More Than a Contest Between Armies: Essays on the Civil War Era (review)

This essay collection gathers a dozen papers from Marquette University's prestigious Frank L. Klement lecture series in one convenient volume. The essays within are of uniformly high quality, as one would expect given the stature of the contributors.

Mark Neely's contribution, which represents the inaugural Klement lecture, examines civil liberties in the Confederacy. Neely finds Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government, much like Lincoln and the Union leadership, to have been far less hindered by constitutional scruples than the Confederate president's postwar writings might have suggested. Robert W. Johanssen discusses the influential but little-remembered author Henry Tuckerman, whose published work soon after the firing on Fort Sumter expressed the romantic hope that the war would bring needed moral regeneration to the nation. Gary Gallagher's essay illuminates the vital role of Confederate veteran Jubal Early in creating the pro-southern Lost Cause mythology that held sway in public memory of the conflict for so long. John Simon compares the careers of Union commanders Ulysses Grant and Henry Halleck. He finds that the former's undistinguished prewar career and resulting willingness to take chances and innovate ultimately served him far better than the latter's tendency toward reputation-protecting caution.

Edward Ayers's essay was delivered at an early stage in his groundbreaking Valley of the Shadow project. He discusses differences and similarities (which he ultimately finds more striking) between the neighboring Pennsylvania and Virginia communities brought to light through the wealth of primary source material incorporated in the project. Catherine Clinton explores varied ways southern women both challenged and were constrained by nineteenth-century attitudes regarding appropriate public behavior by women. George Rable looks at news reporting of the Fredricksburg campaign. He finds that so vast and insatiable was the demand for campaign-related news on the home fronts that rushed and inaccurate reporting became the norm. David Blight's comparative study of the careers of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln suggests that the two men were connected by their limited personal relationship, as well as perhaps more fundamentally by their shared mission of helping the nation bridge its racial divide.

Matthew Gallman provides a close reading of two novels by Philadelphia authors published shortly after the Civil War and set during the conflict. Both authors, he notes, generally portrayed characters as not being fundamentally changed by the war, despite the common image of the war as a transformative experience. Joan Waugh argues that Ulysses Grant's postwar memoir should be seen in large part as an attempt to rebut the already emerging Lost Cause mythology with a more accurate historical narrative. Grant's interpretation, she asserts, had, however, its own political slant, reconciliationist but was also pro-northern. William Blair poses a previously understudied question: why did Union leaders not more vigorously attempt to punish the leaders of the rebellion following its suppression? He finds the answer rooted in political expedience but even more fundamentally in inadequate legal precedent for defining and punishing treason in practice. Lesley Gordon, in the volume's most recent lecture, examines the wartime experiences of a Connecticut regiment and calls attention to the postwar trend toward an increasingly romanticized and inaccurate interpretation of its checkered record.

The editors are to be commended for making these original and important essays available in one volume. The book's major drawback is that many, if not most, of the contributions have been published elsewhere, often in expanded form, and have already become well known and influential. So the authors themselves have previously stolen much of its thunder. That will not and should not keep anyone with a serious scholarly interest in the Civil War from acquiring this volume.