Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front During the Civil War ed. by Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson (review)

One challenge instructors of Civil War history face is to complicate students’ assumptions that the war pitted “The North” against “The South.” Important books have appeared emphasizing the significance of regional differences in the Civil War South.¹ Likewise, scholars have sought to rekindle interest, first emphasized by Frederick Jackson Turner, in American regional history.² But until the appearance of the book under review and a few recent monographs, little Civil War scholarship has focused on what people called “the Northwestern United States,” meaning the antislavery states west of Pennsylvania (2).³

Union Heartland begins to rectify the situation by presenting seven essays that seek to identify what may have been unique about the Civil War’s impact on the most agricultural part of the Union. An important essay by R. Douglas Hurt provides detailed evidence about the extent and variety of the war’s boon to midwestern agriculture. Military demands for horses, hogs, and grains encouraged farmers (male and female) to expand land development and invest in laborsaving technology; the Civil War spurred northern industrialization by first expanding farming output. Another valuable essay is Brett Barker’s study of local Republican efforts to squelch Democratic war dissent through boycotts and acts of violence against antiwar newspapers. Barker’s point is that while official actions by the Lincoln administration to suspend northerners’ civil liberties may have been measured, as previously argued by Mark E. Neely, unofficial or vigilante censorship of the Democratic press was perhaps widespread and warrants further study.⁴

Three of the book’s essays show a variety of midwestern women’s wartime experiences. Ginette Aley emphasizes women’s sense of alienation over the departure and uncertain fate of husbands and fathers. She notes that while gender norms of the day generally “defined a woman’s life almost entirely” in terms of her family, women in remote areas of the North were particularly affected (126). Nicole Etcheson and J. L. Anderson then show different outcomes of midwestern women’s sudden solitary circumstances. Etcheson studies how soldiers’ wives who moved in with or near their husbands’ in-laws effectively remained subordinated to their husbands as a result. Anderson, meanwhile, emphasizes women’s new expressions of autonomy in managing farms and family because of “the vacant chair” (148).

The book’s other two essays reflect how not all midwesterners were consumed by the war’s sacrifices of family or civil liberties, or even economic windfalls. Michael P. Gray describes the circus-like atmosphere of civilians’ enthrallment with Confederate officers imprisoned on Johnson’s Island near Sandusky, Ohio. Julie A. Mujic, on the other hand, studies University of Michigan students’ class essays, debates, and newspapers to explain how the (male) students rationalized their failure to join the Union military. For these students, “staying in school became the equivalent of fighting the rebels,” and their classes, they asserted, prepared them to lead the country in the anticipated murky postwar era (58). Mujic’s essay could benefit from an epilogue to trace whether any of the students she studied actually played public roles during Reconstruction, but her work shows another layer of midwesterners’ reactions to war, in addition to the other “battles” elucidated elsewhere in this diverse and welcome collection.