When This Evil War Is Over: The Civil War Correspondence of the Francis Family, and: Three Years a Soldier: The Diary and Newspaper Correspondence of Private George Perkins, Sixth New York Independent Battery, 1861–1864 (review)

When This Evil War Is Over consists of correspondence between members of the James Carrington Francis family of Calhoun County, Alabama. Doctor Francis practiced medicine for the better part of the three decades leading up to the Civil War, providing his eleven children with an upper-middle-class lifestyle, including the ownership of thirteen slaves. Upon the outbreak of war, Francis’s six eldest sons would see service in the Confederacy, with one killed in action in May 1864. Servants and members of the extended family, including uncles, cousins, and brothers-in law enlisted in units throughout Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, and Texas, and some of their correspondence appears in this volume. Collectively, these letters represent a highly literate family with individual contributions from every immediate member, including the youngest, Charles Henry, at age seven.

These letters provide a widespread perspective on war and its costs. Furthermore, Dr. Francis’s wife, Amy Ingram Francis was the correspondent with their sons, as the moderator and confidant of the family; her femininity serves as the comforter or soothing voice in this great conflict. As indicated in several modern works, a woman’s touch often was necessary in an arena where masculinity was always in competition. The correspondence of the two Francis daughters-in-law also offers a broader look at the war’s homefront consequences. From fatal diseases such as typhoid fever, measles, and whooping cough to domestic matters, the ability of these women to support and comfort to their soldier husbands lights an image of hope and promise.

Additionally, these letters do show their authors’ commitment to duty and honor and the rightness of the cause. The brothers indicate that they were fighting for their independence from the tyrannical North and that the war never revolved around slavery. Interesting is how seldom the word “slave” appears in these letters. The Francises referred to their own slaves as servants or mentioned them by their given names, and it is apparent that several of the male black southerners contributed paramilitary services to the Confederate war effort (14). Thus, a reader with little or no background on the Civil War may assume that blacks, in essence, held agency in the southern cause for independence.

Although whites’ perception of race is not a central issue of Griffith’s Three Years a Soldier, its treatment of the subject adds to a growing sentiment that most northerners really were not abolitionists. George Perkins’s letters and commentary on slavery and blacks themselves reject the popular elementary depiction of white Union soldiers liberating the slaves. Perkins reveals that he is against slavery not for its moral effects but rather its social implications. His letters consist of racist views and expressions, thus portraying him as antislavery but not an abolitionist.

This diary and correspondence with the Middlesex Journal, the Woburn, Massachusetts, newspaper, show a soldier who joined as a patriot to fight for his country. However, the differences between Perkins’s private thoughts and his public column bear additional attention. First, his attitudes toward politics or public matters appear more frequently in the journal than his diary. The tendency to preach on the commitment to the cause and the moral superiority of those who act as the “defenders of our liberty [who] shall make our nation pure and Christian-like” reveal a man deeply committed to the ideals of patriotic duty (255).

An interesting revelation in the Perkins diary is his attitude toward officers, particularly when it comes to discipline. A republican who believed that he was morally and intellectually superior to...