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Reviewed by:
  • So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North ed. by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai
  • J. Matthew Gallman (bio)
So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War–Era North. Edited by Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015. Pp. 307 Cloth, $105.00; paper $45.00.)

This volume contains eleven essays about Civil War–era intellectuals. Any study of intellectual life invites questions about definitions. Lorien Foote offers a useful starting point. These essays are about “educated [End Page 137] people for whom ideas mattered” (2). Foote and her fellow coeditor, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, have assembled a superb volume in which the pieces fit together wonderfully.

Joan Waugh’s short, charming, and absolutely essential foreword sets the stage. Waugh establishes the centrality of George Fredrickson’s magisterial The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965) in framing any conversation about the intellectual history of the Civil War, while discussing her own “heavily marked” copy of Fredrickson’s slim volume. Waugh reminds us that Fredrickson the brilliant scholar was also a charming fellow who had no trouble with young scholars who—like Waugh herself—“differed and departed from” the narrative set forth in The Inner Civil War. Nearly every essay in So Conceived and So Dedicated mentions Fredrickson, but none of the authors is intent on merely filling lacunae in the foundational text, and none are set on tearing it down—which, one imagines, is precisely how Fredrickson would have had it.

Lorien Foote leads off with a historiographical review of the state of the field, with comments on the other ten essays placed within that larger analysis. This wonderful essay deserves attention on its own, as well as for being an introduction to what is to come. Foote considers three crucial questions that have framed the scholarship since the publication of The Inner Civil War: Did the Civil War shift intellectual thought toward modernization? Did it lead intellectuals to embrace “authoritarian modes of thought” (8)? How did the Civil War shape notions of nationalism? Foote’s essay and notes reward careful reading.

The questions, methods, and voice employed in the other ten essays are diverse, but the pieces join together in multiple conversations. The authors interact with one another implicitly, and on multiple occasions they explicitly engage with other essays in the volume. The mix of senior scholars and more junior authors is excellent.

Together they map out some of the ways scholars are rethinking intellectual history in the Civil War era. Kathryn Shively Meier considers the medical professionals who became involved in the United States Sanitary Commission, while—in a marvelously complementary piece—Susan-Mary Grant looks at the thoughts and experiences of those surgeons who actually worked for the military. In an interesting counter to some familiar narratives, Julie Mujic asks how professors in midwestern universities responded to the particular challenges they faced when their pupils clamored to go to war. Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai flips that tale by considering how antebellum and wartime experiences shaped the postwar activities of three prominent soldiers-turned-educators. [End Page 138]

Other authors adopt comparable forms of collective biography, contemplating selected members of key groups. Christian G. Samito examines two Irish Catholics who became prominent prowar Republicans, while William Kurtz finds generally conservative impulses in the writings of a cohort of Catholic editors and archbishops. David Zimring complicates our understanding of the relationship between geography and identity by examining northerners who moved south and largely embraced the politics of their adopted home. Two essays focus on a single figure. Richard F. Miller uncovers the crusade of one New England lawyer to produce empirically sound, fundamentally nonpartisan historical writing about the war; Niki Lefebvre broadens the interpretive lens with a close reading of one artist’s representation of an African American soldier in Harper’s Weekly. Finally, Richard Newman’s intellectually challenging contribution looks at metaphorical discourse surrounding the health of the body politic to reconsider thoughts on the meaning of race and emancipation both during and after the war.

These essays should produce scores of “heavily marked” copies for decades to come. Consider just two...

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