Guarding Greensboro: A Confederate Company in the Making of a Southern Community, and: Voices from Company D: Diaries by the Greensboro Guards, Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, Army of Northern Virginia (review)

G. Ward Hubbs's book, Guarding Greensboro, is a study of the Greensboro Guards, a militia unit from Greensboro, Alabama, starting with its first years, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, all the way to the last veterans' reunion in the early twentieth century. The number of books on such Civil War units has increased steadily over the past several years. In general, most have added to our understanding by showing the war from the point of view of its most basic military unit: the company. Ward does that, but he does much more.

The work is really two books: one about Greensboro; and the other about its militia unit, the Greensboro Guards. Professor Hubbs is an archivist at nearby Birmingham-Southern College and his research into local diaries, newspaper accounts, town records, and military archives is exhaustive. He does a masterful job of making readers feel they truly know the people of Greensboro in all aspects—social life, business life, religion, schools, race relations, and politics—through both words as well as rare photos. Then Hubbs weaves the unit and its members into that community. He is an excellent writer who skillfully integrates quotes from all participants—rich, poor, black, white—into a moving, personal narrative of a small Southern town and its militia. Yet, he never forgets to place the actors within the overall context of regional and national events.

During the Civil War, the Guards became Company D of the Fifth Alabama Regiment, Rodes's Brigade, Army of Northern Virginia, and participated in heavy fighting in all the major battles. Hubbs's comparisons of what the men wrote in letters and diaries about the war publicly versus privately, and what they said at the time of the fighting compared with what they said about the same events years later, is fascinating.

But the key theme that truly holds the book together is community. Hubbs is most interested in what unites rather than what divides a community. Greensboro, a part of Alabama's Black Belt region, sported many fraternal and voluntary associations but it was its militia, the Greensboro Guards, which was the community's focal point before, during, and after the Civil War. Hubbs writes that the Guards "established a standard for inclusion in the community that cut across financial, religious, or ideological differences that distinguished the town's other voluntary associations" (p. 50). But that inclusion also meant exclusion—protecting the community initially from hostile Indians and rebellious slaves, then Yankee troops, then freedmen, carpetbaggers, and scalawags—and finally defining who was truly a Greensborian.

Hubbs's second work, Voices from Company D, is an edited companion piece based on the diaries of eight Guard members. That book, too, is well done, complete with an overall brief history of the unit, along with fine introductions and arrangements. It is an excellent complement to his narrative and both should be read together.