Editor’s Overview

Welcome to the September 2016 issue of Civil War History. We have two articles that provide a critique of the longstanding historical scholarship pertaining to the political narrative surrounding the secession crisis and Abraham Lincoln’s suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. In “Did the Tug Have to Come?” James L. Huston challenges the historical view that Abraham Lincoln and antislavery Republicans brought on the Civil War because of a refusal to compromise on the issue of slavery’s expansion. The new revisionist historians do not consider the problems surrounding the act of individual state secession, the other options available to Jefferson Davis on the eve of Fort Sumter, or that secession could have come much later than the winter of 1861. Houston offers a unique critique of longstanding political assumptions about the road to war.

In his article, “Public Necessity or Military Convenience?” Robert O. Faith challenges historians who have only focused on the Ex parte Merryman case. Few historians have explored subsequent habeas cases during the crucial period leading up to the Habeas Corpus Act of 1863, in which Congress finally sanctioned Lincoln’s earlier suspensions of habeas corpus nearly two years after his initial suspension, of April 27, 1861. Faith uses other high-profile cases to reveal a pattern in which military arrests under Lincoln occurred as a matter of routine military convenience rather than public necessity. All of these cases involved the interference of at least one member of the Lincoln administration in areas often far removed from the battlefield, prompting observers in both the United States and England, as well as modern historians, to question the necessity of certain military arrests and consider the practical consequences of executive suspension on civil liberties during the nation’s greatest trial.

In “A Civil War Hermaphrodite,” Jonathan W. White has uncovered a fascinating primary source pertaining to the life of Ellen/Edgar Burnham, a striking northern woman who transitioned to a male identity in the midst of the Civil War. White’s analysis of a letter in the records of the Adjutant General’s Office, combined with deeper research in various newspapers, sheds light on a story widely reported in the newspapers but absent in the larger scope of the cultural history of the Civil War. The life of Ellen/Edgar Burnham suggests additional pathways of research for historians interested in uncovering how gender and sexual identity influenced the decisions made by those facing the tumultuous war years.

Our reviews section provides a review of the latest title by renowned historian James McPherson. We also feature a plethora of new works that tackle the final years of the war, William Tecumseh Sherman, the lives of Union veterans, as well as explorations into memory and gender studies and the environmental history of the Civil War.