Civil War Maps: A Historical Atlas (review)

BOOK REVIEWS255 Customarily, Carwardine follows the interpretive path charted by his mentor Gienapp, except when he argues that Northern evangelicals "played the midwife's role" in the birth of the Republican party. But the few selective examples in Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa of Owen Lovejoy, John Jones, James Harlan, Josiah Grinnell, and Asa Turner are less than convincing on this point. Professional politicians seemed to manage the evangelicals more than they followed them. While politics and religion have always been intertwined in America, and rightly so if one views religious values as informing political discourse, nevertheless this book should alert religious activists to the risk of being coopted by políticos with the allure of civil religion. God and country is a volatile mix, as proven by the ephemeral Know-Nothing party in the 1850s and again by the Moral Majority in the 1980s. Robert P. Swierenga Kent State University Civil War Maps: A Historical Atlas. By David Bosse. (Baltimore and London : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. ix, 162. $34.95.) For all the books, articles, films, lectures, or other productions relating to the American Civil War, maps and mapping are among the topics often lost in the shuffle. Publication costs may have something to do with this problem. But David Bosse, curator of maps at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, seeks to redress the slight in part through a thin, but informative, volume on Civil War newspaper maps. Just last year, Christopher Nelson and Brian Pohanka contributed Mapping the Civil War: Featuring Rare Maps from the Library of Congress (Washington: Starwood Publishing Company). Their work is more glamorous in artistic quality and focus, but Bosse's book introduces the reader to the more vernacular world of maps for the masses in the Civil War period. For those ardent armchair warriors addicted to battlefield study, neither of these two works quite equals official War Department maps or modern interpretations derived from such genre. Rather, they illumine subtler corners of the Middle Period that coalesced in the cauldron of war. While Bosse provides forty-five newspaper battle maps (primitive, often inaccurate, highly amateurish in style), he also displays other cartographic products for strategic or area perspective. But above all stands his introductory text. It focuses upon the development ofjournalistic cartography, the engravers ' craft, the world of newspaper entrepreneurship, production, design and appearance, and the overall purpose for including maps in daily tabloids in the first place. Frankly, his work is more than about Civil War tactical maps per se. It is an illustrated essay on newspaper devices used to reach an information-hungry Northern populace. If something like 2,045 newspaper maps were produced to enhance tight-columned textual thickets in the daily 256CIVIL WAR HISTORY press, such an endeavor simply reflected the laws of supply and demand. Southern counterparts lacked both technicians and technology to follow suit. Once more, the North, or Union, proved its superiority in a manner that benefited the reading public's comprehension and information gathering. Bosse does little with the political ramifications of such public education. Nor does his text do justice to issues of press-military relations or the question oftreasonable implication of publishing maps that helped the enemy. His brief battle synopses accompanying the atlas plates could easily be omitted and replaced with meatier coverage of the truly historical issues surrounding the Civil War version of today's mass media coverage of bloodshed in Somalia , Bosnia, or the Russian parliament. His forte, however, lies with showing how the technology of map making combined with the use of telegraph, railroad, a corps ofjournalists, and mass readership meshed to satiate the interest of readers concerned with loved ones and friends fighting and dying in exotic places like Shiloh, Antietam, or Gettysburg. His most telling conclusion holds that journalistic maps helped diffuse military and geographical information in a manner that helped the homefront better understand the trauma and national crisis. Whether or not such a device increased the politicomilitary problems of the Lincoln administration lies beyond Bosse's focus. If little more than curiosities to us today, newspapers and their maps (and artistic sketches) did inform a generation. They also...