Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era by Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (review)

In this study of college-educated New Englanders coming of age in the 1840s and 1850s, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai asks what motivated young men to leave their homes and to take up arms for their country. For his answer, Wongsrichanalai turns to a sample of forty-nine young men who attended prestigious New England colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Bowdoin, and Williams. He finds that a uniquely northern culture of "character" compelled young men to fight (p. 8). "An idealized internal standard of behavior consisting most importantly of educated, independent thought and selfless action," this notion of character "should be regarded as a northern variant of the better-known code of southern honor," he argues (p. 2). A matter of a man's interior self and earnest self-presentation (even in the face of adversity), character informed how men thought about their own personal honor as New England's "gentleman class," viewed the South and southerners, and experienced war in various leadership capacities (p. 7).

The book extends George M. Fredrickson's classic work The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union(New York, 1965) to include young intellectuals. Whereas Fredrickson found in New England's intelligentsia a longing for sectional crisis to turn into war to prove the need for educated leadership, Wongsrichanalai shows that this desire was not so for the younger generation. Young college men "did not aimlessly wander through the mid-nineteenth-century world waiting for a conflict to erupt," Wongsrichanalai argues. "Rather these young men concerned themselves with codes of conduct that qualified them as members of the gentleman class, worried about their careers, and observed national affairs with interest" (p. 7). In the language of gender history, and Amy S. Greenberg, these young men valued "restrained manhood" (p. 6). In making this argument, Wongsrichanalai follows a single generation from youth to old age.

The book's principal strength is that it traces antebellum ideas about character and leadership through the Civil War and into the twentieth century, as students became soldiers, veterans, and civic leaders. The first three chapters focus on the antebellum period, especially the social world of college life. The New Brahmins' college writings—mostly commencement orations—revealed a striking New England–centered version of American history, which emphasized nationalism rooted in free labor and the Protestant work ethic. The classical curriculum enforced these ideas, as did the capstone moral philosophy course, which taught young men how to build character through introspection and self-control. Collegians believed that education distinguished them as America's natural leaders; war presented "the ultimate test of character" instilled during college (p. 17). In the four chapters related to the Civil War—the strongest of the book—Wongsrichanalai describes how these young men viewed the South though this lens, criticizing the region's educated class for what they viewed as an impoverished and backward land. Significantly, these men espoused racist views about former enslaved persons, particularly that they had to be taught character and self-control. This presumption fueled many of these men's advocacy for educating freedpeople after the war.

In the end, the book is more successful in proving some claims, mostly those about wartime leadership, than others. Indeed, readers of this journal should question the author's premise that "northern character" was regionally unique. Wongsrichanalai argues, "Historians agree that honor, as a cultural code, pervaded southern society" (p. 5). This is not true. While some historians continue to emphasize honor, many other scholars, including myself, have shown that this rigid binary, while convenient, is not reliable, especially in studying education and gender. Southern colleges and universities instilled character by promoting discipline, industry, sobriety, self-control, emulation, and the cultivation of healthy civic leadership. In this...