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  • MusterInspecting Material Cultures of the Civil War
  • Brian Luskey (bio) and Jason Phillips (bio)

According to the Revised Regulations for the Army of the United States, published in 1861, soldiers were to muster for pay six times a year. These assemblies were military pageants that displayed the organizational strength and functional hierarchy of armies. "Muster" is derived from a thirteenth-century French word that meant both "the inspection of an army" and a "manifestation (of power)." The breathtaking sight of the massing of troops and the presentation of arms revealed that power. "Muster" had another original meaning: "a show of merchandise for sale." Military musters were occasions for the inspection of soldiers' belongings. Commanders examined soldiers' appearances, rifles, accouterments, and clothing to make sure they were clean and presentable. They picked through the contents of knapsacks to make sure men were properly supplied and perhaps seize contraband items. At the beginning of the Civil War, volunteers received things at musters to become soldiers and march off to war. In July 1861, as his 28th Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment mobilized to depart for duty in Maryland along the Potomac River, Will Roberts began a letter to his father with a catalogue of soldiers' stuff: "We have received all our rifles, with sword bayonets, and also caps, shoes, belts & all the other equipments, & we expect to be ordered off at a moments notice." For soldiers, induction into the military and its hierarchy meant receiving, displaying, and carrying things.1 [End Page 103]


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James Gibson, Cumberland Landing, Federal Encampment on Pamunkey River, Va., Another View, copy negative LC-DIG-cwpb-01401, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Photographers of the period recognized the connection between soldiers and the materiél of war but often juxtaposed soldiers and their things, situating human subjects in the foreground and inanimate objects in the background. See, for instance, James Gibson's May 1862 photographs of the Army of the Potomac's depot at Cumberland Landing on the Pamunkey River during the Peninsula campaign. In a famous image from this series, six Union soldiers observe the vast array of horses, tents, and supplies below them. If the enlisted men, with their backs turned toward the camera, are not exactly Gibson's subjects, the photographer asks the viewer to contemplate military things from their perspective. Another image in Gibson's series, however, takes wagons laden with goods, an anvil, and stacked arms as its subject, with mustering soldiers serving as a backdrop. Taking this view of things at the muster as our starting point, we hope to build on a growing historiographical trend that conceives of things as evidence and agents in history.2 [End Page 104]


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Alexander Gardner, Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, 2 volumes (Washington, DC: Philip & Solomons, 1865–66), 1:16, taken from negative by Wood and Gibson, Inspection of Troops at Cumberlanding [sic], Pamunkey, Virginia, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

By assembling a figurative muster of these objects and examining how they shaped lived experience, historians are just beginning to acknowledge that things mattered to Civil War Americans. This trend in Civil War scholarship reflects a broader material turn in the humanities that counterbalances the linguistic turn and its focus on discourse. Scholars associated with this new materialism make a point implicit in the etymology of "muster": subjects and objects are united, interdependent, and interchangeable. We cannot study humans without encountering the accumulated stuff that made their world and shaped how they thought about it. Just as race and gender are socially constructed, relationships between humans and things form within historical contexts, change over time, and vary across cultures. Unlike race and gender, however, objects exist beyond the meanings people assign them. As historians of capitalism and the environment show, the material world pushes back, acts for and against humanity, opens prospects, and imposes limits. Things support and threaten existence, and without stuff—technologies, [End Page 105] infrastructures, goods, and resources—history cannot happen. An army cannot muster without things.3

Because things make history, have agency, and assemble societies, historians are activating material culture...

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