Editor’s Note

How does the West figure in the Union’s political goals during the Civil War and Reconstruction? Does a small story tell only a unique one or does the story reflect broader trends, giving us a greater appreciation for the lived experiences of historical subjects on both a large and small scale? What landscapes from the past do we save? And what do we fail to preserve? The articles in this issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era grapple with such questions. Although there is no uniformity to the findings among such disparate articles and essays, they highlight the rewards of challenging accepted wisdom and raising one’s gaze beyond familiar ground.

Leading off this issue is Steven Hahn’s Fortenbaugh Lecture that stresses the relation of the West to the South when examining the Civil War era. Begun in 1962, the lecture series, run by the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and conducted on the anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, has featured the top practitioners of our profession. In this installment, Hahn argues for considering emancipation in the South and the destruction of Indian sovereignties in the Trans-Mississippi West as related projects for nation building. They represented, in Hahn’s words, “Wars of the Rebellions.” And they suggest that Reconstruction unfolded as a national project, not only a southern one.

Beth Barton Schweiger shows the value of challenging prior assumptions as she argues that the South, contrary to popular wisdom, was a region of readers. Recently, the literature of the antebellum South has swung away from characterizing it as backward or anti-modern. Schweiger reaffirms this feature in the intellectual and cultural realms. The facts underscore that by the 1850s the South had one of the highest literacy rates in the world—among its free population. But even the enslaved had its readers. She suggests that some of the reasons we have not quite appreciated this part of southern culture come from thinking of education as occurring in schools, particularly public ones, from the print culture of the country being located primarily in the Northeast, and from the political use of census statistics by antislavery advocates.

Next, Brian Luskey introduces us to an agency well known at the time but little known to us today—intelligence offices. Unlike our contemporary association with the phrase, these were not government operations gathering secrets but employment agencies that sold information about the labor market to both employers and employees. They became important during the war for handling southern refugees and afterward for distributing black labor. Luskey argues that the intelligence offices provide broader insights into the nature of capitalism and the contradictions between free and unfree labor.

Two, special essays round out the issue. Nicole Etcheson enlightens us about a trend toward microhistory in the profession, especially as it has become part of the story of African descendants. As she identifies it, microhistory falls between the grand synthesis that can overlook human actors and the social history that ignored how its stories fit with broader issues. Microhistory observes larger-scale, historical change from close up. Etcheson’s review essay demonstrates how some of the practitioners of this approach have adapted it to the story of Africans in the Americas. Finally, Megan Kate Nelson tours the Virginia theater of war as she ponders the importance of place and landscapes in how soldiers experienced the past and how we remember it. Her observations of physical landmarks that remain today provide for thoughtful reflection on what Americans have chosen to save from the past and what they have chosen to forget.

Taken together, the articles reinforce the importance of place as an analytical category in thinking about the past as well as the problems of creating a grand, all-inclusive, historical narrative. The histories of the South, North, and West remain vibrant as places of inquiry and for telling stories that add dimensions to national narratives—as the parts leading to a greater sum. Microhistory shows us not only how people connect to a greater story but also how they live their lives in a smaller universe that may not be consciously...