The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS87 information, but, curiously, some of the data in Gibson's main source—House Executive Document 337, the 1 868 quartermaster report—is omitted. For example , the report cites the vessel's owner and the per diem rates and distinguishes between "chartered," "hired," "employed," and "pressed" vessels. The report includes barges, which the Dictionary excludes because they are not "self-propelled." Admittedly, the Dictionary is already lengthy, and adding such omitted information would expand it to an unmanageable length. From that perspective, then, the Dictionary should not be faulted for its omissions. On one matter of interpretation Gibson misses the mark. He makes the valuable point that the traditional interpretation of a "flight from the flag" during the war fails to take into account the construction of many coastal steamships. There are, of course, alternative views on the "flight" (such as this reviewer's, propounded in this journal). Yet it is undeniable that the American merchant marine was decimated during the war—and for the rest of the century. Pointing to the construction of coastal steamships illuminates the postbellum coastal trade but obscures our understanding of the postbellum merchant marine and foreign trade. A sharp-eyed editor could have made the volume better. Too many words are misused, and there are too many punctuation and typographical errors. Nevertheless, this book is a monumental accomplishment and has already won the prestigious Lyman Award of the North American Society for Oceanic History. The volume demonstrates once again the importance of steamships during the war and will be useful for anyone tracing merchant ships ofthe early postbellum era, since many of them had been chartered by the Union army. It will be critical for anyone attempting to understand the Civil War in all its complexity. Kenneth J. Blume Albany College of Pharmacy, Union University The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890. By Lee Ann Whites. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. Pp. 288. $35.00.) Lee Ann Whites's study of Augusta, Georgia, offers a gendered analysis of the violent and chaotic years of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and redemption. Although she researched only one Southern city, her study provides important insights into Confederate ideology and the Myth of the Lost Cause. Whites's gendered approach includes analyses of both masculine and feminine behavior. Criticizing historians who treat white men's behavior as if it were gender- or race-neutral, she deftly interweaves race, class, and gender into a complex study of one Southern city's transformation. Because scholars typically focus on gender and race as categories of oppression, she explains, they tend to equate gender with women, race with blacks. Consequently, they are 88CIVIL WAR HISTORY able to describe the Confederacy's defense of white men's prerogatives of race and gender as ifonly a defense of"freedom" and "honor," as though such ideals existed apart from white men's domination of women and blacks. Although Augusta's white women experienced the war differently than men, most initially supported the Confederacy. As the war dragged on, however, Whites finds that gender united white women in criticism of the war, while class interests divided them. Rich and poor alike deplored "unmanly" merchants and speculators whose behavior impoverished women and children. Whereas lower-class women increasingly criticized the Confederacy itself, however, elite women hesitated to do so. Their class interests were too closely allied with those of Confederate leaders. Whites emphasizes that Northern defeat of the Confederacy destroyed a key component of Southern white manhood—the right to own black people. In the aftermath of the Confederacy's crushing defeat, Augusta's elite women struggled to redeem their fallen men. On April 26, 1875, in the middle of the city, amid parades and crowds of people, a monument to the Confederate dead was erected under the auspices of the Ladies' Memorial Association. In towns and cities throughout the South, similar organizations commemorated Confederate soldiers. The Myth of the Lost Cause was soon to flourish. Organizations such as the Confederate Survivors Association and the Daughters of the Confederacy "redeemed" Southern (and ultimately national) Civil War lore. In Augusta and throughout the New South, schoolchildren learned that noble white men...