A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community by Nicole Etcheson (review)

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, town studies transformed historians' understanding of colonial America. Today, within American historiography, community studies—now termed micro-histories—more likely focus on the Civil War, although they have yet to revolutionize historians' understanding of that period. Most of them focus on southern communities. Etcheson instead looks at a northern one, Greencastle, Indiana, and surrounding Putnam County, and she covers a broader period of time than other Civil War era studies. Her admirably researched and ably argued account of the years from 1850 to 1880 in Putnam County is not heavily quantitative; she more often employs the stories of individuals and families to illustrate larger points of interpretation. Nor does she explore, as many of the colonial town studies did, the nature of community and the structure of the social order. Instead, A Generation at War employs Putnam County to explain how the war changed people's attitudes and lives.

Etcheson includes a full discussion of politics in Putnam. She chronicles the antebellum divisions between Republicans and Democrats and provides an excellent discussion of those who became Copperheads, showing their ties to the Democratic Party and the role of racism in their dissent. She also discusses politics in the postwar period when the Republicans tentatively embraced the vote for African Americans, though their radicalism that did not extend to economics. They opposed policies to help "farmers and debtors at the expense of capitalists" (197).

In addition to politics, Etcheson discusses other developments during the period. In a substantial discussion of Civil War memory, she shows how people in Putnam County acknowledged the role of slavery in the war but never embraced an emancipationist memory. Instead, they held to a reconciliationist view, admitting the legitimacy of the actions of both North and South. Etcheson also explains, more briefly, a growing acceptance of immigrants and increasing support for temperance and prohibition after the war. Etcheson's two major themes, however, are the war's impact on gender and race relations.

In antebellum Putnam County, where a few women held jobs as teachers, most of the adult females were housewives, who occasionally engaged the public sphere in church, sabbath schools, and temperance reform. During the war, women expanded their involvement outside the home, but more through "personal care for their men rather than public work for the war" (133). They preferred "traditional roles within the household"; men provided for the home and women maintained it (125). After the war, families re-established traditional gender roles. Etcheson finds that unlike gender roles, however, attitudes about race did not remain the same. During the 1850s, Indiana pursued a policy of exclusion, passing laws to keep blacks out of the state and providing state support for colonization. Racism persisted during Reconstruction, particularly among Democrats, but the war to end slavery contributed to a change in the attitudes of other whites who came to support African-American suffrage. In 1879/80, when Exodusters fleeing oppression in post-Reconstruction North Carolina settled in Putnam, increasing its black population and forming all-black schools and churches. Etcheson attributes the establishment of these segregated institutions to the growth in the number of blacks, but she notes that persistent white racism played a role as well. In similar fashion, even as she stresses the new racial attitudes among whites in Putnam County, she points out that they appear significant primarily when compared to the exclusionary goals of the antebellum years.

Such caution in making her arguments characterizes Etcheson's fine book. It is a model of how to use a local study to test arguments about cultural and political changes that affected the nation as a whole.