The Union War (review)

Gary Gallagher's The Union War was meant to provoke. As he did in The Confederate War, which was published in 1997, Gallagher takes issue with the larger community of professional historians for what he sees as their inability to escape present-mindedness in their analysis of the past. In the Confederate War, it was the scholarly emphasis on Confederate weakness he attacked. In The Union War, Gallagher argues that present-day concerns about race have resulted in an overemphasis of the emancipationist legacy of the Civil War and a coinciding neglect of attention to the war as a fight for Union. In his book, he therefore sets out to reveal the primacy of the "Union Cause" in the fight of Northern "citizen soldiers."

Gallagher uses a broad variety of source material in order to reveal the importance of Union to Northern soldiers. He analyzes the ideals of Northern soldiers who participated in the Grand Review at the end of the war, consults the rhetoric of Northern leaders, highlights passages from soldier letters and diaries, and notes a concern with Union in the regimental histories of the Northern army. He also discusses unionist rhetoric and imagery in songs, on stationery, and in the print media. The breadth of this evidence indeed reveals that unionism was an important element in the soldier's motivation to fight, and he makes a case that more attention should be given to what the Union meant to these soldiers. While his marshaling of evidence exhibits breadth, however, it has little depth. What Gallagher has done in this brief book is to map out areas that reveal what the Union meant in the North, not provide a definitive statement on why the Northern soldier fought.

Gallagher's interest in giving more attention to the Union Cause is well-founded, but his insistence that professional historians have neglected the importance of Union in the Northern fight is on shakier ground. Much of Gallagher's book is dedicated to criticizing academic historians for ignoring this topic, and in his critique he oversimplifies the arguments that have been made by others. Although other historians may emphasize different aspects of the war than Gallagher, few have actually dismissed the importance of unionism in the Northern fight.

In addition to criticizing the academic community for inattention to Union, Gallagher also uses the book to attack the marginalization of military history among academic historians. As an illustration, Gallagher discusses the importance of the Union armies in providing the opportunity for slaves to escape during the war, and he asserts that historiographical debates about slave self-emancipation versus Lincoln's legacy as the Great Emancipator have obscured the importance of their presence. This illustration is enlisted as part of a meditation on the divide between popular Civil War history, which focuses more on military matters, and academic histories that give more attention to the social and political aspects of the war. Gallagher asserts that both types of history miss the mark. What is needed, he argues, is a clearer acknowledgement in both of these venues of the way in which military action interacted with the social and political developments of the war era. This is a valid goal, and it would be nice to see more explorations of this kind, but his criticism once again oversimplifies a complex field by assuming such a rigid divide between popular and military history and academic and nonmilitary history.

Gallagher's book is sure to generate much discussion and debate among historians of the Civil War era. Much of this debate will come as a response to his meditations on Civil War historiography and his criticisms of the work of others. The real contribution of his book, however, is in his call for more concentrated attention on what the Union meant in the North and on the interaction between military affairs and the course of the war on the home front.