Fractured Family Tales

Is it possible to say something fresh and interesting about the divided family during the Civil War? At first glance the topic does not seem promising. After all, Americans have been talking about—and writing about—the "brothers' war" since shortly after Fort Sumter, or so it seems. As Amy Murrell Taylor points out, people love to tell family tales, both real and imagined, about ancestors who fought on opposite sides of the conflict. And certainly those stories are a staple in popular culture. But although the topic is familiar, there has been little scholarship that directly confronts the issue.

In this, "the first sustained historical study of the divided family in the American Civil War," Taylor has cast her empirical and theoretical net wide, producing a monograph of far-reaching significance, suggesting the importance of both human experience and cultural metaphor (p. 2). Divided families are defined broadly, ranging from the classic stories of brothers in blue and gray, to distant cousins emerging to assist prisoners of war, to a few best friends who were not real siblings, to the imagined interracial families of the plantation South. Multiple themes recur throughout this deeply researched volume. At one level, Taylor is interested in uncovering the lives of families that were literally divided by the Civil War. Who were they, and how did they cope with the complex personal and public challenges that followed when they divided over the war? Time and again frustrated and befuddled men turned to the language of "gender and generations" to explain their loss of political control. Taylor is also concerned with the metaphorical power of family in the midst of the Civil War. How did the flesh and blood experience of divided families in the border states inform the nation's understanding of the war's larger meaning? Finally, Taylor considers the meaning of family in the war's popular fiction. Authors in both the North and the South turned to fictional stories of seduction and romance to process the meaning of the sectional conflict and the subsequent sectional reconciliation. In creating these fictional families, popular writers wrestled with the larger meaning of the national family divided by war, often leading readers to uncomplicated solutions to the nation's dilemmas.

The Divided Family unfolds in a series of topical chapters, moving from close readings of family relations severed by the war to an innovative exploration of the broader cultural, political, and metaphorical meanings suggested by the subject. In the process Taylor deftly leads the reader from her most obvious—and empirically most well-grounded—topics, to an array of creative readings of diverse sources that expand the meaning of her subject. The results are not always equally persuasive, but the cumulative effect is impressive and often quite provocative.

At the core of the study are 166 families divided by the Civil War. Taylor believes that hundreds, probably thousands, of border state families actually split over the conflict, but for the families in this rich sample she was able to uncover manuscript papers that become the basis of a detailed analysis of the wartime experiences, motivations, and often tortured rationalizations that family members turned to in explaining how the war had fractured their private lives. Some of the most painful divisions occurred when border state sons split with their fathers. In most cases these generational clashes found moderate-minded Unionist fathers, accustomed to a world of political compromise, resisting the impulsive spirit of their pro-Confederate sons. As long as such ideological rifts remained within the private sphere of the household, the family could absorb the resulting tensions. But with the advent of conscription sons could no longer maintain a neutral stance in public: they either had to fight for the Union or openly break with their fathers. Quite a few chose to head south. In some cases a rebel son became a particular source of embarrassment, as public men such as Kentucky Congressman John Crittenden had to acknowledge...