Toward a New Intellectual History of the Civil War

In 1965, Americans marked the centennial of the end of the U.S. Civil War, and George Frederickson published his landmark intellectual history, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. This was the first study, in Frederickson’s words, “to see exactly how, why, and to what extent the war itself acted as a catalyst for intellectual change.”¹ Following the historical tradition of his mentor Perry Miller, Frederickson examined an elite, New England intelligentsia, their reactions to secession and the war, and how those conflicts shaped their postwar thought and action, particularly in regard to the growth of empiricism in science and professional social organization. Now, more than fifty years later, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s end has passed, and historians still grapple with the tradition and questions Frederickson established, as the three books under review here demonstrate.

So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North is a first-rate collection of essays that expands Frederickson’s narrow definition of “intellectuals” by accounting for “the Union’s geographically, socially, and ethnically diverse intellectuals” (p. 1). In the introduction (itself worth the price of the book), editor Lorien Foote defines intellectuals as those “educated people for whom ideas mattered” (p. 2): not only famous authors, but newspaper editors, professors, students, clergy, physicians, and artists, black and white, men and women. This definition pushes intellectual history from the study of ideas, or canon, to the history of intellectual life, which draws from many subfields and academic disciplines. Accordingly, individual essays not only address questions about the war’s impact on antebellum modes of thought, the diminution of individualism at the expense of a growing nation state, and the meanings of U.S. nationalism, but they also demonstrate the benefits of methodological innovation for understanding the Civil War–era’s complex and dynamic cultural patterns.

The editors did not explicitly subdivide the volume into thematic parts—something that would have strengthened the book—but the essays can be grouped into three major sections. The first three essays deal with physicians and medicine, which rarely appear in intellectual history. The second part highlights educational institutions such as the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts and Midwestern and Northeastern colleges and universities. The third part of the book comprises essays dealing with individuals on the margins of the nation and Northern intellectual history: black soldiers, Northern Confederates, and Catholics. The disparate subjects analyzed in these essays responded to wartime events in such a way as to constitute a unique discourse about personal choice, duty, and nationalism. This discourse drew from antebellum intellectual culture, adjusted to war, and shaped postwar thought.

One of the most significant accomplishments of the volume is that it underscores just how pervasive and active print culture was on both the home front and behind battle lines. While all the essays deal with print, the studies about medicine deserve recognition in particular. Kathryn Shively Meier argues that the U.S. Sanitary Commission (USSC) played an important role in disseminating scientific texts to military surgeons and officers, including a portable medical volume, The Soldier’s Friend (1865), which reached the hands of more than 105,000 Union soldiers. Frontline surgeons were also significant, however; Susan-Mary Grant shows that they generated discourse about the Union’s medical failures and contributed to transforming the military into a “textual community” (p. 59). Given these “expanding print cultures of medicine” (p. 68), Richard Newman argues that Northern civilians explicitly considered the nation’s past and future in terms of health. For some...