Reviewed by: Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters Matthew E. Stanley Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War. By Kristopher A. Teters. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 240 pp. $32.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-3886-7. W. E. B. Du Bois was crystal clear about which strategic and racial attitudes prevailed among northern whites at the beginning of the Civil War. “The North went to war without the slightest idea of freeing the slave,” he explained in his landmark 1935 book, Black Reconstruction (New York). “The great majority of Northerners from Lincoln down pledged themselves to protect slavery, and they hated and harried Abolitionists.” Recent historians such as Chandra Manning and James Oakes have challenged Du Bois’ point, positing a collective emancipationist impetus within the Union Army and among the northern population and charging “neo-Revisionists” with overemphasis on dissent and initiating a “dark turn” in Civil War scholarship. Gary Gallagher, among others, has reminded us that the overriding objective of most Union soldiers was the restoration of nation. Most of these historians, on both sides of the debate, ignore the critical dynamic of region within their broader conclusions about northern soldiers and politicians. Kristopher A. Teters’ Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War accents the critical convergence of emancipation politics and regionalism. Rather than Republicans successfully infusing the war with a liberationist purpose from its outset, Teters argues that practical considerations, and not morality, motivated western officers to support emancipation. However transformational emancipation and black enlistment were to the war (and they were supremely transformational), western officers only slowly accepted radical change and viewed the conflict not as a revolutionary experience, but as a conservative and restorative one. Their approaches to emancipation and even black enlistment tended to evolve, but their racial attitudes largely did not. They drew a hard line between accepting or even advocating for the destruction of slavery and support for racial equality. [End Page 177] Teters finds definite patterns in western officers’ negotiations about emancipation on the ground that evolved from reluctance to pragmatic acceptance. During the first fifteen months of the war, when the necessity of slavery’s destruction was far from evident, western officers proved inconsistent in their policies toward slaves, the vast majority falling on some spectrum of conservatism. John C. Frémont, who as a department commander in Missouri ordered slaves freed in August 1861 (requiring Lincoln to countermand his edict), was the clear exception. William T. Sherman, Henry W. Halleck, Don Carlos Buell, and others, whose personal beliefs and obedience to the law guided their limited war aims and who initially refused fugitive slaves in their lines, were more characteristic. If the driving force for emancipation was military necessity, western federal armies had little incentive to expand the war aims; unlike their eastern counterparts, their armies saw little but victory. Uneven policy characterized these officers’ efforts, but challenges from below disrupted cohesion within the ranks. Conflict often arose between conservative high-ranking officers and junior officers and enlisted men who sensed the utility of emancipation and were more likely to defy exclusion policies toward runaway slaves. After the Second Confiscation Act and the Emancipation Proclamation, western officers adopted more consistent emancipationist policies. In the Lower Mississippi Valley, Benjamin F. Butler and Ulysses S. Grant proved especially receptive to new liberalizing war measures, and they shifted their command postures and even personal attitudes. While conflicts over emancipation policy persisted in border slave states like Kentucky and Missouri, by 1863 the Union armies driving deep into the Western Confederacy were powerful agents of liberation. Because few western soldiers had enlisted to free slaves, emancipation and especially black enlistment remained subjects of intense debate. Teters contends that officers eschewed moral considerations as they carried out military emancipations for the army’s operational and strategic benefit—freeing slaves for use as laborers, servants, and, more controversially, soldiers. Teters thus [End Page 178] echoes the conclusions of James M. McPherson, Mark Grimsley, and others that freedom advanced with the army as officers accepted able-bodied slaves who possessed “military value...