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  • The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army
  • LeeAnn Whites (bio)
The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army. By Lorien Foote. (New York: New York University Press, 2010. Pp. 256. Cloth, $39.00.)

In her insightful and innovative new book, Lorien Foote explores the ways in which the Union army in the Civil War was, as she puts it, “northern society in miniature, reflecting its culture and values and imbued with its strengths and weaknesses” (1). As much as the Union army was at war with Confederate troops, according to Foote, it was also simultaneously internally at war along fault lines created by changing ideas of what it meant to be a man in a rapidly modernizing northern economy and social order. In order to write this study of northern manhood at war, Foote moves beyond soldier correspondence, memoirs, and regimental accounts, which have served as the basis for most previous discussions of Civil War soldiers, and takes on new sources, particularly the Union army court-martial records, and to good effect.

One of the most arresting discussions in the book concerns the role of honor in northern soldiers’ conception of themselves as men. Historians have assumed that while honor framed white southern men’s way of understanding themselves, conscience framed the self-understanding of northern men. Foote makes the case that honor was alive and well in the Union army. In fact, honor served as a flashpoint in what Foote identifies as the deepest division among northern soldiers, the division created by class, between what she terms the “gentlemen” and the “roughs.” Although both gentlemen and roughs valued honor, in the modernizing world of the North, elite notions of honor were increasingly tempered by self-control, “morality,” and even temperance, whereas lower-class and frequently immigrant men, the “roughs,” were more likely to still privilege honor and consequently violence over self-control. [End Page 424]

This book will undoubtedly, and properly, be read as the latest word on the role of manhood in the internal dynamics of the Union army. In some ways, however, the book seems to fall between two stools. Foote takes the army as a sort of microcosm through which to study northern manhood under pressure. We learn more then about the complexities and conflicts between northern men as men than we learn about how those conflicts mattered in the conduct and the outcome of the Civil War itself. On the other hand, this focus on the army, for all that it offers as a microcosm of the different forms of manhood present in the civilian world, also removes men from the larger gender order in an atypical fashion. Readers will probably think that what they are reading is a gender analysis simply because the subject matter is that of men qua men. The fact is, however, that Foote does not use the term “gender” and instead repeatedly explains the fundamental role of class in her analysis. She can hardly do otherwise given the way she has framed her study. Ironically, authors of earlier works on soldiers, such as Reid Mitchell and Stephen Berry, while failing to explicitly frame their studies in terms of male identity, arguably come closer to a systematic gender analysis because they recognize the fundamental role that the relationships of soldiers to their female kin played in their experience of war.

LeeAnn Whites

Leeann Whites, professor of history at the University of Missouri–Columbia, is coeditor with Alecia Long of Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War (Louisiana State University Press, 2009).

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