Editors’ Overview

As editors, we are always looking for innovative work that challenges traditional scholarship and offers our readers fresh perspectives. This issue does both. Matthew C. Hulbert is interested in recentering our view of the conflict, but his focus is the guerilla war, something that has gained a good deal of attention lately. His article “How to Remember ‘This Damnable Guerrilla Warfare’: Four Vignettes from Civil War Missouri,” focuses on individual stories that challenge any sort of meta-narrative for that bitterly divided state. Hulbert maintains, “Instead they were left with what I call ‘guerrilla memory’—a patchwork of anarchic images and half-resolved traumas that could never be either fully celebrated or fully forgotten.” “Crossing Freedom’s Fault Line: The Underground Railroad and Recentering African Americans in Civil War Causality,” by Scott Hancock explores the juxtaposition of space, geography, and law in antebellum society to argue that slaves, not the abstract institution of slavery, caused the Civil War. “Via the Underground Railroad,” Hancock writes, “African Americans exposed the fault lines of space, identity, law, and ideology by persistently transgressing the North-South border, most powerfully symbolized by the Mason-Dixon line.” Wayne R. Kime presents our readers an edited document, “The ‘Troublous Times’ of 1860–1861: A Memoir by Colonel Richard Irving Dodge.” Dodge is better known for his postwar career and writings about western Indians, but Kime reminds us of Dodge’s personal battle as a well-regarded army officer and loyal North Carolinian. His memoir of those momentous months lays bare the permanent marks made on his consciousness by the imputation of possible disloyalty that blasted his prospects for significant service on the battlefield, and therefore for promotion—pushing him to the brink of resignation from the army. Our Review section includes several important new titles from prominent historians including Allen Guelzo, Nicole Etcheson, Mark Neely Jr., Eric Foner, Annette Gordon-Reed, and the late Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Topics include Abraham Lincoln, abolitionism, the construction of the capital building, and President Andrew Johnson. Our TV critic, Megan Kate Nelson, offers a thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining exploration of Hell on Wheels, season 1.