Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (review)

174CIVIL WAR HISTORY grow impatient at a method of development, especially in the middle chapters, that might be characterized as argument by reiteration. But the opening and closing chapters alone are worth the price of the book. In these Palladino lucidly details the causal relations between idea and act, the lessons of her labor history. These have little to do with the Civil War or with the deployment of troops to quell civil disobedience in Pennsylvania, but rather with right and wrong ways of seeing nineteenth -century industrial development. Believing unquestioningly in capital 's right to control an industry it underwrote, operators saw resistance to their authority as they saw resistance to the draft, as personal and ethnic (especially Irish) depravity. For this reason and for their sense of their own economic well-being, they fought what they understood to be wrongful and dangerous efforts to collectivize labor—using whatever methods came to hand, including the deployment of federal troops. Apparently they missed what to Palladino is the more important understanding , that it was not labor's collectivization that unbalanced the industry, but rather capital's. Regardless, the struggle of one group to impose its view on the other provides the background needed to understand why some influential Pennsylvanians were eager to bring federal troops to the anthracite counties and to keep them there until the end of the war. David R. Johnson Lafayette College Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their Warfor the Union. By Earl J. Hess. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1988. Pp. viii, 154. $35.00.) Some charm invests the straightforward contention that what people believed got registered in what they wrote, and that what they did bears a close relation to what they believed and said. This book has no place for Edmund Wilson's analogy between giant sea slugs intent on devouring one another and societies intent on the same, nor for Robert Nisbet's conjecture about the centrality of sheer boredom in impelling rural youths of the 1860s into the deadly ranks. For Earl J. Hess, "ideas and cultural values" played the central roles. All that talk about "selfgovernment , democracy, individualism, egalitarianism, and self-control" (1) must not be thought of as "mere rhetoric" (8). However, presenting those beliefs as an "ideology" (1-2, 32-33) poses a terminological problem. A dialectical materialist might, on seeing that usage, think how forthright the author was to grant so readily that the verbiage merely cloaked more basic urges. Others will wonder if the views of such a wide variety of Northerners— written both during the war and after—can so readily be synthesized. BOOK REVIEWS175 The reader encounters material from many writers—George Templeton Strong, Jane Grey Swisshelm, and Ralph Waldo Emerson being noteworthy among the many prominent figures. Newspaper editorials and an abundance of writings of soldiers—from privates to generals and their wives and relatives—compound the mixture. Could all of these people have been so much of one mind? To put the wonderment in other terms, individualism and related attributes, however much they may have thrilled an Emerson, may have laid comparatively little claim upon the unsophisticated. In this book an Indiana soldier at Antietam reflects that older persuasion nicely in claiming to have become '"a Victor over self" (43). The author here underscores the imperative nature of "self-command," "self-control," and "self-possession" (42), terms betokening what "self-government" had meant to most all along. This book aspires to much, perhaps too much, but it serves well in reminding a sometimes skeptical modernity of the significance of beliefs. It serves especially well in showing the crucial effect on attitudes of the firing on Fort Sumter (chapter two), and in treating the emergence of determination to see the bloody business through (chapter three). Though the particulars may arouse a question or two, the progression to a "modern definition" of self in the post-war years has plausibility. At book's end we have an inkling of our own presence: "The 'lonely crowd' waited just around the corner" (125). Lewis O. Saum University of Washington To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the Civil War. By Sister...