In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 (review)

In the hands of some historians, individual experiences can enrich our understandings of epic events without diminishing their magnitude. Edward Ayers's In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 offers an example of historical empathy unmarred by condescension. In this beautifully written book, Ayers tells the stories of Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, by tracing the changes wrought by battles and politics in the lives of individuals on both sides of the conflict. In these communities, Ayers argues that ambiguous borderland identities transmogrified into polarized regional identities with the commencement of the Civil War.

The book is a unique experiment in historical transparency, for it appears in conjunction with "The Valley of the Shadow" website, a digital archive created by Ayers and a team of students from the University of Virginia. The site allows visitors to read and search thousands of primary sources from both counties. In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a collage of these primary sources, a narrative made up of individual impressions whose false hopes and glanced ambitions leave the reader with a sense of lived historical experience more resonant than any statesman's overview.

Ayers places the concept of the border at the center of his analysis. The shifting line separating North and South interests Ayers less than the broad swath ofthe upper South and the lower North, the borderland on which "the nation redefined itself" during the war years (xix). Where residents of Virginia and Pennsylvania had depended upon and identified with each other, the war taught them to yearn for the deaths of each other's sons. The similarities between these border communities made the resulting violence all the more bitter.

In the story that Ayers tells, borders in the imagination matter as much as geographic ones. When a young Pennsylvania lawyer noted in 1861 that Southerners had banished Union songs "from their borders," he meant, of course, from the Confederacy itself (113). At a time of regional tension, borders became synonymous with nation. Perhaps for this reason, in the years immediately preceding the war the expansion of slavery into the territories was the core target of the Republican agenda and the rallying cry for Southern secession. As the future Border States of the nation, the territories assumed enormous symbolic power for two rapidly diverging visions of America.

The war shifted other borders as well, and Ayers describes the energies that Northerners and Southerners expended when either guarding ideological boundaries or celebrating their dissolution. The war eroded divisions between the secular and the sacred, as soldiers justified violence by imagining God as their president. After Lincoln's Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Democrat and Union major general George B. McClellan forbade his men to discuss what he considered to be a foolish declaration because he believed "the boundary between political decisions and military power must be jealously protected" (321). The targeting of civilians (especially by northern troops) blurred with terrifying violence the border between homefront and warfront. Most harrowing of all, the war continually demonstrated both to its combatants and their loved ones the thin border-"[o]nly a hair"—between life and death (408).

Ayers's selection of Augusta County, Virginia, and Franklin County, Pennsylvania, as his representative border communities presents a few problems. Two hundred miles separated them, a farther distance than many people traveled in their lifetimes in the mid-nineteenth century. The theme of neighbors-turned-enemies might have been more striking had the counties actually bordered each other. Also, during the period that Ayers covers Augusta County was in the middle of Virginia; it only came to border the Union line when West Virginia became a state in 1863. Although Ayers ends his book within weeks of the creation of West Virginia, he never mentions the event. Readers could forgive the omission had the residents of these counties truly nurtured...