The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America by Edward L. Ayers (review)

The Thin Light of Freedom derives from community study. Edward L. Ayers explores two communities: one in southern Pennsylvania, Franklin County and its county seat of Chambersburg (twenty-five miles from Gettysburg in Adams County), and the other, only two hundred miles away in Virginia, Augusta County, with the county seat in Staunton. Systematic historical exploration of southern communities dates back to the work of W. E. B. DuBois, Howard W. Odum, Arthur F. Raper, and Charles S. Johnson in the early 1900s.¹ The 1970s witnessed a renewed interest in the analysis of communities, although most were sociological rather than historical, and shortly thereafter Lawrence Stone warned of a “collapse into trivia,” and Philip Curtin lamented that the focus on communities caused “an intellectual splintering.”²

Community studies, critics argued, were static, focused on social structure, and social history, statistical, derived from census decade intervals. Ayers’s joint community study relies on all this analyzed quantitative data, but it is in the background, in the notes and in the framework of the analysis and compelling storytelling. Significantly, Ayers understands the importance of politics and its relationship to social and cultural history. The difference between history and antiquarianism is that history is comparative, and Ayers makes comparison explicit by systematically analyzing a northern and a southern community. Moreover, he places local stories in historical context by putting the larger context in italics. Ayers does not address the jargon of analytical concepts in local studies such as deconstruction and postmodernism, but those concepts express a need to look at the reality of daily living, and that is what Ayers does. An examination of all the people in the community, all their ambiguities and contradictions, all their negotiations across lives of race, class, gender, and power, reveals the complexity of people without reducing them to simplicity, and that is what Ayers does.

This is the second volume of two that follow two communities during the course of the Civil War years. Both volumes are much-deserved award winners. The first, Ayers’s In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (2003), covers the period from John Brown’s raid in 1859 until just before the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. The second book begins with Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863, in a section titled “The Scourge of War, July 1863 through November 1864,” and continues through Reconstruction, in “The Harvest of War, December 1864 through 1902.” Whereas many historians conclude Reconstruction in 1876 or 1877, Ayers writes about “Reconstruction’s abrupt end in Virginia in 1870” (491). He then extends this story to 1902, after Virginia rewrote its state constitution to suppress African American voting and to limit public education, which makes sense both politically and legally.

Ayers uses diaries, letters, soldiers’ records, Freedmen’s Bureau records, the U.S. census, Southern Claims Commission records, the report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and many newspapers for as thorough a picture of the times as anyone could ascertain. The documentation is beyond reproach. Primary sources are searchable in the rightly celebrated Valley of the Shadow archive, digital history at its best (although the now-dated search mechanism could be easier). Sources are thorough, comparative, and balanced. Traditional archives can be biased in favor of the people who kept diaries and wrote letters—white men and women—but Ayers includes African Americans, using personal stories of the forty-five men living in Franklin County who volunteered for the famous Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts. He brings forth Willis M. Carter, an African American leader in Staunton, enslaved when the war began and a leading Republican during Reconstruction, to tell his story.

Ayers considers a great number of historical and historiographical questions through this community study. Fake news, as well as people refusing to believe...