Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War by Jonathan W. White (review)

Jonathan W. White seeks the intimate world of Civil War–era dreams. Correspondence, diaries, reminiscences, periodicals, government documents, and literature reveal how commonly Victorian Americans related their dreams, from the baldly sexual to the prophetic, to one another. Happily, White does not apply psychological historical methods but rather argues that "dreams reflected something significant about" people's "emotional states of being" (p. xix). Dreamers found "warning, guidance, inspiration, or self-reflection" in their night lives and sought shared meanings with their loved ones and nations(p. xix). The book begins by examining the profound effects of sleep deprivation on soldiers, employing, among other sources, court-martial records. Some soldiers were court-martialed for drunkenness when they were likely just exhausted. White estimates that at least two thousand Union soldiers were tried for falling asleep at their posts; ninety of these soldiers were sentenced to execution, though President Abraham Lincoln commuted each of their sentences. Next, White explores the content of soldiers' and civilians' dreams. Soldiers used their dreams to connect with distant loved ones and to interpret novel experiences. Soldiers had nightmares, to be sure, but they also enjoyed fond, comforting dreams. Perhaps most interesting to contemplate about civilians' sleep is how their dreams evolved to capture social changes, such as deeper patriotic resolve or increasing female autonomy. White then necessarily departs from the private sphere to explore the published dreams of African Americans. Many of these dreams were prophetic, for instance, anticipating freedom. In popular culture, African Americans were touted as dream interpreters and fortune-tellers; therefore, white people often sought black people's guidance in the mysterious realm. The uses of dreams in black and white churches, however, had diverged by the time of the Civil War. Seeking respectability, white evangelical denominations retreated from sharing dreams in worship services, while the practice persisted among black congregations. White next investigates dreams of dying. To counter Drew Gilpin Faust's theory that such visions were "after-the-fact inventions perpetrated by the living" en route to creating the cultural institution of "'the Good Death,'" White suggests that Americans believed God "revealed something about his providential designs in these deathbed moments" (p. 103).

The stories of these dreams stuck with surviving comrades long after the war. The penultimate chapter relates how dreams permeated newspapers, prints, songs, and poetry, constructing deeply emotional, shared cultural experiences. In the final chapter White explores how Lincoln's public dreams took on various meanings after his assassination, connecting the departed president with his immediate circle and, as incarnations of his dreams proliferated even up to the 2012 film Lincoln, with generations of future Americans seeking an intimate bond with him. White explains that the retelling of Lincoln's nocturnal visions reveals more about his admirers, American hoping to confirm their country's "providential place in history," than about the president (p. 168).

Through an extended analysis of dreams, White poses a compelling counterargument to soldier studies that emphasize the brokenness of soldiers, in the vein of Gerald F. Linderman's Embattled Courage: The Experience of Battle in the American Civil War(New York, 1987). White advocates Walt Whitman's perspective that dedicated "Heroism" yielded striking perseverance, supported by extensive cultural scaffolding, such as religion, patriotism, and small-unit cohesion, detailed in works by Earl J. Hess, Frances M. Clarke, Mark S. Schantz, James M. McPherson, J. Matthew Gallman, and Lorien Foote (p. 194). Because Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil Warconcerns a narrow subject and is so thoroughly researched, including an archival base that stretches from the Northeast to the South and from the Midwest to the West, the book feels overlong despite its brevity at 183 pages of text. Its many chapters can ring staccato. It succeeds, however, in convincing the reader that dreams inspired and healed in this singular...