Keeping Occupied: The Civil War Homefront in Fiction and History

Whether we like it or not, historians who teach or write about the Civil War confront audiences whose knowledge of the war is shaped by fiction: the melodrama and Lost Cause nostalgia of Gone with the Wind, the ponderous pseudo-reality of Michael Shaara's Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War, the epic disillusionment of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain: A Novel. The popularity of the Civil War with the American reading public is a blessing to scholars, providing a ready-made audience for monographs; but it is also a curse when, as sometimes happens, the expectations of scholar and audience fail to mesh. Despite the helpful appearance of the word "novel" in the subtitle, students in my Civil War courses inevitably find it difficult to separate fact from fiction in Killer Angels, and they sometimes prove unwilling to accept that elements of that book (such as characters' lengthy internal monologues) could possibly be "made up." The peculiar but undeniable truth is that many readers find Shaara's characters too compelling, his reality too real, and the subject of Gettysburg itself too somber to admit to question.

Barbara Hambly's Homeland: A Novel is a recent submission in the flourishing genre of Civil War fiction. In 2006 Hambly was a finalist for the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction for The Emancipator's Wife: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln, (2005), a first-person perspective on that first lady that enchanted its largely female readership. A former president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Hambly gained wide recognition in some circles for her much better-than-average "Star Wars" paperbacks. Before turning her attention to historical fiction she also published successful romance and fantasy novels.

Hambly holds an M.A. in Medieval History, clearly enjoys historical research, and gets the vast majority of details right in her novels. But historical accuracy is a rather boring gage of a novel and hardly a compelling recommendation on its own terms. More laudatory is the type of details that can be found in these novels. The Emancipator's Wife was praised by its readers for providing a lens into the lived conditions of mid-nineteenth century womanhood, and her new novel is similarly grounded in women's history. Homeland explores the friendship and travails of two young women, Cora in Maine and Susanna in Tennessee, over the course of the Civil War. Occasionally a character voices opinions that seem anachronistic (Susanna, the daughter of a Tennessee slaveholder, compares the plight of white working mothers with slaves) but Hambly consistently gets right the bricks, mortar, and minutia of nineteenth-century women's lives: the endless labor of laundry and sewing, the horrors of soap making, the use of abortifacients. This is one Civil War novel that has less to say about guns than about butter.

Homeland explores the meaning of dissent during the war, but it ends up revealing more about modern than nineteenth-century perceptions of patriotism, womanhood, and heroism. Secondary characters are deserters and outright turncoats. Cora's own husband (raised in the South) chooses to fight for the Confederacy even though he and his wife moved to Boston after their marriage, and then back to her family home on Deer Isle, Maine. His Southern father, back in Tennessee, joins the Union Army. Susanna openly questions the Southern cause and works to undermine it. Hambly makes much of the degree to which dissent on the homefront was brutally persecuted in both North and South.

Yet dissent in this book has limits, and ultimately those limits extend north to the Mason-Dixon Line. There are no sympathetic Copperheads in Homeland. Cora's husband is a transplanted Southerner who returns "home" to fight for his cause; men only dodge the draft in Maine in order...