War Had Transformed Them All: Coming to Terms with the Civil War

Some 300 yards from where I used to live a neighbor flew the “Don’t Tread on Me!” flag. The symbol of the Tea Party, the banner has an older story: in 1775 Christopher Gadsden, delegate to the Continental Congress, proposed the yellow flag with the coiled rattlesnake at its center and slogan beneath as part of a ceremony to commission marines around the time of the Boston Tea Party. Gadsden’s home state was South Carolina, the fırst to secede from the Union before the Civil War, less than 100 years later.¹

I did not ask my neighbor why he flew the flag. Given the banner’s oblique gesture to the origins of the American Civil War, I found myself with other questions: What did citizenship mean then as the country split apart? What are the legacies of slavery? In what ways do race and gender remain necessary crucibles in which to consider the meanings of the war? Considering the violence that infused all aspects of American culture between 1861 and 1865, what might we learn about the relationship between war and sacrifıce, violence and rhetoric? What does the war signal about the failings of our collective political imagination? These questions are not easy, but the books reviewed here suggest meaningful answers. Across the terrains they survey—intellectual, moral, material—they attend richly to the meanings of the war.

Horrors Beyond Imagination: Examining the Material Aspects of the War

The American Civil War, whatever else it was, remains our “blood-soaked moment of truth.”² As the distinguished historian, Allen Nevins, asserted:

We should pay fuller attention to its darker aspects, and examine more honestly such misinterpretations as the statement it was distinguished by its generosity of spirit, the magnanimity with which the combatants treated each other; a statement absurd on its face, for no war which lasts four years and costs 600,000 lives leaves much magnanimity in its later phases.

(quoted in Adams, 5)

Michael C. C. Adams’s Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War embraces this invitation, showing keen interest in the war’s “darker aspects.” “Preoccupied” as Adams is with the societal aspects of the war more than its politics, he lingers “on the pains, the fears, the tragedies of those who became the war’s victims,” who, contra to romantic narratives about the war, “experienced no transcendence, caught up [as they were] in the mangle of war, along with many thousands of other men, women, and children” (4). Although he neither denies nor discounts the “prodigious courage, sacrifıce, endurance, and magnanimity” demonstrated by soldiers and civilians, Adams believes the war’s dark side must be faced squarely (5). Eight chapters strive to make real those horrors by leading “the reader down the dirty, dusty road of war, in a logical progression from military enlistment to camp, then on the march, to the battlefıeld, and from there to the hospital, the grave, and the haunted minds of psychologically damaged soldiers” (12). Adams’s plan is commendable and its execution, in places, revealing. Over the book’s arc, readers come face-to-face with the hopeful emotions that characterized the war’s beginning, emotions that gave way to horror, deprivation, death...