Locating the South During the Civil War and Reconstruction

Since the 1980s, historians of the American South have increasingly turned to local studies to illuminate homefront experience during the Civil War. Historians have written monographs on urban areas like Richmond, Vicksburg, New Orleans, and Charleston, as well as rural communities scattered throughout the Confederacy. Many of these studies extend their coverage to the postwar battles of Reconstruction. Local studies on the Southern homefront generally address questions of class, race, or gender conflict; patriotism and dissent; community structure and destruction; and military-civilian relations. Amateur historians who write local histories of the Civil War homefront provide valuable building blocks for other historians, but their works are often dismissed as simplistic in interpretation and anecdotal in approach. While some historians celebrate the singularization of the historical experience, most authors of local histories, community studies, and microhistories attempt to address big questions in small places. To examine trends in interpretation and approach in local studies of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, this essay explores three recently published books—two monographs and one edited collection.

The first histories of the Southern homefront adopted the Confederate perspective. In the aftermath of the Civil War, former Confederates promoted a celebratory narrative. Southerners had waged war in defense of the constitutional principle of states' rights. Even slaves had supported the Southern cause, they claimed, siding with their beloved masters against marauding Yankee soldiers. Proponents of the so-called Lost Cause dismissed the role of slavery in the creation of the Confederacy and the significance of the institution in its demise. By the turn of the century, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other organizations had successfully established a Confederate version of the War between the States as the true history of the Civil War.

Historians seeking to move beyond the perspective of Confederates in their studies of the Civil War homefront face intractable challenges. The war and postwar South bequeathed to historians a particularly compromised historical record. Unconditional Southern Unionists were often marginal figures who left relatively few letters, diaries, and memoirs of their wartime experiences. This is particularly the case with slaves who were legally prohibited from learning to read and write. Historians of the Civil War and Reconstruction turn to local studies in order to reveal the everyday experiences of elites and non-elites, including Unionists, which had been obscured by pro-Confederate histories.

Local histories, especially monographs, offer the tantalizing but elusive prospect of interpretive authority by focusing on small topics—places, people, or events. One approach encourages the exhaustive exploration of a finite set of primary sources so that, as historian Richard D. Brown suggests, "the microhistorian commands the evidence on that subject beyond challenge; so within that topic readers learn to accept her or his authority. . . . Their assertions, grounded as they are in a profound, multi-faceted, even holistic, grasp of a fragment of historical experience, cannot be dismissed easily as fictions." Giovanni Levi, an eminent microhistorian, suggests an alternative approach "of incorporating into the main body of the narrative the procedures of research itself, the documentary limitations, techniques of persuasion and interpretive constructions. This method clearly breaks with the traditional assertive, authoritarian form of discourse adopted by historians who present reality as objective."¹ Both Brown's and Levi's approaches represent reactions against the realization of the fragmentary and partial nature of the historical record. The two monographs under consideration attempt to resolve the shortcomings of the historical record in different ways. Richard R. Duncan's book shares more in common with the first...