A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War (review)

Scott Reynolds Nelson, an expert on southern railroads, and Carol Sheriff, author of the well-received The Artificial River, have produced a clear and well-written synthetic text on the American Civil War. Wonderfully presenting a compendium of wartime life, A People at War whets our appetite for the lived experience and multiple existences of civilians during the conflict. The book, however, regrettably falls short of its goal of being a "collective biography" of the Civil War's nonmilitary personnel (p. xi).

The text's five Parts present brief but solid summaries of major late antebellum events and ideas that set up secession; the war's early years (enlistment, guerrillas and African-American labor, and a fascinating chapter on medicine); changes in military and government policies after 1862; soldier and civilian life during the war; and the Reconstruction years with special attention to the Plains Indians. Appendices discuss the significance of 27 political events (1854-1876) and 15 important battles/campaigns, which otherwise receive scant notice, and an annotated bibliography.

Chapters on everyday life, especially Part IV on the home front, abound with numerous topics and are the most valuable. Nelson and Sheriff stress the similar experience faced by people of both regions and acknowledge differences based on sex, race, and class. Southerners suffered more privation, but "even in the Union, normalcy itself was a casualty of war" (p. 236). Many discussions contain topics often overlooked in Civil War scholarship, including Indian experiences, using the Homestead Act to fill Union ranks, soldiers and baseball, nuances in slavery during the war, canning/food preservation, and more on sailors than is common in general texts. They describe a period of rich social change and adaptation.

A People at War dovetails with recent scholarship on the civil-military connection, war at home, and African Americans but eschews historiographic answers. The lack of a conclusion emphasizes the descriptive nature of the text. The work benefits from a relatively small selection of secondary sources but comes to life in the home front chapters when primary sources spice up its narrative (the number of references doubles). Three chapters that illustrate issues through the lives of two families and individuals showcase the strengths of the material and text.

Within the limits of 300 pages of text, many excellent decisions result in expansive coverage; other choices, however, serve to overly emphasize certain subjects, such as the Lane Seminary or USS Kearsarge, at the expense of their context. The chapters' division into brief sections (usually one to three pages) reinforces this impression; the sections allow for the inclusion of numerous topics but also forestall interesting discussions (e.g., Union soldiers' reactions to southern geography pass in under two pages) and can seem episodic or repetitive. The book's synthetic nature can also slip into vagueness, repeating "some" or "many" without specificity.

Given the text's focus, Part III unfortunately seems out of place. These chapters remain primarily top-down history of government and military actions (especially the ones on Lieber's Code and foreign diplomacy). Because it rarely portrays civilians' reactions to orders and policies, this Part undercuts occasional assertions that "the people [were] leading the leaders" (p. x) and misses opportunities to illuminate the lives and views of the people.

A People at War presents an encyclopedic survey of wartime experience, including variations within both regions. The text reads smoothly and would interest readers wanting to know about the nonmilitary side of the war. It both explains basic terminology (cavalry are mounted forces) and assumes knowledge of historical events (especially battles). This work provides a great deal of information and should spur continued scholarship answering Maris Vinovskis's 1989 call for Civil War social history.