Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History by Theodore J. Karamanski and Eileen M. McMahon (review)

I have taught Civil War history with emphases on both the national and local scenes for years with a wish to see an anthology of the type that Karamanski and McMahon's Civil War Chicago: Eyewitness to History sets forth. In offering a reflection of Chicagoans' thinking and emotions, as expressed through their "fears, aspirations, and [perceived] challenges," the editors have done a masterful job of showing the city and its people as they met one gargantuan challenge and embarked on those to be presented in their future. Chicago as entrepot, production center, and transportation hub contributed mightily to the war effort and represented in microcosm the enormity of the conflict that resulted in making America whole and truly indivisible.

Achieving national unity proved especially difficult, as the example of Chicagoans' mixed reactions to the Emancipation Proclamation illustrates. One Illinois regiment, the 8th, could despise the document with its racially charged transformation of the white over black arrangement, while another, the 82nd, composed of Germans along with some Scandinavians and Poles, could support the liberal cause of abolitionism, oblivious to ethnic nationalism.

The deplorable conditions at the Confederate Andersonville prisoner of war camp found their counterpart at Chicago's Camp Douglas, located along the south shore of Lake Michigan. This volume explores both Union and Confederate recollections with emphases on the hopelessness that existed, whether it was Northerners waiting for exchange when the pardon system was in effect, or Southerners becoming lost in an indefinite incarceration far from home. As the diet was once described, "the bacon was alive with maggots, the bread hard, sour, and black, and the sugar the color of Sand." Chicago buried thousands of Southerners on its lakeshore. Neither the divided sections, nor the nation was prepared for war.

The war, in turn, stimulated Chicago in matters that almost forecast its rise to becoming the nation's second largest metropolis by the end of the nineteenth century. In its economic growth, political strength, and civic nationalism, Chicago rose above internal factionalism to unite at war's end in both triumph and sorrow. Although Karamanski and McMahon include much in their collection about such growth and development, they also include the matters concerning race around which so much tension and turmoil revolved. The city's small, almost miniscule, stable African American population contributed to the 29th Infantry Regiment, United States Colored Troops, which fought in the eastern theater of war in 1864 and was present at Lee's surrender. The unit's leader, John A. Bross, died at the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg. Likewise, the successful ending of the nefarious Illinois Black Code rested heavily on the shoulders of African American merchant-tailor John Jones, Chicago's "Old German." However, marginalization of the black population as a whole awaited its members after the war's end.

The editors apply useful methodology, examining numerous issues of contemporary newspapers, from the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Times to the Rushville [Indiana] American, to tell their story. The addition of a central Indiana publication from the time of the horrendous Great Chicago Fire of 1871 illustrates deep post-war related feelings. That publication scolded Chicago and the North for their previous fits of exuberance over the burning of Atlanta and destruction of the Shenandoah Valley. Likewise, the editors scoured countless manuscript collections and government records to build this valuable supplemental collection.

In its comprehensiveness and in its effort to keep Civil War history alive to a twenty-first century generation, Eyewitness even includes in Chapter 9, "A Guide to Civil War Sites." Standing statuary and structures remind today's Americans of a conflict that brought a nation into political wholeness.

Eyewitness provides both teachers and readers with an excellent supplement to James B. McPherson's general study, Battle Cry of Freedom, Victor Hicken's state study, Illinois in the Civil War, and Christopher Robert Reed's chapter on the Civil...