Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters (review)

Just weeks before setting out with his army group to deal a decisive blow to the secessionist rebellion in the West at Atlanta, Major General W. T. Sherman wrote to his brother, Senator John Sherman, with some irritation. "Too much stress has been laid on the Negro," he asserted, despite emancipation being, to his eye, but a "minor question" in the titanic internecine struggle then entering its fourth year. "The Government of the United States is the Issue," he declared. "Shall it stand or fall?" (p. 133).

Practical Liberators, the product of Kristopher Teters's careful research into the letters and diaries of Federal officers serving in the Western Theater of the Civil War, makes clear that Sherman's convictions were shared widely by those who came into contact with the greatest number of southern slaves during the war. While they, like Sherman himself, eventually proved willing to embrace the destruction of slavery as a means to the vital end of putting down the rebellion and ensuring the future integrity of the United States, Teters shows that the war by no means represented "a revolutionary experience for these officers when it came to race" (p. 2). Their gradual drift toward acceptance of emancipation came in fits and starts, nudged on by Congress and even the slaves themselves until most pragmatically embraced emancipation as a viable military tactic. Still, for them, the war's meaning retained an unchanging conservative character for the entirety of its duration. Killing slavery, so far as they were concerned, was merely a pragmatic means to the end of killing the "so-called Southern Confederacy," ending the bloody war as swiftly as possible, and going home. Contrary to the assertions of other historians, most white Western Federal officers eschewed the notion that they were somehow engaged in any kind of social revolution, and remained exclusively "practical liberators" in their approach to emancipation, leaving the Army in 1865 with their anti-Black racism tragically well intact.

Teters's work joins a growing scholarship on the strikingly conservative and strictly pragmatic character of white Northern motivations to paradoxically embrace radically revolutionary means in their quest to put down secession. It also reflects an ongoing evolution in Civil War "soldier studies" scholarship, as prevailing discussion moves away from the tired and inevitably inconclusive debate over "primary" and "combat" motivations toward an analysis of what those in uniform thought, felt, and wrote about other issues, how those opinions shaped their behavior, and how they changed (or did not) over time as a result of personal experience. While not even the most comprehensive survey of Civil War letters and diaries can ever obtain even a modicum of scientific accuracy in positively determining what "most" felt or thought about anything, Teters provides ample evidence of consensus among the Federal "shoulder-strapped gentry" in the West to convincingly support his conclusions.

Perhaps even more important than what Teters' work tells us about the views of Western Federal officers is what it suggests about prevailing ideas about race and politics across the white West during the era. Sadly only broaching the question in his aptly titled conclusion, "How Transformative Was the Civil War?," the book teases the reader with vestiges of a far more historically significant thesis. If, as Teters suggests, these officers were representative of the majority of white Westerners, can the Northern states really be said to have "given up" on achieving the more revolutionary of Reconstruction's objectives? Can one "fail" to achieve a goal that one never earnestly sets out to achieve in the first place? Unfortunately, these questions lay beyond the scope of Teters' work, but his insightful probe into the hearts and minds of Federal officers fighting to preserve republican government in America at the cost of the "Union as it was" warrants careful consideration by students not...