A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War (review)

The challenge of balancing narrative and argument, a perennial one for historians, is particularly acute for scholars of the Civil War. The unifying grand story of the war often impedes our ability to create the thematic approaches favored by so much of the rest of the profession. Combined with the ready supply of thrilling anecdotes offered by the war, most authors choose to advance their arguments by time rather than topic. The authors of A People at War have bucked this trend. Their book is arranged in five sections, each composed of three or four thematic chapters. Many chapters advance chronologically through the whole war, and although the narratives are usually cogent and often compelling, the cumulative effect undermines the overall flow of the book. Because of the segmented nature of the text, students reading the book may have a difficult time recreating the broad chronological movement of the war. On the other hand, the sophisticated treatment of so many key themes may convince teachers that the book would work well as an ancillary text against which they could juxtapose more strongly argued secondary sources.

To be fair, the book does not announce itself as a comprehensive narrative of the conflict. The book is properly titled as a history of Americans in the war rather than a history of the war. This is not an idle point, but essential to how the authors understand the historical period. The message here is an important one—as much as the war shaped how people experienced the period, individuals also created their own history. Decentering the political and military narrative has advantages in certain respects, but it remains essential to recognize when the people themselves drew strength and identity from such narratives during the war. If anything, the nation-state attained even greater importance in people’s lives during the war, particularly for southerners for whom loyalty to one government or another could be literally a matter of life and death.

The book is gracefully written and often condenses complex topics without sacrificing detail. The discussions of finance and diplomacy are particularly strong, for example. At the same time, it includes curious judgments. In considering the deterioration of slavery on the peninsula below Richmond in 1862 and the uses to which McClellan could have put local black civilians, as spies and laborers, the authors contend that McClellan “failed to see the social revolution around him” (85). A conservative Democrat with no animus against slavery, McClellan undoubtedly saw the revolution and was deliberately seeking to obstruct it. They argue that slavery’s deterioration in Union occupied areas in 1862 was “more significant” than McClellan’s loss, when it was only his defeat that ensured the long and desolating war that would actually require the Union stand behind the efforts of slaves to free themselves. This surely would not have happened if McClellan had captured the Confederate capital before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Last, the authors could have made better use of the rich secondary literature on the war. Too often, they often fail to engage some of the most important writing on the war, particularly the social and new military histories written over the last two decades. For example, few of the numerous community studies, particularly on Upper and Border South states, appear in the notes, nor do the authors build on the arguments of seminal studies such as Stephen Ash’s When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (1995) or Mark Grimsley’s The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy toward Southern Civilians, 1861–1865 (1995). In most cases, the authors suggest lines of interpretation rather than advancing arguments. In a book with a richer base of primary source evidence, readers might be expected to develop their own interpretations but the brief coverage of most topics (the war chapters average only eighteen pages of text apiece...