Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments (review)

This may be the golden age of the anthology in Civil War-era studies. For a number of years, Gary Gallagher has edited a nearly annual volume of essays dedicated to the war's major military campaigns; Catherine Clinton has edited or co-edited a number of books on the war-time challenges facing northern and southern women, men, and families; recent anthologies have appeared on the Appalachian South and on loyalty and dissent in the Confederacy; and Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, the editors of this volume, have published or will soon publish collections on other facets of the war and Reconstruction. One of the common denominators in this trend is the effort by editors and authors to break down the historiographical barriers between the home front and the battlefront. The proximity of training camps and even battlefields to towns and cities of the North, the frequency with which men and their families exchanged largely uncensored correspondence, and the intimate connection between the war and popular politics all helped to create this close relationship between fighting men and their families. Cimbala and Miller offer an apt metaphor for the importance of this relationship to understanding the Civil War, comparing it to "the stereoscopic view so popular in Civil War days. Only by looking simultaneously with both eyes through the common lens is it possible to see the whole picture. Just so for the soldier and the citizen" (xvi).

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front is a vibrant contribution to the literature on the Civil War era. Because the work of anthologizing is an art form, not a science, most reviewers and readers will wish for essays on topics that do not appear here. For instance, none of the essays explore the experiences of soldiers and civilians in the Border States that remained in the Union. The essays generally meet very high standards of scholarship, but, as in any collection drawing on scholars ranging from recent graduates to holders of endowed chairs, the quality of the essays varies. Some are more readable than others, some are a little too narrowly conceived and selectively researched, and some have footnotes whose bulk would be more appropriate for a dissertation than for a published essay.

But these are simply quibbles that do not detract from the overall usefulness and creativity of the volume. Cimbala and Miller gave their contributors plenty of space—the essays run an average of thirty pages each—and all of them make interesting and sometimes important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between Civil War soldiers and the northern home front.

Some of the essayists cover previously overshadowed institutions and issues. Although the U.S. Sanitary Commission and the Grand Army of the Republic have frequently been studied, David A. Raney examines the U.S. Christian Commission and Dana B. Shoaf discusses the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States. Michael J. Bennett moves beyond the much more thoroughly studied Union army to describe the attitudes of Union sailors and the work of benevolent organizations among them. Other contributors illuminate even more unusual or at least under-studied topics: Patricia L. Richard on the correspondence "craze" between soldiers and home front women, for instance, as well as Cimbala on the Veteran Reserve Corps and Frances Clarke on veteran amputees during and after the war. Useful discussions of race issues appear in the essays by David A. Cecere, Earl F. Mulderink III, and Donald R. Shaffer, who examine, respectively, the evolving attitudes among New Englanders about black soldiers; the surprising ambiguities that surfaced in attitudes toward black veterans in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a prewar center of abolitionism; and the uneasy place of African Americans in the GAR. A truly original essay, by Lesley J...