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Reviewed by:
  • Untouched by the Conflict: The Civil War Letters of Singleton Ashenfelter, Dickinson College ed. by Jonathan W. White and Daniel Glenn
  • J. Gregory Acken
Jonathan W. White and Daniel Glenn, eds. Untouched by the Conflict: The Civil War Letters of Singleton Ashenfelter, Dickinson College. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2019. Pp. 147. Photographs, illustrations, appendices, notes, index. Cloth, $29.95.

Civil War–era literature is replete with the memoirs, letters, and reflections of combatants, while new accounts by participants in the fighting, many of uneven value, are continually being unearthed and brought to print. Far less common than accounts that provide the soldier’s view, however, are memoirs and letter collections written by civilians who lived through the conflict. Singleton Ashenfelter’s letters, gathered, annotated, and skillfully edited by Jonathan White and Daniel Glenn, are a refreshing, insightful addition to this small but important body of literature, and are all the more valuable because the author was one of the small fraction (less than 2 percent) of the college-aged population of the North who attended institutions of higher learning in the mid-nineteenth century.

Ashenfelter (1844–1906), a native of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, enrolled as a student at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in March 1862, and began dispatching engaging, introspective letters to his best friend Samuel W. Pennypacker (1843–1916), a future governor of Pennsylvania. Throughout the course of his life, Ashenfelter wrote approximately 300 letters to Pennypacker; collected in this volume are forty-seven letters that commence on April 25, 1862, and conclude in July 1865. Regrettably, none of Pennypacker’s replies to his companion have survived, but this does not detract from the usefulness of the collection. [End Page 259]

The closeness between Ashenfelter and Pennypacker is but one of many themes that course through their correspondence. “I could open up to you the most secret chambers of my heart,” he wrote to Pennypacker in March 1864. “In short, you are the only person living who, with my consent, may know . . . Ashenfelter as well as I do” (53). Because of this willingness to “open his heart” to his friend, readers are rewarded with a rich vein of subjects to explore. Like any adolescent on the cusp of maturity, matters of the heart were never far from his mind, and Ashenfelter provides insightful commentary on both his own attempts at courtship and those of his friends, revealing much about male/female relationships during the era. His delightfully descriptive, soul-searching letters touch upon topics as varied as faith (he was skeptical of organized religion), the use of alcohol (he swore off it, but later reneged), politics (he identifies as a Republican, but was openly critical of both of the main parties in the North), and cursing (“I swear in opposition to my will,” he wrote his friend, “to what I know to be politic to what I know to be right & what I know to be sensible”) (62). Ashenfelter placed more importance on being a member of the Dickinson community than being a devoted student, and much of his energy during his time in college was dedicated to literary societies and clubs, to the detriment of his studies. He outlines his courses and study habits, offers his candid opinions on fellow students and Dickinson faculty, and describes the pranks students play on their classmates and staff. An expansive library at his disposal allowed him to indulge in his love of books, and he never fails to inform Pennypacker of the works he is reading.

While war themes and news from the battlefront dominate many of the letters and recollections written by ordinary citizens during the war, Ashenfelter only mentions the conflict in passing, which may be evidence of the degree to which he was engrossed in college life. His older brother served in two different Pennsylvania infantry regiments during the war, while a close friend was killed at the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864. Ashenfelter’s only brush with war service came in September 1862, when he served for less than a week in a local militia company that was formed in response to Robert E. Lee’s Maryland invasion, but saw no action...

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