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

Part of a series of volumes documenting the Civil War in the Midwest, Illinois’s War provides a well-curated collection of speeches, letters, and newspaper articles illustrating the experiences of Illinois residents during the Civil War era. Organized largely chronologically in eight chapters, each with a well-written introductory essay, the collection includes seventy-five documents. Some of these, such as Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, would be familiar to most readers, while others, particularly in the chapters on the soldiers’ experience, have been plucked from archival manuscript collections.

Two major themes emerge from the introductory essays and the documents. First is the role of race and slavery. Bordering the slave states of Missouri and Kentucky, Illinois became the destination for thousands of runaway slaves, shaping the state’s politics before and during the Civil War. Second is Illinois’s dramatic demographic and economic transformation in the decades preceding the Civil War. Immigration and urbanization had transformed a frontier state into a robust and bustling industrializing society. Not surprisingly, Abraham Lincoln features prominently in this documents collection. Nearly half of the documents are written by, to, or about Lincoln, a presence that at times seems to overwhelm the other documents.

The strongest chapters in this collection are those that focus on the war years themselves. Here the editor has located a number of previously unpublished manuscript collections, many of them letters between soldiers and their families. One significant omission from this collection, given the recent scholarship on the Civil War and memory, is a chapter on how the Civil War has been remembered and commemorated in Illinois over the last century and a half. Documents illustrating the myriad manifestations of the Cult of Lincoln alone would have provided an interesting coda to this collection.

The volume appears to be intended primarily for use in the classroom: there are discussion questions at the end of the volume and a selected bibliography more appropriate for students than scholars. Most of the documents are brief, usually a page or two in length, making them accessible to high school or college students. There are a couple of areas where this collection could have been much more pedagogically useful. First, the two maps included do not have enough detail for students without an encyclopedic knowledge of Illinois geography. Second, the four (somewhat drab) illustrations add little to the text. A selection of political cartoons critical of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, would have given students more to work with. The reviewer wonders if this collection might have been better imagined as a Web site that allowed teachers to select which documents to use with students and provided a greater diversity of visual culture.