Sitting on the Front Porch Watching the War

In Seasons of War, Daniel E. Sutherland ambitiously tries to tell the story of the Civil War from the perspective of Culpeper County, Virginia. “Most people, even the soldiers to a large extent, were spectators of the war, much like us,” Sutherland says. “So, as spectators, we need a perch on which to sit and watch the action unfold.”

Sutherland’s choice of places to perch is a good one. Confederate and Union troops alike occupied Culpeper County. Culpeper prospered from feeding the Confederate army; and it was one of the first occupied regions in the Confederacy, one in which the Union army experimented with treating civilians rough. It was close to several major battles of the war and the site of the battles of Cedar Mountain and Brandy Station. Furthermore, as Sutherland’s thorough research demonstrates, Culpeper County’s inhabitants, soldier and civilian, left a wealth of sources—family papers, soldiers’ letters and diaries, newspapers, church and court records, tax rolls, claims to the Southern Claims Commission—with which to recreate the community’s life.

Sutherland’s book is subtitled “the Ordeal of a Confederate Community,” and it’s a subtitle worth noting. First, because Sutherland does think of Culpeper County as a Confederate community; time and again he assures us that most of its people—indeed, most Virginians—were committed Confederates. There is little in this book about the class and racial conflicts that other historians have asserted lay at the heart of the Confederate experience. When Stonewall Jackson died, Sutherland tells us, all Culpeper mourned. Second, while Sutherland deals with the liberation and emancipation of Culpeper’s enslaved people, he does not let this change his understanding of the war as an ordeal, first and foremost—the chapter entitled “Liberation” concerns not the Union army and the enslaved, but the Confederate army ousting the Union army. Third, we should understand that the concept of “community” in the subtitle is based on assumed ideas, not on investigation. Sutherland did not follow the lead of O. Vernon Burton, who tried to define community in his In My Father’s House There Are Many Mansions (1985), and who is now engaged in charting the transition from antebellum community to wartime nation in Edgefield, South Carolina.

The opening and closing dates are significant too. This is not a book about the transition from the antebellum to the postwar South. While it is not exclusively concerned with military operations, the war frames the discussion of Culpeper. The reader who wants to learn, for example, what Culpeper was like during Reconstruction, will learn a lot more about the memorializing of war in Culpeper.

Nonetheless, this is a remarkably strong book. The more Civil War history readers know, the more they will admire Seasons of War. (And the more they will find to disagree with.) Sutherland is generally graceful in the way he brings large amounts of the secondary literature to his discussion of Culpeper County, and, vice versa, in how he uses the Culpeper experience to illuminate larger issues.

For example, the account of Union general John Pope’s occupation of the Culpeper region in 1862 should serve as a corrective to the commonplace myth that it was W. T. Sherman who invented harsh war single-handedly in Georgia in 1864. (It should but it won’t.) Pope was the Yankee Lee hated most, because Pope, applying his experience in Missouri to the east, set out policies designed to bring the Confederate civilians into line—and the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac followed them enthusiastically, possibly more enthusiastically than Pope himself foresaw.

Seasons of War is on the leading edge of Civil War history. For some time, I predict, the community study will be the direction in which Civil War historians go. We have a plethora of studies of “the Big Picture,” whether of military strategy, the decision for emancipation, southern slaveholding women, or the experience of soldiers...