Editor's Overview

Our second issue of 2021 explores some new directions in the naval history of the war as well as the period of Reconstruction. The Union's Mississippi Squadron fought an unconventional war against Southern soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians who attacked Northern supply lines. Under the direction of David D. Porter, the squadron used a strategy of exhaustion to wear down Southern resistance but could never fully defeat its foe. As Robert Gudmestad argues, Northern sailors hated their service in the brownwater navy and viewed their time in the war as transactional in nature. The fleet underwent a massive turnover in 1864, but the North used its advantages in economics, technology, and population to compensate for a fleet of sailors who lacked motivation and discipline. While the Union did not defeat its foe along the western waters, it provided enough protection to the logistical network to assist in victory on the battlefield.

Antebellum racism did not doom the Reconstruction project of black citizenship to failure. In the 1850s, as Daniel P. Kilbride argues, a flood of African travel accounts captivated Anglo-American readers. These appeared at an opportune time for Northerners committed to granting citizenship to four million newly emancipated slaves. Together with the glorious record of black military service, these books proved that people of African descent possessed the moral and intellectual qualities to participate in civic life. In the 1860s, however, a new rash of African travel accounts appeared that gave free rein to the most lurid images of African peoples. White Southerners and their Northern allies realized the potential of these accounts and weaponized them. They seized control of the terms of the debate over black citizenship. Instead of demanding that the defeated South obey the Union's basic demands for just treatment of the freedpeople, Republicans allowed themselves to be diverted into a contest over the innate barbarity of African people. It was a wholly unnecessary debate and one that, given the ruthlessness of their opponents, Republicans were poorly positioned to win.

Reviews in this edition of Civil War History cover a host of topics, from environmental history, to gun rights, to memory, to nineteenth-century literature. In these, readers will note the scope, scale, and dynamic nature of Civil War scholarship and the ways scholars are continually testing the limits of our field.