The Northern Home Front during the Civil War by Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (review)

Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller are editors extraordinaire, having edited and coedited, by my estimate, twenty-four volumes between them—six of them together. And, they also coauthor books, like this one, the latest in John David Smith's "Reflections on the Civil War Era" series. This volume makes clear that Cimbala and Miller have also read just about everything that has been published about the North in the Civil War for the past thirty years—including dozens of published letter collections. For proof, readers can turn to the fifteen-page bibliographic essay that accompanies the narrative. Northern Home Front mostly avoids the trap of trying to decide if the war did or did not change the North by instead highlighting how "Northern people engaged and understood the war" (xiii). Doing so allows Cimbala and Miller to conclude that in 1865 "most Northerners were happy to get on with their lives" (160). In this short volume, the authors provide ample evidence of how much the lives Northerners were eager to get on with were changed as well as the nation they inhabited. A synthesis of recent scholarship on the war, Northern Home Front also features original research that highlights how everyday Americans in Northern communities sought to make sense of a war that came into their homes and communities and stayed there too long.

With its accessible prose and short length, this volume would work well in an undergraduate course on the Civil War, as an introduction to such issues as Northern labor relations, freedom of the press, war financing, draft evasion, dissent, and industrial development. Each topic is briefly and efficiently discussed. Among its many virtues, the book is full of useful statistics. Here are two examples that will make their way into my lectures: in one year (late 1863-early 1864), the US Army arrested 2,810 deserters and 3,743 draft evaders in eastern Pennsylvania (142); and 85,000 of the 133,000 men who were drafted in the first two federal drafts paid the commutation fee to avoid serving (138). Graduate student mentors will find the book useful in guiding their mentees to underexplored research topics, such as the aftershocks that rippled through Northern communities as a result of rapid industrial demobilization that left behind shuttered factories and, in some places, wrecked environments—and, of course, lingering resentment for the administration and the war's outcomes. I particularly appreciated the chapter titled "Incomplete Families," which, in addition to sketching out for readers the stakes for Northern families of the absence of male breadwinners, includes original analyses of the experience of stress and depression among women with absentee husbands and the best summary I have seen of various efforts to send soldier wages home to the families who needed the money. The book treats emancipation and the limitations of Northern racism fairly.

And, throughout Northern Home Front the authors weave in welcome surprises. Some of the usual suspects appear, such as Chicago nurse memoirist Mary Livermore and Philadelphia diarist and Democrat Sidney Fisher but other more well-known figures are left out to make room for new voices. Readers will not miss cranky and bigoted New York diarist George Templeton Strong, and although Northern governors and other politicos make appearances, the book takes readers beyond the statehouses and into the homes, churches, streets, and schoolhouses of the wartime North. There readers will be introduced to students at the University of Vermont writing home about how talk of war was making it impossible to study; New York journalist, George Lawrence Jr., suggesting that the secession crisis could be resolved by arming a band of African American irregular fighters; German and Luxembourgian draft resisters in Wisconsin; and residents of Belfast, Maine, who established a coast guard, mostly to protect citizens from rowdy and disruptive soldiers who passed through the town on their...