War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era ed. by Joan E. Cashin (review)

Cultural historian Leora Auslander has rightly observed that "historians are, by profession, suspicious of things" ("Beyond Words," American Historical Review 110 [October 2005]: 1015). Auslander urged scholars to expand their sources, to seriously consider material culture, in order to better answer familiar questions and more easily pose new ones. If the historical profession has been slow to embrace material culture as evidence, then the pace of Civil War scholars has been glacial. Fortunately, Joan E. Cashin's edited volume, War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era, addresses this lacuna and represents, I hope, a harbinger. The book is an introduction to the field. As Cashin explains, it reminds scholars of the "material world's importance in peace and war, for civilians and soldiers, blacks and whites, and women and men in all regions" (2).

Organized chronologically, the collection includes ten essays by leading lights in the field of Civil War history. The authors capaciously define material culture as environments and physical objects modified by "culturally determined behavior" (3). Cashin contends in the book's useful introduction that material culture analysis can give new perspectives on key historiographical debates, including the common soldier's experience; the strength of Confederate allegiance; race, slavery, and emancipation; political behavior; environmental history; women's history; and memory studies (5–7). Although it is an ambitious charge, the volume's essayists ably answer Cashin's call. As revealed by a survey of topics included in the volume, things mattered to nineteenth-century Americans: for veterans, Appomattox became inextricably linked with pieces of an apple tree; small arms and artillery engendered a range of feelings among soldiers; and the built environment of refugee camps symbolized both African Americans' freedom struggle and white people's continued racism.

Antebellum northerners and southerners used objects to advance and represent their respective visions for the future. As Jason Phillips proffers in the volume's first essay, John Brown's pikes were deeply symbolic weapons. Once a weapon of wealthy white Virginians, these blades were converted into the tools of black liberation (19). The pikes became sought-after relics "of a revolution to end or defend slavery" (26). The revolutionary nature of the Civil War heightened the importance of objects from America's eighteenth-century war for independence. "The contest over Revolutionary artifacts," Cashin observes in her contribution, "was part of the all-out political and cultural struggle during the Civil War between the North and the South" (34).

Several of the essays thoughtfully consider environment and architecture as material culture. Lisa M. Brady and Timothy Silver turn to the Antietam National Battlefield, observing that "treating the preserved landscape as material culture can lay bare the physical realities that affected the battle and turned an ordinary patch of ground into a commemorative site" (55). As the authors illustrate, the material world shaped the human experience (70). Brady and Silver's methodological insights are linked to Sarah Jones Weicksel's excellent essay, "The Material Culture of Refugee Relief." By examining "relief workers' constructed narratives of redemption" from slavery, along with "refugees' own material, lived experiences," Weicksel demonstrates how the built environment both constrained and liberated African American refugees (152). Victoria E. Ott focuses on Alabama homes to explore how white women used the built environment to participate in politics and civic affairs, and thus, the household "blurred the lines between public and private life" (180–81).

From pocket Bibles that stopped bullets to lymph and scabs used to prevent smallpox, a range of objects populates the volume. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray consider bullet-in-the-book episodes to both understand the creation of talismans and systematically document these remarkable episodes. Robert D. Hicks's unexpected essay, "Scabrous Matters," looks at vaccine matter to "understand how Confederate doctors created new knowledge about a natural, biological material—vaccine virus—that they circulated through live humans and...