Approaching Civil War and Southern History by William J. Cooper (review)

Approaching Civil War and Southern History is aptly named, as eminent historian William J. Cooper’s essays analyze some of the most important debates in the history of the Civil War era. Well written and meticulously researched, the collection brings together a career’s worth of scholarship on the American South. The ten essays were previously published between 1970 and 2012, and Cooper serves as both author and editor of the collection, including a preface to the book and adding an introduction to each chapter.

The essays encapsulate an impressive breadth of expertise. From an excerpt of his senior thesis (chapter 1: “A Reassessment of Jefferson Davis as War Leader: The Case from Atlanta to Nashville”) to an essay borne out of his presidential address to the Southern Historical Association in 2010 (chapter 9: “The Critical Signpost on the Journey toward Secession”), the book is a snapshot into a historian’s lifework. Like many (if not most) historians, Cooper did not follow one topic throughout his career, instead meandering through the nineteenth-century South, dissecting the people and events that most caught his eye. And that proves to be both a strength and a weakness for this collection.

The greatest strength is its accessibility. The essays showcase the historian’s craft at its finest—each advances a strong argument supported by clear prose, and all but one essay (chapter 8: “Jefferson Davis Confronts a Changed World,” which first appeared in 2008 as an introduction to volume 12 of The Papers of Jefferson Davis) includes notes. Each essay can stand alone, and Cooper is also careful to place each within the historio-graphical context of the time in which it was written, making this book a wonderful resource for any upper-level undergraduate or graduate course. (An added benefit for both students and teachers alike, no essay is longer than twenty-five pages, and most are ten to fifteen pages in length.) Not only does the information contained in each add value to a course, but also the way in which the essays are constructed serves to educate and challenge future historians in their own research and writing.

Three of the essays focus on the secession crisis of 1860–61. The arguments given have since been developed into separate books, but Cooper’s contribution defining the “politics of slavery” reminds the reader of the complexity of the series of events surrounding the secession crisis (56). While Cooper is quick to state that slavery was a main cause of secession, he complicates the issue by arguing that it was not slavery alone that led eleven states to leave the Union. Slavery, Cooper contends, does not clarify why Louisiana and Virginia seceded at different times or why the slave states of Maryland and Delaware never left. Cooper believes the answers to those questions can be found in state politics.

Other essays include three that served as book introductions. One has been previously noted. The other two were written for reissues of older volumes. These highlight two men much less famous than Jefferson Davis: Daniel R. Hundley and Edwin Forbes. Hundley authored Social Relations in Our Southern States, a book forgotten almost as soon as it was published in 1860 but that was rediscovered by scholars interested in his descriptions of race and class relations in the antebellum South. The third introduction was written for a memoir authored by Forbes, a former employee of Frank Leslie’s for his eponymous newspaper, who spent several years with Union forces sending sketches back to be printed. After the war, Forbes published a book detailing his experiences, something no other Civil War pictorial reporter accomplished. This introduction to the reprint edition of Forbes’s Thirty Years After: An Artist’s Memoir of the Civil War (1993) is perhaps the most fascinating as it details a person and a series of events during the war that do not typically receive much notice. Cooper reminds fellow scholars of the...