The High Water Mark of Social History in Civil War Studies

Just hours before the Army of Northern Virginia raised the white flag at Appomattox Court House, Confederate Colonel Edward Porter Alexander approached his commanding officer, Robert E. Lee, with what he hoped was a game-saving plan. Rather than suffer the mortification of surrendering, Alexander begged Lee to scatter his men across the countryside like "rabbits & partridges" where they could continue waging war, not as regular Confederate soldiers, but as elusive guerrilla fighters. Lee listened patiently to his subordinate's reasoning for irregular warfare. Before Alexander finished, he reminded Lee that the men were utterly devoted to their commanding general, and that such loyalty would continue to inspire the sacrifice of more blood, even if it meant taking to the woods and fighting like common outlaws. When Alexander concluded his impassioned plea, Lee asked his subordinate to imagine what would happen if he turned Alexander's suggestion into official policy. But before Alexander had a chance to respond, Lee reminded him that virtually every Southern community had been overrun by Union armies, that farms were in disarray, and that crops were ruined. Lee feared that his veterans, upon returning home, would have no choice but to plunder and rob for survival. It would take no time for his disciplined army to descend into a demoralized mob that would take the rest of the South into a downward spiral of unending and unrestrained violence. "As for myself," Lee concluded, "while you young men might afford to go to bushwhacking, the only proper & dignified course for me would be to surrender myself & take the consequences of my actions."¹

Imbedded in this exchange are some of the most contested interpretive points in the field of Civil War history: Did the Confederacy possess sufficient nationalism in its quest for independence? What did Lee symbolize to the South? Was Confederate strategy doomed to failure, since its military and political leaders were largely committed to conventional fighting with professional armies? How did military operations affect the Southern home front? And what enabled the Southern soldier to continue the fight long past the point when final military success seemed realistic to those outside the army? These questions crisscross two extraordinarily important books on the Confederate experience—Joseph Glatthaar's General Lee's Army and Daniel Sutherland's A Savage Conflict. Barton Myers' Executing Daniel Bright is micro-history at its finest, for it too engages these big questions of Civil War historiography in a focused study of a local guerrilla conflict in North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp region. Although the authors look at radically different forms of warfare—one fought by a regular army and the other waged by partisan forces—their work signifies an important turning point in Civil War scholarship, for they have taken the methodology of social history as far as it can be taken to pursue these lines of inquiry. For more than twenty years, the contours of the field have been broadly outlined by questions into the common experience of both civilians and soldiers, the relationship between the battlefield and the home front, how political loyalties were created and contested, and why the North won and the South lost. These questions, for the most part, have been and continue to be pursued primarily from a social history perspective. The results have been extraordinary, especially in showing how people of different social groups occupied the same historical space but made very different meanings of their experiences. We possess a kaleidoscope of patterns of a Northern and...