A Philadelphia Perspective: The Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher (review)

In 1967, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania published Nicholas B. Wainwright's very selective—but over six-hundred-page—edition of Sidney George Fisher's 1834–71 diary. In this new edition, Jonathan White offers us the Civil War years (1860–65), a selection that will prove useful especially to teachers. White has written a new introduction for this edition and amplified some of Wainwright's explanatory footnotes but otherwise preserved the text as Wainwright presented it. Accordingly, this edition's main contribution will likely be to the classroom.

That contribution is of real value, as Fisher's journal provides an excellent resource for teachers interested in the Civil War home front. Fisher was an elite—and elitist—Philadelphian who consistently followed a moderate path in politics. Never a staunch antislavery man or dough-faced sympathizer with the South, both before and during the war he offered relatively disinterested observations on the sectional crisis and the political parties caught in its vortex. (One exception to this rule is his consistent hatred of the Democratic Party in its various incarnations; from Thomas Jefferson to the Copperheads, he execrated Democrats as venal demagogues with no moral compass.) If this diary does not give us the picture of a doughface embracing the Republican Party evident in the antebellum diary entries of George Templeton Strong or Benjamin Brown French, Fisher does provide a host of neutral observations on public affairs in wartime Philadelphia.

Those observations include a vivid picture of a polarized political world. Perhaps the leading theme in the diary is the extreme bitterness of Copperheads in his family and social circle. After every encounter with them, he recorded their rants against the Republican regime, painful as their passionate and extreme positions were to his moderate sensibilities. Of one relative, he wrote in 1863, "He is more violent than ever about the war and I really fear that his mental & bodily health will be seriously affected!" (179). On the other hand, he chronicled a series of mob actions against the most provocative antiwar Democrats, from 1861 to 1865 (84, 109–10, 189, 253–59). Fisher's observations here as elsewhere carry weight largely because he had no particular ax to grind in recording them.

Another vital Civil War theme of Fisher's journal is how nonabolitionist northerners came to embrace first the Republican Party and then its emancipationist wartime agenda. Aside from his loathing of Democrats, Fisher was no natural-born Republican. But he noted approvingly in 1860, "the northern people are roused at length" behind the Republican platform, a development he ascribed to white southerners' "excesses and monstrous abuse of power" (20). Indeed, Fisher believed in and feared a slave power conspiracy, although he never used that phrase in the diary (64). After the firing on Fort Sumter and the mobbing of northern troops in Baltimore, even this inert gentleman caught a little war fever (86). Fisher also received much more complete information about southern slavery during the war, which turned him against it (158–59, 197, 202). Crucially, despite his knee-jerk opposition to the idea of black equality, he came to see the military value of black troops (198, 200, 245–46). He knew he was far from alone in this political journey: "The war has changed our notions in regard to slavery," he wrote in 1863, and "if we are not now abolitionists, . . . we are emancipationists & wish to see slavery destroyed since it has attempted to destroy the nation" (206). Moreover, his postwar reflections on the prospect of black equality bespeak the severe limits of most northerners' commitment to the most radical ideas for Reconstruction.

Nor are these the only significant themes Fisher's diary illustrates. For he recorded his thoughts on such perennial themes as early expectations of a short war giving way to determined fighting over the long haul, the character and leadership of Abraham...