Connecticut for the Union: The Role of the State in the Civil War (review)

BOOKREVIEWS87 criticism is with the publisher's decision not to include Professor Summersell 's bibliography. James M. Merrill Whittier College Connecticut for the Union: The Role of the State in the Civä War. By John Niven. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Pp. xviii, 493. $10.00.) Niven clearly presents Connecticut's response to the Civil War in this well-organized book. Its narrow scope enables him to examine in depth many aspects of the war effort with gratifying results. Niven's work is to be taken seriously by all Civil War historians and is not intended solely for Connecticut's filiopietistic progeny. One of Niven's main themes is that Connecticut life, so boring, dreary, and lacking in opportunity, frustrated its young men. Consequently, they plunged into the 1860 Republican campaign as uniformed "Wide Awakes," marched in torchlight parades, and brawled with Irish Democrats. During the secession crisis, while older leaders drifted, ambitious young Republicans —like Charles Dudley Warner and Joseph R. Hawley—opposed any concessions to the South. And when war came, young men volunteered more to escape their state than to defend the Union. Niven places special emphasis on the thwarted ambitions of young men. But are young men ever satisfied? Isn't it more significant and unusual that mature leaders abdicated responsibility and allowed young men of this era and locale to formulate policy and to make decisions? Military experience nationalized and broadened Connecticut's youth. "Union now meant nation, not state, not even North," and the Yankee, Irishman, German, and Negro learned to appreciate each other, as well as the common heritage for which each fought. Despite incompetent brigade and division commanders, Connecticut troops fought hard and well on scores of batdefields. Their mechanical and nautical skill made them particularly adept at coastal seige operations. Niven uses his focus on Connecticut regiments, rather than Union armies, to good advantage and clearly illustrates the soldier's mixed lot of boredom, suffering and death. Niven's treatment of wartime politics is disappointing. On the home front he delineates three political groups while noting the "confusing mixture of politics and principles." These groups are conservative or Peace Democrats, War Democrats, and Moderate Republicans fighting for the Union as it was; and Radicak struggling for abolition, nationalism, and free enterprise. As the war progressed, the Moderates gravitated to either extreme. Niven, who equates opposition to the Lincoln administration with disloyalty, is hostile to the Radicak and harsh on the Peace Democrats. Accepting a widely held view of the Radicals, which has recently come under fire, Niven neither tests whether Connecticut Radicak were indeed a hard and fast group nor analyzes the fissures in the Connecticut 88CI VIL W A R HISTORY Republican party that might reveal a factional rather than an ideological base for Radical opposition to Lincoln. Furthermore, the loose use of the term "disloyal" obscures rather than clarifies. Finally, Niven argues convincingly that the war not only "unbalanced the maturing economy" but "delayed rather than hastened the difficult adjustment to the dominant industrial society." Though a "catalyst in the industrializing process" and a creator of new capital, the war "promoted some disorderly economic growth, some resultant social problems. Railroad development, so essential to a mature industrial economy, was neglected; while the munitions industry, of little use in the postwar era, was expanded far beyond even wartime needs." Touching all phases of the war, Niven has written a provocative book. Ari Hoogenboom Pennsylvania State University The General to His Lady: The Civil War Letters of William Dorsey Pender to Fanny Pender. Edited by William W. Hassler. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1965. Pp. xiii, 271. $6.00.) Major General Dorsey Pender, Army of Northern Virginia, was dead at the age of twenty-nine. Like his compatriot, Stonewall Jackson, this North Carolinian was a professional soldier whose military star shone brightly, but briefly. He rose through the ranks of the 3rd and 6th North Carolina to become "Pender the diligent" in the eyes of Robert E. Lee. He had just established himself as one of the most promising division commanders in the Confederate army when a mortal wound at Gettysburg snuffed out bis young life. Officers...