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  • Banners South: A Northern Community at War
  • Barry M. Stentiford
Banners South: A Northern Community at War. By Edmund J. Raus, Jr. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-87338-842-9. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 333. $39.00

While no subject in American history has generated more volumes than the Civil War, skilled historians still find much that warrants deeper investigation. Banners South is a study of the relationship between a town and its residents serving in a state-raised Volunteer regiment. Edmund J. Raus, Jr., a historian formerly employed at Manassas, Gettysburg, and Fredericksburg, attempts that rare alchemy of blending military history with social history. The author's stated intent is to "illuminate the major themes and events of the first two years of the Civil War in the eastern theater from the perspective and experience of Cortland soldiers and civilians" (p. x). He largely succeeds at this.

Cortland, a small central New York town about thirty miles south of Syracuse, sent many of its sons to war through Company H of the 23rd Regiment of New York Volunteers. The 23rd served during the first two years of the war, participating in the occupation of Fredericksburg and fighting at Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Through diaries, letters to families and newspapers, the men recorded their impressions of the South, blacks, and the war itself. A recurring theme is their bitterness when forced to treat white Southern civilians as Americans and not as intractable enemies. More hinted at than developed is the sometimes difficult reintegration of the veterans into the community.

Banners South attempts to do on a community scale what Gerald F. Linderman's Embattled Courage did on a national scale; show the impact of the war on the men who fought it, and how they tried to reconcile the expectations of war with its reality. Banners South makes a good companion to G. Ward Hubbs's Guarding Greensboro, in that both go beyond traditional Civil War unit histories by emphasizing the links between a community and its military company. While Hubbs used a town firmly in the Confederacy both politically and geographically, Raus focuses on a similarly situated Union town.

Raus's style is straightforward, and he generally does a good job of blending secondary sources with primary sources related to his subject. Raus has his biases, and his scorn falls most often on the Radical Republicans. Major Generals Irvin McDowell and George B. McClellan are mostly tragic figures, while President Abraham Lincoln is usually portrayed as a meddler in military affairs. The book has its drawbacks. The narrative too often strays from its stated purpose, and includes long sections of traditional history of Union [End Page 1135] operations in northern Virginia, broken by only occasional reminders of the Cortland men in the 23rd New York. Space filled with too familiar quotations on the physical impact of combat in the Cornfield at Antietam (p. 204) or of Lee's mixed feelings towards the benefits of the terribleness of war (p. 237) would have been better filled with more on the relationship between hometown and military company. Historians wishing better to understand the inner workings of the company, or its relationship to its hometown, will find the filler tiresome. That said, Raus has produced a valuable and readable volume on how small northern communities experienced the war.

Barry M. Stentiford
Dubach, Louisiana
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