Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front (review)

J. Matthew Gallman’s latest book, Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front, is a tour de force of the eminent historian’s intellectual development and evolution over the past two decades. Since the appearance of his first book, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War (1990), Gallman has emerged as a leading figure in nineteenth-century social history, particularly on Civil War homefront issues. Gallman’s central thesis throughout his many books, journal articles, and essays on the Northern home front argues the war had only limited transformational effects; he rejects outright the idea that the Civil War represented a decisive turning point or drastic new direction in American social, economic, or political development. Throughout his career, Gallman has consistently argued that antebellum social, economic, and political patterns were successfully adapted to meet the war’s exigencies, making bold deviations and sharp turning points unnecessary.

Armed with this unifying theme, Northerners at War samples two decades’ worth of Gallman’s articles, essays, and other writings on a variety of homefront issues. Northerners at War, however, is more than just a random collection of essays hastily assembled and thrust into action like the green and untested regiments at First Bull Run. Instead, Gallman had two interconnected strategic purposes. First, in this collection he intended to make more accessible some of his important essays that have appeared in various journals or in collections that are only tangentially related to the Civil War and that may have escaped notice of its scholars and students. Second, and perhaps more significantly, in this work Gallman frankly discusses and reveals his own intellectual and scholarly evolution since his graduate student days as an American colonial historian and his transition to the Civil War, simultaneously demonstrating the growing significance social and economic historians have had on the war’s historiography since the 1980s. Gallman precedes each essay with an informal yet insightful discussion of how and why he came to investigate each particular subject, his thinking and perspectives at the time of its research and writing, and how he was drawn into other distinct but related avenues of scholarship, including economic, gender, and immigration studies, and a recent foray into the new military history.

The majority of Gallman’s books and articles have focused on Philadelphia particularly or Pennsylvania more generally, and this volume is no exception. Three essays deal directly with wartime Philadelphia, three others focus on the Philadelphian lecturer and orator Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, while another compares the fictional literary portrayals of wartime life in the North by Dickinson and the Philadelphia physician-writer Silas Weir Mitchell. Gallman maintains a Quaker City connection in his essay on the black troops at the 1864 Battle of Olustee, Florida, and stays within Pennsylvania’s borders in an essay gauging the war’s impact on the town of Gettysburg. Gallman rounds out the book with a wider analysis, cowritten with Stanley L. Engerman, on the war’s economic impact and a discussion of whether it should be regarded as a true “total war,” and finally, he offers seven of his own reviews on Civil War urban histories by scholars including Louis S. Gerteis and Stephen J. Ochs.

The unifying theme in the included essays is Gallman’s argument that the Civil War North’s home front was not drastically or permanently changed, but successfully adapted its antebellum institutions, patterns, and values for the war’s extraordinary demands, and when the war ended they largely resumed their old character. The gulf between antebellum and postbellum social and economic patterns is relatively small in Gallman’s view. For instance, in the essay “Preserving Peace: Order and Disorder in Civil War Philadelphia,” Gallman demonstrates that the keys to the city’s relative success in maintaining civic order in the face of wartime pressures are found in its antebellum experiences with disorder and rioting. As a result...