The Burning: Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley (review)

BOOK REVIEWS349 The Burning: Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley. By John L. Heatwole. (Charlottesville: Howell Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 266. $29.95.) In 1864, Union general Ulysses S. Grant directed his generals to wage war against the Southern homefront. While William T. Sherman followed his directive in Georgia and the Carolinas, Philip Sheridan invaded Virginia's Shenandoah Valley. In The Burning, John L. Heatwole explores the experiences of four Virginia counties: Augusta, Page, Rockingham, and Shenandoah. Through an assortment of family stories and recollections, Heatwole stresses the importance of Sheridan's burning of the region's bams, factories, mills, forges, farms, supplies , bridges, and homes. According to Heatwole, Sheridan's destruction of the Virginia countryside, what he terms as "the defining moment in the life of the Valley," directly impacted the South's ability to fight. Heatwole, himself a descendant ofVirginians in Sheridan's path, explores his regional and familial past through a compilation of sixty-six interviews conducted over the past three decades. In his narrative Heatwole interweaves the interviews with his subjects' descendants with an occasional reminiscence and contemporary letter or diary entry. According to the author, the resulting account "retains the echoes of the original emotions experienced by those who first related it [over a hundred years ago]." Unfortunately, Heatwole does not focus on the "echoes" of original experience; he ignores the peculiarities of memory. Instead, he uncritically accepts oral history as an accurate account of events. The limits of oral history reveal themselves in the stories told throughout the book. As do most oral histories, the ones presented in this volume glorify the past: almost all of the citizens in Sheridan's path are portrayed here as courageously willing to stand up to Northern soldiers and actively foil their plans. According to the descendants, Virginia civilians successfully bribed Union soldiers not to bum their property, appealed to the sympathies of the Northern invaders, and received help from the enemy in rescuing personal property and family heirlooms from homes that "accidentally" caught fire. This stress on resistance within the region's memory reveals as much about the nature of the myth of the Lost Cause and family honor as it does Sheridan's actions. An exploration of these influences on family stories would offer more nuanced insights into "the burning" and its aftermath. The volume's emphasis also refutes the interpretation offered in the introduction . Heatwole boldly claims that "the civilian population of the Valley was affected to a greater extent than was the populace of any other region during the war, including those in the path of Sheridan's infamous march to the sea." His evidence belies this assertion. Both Sherman and Sheridan began their campaigns with similar orders to destroy anything that would help the Confederate war effort, and both campaigns left widespread destruction in their wakes; without a sustained comparison, Heatwole's interpretation falls short. 350CIVIL WAR HISTORY The Burning recounts the family legends surrounding a traumatic experience on the Southern home front. The detailed stories that still exist about the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War attest to the impact of Sheridan's campaign on the region's psyche, and in this work Heatwole has begun the process of drawing attention to the memories of "the burning." Lisa Tendrich Frank University of Florida The Limits ofDissent: Clement L Vallandigham and the Civil War. By Frank L. Klement. (Bronx: Fordham University Press, 1998. Pp. xxvi, 351. $32.50.) "A TRAITOR, A MONSTER, A DISGRACE TO HIS ANCESTRY, A SHAME TO POSTERITY . . ." shrieked the editor of the Louisville Journal in June 1861 (71). The editor's target was Clement L. Vallandigham, Democratic congressman from Ohio's Third District. Vallandigham, an old-line conservative Jacksonian Democrat , emerged during the Civil War as one of Lincoln's most severe and sustained critics. Ambitious, self-righteous, egotistical, and an ideologue, Vallandigham by 1 863 became the leader of anti-Administration forces and the peace movement in the Middle West. Arrested for sedition in April of that year by Gen. Ambrose Burnside, he became a martyr for scores of Democrats. Wisely, Lincoln chose banishment as his punishment instead of imprisonment. Vallandigham rigidly believed in states rights, opposed emancipation, and...