The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography (review)

78CIVIL WAR HISTORY in Northern antislavery newspapers, as were two other Birdseye letters that Dunn selects. As accounts clearly intended for publication and circulation, then, these dispatches sought as much to make history as to record it. Like Theodore Dwight Weld's American Slavery As It Is ( 1 839), they presented the daily horrors of chattel slavery to citizens of the free states unsure of the true nature of the institution. Birdseye clearly realized this, repeatedly declaring his hopes that his observations might help in some way to "further the cause" by discrediting slavery and rallying opposition to it at a moment it seemed economically unproductive. Viewed from this perspective, the letters are a compelling case study of the intricate, dialectical interaction between an antislavery North and a slave South that Stanley Harrold has recently documented. Birdseye consistently affirmed that Northern resolve, inspired by accurate knowledge ofconditions in the slave states, would as effectively turn slaveholders from sin as the recent "Temperance Reformation" in the North had spread light to a once-drunken South. He assured Gerrit Smith and his Northern associates that their efforts against slavery were already accomplishing good, even though many improvements were still needed. Birdseye also looked to Smith, one of the nation's wealthiest men, to sponsor free labor colonies in the slave states and to purchase the freedom ofan especially promising slave, William, who clearly had "talents to expose the system and a scarrified body which would show how true his statements must be" (262). Mindful of the sophisticated antislavery campaign to shape public opinion , Birdseye worked to make sectional dynamics an aid, rather than an encumbrance , to confronting and overcoming thenational problem ofhuman bondage. Robert E. Bonner University of Southern Maine The Civil War in Books: An Analytical Bibliography. Compiled by David J. Eicher. Foreword by Gary W. Gallagher. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. xxiii, 407. $39.95.) In his cogent Foreword to this analytical bibliography, Gary W. Gallagher reminds us that "There never has been a better time for prospective readers to be interested in the Civil War" (xv). As Gallagher explains, scholarship on the Civil War has mushroomed over the last dozen years, bringing the methodologies of the "new" social history, as well as more traditional military, political, and cultural history, to bear on America's most studied war. The standard Civil War bibliography, Civil War Books: A Critical Bibliography, 2 vols., edited by Allan Nevins, James I. Robertson, Jr., and Bell I. Wiley, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967-69,) assessed roughly six thousand titles up through the early 1960s with limited and often inadequate annotation in a nowobsolete format. It is time, then, for a new analytical bibliography, one in step BOOK REVIEWS79 with current Civil War historiographical trends. Few scholars in fact can keep up with the flood of works churned out today. Compiler David J. Eicher, drawing upon the expertise of Gallagher and five other leading historians and bibliographers, has assembled a competent but limited bibliography of 1,100 titles (slightly more than one-half reside in Eicher's persona] library). This represents at best 2 percent of the roughly fifty thousand available books and pamphlets on the war. With a "selection" (xxi) rather than an authoritative compilation, Eicher seeks to provide a working list of essential works on the Civil War for buffs, librarians, collectors, and historians. He arranges them in five major categories: Battles and Campaigns; Confederate Biographies , Memoirs, and Letters; Union Biographies, Memoirs, and Letters; GeneralWorks; and Unit Histories. Coverage includes studies offorty-one battles and campaigns and biographies of 206 Federals and 159 Confederates. Eicher examined each of the works in his compilation and made a conscious effort to strike a balance between early and recent works on the same subject. In a rather curious editorial decision, he elected to omit vital books (he fails to cite examples) that were especially difficult to find. "If a book is nearly impossible to locate," Eicher explains, "it should first be reprinted and made available before being discussed for the readership at large" (xxi). But this logic in effect denies bibliographic access to those who require information on a particularly essential book. In...