War without Battles

Almost two decades ago Maris Vinovksis famously asked whether social historians had lost the American Civil War. He argued that "almost every battle and skirmish has been thoroughly examined and reexamined" and that "much excellent work has been done on that conflict—especially the military aspects of the war." Vinovksis lamented, however, that despite over 50,000 books having been published, "We do not know much about the effects of the Civil War on everyday life in the United States. Surprisingly little has been written about the personal experiences of ordinary soldiers or civilians during that struggle." He blamed social historians, who had "lost sight of the centrality of the Civil War."¹ In the last twenty years social historians have responded to Vinovksis's challenge. Other historians have also become more interested in social aspects of the Civil War, such as the new military history, which seeks to understand the relationship between a society and its military. Gary W. Gallagher has argued that social historians now dominate the academic study of the Civil War, particularly compared to military historians, in his 2005 Fortenbaugh Lecture at Gettysburg College, "′The Progress of Our Arms': Whither Civil War Military History?" The findings of social historians have been incorporated in most new comprehensive studies of the Civil War. Two of the most prominent examples are the 2001 revision of The Civil War and Reconstruction, in which David Herbert Donald, Jean Harvey Baker, and Michael F. Holt incorporated new sections on the role of women, the family, African Americans, and common soldiers, and James M. McPherson's third edition of Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, which also has extensive new passages on the role of women and the experience of common soldiers. Given the dominance of social historians in the field and the widespread integration of social dimensions in popular Civil War texts some would argue that far from losing, in the last twenty years social historians have won the Civil War.

Scott Nelson and Carol Sheriff, self-described social and cultural historians, see their work as part of a continuing struggle for social historians to win the Civil War (p. 334). The authors explicitly state their mission, acknowledging that they "borrow liberally from the rich historical literature that has been published since Maris Vinovksis issued his intellectual call to arms," and that "by stitching together material from other scholars' specialized studies and adding our own historical scraps to the patchwork, A People at War provides an overview of what the Civil War meant to the sorts of people whose individual biographies rarely appear on bookshelves" (pp. x–xi). In many ways their objectives are even larger, for the authors acknowledge that "our emphasis is on the years 1861 through 1865, but we also cast an eye at the tumultuous decades that preceded and followed the battlefield confrontations," and spend almost a third of the book trying to place the Civil War within the context of mid-nineteenth-century America (p. x). In addition, Nelson and Sheriff do not merely want to win, but wish to sweep their opponents from the field. The authors' goal is "a collective biography of the millions of people who experienced, often in life-altering ways, America's Civil War," but with little attention to military or political history, for they explain that "our story is set against a backdrop of the war's political and military developments . . . but most of it unfolds away from the battlefields and seats of power" (pp. xii, x). The renewed segregation of social history from military and political history severely limits the authors' ability to tell the story of civilians and soldiers during the Civil War, for battles and politics were integral to their lives. Even solely as a social history of the Civil War, however, A People at War suffers from problems ranging from extrapolating incorrectly from primary sources to the neglect of major...