Johnson’s Island Prison in Ohio shows midwesterners’ fascinations with Confederate prisoners and the economic benefits of these prisons. Gray points out that Johnson’s Island contained a population of captured Confederate officers and that midwesterners’ curiosities with these visitors led to an economic boom in Sandusky, as well as nearby Great Lakes communities that established cruises to see the prisoners. This in turn embittered the Confederate officers, who publically displayed their disdain for the gawkers, and strengthened the local economies. Julie A. Mujic studies the experiences of college students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In this interesting and novel analysis, she finds that these young men attempted to create their own forms of patriotism through their education, justifying their absence from the battlefield. While other young midwesterners spilled their blood in the South, these students argued that their education prepared them to lead the United States in the conflict’s aftermath, which also contributed to Union victory. R. Douglas Hurt follows this with a study of the region’s agricultural power. Although seemingly an obvious piece of the midwestern experience, Hurt shows how the Union armies’ logistics benefitted from the agricultural power of the Midwest and how the midwestern economy grew in the process. In addition, the region expanded its agricultural power during the conflict, solidifying [End Page 92] its place as the breadbasket of the United States, something few historians have previously noted. Nicole Etcheson, Aley, and Anderson focus on the experiences of soldiers’ wives and families on the home front, revealing the weakening of the gender structure that resulted from the departure of so many men. Etcheson examines the relationship between the wives of Putnam County, Indiana, soldiers and their in-laws and how these influenced the gendered power struggle between husbands and wives. Since the soldiers pushed their wives to stay with their families when they went off to war, even if the wives’ families lived nearby, Etcheson argues, the “in-law relations were frequently a power struggle between husband and wife, and the husband’s authority often prevailed” (101). Aley concentrates on what the “vacant chair” meant for the women on the home front. She finds that the soldiers’ absences created uncertain futures for women and the soldiers’ families, since their futures were interconnected with their male kin’s presence. Anderson maintains that the experience of Iowa women resulted in the complicating of gender norms in the Midwest as, in the absence of their male relations, women gained...

Touching America’s History: From the Pequot War Through World War II by Meredith Mason Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Touching America’s History: From the Pequot War Through World War II by Meredith Mason Brown Daniel Vivian (bio) Touching America’s History: From the Pequot War Through World War II. By Meredith Mason Brown. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013. Pp. 271. $30.00 cloth; $24.99 ebook) In recent decades, studies of material culture have moved into the mainstream of historical scholarship. Once the domain of specialists, object-based analyses are now common in many fields. In Touching America’s History, Meredith Mason Brown undertakes something of the sort without identifying it as belonging to the genre. Instead, he speaks of a “reliquary approach to American history” (p. 2). Using fifteen artifacts as a basis for exploring select episodes and events, Brown recounts ten histories. His “relics” include stone tools used by Algonquin peoples in early New England, two nineteenth-century diaries, a pistol carried by a Confederate officer during the Civil War, and a porcelain fragment reputedly taken from a toilet at Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof. Most have personal associations with Brown, either through ancestry or other connections. Brown’s histories begin with a May 1637 massacre of Pequot Indians near the site of present-day Mystic, Connecticut, and continue through to World War II. Relying principally on secondary sources, he offers readers informative but thoroughly conventional histories of well-known events. Brown’s artifacts introduce each of the ten chapters of the book. The officer’s pistol, for example, is the inspiration for a chapter on William Preston, an ancestor who fought in the Mexican War, served in Congress, and later as a general with the Confederacy. Another item, the transcript of the court-martial of the author’s great-uncle, provides the basis for a chapter on the Philippine-American War of 1899–1902. Because of Brown’s personal ties to artifacts and historical actors, each chapter explains how the author came to possess the artifact in question and how he is related to associated figures. Brown [End Page 136] is, therefore, narrator and participant; his histories are personal, if for no other reason than his role as a collector. His presence is especially strong in the last three chapters, which concern twentieth-century artifacts. These focus on men whom Brown knew personally, and his writing reflects the closeness of his relationships with them. Brown deserves credit for investigating the lives and experiences of his ancestors, and his attempt to highlight the evocative power of artifacts is laudable. His analytic approach, however, falls short. Brown makes no attempt to study the physical qualities and social roles of his artifacts, which robs him of valuable strategies for uncovering historical meanings. His examination of the mnemonic power of artifacts is equally feeble. His “relics” serve solely to introduce historical subjects. Does using them in this fashion really make history “come alive,” the goal announced by Brown at the beginning of the book? Reader’s familiar with the work of scholars such as Henry Glassie, Bernard Herman, and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich will surely think otherwise. Brown’s basic method of selection is also problematic. Rather than examining artifacts associated with a particular event, place, or socioeconomic group, his choices are based on ownership and personal associations. He is the common characteristic. Without unifying qualities rooted in historical processes, opportunities for meaningful analysis are nonexistent. Brown’s histories leave much to be desired. Although he writes in a clear and lively style, he makes no attempt to situate his subjects historiographically. Instead, he recounts such well-known events as John Brown’s assault on Harpers Ferry, the battles of Shiloh and Chickamauga, and the fall of Nazi Germany in familiar fashion. Brown thus imparts nothing new to knowledge of the histories he tells. His interpretations are resolutely whiggish, and he seems unaware that the American story may be something other than a tale of incremental progress over time. Brown has written a book that will interest members of his family and close friends but is unlikely to have a broader appeal. Heavy on antiquarianism and lacking scholarly rigor, its main value lies in [End Page 137] its exploration of material ties to historical figures. By...

“Mississippi’s Greatest Hour”: The Mississippi Civil War Centennial and Southern Resistance

“Mississippi’s Greatest Hour”The Mississippi Civil War Centennial and Southern Resistance Alyssa D. Warrick (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution When Congress authorized the Civil War Centennial Commission to plan events and steer state and local organizations towards commemorating the war, Mississippi quickly organized a commission to encourage events within the state, due to its importance as the home state of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and as the site of one of the most important Confederate defeats, Vicksburg. Civil War monument, Vicksburg, Mississippi, courtesy of the Library of Congress. [End Page 95] On Tuesday, March 28, 1961, the overcast clouds above Jackson, Mississippi, parted just around ten o’clock in the morning. Shortly after, drummers took to their instruments to send off the color guard at the beginning of the parade. Behind them, stretching for six miles, were three thousand men dressed as Confederate soldiers, collectively known as the “Mississippi Greys.” Cheers rang out when the Jackson Central High School Junior rotc unfurled the largest Confederate battle flag in the world, owned by the University of Mississippi. After the two-hour parade, Governor Ross Barnett, clad as a Confederate officer, performed as his 1861 counterpart in a dramatized reenactment of Mississippi’s secession convention. As five thousand Mississippians watched in the halls of the Old Capitol, Mississippi symbolically left the Union once again. Mississippi’s official commemoration of the centennial of the Civil War had begun.1 The United States had been preparing for the Civil War centennial since 1957, when Congress authorized a commission, appropriately titled the Civil War Centennial Commission (cwcc) to plan events and steer state and local organizations towards commemorating the war and especially the men involved. Mississippi quickly organized a state commission to plan and encourage events within the state, due to its importance as the home state of Confederate president Jefferson Davis and as the site of one of the most important Confederate defeats, Vicksburg. From the outset, Mississippi’s commission had a clear goal, evinced by its name. The Mississippi Commission on the War Between the States (mcwbs) was unapologetically pro-Confederate, though willing to acknowledge, however begrudgingly, the Union victory. But the commissioners did not wish to fight the war again; rather, the commissioners urged Mississippians to “honor dedication and devotion, courage and honor, integrity and faith” of the men who fought in the previous century. The mcwbs focused on the fighting generation’s character as necessary lessons for children and adults alike. The Civil War centennial was more than just recognition of a central event in American history. It was more than simple nostalgia for an imagined Old South. The numerous parades, the pageants and balls, and the multitude of reenactments and commemorations around the state collectively reinforced ideas of a moral fiber that would save the South from a host of “-isms”: liberalism, communism, socialism, pacifism, and atheism. The story of the Civil War centennial commemoration has been a subject of recent inquiry by historians Robert J. Cook and David Blight. Cook studied the commemoration from a national standpoint in light of the Cold War; Blight examined the works of four prominent historians of the day. Jon Wiener analyzed the centennial events in the context of the Civil Rights Movement in addition to the Cold War. The national scope of these works causes them to miss a dominant theme from the Centennial that is best seen at the state and local level, particularly in Mississippi. The events from 1961 to 1963 in the Magnolia State shed light on [End Page 96] how one generation of men, born before 1920, and who benefited from the rabid white supremacist rhetoric and policies of men like Governor James K. Vardaman, used the anniversary to impart similar anti–Civil Rights (and, by their own extension, anti-communist) values onto the next generation of Mississippians.2 The Civil War Centennial did not create a new spirit of resistance for southerners, but it arrived at a critical moment. As returning veterans, often young, arrived home from Europe and the Pacific, they began making inroads in their communities as business leaders and politicians. Yet the four men who defined Mississippi’s Centennial period—Commission...

“Under These Classic Shades Together”:

cross American colleges and universities during the late antebellum period, young men associated outside the classroom in literary, social, and fraternal clubs, all-male spaces highly conducive to the formation of strong friendships. Strong male relationships developed in which such terms as “intimacy,” “fraternal love,” and the “after life” were fundamental tenets of a shared experience. Unlike the collective world found in the public sphere of adult men, the antebellum college setting differed precisely because the young men quite frequently lived and dined together in dormitories, boarding and rooming houses, and fraternities, often secretly organized, in the towns and cities in which their colleges were located. Their lives were marked by dynamic uncertainty: not yet fully independent adults, but no longer completely dependent for support on their families. Since at least the 1970s, historians have debated the possibilities of same-sex intimacy among women, the terms of which have often centered on their timing and their prevalence in early American society. Only recently, however, have men as gendered subjects A

Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges ed. by Stephen Berry (review)

Reviewed by: Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges ed. by Stephen Berry Donald R. Shaffer (bio) Weirding the War: Stories from the Civil War's Ragged Edges. Edited by Stephen Berry. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Pp. 352. Cloth, $69.95; paper, $24.95.) Weirding the War stands out. Not only because of its highly distinctive cover art, but also more importantly because of the high-quality content within. Edited by Stephen Berry, and containing an eclectic collection of original essays, this anthology makes a brave attempt to break away from the culture of reverence that shapes many studies of the American Civil War, even by top scholars. Weirding the War draws its inspiration from "Freakonomics," the multimedia phenomenon of journalist Stephen J. Dubner and economist Steven D. Levitt, who according to Stephen Berry employ "the use of economic theory to investigate atypical subjects in the hope of yielding fresh insights into typical social dynamics" (5). Berry and his collaborators seek to bring the sensibility of Freakonomics to history, calling it "weirding." Practically speaking, this means the authors explore corners of the Civil War that at first might seem trivial. As Berry puts it, the book is "dedicated to cowards, bummers, drunks, prostitutes, scavengers, and profiteers" (2). In other words, this is a scholarly anthology that, while not disrespectful of more conventional Civil War historiography, [End Page 152] is devoted to obscure people, places, and things of the Civil War, teasing scholarly significance from them. Berry organizes Weirding the War into six sections of related essays. Section 1 deals with materiality, with essays on souvenir collecting from battlefields during the Civil War; the postwar aesthetic appreciation of Civil War ruins; and corrupt North Carolina officials enriching themselves by abusing the law allowing government confiscation of the property of persons disloyal to the Confederacy. Section 2 addresses women, with fascinating essays on the various identities created by William Quantrill's wartime "wife"; how the war altered prewar patterns of courtship in the South; and insights into the shifting mores in the wartime romances of a Virginia belle. Section 3 takes as its theme suffering, with essays on the torture of the wife of a Unionist guerrilla leader in North Carolina; hunger in the Civil War South; and the social significance of southern coroners' reports in the Civil War era. Section 4 examines emancipation, with contributions that explore how a Kentucky cold snap helped advance freedom for the slaves; how desertions of black Union soldiers revealed a greater loyalty to family and community than to the army; and how ex-Confederates healed themselves after defeat and forged a resistance to Radical Reconstruction in elaborate postwar horsemanship tournaments. Section 5 analyzes the minds of soldiers, with essays covering what a Confederate officer's court-martial revealed about the meaning of honor in the southern army; the minds of white Union soldiers as demonstrated by some of their common catchphrases; and a fictional reenvisioning of the wartime activities of a famous nineteenth-century artist. The sixth and last section deals with the postwar period, featuring essays on how wartime disabilities altered gender relations in white southern families; the tremendous psychological damage war and defeat wrought on Confederate veterans; and how a Union survivor of Andersonville publicly refashioned his own Civil War memory through written histories that alienated his former comrades. Not surprisingly, although all the essays in this anthology make worthwhile reading, they adapt the volume's weirding approach with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success. Probably, the single most unconventional essay in Weirding the War is Daniel E. Sutherland's fictional reen-visioning of the Civil War experience of painter James Whistler. Before the war, Whistler was thrown out of West Point for poor performance. Sutherland imagines Whistler's Civil War career as a Confederate officer, playing off of Whistler's well-known gest that if he had passed a third-year chemistry exam at West Point, he would have become a general instead of an expatriate artist. Although seemingly an entertaining bit of fluff, Sutherland's essay is a useful reminder of the importance of chance in [End Page 153] how the Civil War developed. Consequently...