The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (review)

Since Maris Vinovskis called for a broadening of Civil War writing to include more social history in 1990, several important studies of both Northern and Southern civilians have appeared. These include works on the relationships between soldiers and their respective home fronts, wartime changes in attitudes toward race and gender, as well as detailed community studies. Joan Cashin's edited volume not only makes a considerable contribution to the field, but it also suggests new ways of approaching wartime social and cultural history.

Many of the essays in this volume integrate fields of study such as African American history, women's history, and cultural history, which have hitherto been left to specialists. Perhaps because so many of the articles in this volume transcend traditional historiographic boundaries, Cashin has chosen to divide her book along conventional sectional lines, with six essays dealing with civilians in the South, six in the North, and three in the Border areas. The book's simple, orderly structure throws into relief the diverse, interrelated nature of the home front experience within and across geographic and cultural boundaries reflected in the articles. Cashin's introduction suggests other (and possibly more effective) ways of categorizing the themes explored in these essays, including, for example, changing gender roles in nineteenth-century America, the impact of home front attitudes on soldiers, and the experiences of Northerners in the South, and vice versa.

Many of the essays reveal the permeable and inconsistent nature of both geographic and historiographic boundaries, with the works seemingly suggesting that traditional sectional divisions will have to give way to more flexible themes and categories in studying Civil War history. For this reason, some of these essays would be especially useful in undergraduate courses on the Civil War era. For example, although Peter W. Bardaglio's essay on white children in Maryland reveals many of the important problems encountered by border state civilians, it also sheds light on the long-term effects of traumatic wartime experiences, split loyalties, and disrupted family relationships on nineteenth-century children.

Several of the articles examine the impact of divided allegiances during the Civil War, thus helping to illuminate the complicated shifts in civilian attitudes on important issues. Joseph T. Glatthaar's careful study of an Ohio family reveals the influence of a son whose battlefield valor gradually wins over a conservative father to increasingly liberal attitudes toward race, and Amy E. Murrell's study of sons who rebelled not only against the Union but also their pro-Union fathers in border state families examines generational as well as sectional conflicts.

Other chapters shed new light on the relationship between civilian viewpoints on military recruitment and participation, once again revealing both pragmatic and ideological conflicts within communities. William Blair's article on Pennsylvania recruiting argues that local and familial concerns, such as the need to bring in the harvest, was a more fundamental obstacle to recruiting soldiers than ideological or political issues. Cashin's excellent article on desertions reveals the Northern side of what has traditionally been considered a Southern problem—the fact that civilians abetted desertions, which she argues occurred on a much larger scale in the North than historians have hitherto suggested.

Other essays examine the rapid and somewhat incomplete changes in gender roles and expectations. Two of the most interesting essays use biographies of Northern women, with J. Matthew Gallman using Anna Elizabeth Dickinson and Elizabeth D. Leonard focusing on Mary Surratt to examine shifting cultural expectations of women during the war. While Dickinson was clearly able to carve out a respected and successful career as a public speaker during the mid-nineteenth century, Leonard argues that Surratt's fate was essentially a punishment for her perceived transgressions of traditional gender roles.

The connection between race, memory, and gender during the Civil War plays an important role in several of these essays. W. Fitzhugh Brundage's chapter...