The House Divided and Digitized

Edward L. Ayers and Anne S. Rubin. Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, Part 1: The Eve of War. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000. CD-ROM + 103 pp. $49.95.

The publication of a CD-ROM version of Valley of the Shadow marks a partial completion of the innovative and ambitious project that has been recognized over the last several years as "probably the most sophisticated historical site on the Web." ¹ The CD carries the electronic archive examining Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, in the Civil War era into the summer of 1861; the online version already includes much material for the other phases of the project, which focus on the war years and their aftermath. Even within the prewar period, the CD does not replace the website, and the Valley project retains the flexibility afforded by Internet publication to enhance its presentation. The subsequent phases of the overall undertaking and possible online additions to its antebellum component may cast a different light on the new CD. But the release provides a good opportunity to assess the contributions that Valley of the Shadow has thus far made to an understanding of the Civil War era and the uses of digital technology in the practice of history.

The technological breakthroughs pioneered by Valley of the Shadow can easily obscure the extent to which its success rests on familiar foundations. The starting point is an original and elegant research design. Only five years ago, Reid Mitchell observed in these pages that community studies represent "the leading edge of Civil War history." ² Scholars are still in the early stages of using localized approaches to analyze the origins of the war and the patterns of support and resistance, the impact of the war on gender roles and family structures, the social tensions that the war deepened or alleviated, the negotiation of freedom, and other themes. Valley of the Shadow adds to this versatile genre a comparative dimension, inviting all investigations to proceed along parallel lines. The juxtaposition is not merely an artificial device but reflects a good balance of commonalities and differences in two related counties. Two hundred miles apart in the Great Valley formed by the Cumberland and Shenandoah Valleys, Franklin and Augusta shared much the same geographical setting for economic development and comparable populations of whites and free African Americans. The similarities enable Valley of the Shadow to isolate and highlight--insofar as a snapshot taken in 1859-1861 will permit--the difference that the institution of slavery made in Augusta, where about one-fifth of the population was in bondage throughout the antebellum era.

No less fundamental to Valley of the Shadow is another basis for comparison of the counties, their wartime experiences, for the heart of the project is clearly more in the years from 1861 to 1865 than in the coming of the war. The ways in which men like the more than 15,000 soldiers from Augusta and Franklin represented their communities and maintained connections to home, rather than merging into national military machinery, is a prime theme of current writing on the war. More distinctively, Augusta and Franklin both had significant contact with the armies of the other side during the long struggle in the Valley. Franklin is virtually a unique northern case in this regard. The point at which Lee's army concentrated more than 60,000 men during the three weeks before the battle of Gettysburg, the county seat of Chambersburg was also the site of a briefer occupation and the victim of the most devastating Confederate raid into the North. As Everard Smith has pointed out, Chambersburg became to the Confederate invaders "the virtual embodiment of Yankee society and Yankee institutions." ³ The reflections of these southern visitors to Franklin, paired with observations by northern soldiers in the Valley of Virginia, will enable Valley of the Shadow to compare perceptions of the two communities as...