Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War by Brent Tarter (review)

Conveying a genuine sense of contingency is one of the greatest challenges facing historians of the Civil War. The familiarity of cast and plot strains against historians’ efforts to draw readers into imagining the very different futures many Americans anticipated in 1861. For Americans living in the northwestern counties of Virginia, the war brought rupture upon rupture: secession, the division of the state itself, and perhaps most painfully, the fracturing of towns and families. Conscience, circumstance, and desperation compelled Virginians to disentangle and prioritize loyalties they had long held together, if in tension. In this gracefully written book, Brent Tarter offers a fresh perspective on the Civil War that brings to life how political events reverberated unpredictably in individual lives. Built around letters exchanged between George William and Susan Miranda Holt Berlin, a married couple who began the war in Upshur County and ended it in the Shenandoah Valley, Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and Waroffers a vivid account of secession’s impact on the region that became West Virginia. Further, it illuminates how the most ordinary concerns competed with historically monumental ones, even for individuals directly engaged in transformative political developments.

When George Berlin, a prosperous lawyer from Buckhannon, Virginia, traveled to Richmond in February 1861 as a delegate to the state’s convention on secession, he went with a strong Unionist mandate. Working from Berlin’s speeches, notes, and letters, Tarter presents the distinctive position carved out by many western Virginians: antisecession, antiabolitionist, and alert to the opportunities the crisis might present for addressing long-standing regional grievances within the state. George and Susan Berlin, nonslaveholding defenders of slavery, reveal an untroubled relationship to the institution, doggedly insisting troublemakers, not irresolvable differences, lay at the heart of the conflict. Despite his Unionist convictions, George Berlin was swept up by the tumultuous politics of the convention and ultimately endorsed secession. That decision, while inconsequential for Virginia’s wartime future, radically transformed his family’s lives. It stranded him away from home and left his wife and children paying the price of being secessionists in a Unionist stronghold. Through Susan’s letters, complemented by diaries and newspapers, Tarter provides a suggestive account of the hardening of political divisions in the western counties, sometimes manifested in simmering economic and social conflicts and in other instances boiling over into deadly violence.

Daydreams and Nightmaresis as much interested in the relations of family and region as it is in the politics of the Civil War. Tarter sensitively mines the Berlins’ letters for what they reveal about marriage, sentiment, and familial ideals in nineteenth-century Virginia. With restraint he deftly fills in gaps in the letters with discussions of the economic, political, and religious context through which the Berlins moved. The result is a concise, lively, and deeply humane portrait of an exceptional but revealing experience of the conflict. The book never condescends to its subjects, making its frank depiction of their blinkered views of their present a useful reminder that misapprehensions, as much as interests, often guide the choices people make.