Daydreams and Nightmares: A Virginia Family Faces Secession and War by Brent Tarter (review)

Sometimes, the story of a rather mundane family caught in calamitous times can reveal a great deal. Although thousands of historians have looked under seemingly every rock from the Civil War era, a heretofore forgotten cache of letters in the right historian’s hands might still have power to evoke for readers the hopes, fears, and personal contradictions of individuals faced with momentous choices. Such is the case with Brent Tarter’s poignant telling of the stories of George William Berlin and Susan Miranda Holt Berlin. Their experiences during the late antebellum and early years of the Civil War divulge much about West Virginia at its founding as well as the impact that the war would have on families and communities.

The Berlins represented the changing nature of western Virginia. George, born in 1824, grew up in Pennsylvania and was briefly a schoolteacher before he and his brother began studying law in Staunton, Virginia, in the 1840s. The two brothers married sisters, building an extended family network that took them and their in-laws over the Allegheny Mountains to the small western Virginia towns of Philippi and Buckhannon, where they prospered as attorneys and land speculators. Like many others who made up the rising “buckskin elite” of northwestern Virginia, Berlin was a Whig in politics who harbored some resentment against the state’s tidewater planters for their undemocratic practices and their control over the state’s purse strings, but not, Tarter notes, because they were slaveholders. In fact, Berlin believed that every “real woman” (by this he meant white female) should have a husband and a slave. When Virginia began to debate secession following the election of Lincoln, Upshur County chose Berlin to represent its strongly pro-Union sentiments at the state convention. For weeks, Berlin voted against secession and advanced western interests on tax and development issues. Then, the clash at Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for troops decimated support for remaining in the Union; most northwestern delegates stole away from Richmond under cover of darkness, but Berlin remained. In fact, he changed his vote to support his adopted state and defy the voters who had elected him.

Tarter beautifully relates this story through the letters that George and Susan Berlin exchanged in the critical months of 1861–62 when George was away, first in his role as delegate and later in the new role of pariah. Through these letters a much broader story unfolds. It is the tale of a border region torn between loyalty to a state and a nation, of families and communities ripped apart by those divided loyalties, and of individuals coming to grips with dreams that became nightmares and regrets. For George Berlin, the coming conflict deeply affected his psyche and weighed on him for the remainder of his life. That fateful decision in April of 1861 put his family in jeopardy, strained his close relationship with his brother, and meant that he had to give up all that he had amassed in Buckhannon, including the comfort of a large, extended family. Just two years after the end of the war he also lost his soul mate, Susan, only forty-one years old.

Although hardly the typical account of the splintering of Virginia and the nation, this compact book is ideal for use in undergraduate courses seeking to examine the processes of and the personal consequences of secession for noncombatants in a border state.