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  • Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front by J. Matthew Gallman
  • Andie Tucher
Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front. By J. Matthew Gallman. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [viii], 327. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-2099-2.)

How did Union civilians figure out what “duty” meant during the Civil War, a crisis bigger and more complicated than anything America had ever seen? How did ordinary northerners who wanted the Union to win decide what they themselves should or would contribute to the victory? In this rich study J. Matthew Gallman explores one critical and almost universal action: reading. Drawing on a vast array of newspapers, magazines, novels, pamphlets, sermons, songs, poems, cartoons, and comic papers, Gallman argues that a vast public conversation about personal responsibility and the meaning of citizenship was shaped by the popular press.

Part 1 is devoted to satire. Especially during the first years of the war, humorists, cartoonists, and novelists constructed a range of stereotyped figures whom civilians could safely and righteously mock: empty-headed dandies and coquettes enjoying a giddy social life; hypocritical “shoulder straps,” who strutted in officers’ uniforms but never actually set foot on a battlefield (chap. 2); and profiteers and the “shoddy aristocracy,” who exploited the wartime market for their own gain (chap. 3). By offering themselves up for derision, these characters marked the outer boundaries of acceptable behavior during the crisis. The boundaries, in Gallman’s telling, turned out to be generous, only excluding actions that were excessively dishonest, venal, or crass, and gently embracing the candid self-assessments and modest readjustments made by generally well-intentioned civilians navigating a changed world. [End Page 180]

Part 2 turns to an examination of the messages directed at men and women, white and black, who were making hard choices about their own duty. Should I enlist? Should I actively avoid the draft? Should I encourage my sweetheart to sign up? Should I volunteer as a nurse? Should I fight for white men who deny me basic rights? Gallman describes a literature that, at least for white and middle-class readers, encouraged individual decision making based on the honest evaluation of one’s own circumstances, rarely if ever making overt appeals to patriotism or invoking the rights and obligations of citizenship. The much more limited universe of printed materials that specifically addressed African American readers, in contrast, focused more on reciprocal rights and collective responsibilities. Gallman concludes that the Union “relied on individual citizens to make informed decisions,” and individual citizens relied in large part on their novels, newspapers, poems, and cartoons for that information (p. 252).

Gallman is an insightful, indefatigable guide to this immense body of literature and offers an intriguing and intimate perspective on what people may have thought about during the crisis of war. Yet his efforts to shape a wildly diverse corpus—which ranged from rude jokes to syrupy novels to orotund sermons and was cobbled by motley legions of often faceless scribblers, advocates, elites, and hacks—into the building blocks of a coherent and prescriptive “cultural conversation” can sometimes feel a little uncomfortable (p. 13). While Part 1 makes a compelling case for the importance of satirists as boundary workers, Gallman’s later section on romantic fiction struggles to make a consistent argument out of shelffuls of sentimental complications that sometimes seemed to use the war as simply another scenic backdrop. There are few acknowledgments of the Miltonian marketplace of ideas or of the commercial marketplace. Surely some of these materials sank without a trace, were roundly repudiated, or did duty as straw men, while others certainly served mainly as guilty pleasures or outhouse reading. Yet Gallman gives all printed materials equal weight as participants in the conversation. Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front is lucid, informative, and admirably researched, and it offers an invaluable glimpse into the teeming world of ideas in print—but neither all print nor all ideas are created equal.

Andie Tucher
Columbia University

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