Editor’s Overview

Our March issue offers some unique perspectives that tackle the political and social fabric of the nation consumed by war. Julie Roy Jeffrey explores northern attempts to stamp out “treasonous” speech during the Civil War. The voluminous case files of Levi C. Turner, associate judge advocate for the Army, and Lafayette C. Baker, special provost marshal, two officials at the heart of the effort to suppress subversion, supplemented by newspaper accounts, provide detailed evidence of the workings of the federal program to quell dissent outside the usual procedures of civil law. These efforts reveal uncertainties about the nature and limits of free speech, especially when expressed in the public arena, and the complicated and layered character of loyalty.

Although stalwart unionists insisted that the line between loyalty and disloyalty was clear, Roy argues that the attempts to curb supposedly disloyal discourse suggest otherwise. The workings of the program privileged the accusers, local men (and some women),who were willing to denounce their neighbors’ public utterances. Whether those accused were disloyal or merely had ordered their allegiances differently than their accusers, whether the accusers were telling the truth or lying, the consequences of being denounced were dire. Without any information about the accusations and those who had made them, without any procedure for defending themselves, those caught up in the attempts to curb disloyalty faced incarceration in prison facilities far from home. Their plight highlights the limits of free speech and the simplification of the definition of loyalty during the Civil War.

Scholarship on Confederate government officials’ attempts to negotiate with the United States during the last year of the war tends to fall into two categories. Some historians chart the increasingly desperate efforts to modify the terms of inevitable reunion and emancipation. Others demonstrate the futile instances of an absence of meeting of minds with an exchange of incompatible positions of independence on one side and reunion with emancipation on the other. As Adrian Brettle argues, there is a different and more contingent interpretation of the interaction between Confederates and northerners off the battlefield.

In their endeavor to establish an independent nation-state in a time of war, Confederates looked forward to and planned for the future and knew that in peacetime their most important commercial and diplomatic relationship would be with the Union. They rationalized events and developments on and off the battlefield, as well as the attempts at negotiation themselves, as stages in pursuit of the desired quest of a state of harmony with the United States. Confederates also believed this state of affairs would be either in the best interest of northerners as a whole or at least elements within the Union, such as the Midwest states or the Democratic Party. Confederates therefore believed compromise on both sides was both possible and desirable, albeit to be facilitated by the battlefield. Individuals who passionately disagreed about domestic policies—for example, President Jefferson Davis and his vice president, Alexander Stephens—agreed on this point. Finally, while these would-be negotiators hoped to preserve both slavery and independence, they were also prepared to consider creative arrangements to address what they presumed to be the US government’s concerns. What Confederates thought the terms of the agreement with the Union should be reveals much about what they expected their nation to become in the future.

The voices of northern rural women are still largely missing from the massive body of Civil War scholarship. Joseph J. Casino has gathered nine letters written by Mary Ann O’Donnell, a young single rural woman living in southwestern Illinois. Somewhat surprisingly, in these letters the war seems rather remote, as economic issues stand paramount. The weather, road conditions, health, high taxes, crop conditions, and the labor shortage caused by military enlistments dominate the correspondence, which helps enrich our understanding of how the war impacted the lives of regular Americans in a multitude of manners.

Reviews in this issue follow three distinct themes: The first focuses on family life, broadly, during the Civil War era, beginning with Diane Miller Sommerville’s review of Robin Sager’s Marital Cruelty in Antebellum America, and then continuing with a number of recently published...