A Place Called Appomattox: The Civil War Told Through the History of the Famous Town (review)

A Place Called Appomattox: The Civil War Told Through the History of the Famous Town. By William Marvel. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2000. Pp. x, 400. $34.95.)

William Marvel's elegantly written book offers scholars valuable evidence about antebellum, wartime, and Reconstruction Virginia by interweaving the actions and perspectives of soldiers and civilians over nearly eighty years in this "place." By showing how Appomattox residents eagerly sought new economic opportunities after the county's founding in 1845, Marvel challenges the older historiographical view that this period of Virginia history can be characterized as stagnant. Like most Virginians, Appomattox families invested in slave labor whenever possible and stayed loyal to the Union until the late 1850s. The efforts of these early founders to build a community (visually chronicled through a series of town maps) slowed between 1861 and 1865, as birth and marriage rates fell and war demands made capital and labor scarce. Even though Appomattox residents saw no Union troops until the very end of the war, Confederate soldiers on furlough brought the war home when they transmitted to their families often fatal illnesses they contracted in camp. Marvel chronicles a growing uncertainty about the war effort among Appomattox civilians and soldiers beginning in mid-1862, as they faced more forceful Confederate conscription efforts and the deaths of their loved ones on battlefields to the east.

Although Appomattox sent many of its young men to fight for the Confederacy (many of whom did not return), Marvel reveals the ways in which elite men, and frequently their sons, could exploit exemption laws and political connections either to avoid service or to secure safe positions away from the front. By unveiling those places where the rich shirked a duty they demanded from less well-off neighbors, Marvel makes a significant contribution to the debate about who actually fought for the Confederacy. A numerical examination of service and desertion would have provided valuable context for Marvel's assertion that "rich and influential residents usually managed to avoid the front if they preferred" (ix). Marvel proves that men in the right position could avoid service; it is unclear how many did. Completing his argument about the demographic pattern of Confederate military service, he argues that "among the lower classes total sacrifice has been common. . ." (ix). Regrettably, Marvel does not reveal what his deep immersion in Appomattox sources might have told him about the ideological or social bases for that commitment.

Nor does Marvel spend much time analyzing the remarkable evidence he has uncovered. While readers probably will not miss arcane historiographical debates, selective engagement with relevant secondary sources could have illuminated the relationship between Appomattox County and other places in Virginia, as well as the relationship between the events Marvel describes and the course of the war as a whole. Toward the end of the book, Marvel does analyze the image, designed by Lost Cause romanticists like John B. Gordon, that Union and Confederate soldiers laid down their guns at Appomattox so they could embrace and recall each others' heroic efforts during a war that had nothing to do with slavery. Marvel convincingly uncovers the less pleasant but more believable historical reality of bitter enemies exhaustingly concluding a horrible war. The difficulty of creating new economic, political, social and racial relations among themselves and with outsiders challenged Appomattox residents for several decades after the war. Marvel's conclusion, which highlights the town's disintegration by the early 1920s, reveals their inability to form a lasting community on the site of the old one and underscores the transient nature of even this now most hallowed "place" in America. The brief lifespan of Appomattox fittingly symbolizes a Confederacy that for Marvel drew vigorous initial support but to which many men would ultimately make only a hesitant commitment.