From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era: Middle Class Life in Midwest America. by Timothy R. Mahoney (review)

As further proof of both the vibrancy of the Midwest's historiography and the regional approach to the Civil War era, Timothy R. Mahoney's From Hometown to Battlefield in the Civil War Era: Middle Class Life in Midwest America, the third volume in the author's trilogy on nineteenth-century midwestern society, relates stories about how an emerging urban middle-class culture was shaped by town-building, economic recession, and civil war, along with a core of common beliefs, during the 1850s and 1860s. To do this, Mahoney skillfully draws from an impressive range of archival and published sources to re-create the lives and circumstances of middle-class midwesterners, including diaries, letters, newspapers, local governing documents, and business records. His social history analysis traces a sampling of about seventy middle-class families, primarily situated in the Mississippi River towns of Dubuque, Davenport, Burlington, and Keokuk, Iowa, with comparisons to similar areas like Galena, Illinois, as well as larger urban cities such as Chicago and Saint Louis.

At times, Mahoney's format and stylistic choices (i.e., excessive quoted phrases) obstruct the narrative flow with layers of constructs that add unnecessary artificiality to otherwise engaging historical contexts and primary source material; it likely will not do well in the classroom. Specifically, the volume is divided into chapters focused on the hometown era dominated by Main Street boosters who founded and built up these towns, and those focused on the battlefield era when Main Street was transformed by meeting the demands for supporting the war, representing a triumph of national concerns over local. While Mahoney roots his analysis in the creation and transformation of a hometown ethos, he is particularly interested in how middle-class men and their families formed class and community identities that were predicated on an adherence to a professional culture and, for men, a male subculture, as well as shared beliefs in individualism, materialism, gentility, Christianity, and a shared understanding of democratic republicanism. Further, his method of tracing these changes is in identifying what he calls social experiences and spatial narratives. Almost lost in this, historiographically speaking, is the simple novelty of how midwestern Mississippi River towns and their inhabitants responded to and were shaped by the 1850s and the Civil War.

Boosters were as integral to the emerging midwestern towns and middle-class identity as soldiers were to fighting the Civil War. These were the individuals, being both capitalists and community builders, who sought legislation supporting growth and development they believed would result in wide prosperity. "Between 1852 and 1857," Mahoney writes, "Dubuque boosters chartered at least ten corporations to build railroads, roads, and bridges, improve the harbor, and develop the town" (76). But then the Panic of 1857 hit, and highly (overly) invested towns like Dubuque were beset with hardship. Local influence was trumped by outside influences now managing their debts. The outbreak of the Civil War in the spring of 1861 afforded boosters a chance to again lay claim to dominating Main Street as they regrouped in support of local soldiers and the larger war efforts, through coordinating parades, receptions, public debates and Union meetings, newspaper coverage, the creation of citizens committees, and the making of soldiers' uniforms (in a "sewing marathon"), banners, battle flags, and more. In this way, Main Street was transformed into a new kind of public space, a veritable "domestic battlefield" (184).

To disentangle the stories of these midwesterners from Mahoney's constructs at this point is to really be able to appreciate the Mississippi River orientation of eastern Iowa and western Illinois soldiers and women volunteers, as troop movements went south, west, and east. Many Iowa troops were part of key campaigns and battles including Wilson's Creek, Shiloh, Chattanooga, and Sherman's March to the Sea, before heading north through the Carolinas and Virginia. Because of Mahoney's theme of...