Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 (review)

A rich literature exists on timekeeping and time management as defining features of the modern world. Among many notable works are E. P. Thompson's 1963 essay on "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," David Landes's Revolution in Time (1983), Mark Smith's Mastered by the Clock (1997), and, most recently, Carlene Stephens's On Time (2002). In Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865, Cheryl A. Wells takes us a step farther. She seeks to show how the Civil War "complicated and temporarily altered how Americans understood and used time, as battlefield events overrode antebellum conceptions of time to create new temporal parameters within which Americans functioned" (p. 1).

In developing her argument, Wells differentiates between clock time, natural time (associated with agriculture and the changing seasons), God's time (associated primarily with Sabbath keeping), and individualized personal time. Prior to the Civil War, these ways of keeping time were intermixed, with clock time gaining ascendancy with the expansion of mechanized industry and a national market. Then came the Civil War, during which "battle time" disrupted everything. "Booming cannons superseded watches' and clocks' ability to order society, and God's time became increasingly secular in the face of battle," Wells argues. In effect, "battle time" reached beyond the battlefield, "altering the established schedules of soldiers, nurses, civilians, and prisoners and forcing them to abandon the modernity of the clock and embrace, at least during the war, task orientation" (p. 5).

Civil War Time consists of five chapters, one each on the first battle of Manassas (1861), the battle of Gettysburg (1863), army camp life, military hospitals, and Civil War prisons. Among other things, Wells shows how military commanders and war leaders sought to conduct the war in an orderly, organized, clocklike manner only to be thwarted at virtually every turn by the battles themselves. When the shock of battle occurred, clock time, God's time, indeed all sense of temporal time, invariably gave way to the blurring tumult and confusion of "battle time." Nowhere was this better illustrated than at first Manassas, where the inability of Union commanders to synchronize and coordinate their attacks in a timely manner completely disrupted "the desired regimentation and clock-driven nature of the battle plan" (p. 24) and ultimately sent the Union army reeling back to Washington in complete disarray.

In her excellent chapters on camp life, hospitals, and army prisons, Wells underscores the importance of owning accurate timepieces. "A functioning watch," she maintains, "was not a luxury. Like canteens, shoes, rifles, and water, it was essential," so much so that the fledgling Waltham (Mass.) Watch Company sold thousands of cheap but well-made "soldier's watches" during the war (pp. 57–58). Yet ironically, even in the best-organized camps, hospitals, and prisons, careful time management gave way to impromptu task-oriented action in the face of battle. "With the intrusion of battle times," Wells observes, "clock-regulated schedules were abandoned and leisure and work times conflated as patterns of work, meals, sleep, and leisure became contingent on military events" (p. 67).

Wells concludes her study by noting that once the war ended, Americans "returned to a society governed by multiple and interpenetrating times based largely on the clock" (p. 111). In both North and South people resumed their time-oriented ways, as clock-governed bells, whistles, horns, and alarms called them to and from work. But here Wells does not go far enough. She has little to say about how postwar readjustments comported with the rise of big business, modern management, and organized labor. Although Civil War Time succeeds admirably at describing the disruptions caused by clashing armies at battle time, it is less successful at analyzing and assessing the larger residual effects that war making had on American society. Had nothing changed as a result of the war? Did the disruptions caused by battle encourage military and business leaders...