Virginia at War, 1863 (review)

This collection of essays is the third volume treating varied aspects of the American Civil War in Virginia, and it contains original work of well-qualified authors. In keeping with the contents of the previous volumes that covered 1861 and 1862, respectively, and also reflecting much recent Civil War scholarship, these essays generally explore social history topics and noncombatants rather than concentrate on battlefield history.

The volume opens with A. Wilson Greene's brief survey of military operations in Virginia during the third year of the war. That is followed by James Marten's brief but suggestive exploration of how wartime conditions affected the lives of white children in the war zone and Benjamin H. Trask's account of missionary teachers and freedpeople in southeastern Virginia. David Rolfs contributes an essay on the trials of war as a test of Confederate civilians' faith. Editor William C. Davis provides a brief but tantalizing look into how people tried to preserve and understand the difficult wartime news through keeping scrapbooks. And Jared Peatman offers a critique of how Virginia newspapers missed or misconstrued the events and import of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The volume concludes with the third installment of editor James I. Robertson Jr.'s thoroughly annotated edition of Judith Brockenbrough McGuire's famous wartime diary, which was one of the first to be published after the war. In the 1867 edition, which has been reprinted several times, many of the people she mentioned or described are difficult to identify. Robertson's editing enriches that rich text.

Of primary interest to the part of western Virginia that became West Virginia during the year 1863 is James M. Prichard's "The Devil at Large: Anse Hatfield's War." This is a careful exploration of what the documentary record reveals about William Anderson Hatfield during the war and compares and contrasts that information with what the postwar accounts of his life and of the Hatfield-McCoy Feud contain. The contemporary documentation suffers from discrepancies and gaps, which some of the later recollections and narratives filled, sometimes imaginatively and sometimes reading backward from the feud to locate its causes in the bloody bushwhacking war that many localities in the divided counties of western Virginia suffered through during the Civil War.

Prichard's essay also highlights one of the principal unifying themes of this set of essays. While the war swirled around them, civilians struggled to understand what it meant for them and their culture. Their diaries, scrapbooks, and newspapers, the sermons they heard, the schoolrooms in which they studied, the scenes that they witness, the rumors that they heard, and even the children's play generated impressions that evolved into memories and myths and legends and historical accounts that helped them interpret the war even while it was still going on. Those impressions and memories also influenced how they conveyed to the next generations what the Civil War had done to them and meant to them.

With the 150th anniversary of the Civil War rapidly approaching, these reflections on how the national tragedy affected every person in every locality are particularly timely and remind us, even though it was a minority of Americans who fought in the Civil War, that the war deeply touched every person in a unique, complex, and irreversible way.