Illinois’s War: The Civil War in Documents ed. by Mark Hubbard (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SPRING 2013 85 Illinois’s War: The Civil War in Documents Mark Hubbard When Abraham Lincoln spoke of “a house divided against itself,” he intended his words to serve as a metaphor for the Union. Yet as the primary sources edited by Eastern Illinois University historian Mark Hubbard in Illinois’s War: The Civil War in Documents reveal, Lincoln’s native Illinois also proved a “house divided” throughout the middle of the nineteenth century. Part of Ohio University Press’s “The Civil War in the Great Interior” series that also covers Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, and Ohio, Illinois’s War provides a comprehensive portrait of the state between 1850 and 1870, with race and slavery at the center. The book’s eight chapters each feature approximately ten wide-ranging primary readings. Despite ample historical context and a clear interpretive framework , Hubbard lets his fabulous sources speak for themselves. They reveal that while Illinois played a central role in the Union cause, the state, like the Union itself, was also fraught with division. The book’s contents will leave proponents of Confederate internal defeat much to consider regarding comparable factionalism within the wartime North. The “most consequential state in the Union,” Hubbard’s Illinois looks more like a complicated border state than a Unionist monolith (xv). Like Ohio and Indiana, contemporary observers often remarked on divisions within Illinois and the border North, and Hubbard underscores these fissures. Arising out of an antebellum demographic rift that saw upland southerners and eastern Yankees vie for political and cultural supremacy, Illinois proved ground zero for sectional political arguments during the 1850s, culminating in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Illinois’s shift toward the Republican Party in 1860 marked a Yankee victory in what historian Richard Lyle Power termed the “thirty year’s war” between pro- and antislavery influences in the state. Although these divergent political cultures formed an often-shaky wartime coalition, the 1862 “Secession Constitution,” civil liberties issues, and debates over contraband slaves split Illinoisans at both polling places and in blood-soaked streets. Even within the ranks, discord abound. As Hubbard’s section on common soldiers reveals, Illinois again stood as a northern standard, contributing upland southern, native-born Yankee, African American, and Irish, Mark Hubbard, ed. Illinois’s War:The Civil War in Documents. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780821420102 (paper), $18.65. BOOK REVIEWS 86 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY German, and mixed European regiments. These soldiers took center stage in the Western Theater, Hubbard maintains, and played an integral role in the development of what he deems “total war.” Changes wrought by war sparked new debates over race and freedom on the home front, as the former white society in a white republic grappled with rapid racial transformation . Citizens clashed over liberalizing war aims, waved the “bloody shirt,” and debated the nature of Reconstruction. Although Illinois became the first state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, many residents contested racial progress at every turn. Yet as Hubbard’s vista of postwar Illinois demonstrates, reform issues, economic policy, and battles between capital and labor gradually supplanted questions of Reconstruction. Indeed, as Hubbard suggests the war ultimately made Illinois into a national cross-section, with Chicago as its metropolis, the great city of the interior bridging East and West. Although Hubbard rightly gives priority to racial politics and slavery, women’s work on the battlefront and activism on the home front, libertarian-minded dissenters, Peace Democrats, striking miners, and sanitary workers all occupy critical space in his chronology. Moreover, by putting central and southern Illinois on near-equal footing with Chicago and the Springfield region, Hubbard provides a fair and representative portrait of the state as nineteenth century Illinoisans viewed it. To its credit, Illinois’s War also features a timeline, classroom discussion questions, and illustrations , including several helpful maps detailing election data. Overall, Hubbard’s wealth of documentary evidence provides an exemplary composite of stasis and change, consensus and contestation in the highly stratified Middle West during the Civil War era. Yet Illinois’s War is not without its shortcomings . For instance, Hubbard’s use of the term total war will rankle some military historians , particularly those who...