Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front by J. Matthew Gallman (review)

In Defining Duty in the Civil War, J. Matthew Gallman seeks to assess how Americans of the 1860s — especially white northern men of military age — envisioned their individual responsibilities in a time of national crisis. Gallman’s methodology is as interesting as his research brief, and the book also illuminates how Americans of the 1860s used a burgeoning print culture to help them navigate dilemmas of whether and how to serve. Gallman depicts a notably down-to-earth culture of wartime decision-making, in which individuals weighed the conflicting calls of family obligation, money-making, civic obligation, anti-slavery and pro-Union sentiment, and honour — which, for northern men, meant not so much the pursuit of heroism as obedience to the law. Print culture’s injunction to northern readers was, in a nutshell, make your own decisions, but search your soul first.

Gallman’s analysis rests on a rich and startlingly funny body of political cartoons (more than fifty of which are reprinted in the book) and popular fiction. As he points out, most of this material was fundamentally conservative, reinforcing ethnic and class stereotypes and depicting women in markedly traditional roles. Many of the scenarios were melodramatic or simply implausible, as when the heroine of Henry Morford’s novel The Coward fails to recognize her former fiancé because he has grown a beard since she last saw him. But the ludicrous extremity of cartoon and literary depictions served a psychological purpose: they “defined the sorts of selfish decisions that only the worst northern citizens would make, leaving ordinary readers happily content that they had chosen acceptable paths” (254). By defining the unacceptable so luridly, they left a wide range of behaviour within socially acceptable bounds.

Of course, not everyone shared the same popular culture. As Gallman points out, the sources on which Defining Duty is based have a middle-class slant; it is not clear to what extent immigrant and working-class Americans partook of this print culture. Furthermore, the African American press was largely separate from the white press, and free Blacks carried on their discussions of the meaning of the war in their own churches, voluntary organizations, and periodicals, largely outside the notice of white compatriots. Gallman devotes a thoughtful chapter to the northern Black community’s wrestles with the war, which developed into a discussion of African-American citizenship and what it meant — in the wake of the Dred Scott decision and high-profile controversy over streetcar segregation in northern cities — to fight in segregated units to defend a segregated society. White women shared white men’s print culture to a greater extent, but popular essays and stories prescribed highly gender-specific roles to women. In practice, they gave women tacit permission to go on with their everyday lives in wartime, as long as they fulfilled the limited roles of spreading abolitionist sentiment, patriotism, and good cheer.

Defining Duty is organized thematically: the first section of the book addresses stock literary figures, with chapters on topics such as “Shoulder Straps and Faux Soldiers,” and the second section focuses on aspects of citizenship. A modest sense of change over time is built into the structure of the book, as the war transformed from something that most northerners encountered chiefly in the imaginative and literary sphere to something that — with the introduction of conscription and President Lincoln’s propagation of the Emancipation Proclamation — posed increasingly direct questions about citizenship and morality to a wider spectrum of people. But the structure of the argument still leaves the reader slightly confused: Americans of the 1860s experienced the war chronologically rather than thematically, their understanding of what was at stake changed significantly from year to year, and it would be helpful to have clearer indications of the lineaments of individual experience.

What Defining Duty seems to depict, in the end, is a...