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 INTRODUCTION  The Civil War saw the United States and the Confederacy create huge armies that waged some of the bloodiest and most famous battles in American history. The governments headed by Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis sought to make the most of their respective human and material resources and strove to achieve national unity. Yet on February 28, 1863, Harper’s Weekly offered its readers a vivid portrayal of northern political dissent.The cartoon depicts a beleaguered yet defiant Columbia, her shield emblazoned with “UNION,” determined to slay three copperhead snakes threatening the U.S. war effort. Three months later, a cartoon in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper showed southern women concerned with shortages of bread and other food rioting in Richmond’s streets. Armed with clubs and pistols, the women strike belligerent poses in front of a store’s smashed windows. Such acknowledgments of political and social conflict would not have surprised anyone at the time because both the United States and the Confederacy experienced internal dissent throughout most of the war. Union victory ensured reunion and emancipation, but heated disagreements over the war’s meaning and memory remained bitter in the immediate aftermath of the war and have continued in various forms to the present day. Civil War dissent sometimes has been obscured amid popular conceptions of the conflict as a tragic but ultimately triumphant testing of the nation . Celebratory views accurately capture the degrees to which the people of both sides sacrificed in the course of a struggle that exacted a terrible human and material toll. Bruce Catton’s “Centennial History of the Civil War” and Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative, two beautifully written and widely read trilogies published between 1958 and 1974, exemplify this tradition, as does Ken Burn’s immensely influential PBS documentary, titled The Civil War and first aired in 1990. Yet any account of the war x INTRODUCTION  that diminishes the extent and severityof dissatisfaction, North and South, leads to a flawed understanding—a fact long recognized by historians. Works such as A. B. Moore’s Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (1924), Frank L.Owsley’s State Rights in the Confederacy, (1925), James G. Randall’s Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln (1926), Ella Lonn’s Desertion During the Civil War (1928), and, more recently, Mark E. Neely Jr.’s The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (2002), Armstead L. Robinson’s Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slaveryand the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865 (2005), David Williams’s A People’s Historyof the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom (2005), and Amy Murrell Taylor’s The Divided Family in Civil War America (2006) document the widespread disaffection and political disagreement that confronted both nations.1 The contributors to Wars within a War explore internal stresses that posed serious challenges to each country’s viability, as well as some of the ways in which wartime disputes and fissures carried over into the postwar years and well beyond. Their twelve essays are not meant to offer a comprehensive treatment. Rather, they are designed to suggest some of the many forms of conflict that arose among civilians, soldiers, politicians, and military leaders during the war. The essays extend the discussion of controversies far past the death of the Confederacy in the spring of 1865, analyzing , among other things,Walt Whitman’s poetry, handling of the Union and Confederate dead, treatment of disabled and destitute northern veterans , Ulysses S. Grant’s imposing tomb, and Hollywood’s long relationship with the Lost Cause narratives. Reflecting disparate methodologies, the essays, as a group, provide a starting point for anyone interested in how Americans have argued about the prosecution, meaning, and memory of thewar.Theyalso underscore thevarietyof approaches adopted bycurrent historians and convey, in several cases, arguments and evidence from recently published or forthcoming books.2 The essays can be placed in five broad categories. The first, comprising pieces by Stephanie McCurry and William Blair, deals with the respective home fronts. McCurry investigates the response of Confederate women, especially poor soldiers’ wives, to the hardships brought on by a war that witnessed enormous expansion of the Confederate state. Focusing on a series of sometimes violent demonstrations triggered by shortages of food, she finds examples of interstate political communication and organization among non-elite white women that suggests a major shift in the relationship between citizens and their government. Blair takes up the thorny issues of how the North (the United...

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