So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North ed. by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (review)

A century after Appomattox, in The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union, George M. Fredrickson powerfully demonstrated that the “collective trauma” of the Civil War “had consequences for the study of ideas which were comparable to its well-known political and economic effects” (New York: Harper & Row, 1965 [vii]). Focused on a select group of New England writers, Fredrickson’s work argued that the conflict wrenched his elite subjects out of old habits of thought, intensified their doubts about individualism and democracy, and convinced them to restore order by asserting expert authority. Fifty years later, Fredrickson’s thesis still inspires admiration and debate. It also provides a point of departure for the contributors to So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North. The essays in this excellent volume build on Fredrickson’s foundation, but they address a more diverse set of thinkers in a broader range of contexts. Together, they confirm the mutual significance of the Civil War and American intellectual history, while challenging some of Fredrickson’s specific arguments. Readers interested in the Civil War–era North or the history of ideas will profit from this well-crafted collection.

Coeditor Lorien Foote’s superb introduction situates the essays in historiographical context and outlines three main issues addressed throughout the volume. First is the problem of continuity versus change across the Civil War. Did antebellum modes of thought buckle under wartime strains, or did they remain resilient? The second question is whether the war fostered authoritarian tendencies by shaking intellectuals’ trust in democracy. The third issue is the war’s effect on northern understandings of nationalism and the relationship between the individual and the nation-state. By engaging these questions, the contributors and editors have produced a markedly coherent volume of essays. The authors do not agree on every point, but the book does advance a general interpretation of northern intellectual history. Collectively the essays identify more continuity between the antebellum and postwar periods than Fredrickson did, highlight persistent tension between elite assertion of power and popular opposition, and show how transnational influences and individual agency shaped notions of loyalty and citizenship.

These chapters are less homogeneous or authoritative than Fredrickson’s, but their ideas are equally important. Indeed, because the authors focus on people who strove to put their thoughts into action, the ideas explored in this book have tremendous vitality. Three contributors explore medicine and health, a flourishing subfield of Civil War studies. Kathryn Shively Meier analyzes ambitious young physicians who served in the U.S. Sanitary Commission; the war helped them establish professional authority, but only because their public writings endorsed popular understandings of disease causation, prevention, and treatment. Susan-Mary Grant argues that Union army surgeons gained power as intermediaries between convalescent soldiers and the nation-state but could not join in celebrating a war whose sobering costs deeply disturbed them. As Richard Newman demonstrates, the language of public health also shaped interpretations of disunion, reunion, and emancipation. When northern writers diagnosed disunion as an ailment afflicting the body politic, some prescribed abolition as an antidote. But medical metaphors exacerbated conflict between those who saw African Americans as a debilitating influence on the republic and those who doubted whether whites had recovered from their long bout with racism.

Other contributors address Fredrickson’s class- and region-specific argument for change over continuity. Richard F. Miller’s study of Massachusetts historian John Codman Ropes challenges Fredrickson by arguing that the Harvard-educated Ropes was moved to promote professional study of the war not by class anxiety but by personal grief over his brother’s death at Gettysburg. Julie Mujic shifts our attention westward to faculty members at state universities in Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Far from embracing the war and abandoning old ideals...