The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (review)

BOOK REVIEWSI77 wounded in Mississippi, and, understandably, his journal entries become sporadic after that point. In March 1864, weakened by wounds and exposure, he contracted pneumonia and died in the Cincinnati Military Hospital. He had risen from sergeant to lieutenant colonel. Although he saw a good deal of the war, Haydon's diary is not most useful for its view of great battles. Because he served mainly at junior grades, he was not privy to command decisions, and his depictions of major events are often incomplete, compounded of limited eyewitness observations, camp gossip, and guesswork. He was on the periphery at first Bull Run and Fredericksburg and missed Antietam completely. Haydon is at his best in describing the everyday texture of army life. He was an unusually educated man for his rank, having spent four years at the University of Michigan before entering the legal profession. In camp, he read the Atlantic Monthly and the latest works by Charles Dickens. He also had a flinty intellectual integrity, a determination to record all of what he saw. The book gives a fine account of the life of a company officer struggling to impose drill and discipline, feeling the stress of responsibility, appreciating the compensations of small camp comforts and comradeship. The author graphically describes the misery of picket-line duty during the fall 1861 when all was supposedly "quiet along the Potomac." Each day some soldier or two would be killed or maimed hideously by snipers' bullets while walking the line. Haydon also describes in careful detail the many grotesque changes that take place in a corpse left out in the Southern sun. He further convinces me that the candor of Civil War battlefield photographs has been overstated. As he was honest about death, so he was about life. For a Victorian, Haydon is remarkable in his depiction of society's underside. He talks about the soldiers' addiction to alcohol and prostitutes, which led to disease and dereliction of duty. He notes the war's erosion of conventional morality. Both in the occupied South and back in Michigan, girls who would normally be chaste until marriage gave sex to soldiers, sometimes with their parents' blessing. Because of this candor, Haydon's book is a more inclusive and more valuable account of the war than many soldiers' journals. Michael C. C. Adams Northern Kentucky University The Romance ofReunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. By Nina Silber. (Chapel HiII: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Pp. 269. $34-95) 7"Ae- Romance ofReunion provides the first sustained analysis of sectional reconciliation since Paul H. Buck's 1937 classic The Road to Reunion, which I78CIVIL WAR HISTORY it occasionally corrects, often expands upon, but does not entirely supplant. Nina Silber has examined a far wider variety of sources than did Buck— plays, minstrel shows, travel literature, letters, and diaries. The major difference between the books, however, results from Silber's grounding her analysis in recent scholarship in cultural and gender studies. Silber contends that "gender served as a central metaphor" (6) in shaping Northern attitudes toward the South and reunion. She begins her fascinating analysis with a discussion of how, after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln , Northerners denigrated the manliness of aristocratic Southern males and depicted the Confederacy as "female-led and feminine-inspired" (38). Over the next thirty years, Northerners crafted, out of sentimentalism and Victorianism, a "Culture of Conciliation" (93) at the heart of which stood the symbolic marriage of a Northern husband and a Southern wife. This "romance " promoted reunion but, since the South remained feminine, also testified to that region's continued subordinate status. Most Northerners embraced this vision of reconciliation because of frustrations rooted in industrialization , increasing materialism, and class and gender conflicts: "In the economic hardship of the southern elite, the class loyalty of black domestics, and the superior womanliness of southern females, northerners found an alternative to the materialistic and conflict-ridden components of their own lives" (122-23). The North's image of the South remained domestic and feminized until in 1890s, Silber concludes, when a crisis in Northern manhood and Southern participation in the Spanish-American War combined to foster a positive image of...