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  • Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. by Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai
  • Susan-Mary Grant (bio)
Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. By Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 263. Cloth, $140.00; paper, $35.00.)

The death of Union soldier Charles Russell Lowell at Cedar Creek in the penultimate year of the American Civil War gave rise to sermonizing and soul-searching in almost equal measure across the New England states. For Unitarian minister Cyrus Bartol, Lowell's death was a sacrifice for the Union, and for Edward Waldo Emerson, whose words from his introduction to Lowell's Life and Letters (1907) open this study, it was a sacrifice that Lowell was almost destined to make. For men like Lowell, as for those who commemorated him, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai argues, character was destiny; and in the course of the Civil War, for many of the New England elite, that destiny turned out to be death in the name of the nation. It is these men's lives, however, rather than their deaths, that most interest Wongsrichanalai, and in particular the social rules by which these lives came to be conceptualized, constructed, and, ultimately, commemorated. [End Page 328]

Men like Charles Russell Lowell, Wongsrichanalai acknowledges, were hardly typical Union soldiers. They were products of an exclusive, elite environment in which "class, education, and a person's bearing meant a great deal." The scions of what Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. famously defined as the "Brahmin caste of New England," these "New Brahmins" were linked by familial, intellectual, and religious ties—by social, educational, and cultural traditions that formed the pattern for their lives, a pattern shaped around the concept of character, defined as "an idealized internal standard of behavior consisting most importantly of educated, independent thought and selfless action." This regard for character among the New England elite, Wongsrichanalai suggests, should be understood as a "northern variant" of southern honor (2). Shorn of slavery—or at least safely distanced from it—this northern honor code informed the New Brahmin approach to their own lives, to the nation, and, of course, to the Civil War. That it was an ideal that few could live up to, in the end, is acknowledged at the start of this fine and nuanced work, which tracks the evolution of the New Brahmin outlook from college through military camp to Reconstruction.

In effect, what Wongsrichanalai is offering here is a modest yet probing generational study that reminds us that questions remain over combat and its consequences during the Civil War, questions that earlier studies of what Civil War soldiers fought for have left unanswered. This is partly because many of those studies concentrate on the war years themselves, and partly because combat motivation is frequently the main focus. Wongsrichanalai, by contrast, is less concerned with motivation than he is with the mentalité of his select—socially very select—group of northern volunteers. By locating his subjects more firmly within their educational and moral milieu before the war, he is better able to examine their conduct during and after it, as the survivors moved into careers and, eventually, leadership positions in the postwar world.

In his focus on the inner lives of the Union elite, Wongsrichanalai acknowledges his debt to George Fredrickson's The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965), and Northern Character is in many ways evidence of Fredrickson's deservedly lasting influence and impact. Wongsrichanalai, however, has taken the debate in a different direction. Indeed, he is very much in the vanguard of a fresh wave of scholarship concentrated on the Union: on the home front as much as the battlefield, on the relationships between them, and, most important, on the role that the Civil War played in inculcating stronger nationalist sentiments. One thinks of Lorien Foote's 2010 study of the class clash within Union ranks (The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army), which Wongsrichanalai cites, or Matthew [End Page 329] Gallman's 2015 study of the sense of duty, patriotism, and popular culture...

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