Monday, October 21, 2024

The 2024 Wyler-Silver Prize Winner ---Gradual Emancipation Politicians and Immediate Emancipation Camps Struggle Together the Transform the Union and Win The War 330 pp, $50.00, 2024.

at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia.

Cirillo Abolitionist Civil War

The prize committee praised Dr. Cirillo's book as follows: "In an extraordinarily nuanced and well-written analysis of abolitionists, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionists Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union assessed how these men and women acted during the war that ended slavery.

Even the abolitionists who had fought so hard to end slavery had to recalibrate their assumptions and expectations on how to achieve their goals amidst the unprecedented transformations wrought by a massive war. In this ambitious study, Cirillo found that these ideologues, specifically those who had advocated for the immediate end of slavery, divided on the verge of achieving their most dearly held ambition. 

On the one hand, some of these men and women continued their allegiance to immediate and radical action to end slavery to ensure America’s moral redemption. Those who stayed true to immediatism rejected political maneuvering because they believed achieving abolition by political means corrupted their movement. 

On the other hand, some immediatists joined the political fray and supported the Republican Party to achieve their purpose. These interventionists were willing to sacrifice the purity of their movement to ensure slavery's end. Cirillo argues that the unrepentant immediatists' predictions came true; interventionists’ political allegiances resulted in their sacrifice of racial justice because they had identified their movement with the Republican Party and its limited vision of emancipation, which rejected both the need for white redemption and black equality.

 Lincoln understood the reason for this realignment when, in the Second Inaugural Address, he asserted, 'Neither [side] anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.'  If the people most likely to support African American social, civil, and political rights embraced black freedom as defined by white racist partisans during this cataclysm, then the formerly enslaved had little chance of fully realizing the benefits of emancipation. 

This book contributes significantly to understanding the United States’ failure to make emancipation more meaningful despite the realization of immediatists' decades-long dedication to the slave's cause."


Text Dource: https://lsupress.org/9780807179154/the-abolitionist-civil-war/

Wednesday, October 02, 2024

GRANT'S OWN WORDS, ANNOTATED

 


The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2017, 816 pp., $39.95

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been in publication since their original re‐ lease in 1885, just months after Grant’s death from a long bout with throat cancer. In this most recent edition, the editorial staff of John Marszalek, David Nolen, and Louie Gallo has assembled a completely annotated version of this autobiography, a Herculean effort for which we should be grateful.

Grant’s narrative remains a masterpiece: “not only a major piece of war literature, but also a classic of all American literature … the pinnacle of American nonfiction” (p. xxvi). The editorial team maintains as much of Grant’s original prose as possible, only cleaning up typographical errors and errata in the main narrative while acknow‐ ledging when such steps are taken. Grant’s pith, humor, and erudition seep through every page. Much of his humor comes from self-deprecation, which makes the book feel like it was written by an everyman who recognizes his flaws rather than the man often credited with winning the war that divided the United States. He recalls moments from his life, specifically from his time in combat, down to the day that they occurred with precision as to what was said to whom and where. His battle against cancer as he wrote these memoirs makes his recall and his prose even more incredible, and his dedication to completing this task kept him alive as long as possible, succumbing to his dis‐ ease but days after he last put pen to paper on this project. Grant wrote a book in which all readers can find value.

The editorial staff mention in their acknowledgements that they have tried to do as Grant wrote in his memoirs: “Everyone has his superstitions. One of mine is that in positions of great responsibility everyone should do his duty to the best of his ability” (p. 767). With the publication of this work, they have fulfilled the tall order given H-Net Reviews by the man at the heart of this project many years ago.

H-Net Reviews   [online link to complete text of review]

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleedin' [lyric, Bob Dylan]: Tell Ma Not To Worry I'm Buried In Gettysburg on a Farm

 



“Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg and "Tell Mother Not to Worry": Soldier Stories From Gettysburg’s George Spangler Farm, Ronald C. Kirkwood, 320 pp. & 408 pp. 

Savas Beatie Publishing, available in hard cover and paperback

Too Much For Human Endurance and "Tell Mother Not to Worry" together are over 700 pages and describe one farm hospital  behind the Army of the Potomac's battle lines at Gettysburg. 

The bloodstains are gone, but the worn floorboards remain. The doctors, nurses, and patients who toiled and suffered and ached for home at the Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps hospital at the George Spangler farm in Gettysburg have long since departed. Fortunately, what they experienced there, and the critical importance of the property to the battle, has not been lost to history. Noted journalist and George Spangler farm expert Ronald D. Kirkwood brings these people and their experiences to life in “Too Much for Human Endurance”: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg.

Using a large array of firsthand accounts, Kirkwood re-creates the sprawling XI Corps hospital complex and the people who labored and suffered there—especially George and Elizabeth Spangler and their four children, who built a thriving 166-acre farm only to witness it nearly destroyed when war paid a bloody visit in the summer of 1863. Stories rarely if ever told about the wounded, dying, nurses, surgeons, ambulance workers, musicians, and others are weaved seamlessly through gripping and smooth-flowing prose.

A host of notables spent time at the Spangler farm, including Union officers George G. Meade, Henry J. Hunt, Edward E. Cross, Francis Barlow, Francis Mahler, Freeman McGilvery, and Samuel K. Zook. Pvt. George Nixon III, great-grandfather of President Richard M. Nixon, would die there, as would Confederate Gen. Lewis A. Armistead, who fell mortally wounded at the height of Pickett’s Charge. In addition to including the most complete lists ever published of the dead, wounded, and surgeons at the Spanglers’ XI Corps hospital, this study breaks new ground with stories of the First Division, II Corps hospital at the Spanglers’ Granite Schoolhouse.

Kirkwood also establishes the often-overlooked strategic importance of the property and its key role in the Union victory. Army of the Potomac generals took advantage of the farm’s size, access to roads, and central location to use it as a staging area to get artillery and infantry to the embattled front line from Little Round to Cemetery Hill and Culp’s Hill, often just in time to prevent a collapse and Confederate breakthrough.

“Too Much for Human Endurance" introduces readers to heretofore untold stories of the Spanglers, their farm, those who labored to save lives, and those wh
o suffered and died there. They have finally received the recognition that their place in history deserves.

CWL: Kirkwood's efforts are very much in the tradition of Gregory Coco's pioneering literary works which focus on the first person accounts of the wounded and dying as well as those who are attending and burying them. Kirkwood's writing style is straightforward and reportorial; he relies upon accounts made by the wounded and their caretakers. Confederate General Armistead's wounding and death is covered in a satisfactory manner with very little speculation. Ambulance wagon drivers' Doctors' and nurses' accounts are on every page. The Spangler family's living conditions are featured as well. Kirkwood's work is likely to have a spot on lists of essential Gettsyburg books.

The Child Is a The Father of the Man: Lincoln and Grant Biographer Tackles Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain:

 

On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Ronald C. White

512 pages, $22.00, Random House Publishing. 

Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North’s greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg—and told by two surgeons he would die—Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin College.

How did a stuttering young boy come to be fluent in nine languages and even teach speech and rhetoric? How did a trained minister find his way to the battlefield? Award-winning historian Ronald C. White delves into these contradictions in this cradle-to-grave biography of General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, from his upbringing in rural Maine to his tenacious, empathetic military leadership and his influential postwar public service, exploring a question that still plagues so many veterans: How do you make a civilian life of meaning after having experienced the extreme highs and lows of war?

Chamberlain is familiar to millions from Michael Shaara’s now-classic novel of the Civil War, 
The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns’s timeless miniseries The Civil War, but in this book, White captures the complex and inspiring man behind the heroHeavily illustrated and featuring nine detailed maps, this gripping, impeccably researched portrait illuminates one of the most admired but least known figures in our nation’s bloodiest conflict.

CWL: Splendid. Clear, crisp narrative style. Pays attention to Chamberlain's faith and character. Enjoyable to read and even suspenseful at times. 

American Civil War Archives: Their Lives and Afterlives

 


War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War
, Yael A. Sternhell, 
320 pages, Yale University Press, $37.50, 2024.

Winner of the 2024 Tom Watson Brown Book Award  

Shortlisted for 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
 
The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records—documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. 

Yael Sternhell traces these records from their creation during wartime through their deployment in a host of postwar battles, including those between the federal government and Southerners seeking reparations and between veterans blaming each other for defeat.
 
These documents were eventually published in the most important historical collection ever to have been assembled in the United States: 
The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Armies
Known as the OR, it is the ultimate source for generations of scholars and writers and ordinary citizens researching the war. 

By delving into the archive, Sternhell reveals its power to shape myths, hide truths, perpetuate rancor, and foster reconciliation. Far more than a storehouse of papers, the Civil War archive is a major historical actor in its own right.

Friday, September 06, 2024

Investing In Slaves During Wartime and a Time of Currency Inflation

 

An Unholy Traffic: Slave Trading in the Civil War South        Robert K.D. Colby, Oxford University Press, 360 pages, $35.00, 2024





The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery and, after a four-year struggle to become an independent slaveholding republic, died as emancipation dawned. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. 
These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.

As
 An Unholy Traffic shows, slave trading helped Southerners survive and fight the Civil War, as well as to build the future for which they fought. They mitigated the crises the war spawned by buying and selling enslaved people, using this commerce to navigate food shortages, unsettled gender roles, the demands of military service, and other hardships on the home front. 
Some Rebels speculated wildly in human property, investing in slaves to ward off inflation and to buy shares in the slaveholding nation they hoped to create. Others traded people to counter the advance of emancipation. Given its centrality to their nationhood, Confederates went to great lengths to prolong the slave trade, which, in turn, supported the Confederacy. 
For those held in slavery, the surviving slave trade dramatically shaped their pursuit of freedom, inserting a retrograde movement into some people's journeys toward liberty while inspiring others to make the risky decision to escape.

Offering an original perspective on the intersections of slavery, capitalism, the Civil War, and emancipation, Robert K.D. Colby illuminates the place of the peculiar institution within the Confederate mind, the ways in which it underpinned the CSA's war effort, and its impact on those attempting to seize their freedom.
Introduction
Chapter 1: "No Money, and No Confidence": Slave Commerce, Secession, and the Panic of 1860
Chapter 2: The "Uncongenial Air of Freedom": Union Occupation and the Slave Trade
Chapter 3: "Old Abe Is Not Feared in this Region": The Revival of Confederate Slave Commerce
Chapter 4: "Negroes Will Bear Fabulous Prices": Inflation, Speculation, and the Confederate Future
Chapter 5: "Liable to Be Sold at Any Moment": State-Making, Continuity, and the Slave Trade
Chapter 6: Sold "Far Out of the Way of Lincoln": Emancipation and Counterrevolutionary Slave Commerce
Chapter 7: "Broke...All Up": The Ends and Afterlives of the Wartime Slave Trade
Epilogue, Notes, Select Bibliography, Index
Author  Interview   
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-unholy-traffic-slave-trading-in-the-civil-war/id1729723969?i=1000655641457

 

2024  Society of Civil War Historians Watson Brown Book 

 

War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War Hardcover, Yale University Press, $38.00, 320 pages, 2023.

 
 
The Civil War generated a vast archive of official records—documents that would shape the postwar era and determine what future generations would know about the war. Yael Sternhell traces these records from their creation during wartime through their deployment in a host of postwar battles, including those between the federal government and Southerners seeking reparations and between veterans blaming each other for defeat.
 
These documents were eventually published in the most important historical collection ever to have been assembled in the United States: 
The War of the Rebellion: The Official Records of the Union and the Confederate Armies. Known as the OR, it is the ultimate source for generations of scholars and writers and ordinary citizens researching the war. By delving into the archive, Sternhell reveals its power to shape myths, hide truths, perpetuate rancor, and foster reconciliation. Far more than a storehouse of papers, the Civil War archive is a major historical actor in its own right.





Rape, Culture & Antebellum Dixie


Sexual Violence and American Slavery: The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South, Shannon Eaves,

University Of North Carolina Press, April 2024, 242 pages, paper, $27.95

From the publisher:   It is impossible to separate histories of sexual violence and the enslavement of Black women in the antebellum South. Rape permeated the lives of all who existed in that system: Black and white, male and female, adult and child, enslaved and free. Shannon C. Eaves unflinchingly investigates how both enslaved people and their enslavers experienced the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of bondswomen and came to understand what this culture of sexualized violence meant for themselves and others.

Eaves mines a wealth of primary sources including autobiographies, diaries, court records, and more to show that rape and other forms of sexual exploitation entangled slaves and slave owners in battles over power to protect oneself and one's community, power to avenge hurt and humiliation, and power to punish and eliminate future threats. By placing sexual violence at the center of the systems of power and culture, Eaves shows how the South's rape culture was revealed in enslaved people's and their enslavers' interactions with one another and with members of their respective communities
.

Author Interview Podcast: paste into browser

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sexual-violence-and-american-slavery-the making/id1729723969 i=1000668269870

Friday, August 30, 2024

Union Special Ops versus Mosby's Rangers



The Unvanquished: Jessie Rangers versus Mosby's Raiders,   Patrick K. O'Donnell, Atlantic Monthly Press, 432 pages, $21.50 paperback

The Unvanquished, a vital shadow war raged amid and away from the major battlefields that was in many ways equally consequential to the conflict’s outcome. At the heart of this groundbreaking narrative is the epic story of Lincoln’s special forces, the Jessie Scouts, told in its entirety for the first time. 

In a contest fought between irregular units, the Scouts hunted John Singleton Mosby’s Confederate Rangers from the middle of 1863 up to war’s end at Appomattox. With both sides employing pioneering tradecraft, they engaged in dozens of raids and spy missions, often perilously wearing the other’s uniform, risking penalty of death if captured. 

Clashing violently on horseback, the unconventional units attacked critical supply lines, often capturing or killing high-value targets. North and South deployed special operations that could have changed the war’s direction in 1864, and crucially during the Appomattox Campaign, Jessie Scouts led the Union army to a final victory. 

They later engaged in a history-altering proxy war against France in Mexico, earning seven Medals of Honor; many Scouts mysteriously disappeared during that conflict, taking their stories to their graves.

Patrick J. O'Donnell is an expert on special operations, he transports readers into the action, immersing them in vivid battle scenes from previously unpublished firsthand accounts. A combat historian, bestselling author, and public speaker Patrick K. O'Donnell has written 13 critically acclaimed books that recount the epic stories of America's wars from the Revolution to Iraq. A Fellow at Mount Vernon, he is the recipient of numerous national book awards. O’Donnell is a premier expert on elite and special operations units and irregular warfare.

He introduces indelible characters such as Scout Archibald Rowand; Scout leader Richard Blazer; Mosby, the master of guerrilla warfare; and enslaved spy Thomas Laws. O’Donnell also brings to light the Confederate Secret Service’s covert efforts to deliver the 1864 election to Peace Democrats through ballot fraud, election interference, and attempts to destabilize a population fatigued by a seemingly forever war. Most audaciously, the Secret Service and Mosby’s Rangers planned to kidnap Abraham Lincoln in order to maintain the South’s independence.

A little-known chronicle of the shadow war between North and South, rich in action and offering original perspective on history, The Unvanquished is a dynamic and essential addition to the literature of the Civil War.


Spotsylvania: The Iron, The Lead, & The Dead

 

 Tempest of Iron and Lead: Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864,Chris Mackowski, Savas Beatie, Hardcover, release date October 15, 2024, $34.95



May 1864. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia spent three days in brutal close-quarter combat in the Wilderness that left the tangled thickets aflame. No one could imagine a more infernal battlefield. Then they marched down the road to Spotsylvania Court House.  Even the march itself was unprecedented. 

For three years, the armies had fought and disengaged. That changed on the night of May 7. Instead of leaving the Wilderness to regroup, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant led the Federal army southward, skirmishing with Confederates all the way. “There will be no turning back,” he had declared. He lived up to his word. By dawn on May 8, the armies had tangled their way ten miles down the road and opened another large-scale fight that would last until May 21. 

“One thing is certain of this campaign thus far,” explained Dr. Daniel Holt of the 121st New York: “more blood has been shed, more lives lost, and more human suffering undergone than ever before in a season.”
The fighting launched a score of new place names and events that would sear themselves into the American consciousness, including Laurel Hill, Upton’s assault, the Mule Shoe, the Bloody Angle, and Harris Farm. The casualties exacted at Spotsylvania would exceed those of the Wilderness by thousands. 

The fighting would severely test the offensive capabilities of Confederate commander Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army, just as the defensive posture his men embraced would, in turn, test the limits of Federal endurance.
In 
A Tempest of Iron and Lead: Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864, author Chris Mackowski has crafted a meticulous and comprehensible study of this endlessly fascinating campaign.
 
Mackowski, long-familiar with the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, is a former historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Chris continues to give tours of the battlefield as the historian in residence at Stevenson Ridge, a historic property on the battlefield’s eastern front. His intimate knowledge of the landscape and nearly two decades of insight, together with primary source materials, outstanding maps, and helpful images, combine to create a readable and satisfying single-volume account the campaign has so richly deserved.

Thursday, August 29, 2024

One Day in the Life of Eight Soldiers & President

 


A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind

Stephen Budiansky,  304 pages, W. W. Norton Publishing, $32.50, Release date: early September 2024

A panoramic account of the fateful Civil War battle and its far-reaching consequences for American society and culture.

The Battle of Antietam, which took place on September 17, 1862, remains the single bloodiest day in America’s history: more than 3,600 men died in twelve hours of savage fighting, and more than 17,000 were wounded. 

As a turning point in the Civil War, the narrow Union victory is well-known as the key catalyst for Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. Yet Antietam was not only a battle that dramatically changed the fortunes and meaning of the war; it also changed America in ways we feel today. 

No army in history wrote so many letters or kept as many diaries as the soldiers who fought in the Civil War, and Stephen Budiansky draws on this rich record to re-create the experiences of those whose lives were forever changed, whether on the battlefield or in trying to make sense of its horrors in the years and decades to follow. 

Antietam would usher in a new beginning in politics, military strategy, gender roles, battlefield medicine, war photography, and the values and worldview of the postwar generation.

A masterful and fine-grained account of the battle, built around the intimate experiences of nine people whose lives intersected there, A Day in September is a story of war but also, at its heart, a human history, one that encompasses Antietam’s enduring legacy.

Stephen Budiansky is a historian, biographer, and journalist, the author of 18 books exploring intellectual and creative lives, military and intelligence history, and science and the natural world. He is the former Washington Editor of the scientific journal Nature and a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. He lives on a small farm in northern Virginia.


CWL: Paying attention to both American Civil War topics of Environmental History & Civilian Farms, A Day in September is likely to arrive for my personal library soon.

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

The Fabric of The Civil War Society: What The Soldiers and Veterans Wore & The Flags They Carried

 


Cox, Shae SmithThe Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Illustrations. 318 pp. $48.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780807181171.

Reviewed by Rachel Williams (University of Hull)
Published on H-CivWar (August, 2024)
Commissioned by Lindsay Rae Smith Privette (Anderson University)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60653

The Fabric of Civil War Society, Shae Smith Cox’s richly textured study of uniforms, flags, and badges during and after the Civil War, uses material culture to explore not only the contingency of citizenship and the tension between individual and collective identities during the sectional conflict but also the role of objects and performance in constructing and imposing potent collective memories decades after the war’s end. A highly readable and meticulously researched study, it joins recent work by Joan E. Cashin and Sarah Jones Weicksel in making a strident case for material objects as sites where the multiple and contradictory meanings of the war were played out.[1]

The first four chapters, which focus on the war years, explore the challenge of outfitting the armies, the practical problems of keeping the armies clothed on the march, the ambivalent emotions elicited by uniform and flags among their wearers and bearers, and the home front industry producing (by hand or by machine) these tangible symbols of the cause(s). Cox amply demonstrates not only that uniforms were far from uniform (despite the increasing codification of dress regulation and eventual streamlining of requisition processes) but also that their practical and symbolic functions did not always neatly align. As tools to condition individuals for battle readiness, uniforms frequently fell short; clothing allowances were insufficient, leaving men ragged, exposed, and uncomfortable, or else weighed down by heavy material in punishing conditions. Theft was a perennial solution: men stole constantly from each other and from their enemies. Yet uniforms performed complex symbolic functions that transcended these quotidian practical challenges. Take, for instance, the relationship between uniform and honor. Men frequently articulated their service as an aspiration to “live up to” the uniform they wore. Conversely, such actions as disguising oneself in enemy uniform, or seizing an enemy flag and desecrating it, or using it as a means of deception were considered beyond the pale and prompted censure and punishment up to and including execution.

In the remaining four chapters, Cox explains the rapidly changing meanings of Civil War uniforms between Appomattox and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1938 (the last major anniversary at which significant numbers of veterans were present), considering the role and regulation of uniforms and badges in postwar veterans’ organizations and the centrality of material items to reunions and anniversary gatherings. Again, the symbolic potency of uniforms is apparent in the postwar period; Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) badges made from melted-down Confederate cannons and Confederate uniforms being repurposed to clothe prisoners stick out as particularly pointed illustrations of the war’s unfinishedness. Moments of heightened patriotism and military mobilization—1898, 1917—often provided opportunities for Confederate veterans and their descendants to reimagine Confederate iconography and claim a space for Rebel badges, flags, and clothing in public pageantry. The material items that became fuel for postwar “memory machines” were less and less genuine relics of the war itself but, rather, newly minted objects that swiftly replaced their wartime equivalents in the public Civil War imaginary (p. 142). While organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy used the sale of badges to raise funds for their activities and assiduously policed their design, production, and sale, by the early twentieth century, the manufacture of ribbons, veterans’ uniforms, and other commemorative objects of varying quality increasingly fell to enterprising manufacturers whose profit motivation frequently took precedence over their political allegiances.

Public interest in Civil War uniforms and ephemera is hardly novel: Hollywood is replete with (as Cox indicates, often highly inaccurate and mythologized) depictions of the blue and gray, and antiquarian societies, reenactment circles, and certain strands of military history boast considerable expertise in the minutiae of Civil War uniforms and accoutrements. Cox moves beyond the descriptive, however, by mining the political and cultural meanings of these objects and exploring their powerful individual and collective resonances during and—perhaps even more so—after the war. To explore the multiple meanings and uses of these objects, she draws on an impressive array of written, visual, and material sources. Weaving together military orders, regimental ledgers, governmental records, newspaper accounts, minutes of veterans’ association meetings, soldiers’ papers, and industry reports, she surmounts a pressing challenge of material culture history: how do we recover objects’ meanings when those objects no longer exist (whether through destruction, misplacement, or decay)? Yet, where possible, Cox introduces us to extant objects, which she herself has painstakingly collected. There is scope here for even further engagement with the visual record of Civil War uniforms (for instance, the vivid depictions of regimental mustering in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated), but the relatively modest list of figures here likely bespeaks the often prohibitive cost of image reproduction rather than any deficiency in Cox’s methods.

Cox’s comparative approach is an ambitious and ultimately rewarding one. Evaluating the challenges both sections faced in clothing their armies appears largely to confirm the gulf in resources, industry, and infrastructure between North and South, yet also emphasizes the continuing ubiquity of handmaking, community labor, adaptation, and improvisation regardless of section. Moreover, in comparing how Union and Confederate veterans, their relations, and their descendants used material objects to maintain a visible demarcation between Confederate and Union veterans, assiduously policing in- and out-groups, Cox reveals the contingency and incompleteness of white reconciliation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Important, too, is Cox’s consideration of what uniforms meant to Black and Indigenous soldiers. As Frederick Douglass’s famous rallying cry—“let the black man get an eagle on his button”—signaled, uniform served to make African Americans legible as men deserving of the full benefits of American citizenship. Uniforms were frequent sources of pride and belonging for Black and Indigenous soldiers; Black communities, too, drew succor and encouragement from the sight of spick-and-span United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiments on parade. Yet uniforms provoked complex emotions for Black and Indigenous wearers. Upkeep exacerbated the existing pay inequality faced by Black troops. There is evidence that the sight of Black men in uniform, even as it visually refuted white supremacy, strengthened white Southern hostility and placed USCT regiments in heightened danger. Military authorities on both sides debated the merits of imposing uniform codes on Indigenous soldiers, and Indigenous soldiers struggled to reconcile tribal identities and sartorial traditions with sectional loyalties and aspirations. This ambivalence only deepened after the war. The often peripheral participation of Black and Indigenous people in veterans’ organizations revealed their precarious place in the postwar narratives of the war and the erosion of emancipationist memories of the conflict, despite the attempts of Black GAR members to keep alive their interpretation of the war as a new birth of freedom. Increasingly, by the end of the nineteenth century, people of color were deliberately incorporated into Confederate reunions and displays, used, Cox says, as “props” to shore up the Lost Cause by promoting the service of supposed “Black Confederates.”

Future scholars will no doubt build on Cox’s work to explore less fully developed themes: there is surprisingly little discussion of gender and masculinity here (a brief passage about women soldiers notwithstanding), and there is scope to probe the intersection of material and environmental histories to consider the haptic and emotional dimensions of dirt, discomfort, recycling, disposal, and destruction. The very good treatment of Black and Indigenous uniform wearers leaves comparatively untouched the role of material culture in constructing and legitimizing sectionally specific whiteness. These critiques should not take away, however, from Cox’s wide-ranging and thematically coherent work. The Fabric of Civil War Society firmly situates uniforms, badges, and flags as potent repositories of meaning and memory and will make valuable reading for scholars of the Civil War battlefront, the home front economy, and postwar memory making.

Note

[1]. Joan E. Cashin, “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (2011): 339-67; Joan E. Cashin, War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Sarah Jones Weicksel, “The Dress of the Enemy: Clothing and Disease in the Civil War Era,” Civil War History 63, no. 2 (2017): 133-50; and Sarah Jones Weicksel, “Cultures of Confederate Military Clothing Production,” in Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, ed. Ted Ownby and Becca Walton (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2020): 32-53.

Citation: Rachel Williams. Review of Cox, Shae Smith. The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. August, 2024.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60653