Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival by Matthew Warshauer (review)

Matthew Warshauer's engaging book is the first treatment of the Nutmeg State's participation in the Civil War since John Niven's classic Connecticut for the Union appeared in 1965. While Niven's study focused on the sacrifices made by the state's common soldiers, Warshauer skillfully intersperses the most recent historiography with fresh research, situating the story of Connecticut and the Civil War within several larger tales: the history of slavery and attitudes about race in the North; the history of sacrifice and loyalty; and the history of survival and the search for closure after the war. What ultimately emerges is a portrait of relentless racism, fiendish partisanship, and gripping ideological conflict that quickly dismisses any enduring notions of morally erect Yankees who hastened to defend the Union and abolish slavery. Expertly tacking between the local and the national, maintaining a keen sense of war's contingencies, and usefully dissolving the neat boundary between the home front and battlefield, Warshauer's book is a model for future state-based appraisals of how soldiers and civilians experienced the Civil War.

Warshauer begins with a brief survey of Connecticut's long and lucrative connection to slavery, its hostility to the presence of free blacks, and its often violent intolerance of abolitionism. Though Lincoln carried Connecticut in 1860, he scored victory by a razor-thin margin—and only after state Republican activists divorced themselves from discussions about black equality. Though Nutmeggers heeded calls for volunteers once the war came, a peace movement quickly gained adherents across the state. While sewing circles, bandage rollers, and eager enlistees reveled in the patriotic ardor of the war's opening months, equally zealous Democrats hoisted peace flags in Avon, New Milford, West Hartford, and Windsor. And a few Connecticut weapons manufacturers continued to ship wagonloads of carbines to the South during the secession winter. "Perhaps never in Connecticut's long past," Warshauer writes, "was there a time that revealed more division and more commitment" (219).

Indeed, Warshauer's portrait of Civil War Connecticut offers a particularly compelling example of just how complicated national loyalties and patriotism could be on the northern home front. News of the defeat at Bull Run encouraged both the peace movement and resistance to the war effort. The book vividly recounts the jeering editorials, draft dodging, and even outright celebration of rebel victories that led one wartime Republican newspaper to declare: "In no northern state has spirit of secessionism been so rampant and malignant as in Connecticut" (93).

For Republicans and others committed to the suppression of the rebellion, confronting that spirit proved "as important as any military battle" (102). Pointing out that the Democrats who blasted the Lincoln administration for its emancipation policy captured control of Hartford, New Haven, and Bridgeport in the November 1862 municipal elections, the book reminds readers of the significance of the heated 1863 gubernatorial contest between Republican governor William Buckingham and Peace Democrat Thomas Seymour. Warshauer suggests that Buckingham's narrow victory, which secured Connecticut's continued participation in the war and dealt a demoralizing blow to peace advocates throughout the North, should stand alongside Gettysburg and Vicksburg as a crucible of the Union cause.

Warshauer does a fine job following Connecticut's soldiers—white and black— through the bayous of Louisiana, on picket duty in South Carolina, and into the prison-hell of Andersonville. Connecticut soldiers, constituting 10 percent of the state's population, fought in every one of the war's major engagements. The picture of war presented here is one of frustration, deadlock, exhaustion, and fear. But even more important, Warshauer neglects neither the steady stream of supplies sent forth from local aid societies nor the flood of maimed and wounded men who returned to the care of devoted nurses and civilians throughout the conflict.

Though many in Connecticut eventually accepted emancipation as a military necessity, Warshauer emphasizes that most Nutmeggers believed...