American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era ed. by Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon and Laura Mammina (review)

George C. Rable, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama, left an indelible mark on the fields of southern and Civil War history. American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era offers a collection of essays as thematically diverse as the work produced by the contributors’ mentor. Editors Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, and Laura Mammina have assembled an insightful and engaging volume that seeks to honor, yet expand upon, Rable’s eclectic scholarship, which spans military, political, religious, and gender history. The volume likewise captures Rable’s emphasis on the agency of everyday people. In the editors’ words, “All of these scholarly inquiries begin with the premise that ordinary human beings and their experiences matter—that the dynamics among family, friends, and enemies have not only local consequences but often sweeping national consequences as well” (3). The collection of fifteen essays is divided into three loosely chronological sections, exploring the sectional crisis, the war, and Reconstruction. The editors center each of these sections on a unifying topic: part 1 on “party politics and political culture,” part 2 on “political and military conflicts,” and part 3 on “Reconstruction and counterrevolution.”

The four essays included in part 1 collectively reveal Americans, particularly northerners, to be disinterested in political compromise as they entered the 1860s. For example, Bever explores northern temperance reformers who, at the time of the 1860 presidential election, argued that intemperance was a national sin more threatening than chattel slavery and more pressing than even the secession crisis. Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr. considers the crucial yet understudied role of newspaper advertisements in shaping public opinion. Americans widely read advertisements in the mid-nineteenth century, and partisan merchants in the North found effective ways to associate their products with politics. They exploited a new market for politically themed badges, biographies, and lithographs. Continuing the theme of political division, Christian McWhirter analyzes popular songs by northerners and southerners, Democrats and Republicans, written about Abraham Lincoln both before and after his 1865 assassination.

Next, the six essays included in part 2 build on the previous section’s theme of internal conflict, particularly as it relates to issues of law, race, environment, and gender. Lindsay Rae Privette considers the role that contaminated water and dehydration played for both Union and Confederate troops during the siege of Vicksburg. Using an environmental lens, Privette concludes that the inability to access safe drinking water not only was debilitating to soldier health, but also contributed to the consequential Confederate defeat at Vicksburg. Mammina offers an insightful analysis of the relationships forged between four Union soldiers and four southern women, Black and white, elite and nonelite. Mammina argues that all eight expressed a strong preference for domesticity. In her words, “This adherence to domesticity even in the turbulence of war reveals that this idea—with its emphasis on the patriarchal control of male heads of household, the duty of a husband to support and protect his family, the woman’s control over household matters, and the obedience and service that a wife owed to her husband—was intimately linked to ideas of political power” (165). Charity Rakestraw and Kristopher A. Teters focus on the little-known experiences of Black female refugees in Union camps. The coauthors ascribe significant agency to these women, maintaining that they actively controlled their own fates in an uncertain environment and with virtually no leverage.

In 1984, Rable published But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction, which rejects the preexisting scholarship contending that Americans had failed to remedy the nation’s sin of slavery and racial discrimination. In contrast, Rable argues that Reconstruction did offer a radical agenda, one that prompted white southerners to respond via violent counterrevolution. The five essays included in part 3...