Megan L. Bever, Lesley J. Gordon, Laura Mammina, eds. American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. 304 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-6969-8.
Reviewed by Clayton J. Butler (University of Virginia)
Published on H-Nationalism (September, 2021)
Commissioned by Evan C. Rothera (University of Arkansas - Fort Smith)
In an era of seemingly ever-increasing scholarly specialization, historian George Rable, who taught at the University of Alabama for many years, stands out for having published fine works on the political, social, gender, military, and religious history of the Civil War era. With American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era, editors Lesley J. Gordon (Rable’s successor at Alabama), Megan L. Bever, and Laura Mammina (both alumni of the PhD program there) have produced a collection of essays in Rable’s honor reflective of the diversity of subject matter that characterized his research. The fifteen essays are loosely grouped into three broad categories: party politics and political culture; political and military conflicts; and Reconstruction and counterrevolution. The book, taken as a whole, seeks to present the “myriad complicated experiences of the human beings who experienced the conflict,” motivated by the belief—one championed by Rable throughout his career—that “ordinary human beings and their experiences matter” (p. 3). In this, the editors have succeeded. Together, they have produced a singular work, a blending of the “mundane and the sublime” that reflects life as it is and history as it was (p. 3).
Part 1, titled “Enemies Must Be Defined: Party Politics and Political Culture,” examines the ways that American politics during the late antebellum period into the Civil War became more extremist and uncompromising, both between and within the sections, to the point that compromise itself increasingly became seen as immoral. If God is on your side, what does that say about the opposition? The first essay, “Northern Temperance Reformers, Slavery, and the Civil War,” by Bever, presents a fascinating cultural history in which temperance advocates contended, unequivocally, that their social reform crusade superseded all others in importance—including abolition. The fact that one activist could unblinkingly proclaim that “intemperance, which is the slavery of the soul, is infinitely worse than chattel slavery” (p. 17), a statement at which the modern mind reels, signals the need for a robust cultural-historical analysis and presents a valuable teachable moment. Even many Northern reformers, such examples make clear, could not imagine African Americans as full people. Their objection to slavery was often so abstract that they could consider it and drunkenness as equally problematic social ills. Indeed, as Bever explains, “reformers wanted to end slavery in order to end the war because the war made intemperance worse” (p. 13). Understanding how this mentality was ever possible is crucial to understanding the period as a whole.
The next essay, “Debating Black Manhood: The Northern Press Reports on the 54th Massachusetts at Fort Wagner,” by Glenn David Brasher, illustrates how the reporting on the combat performance of the famed 54th Massachusetts proved intensely political and how the regiment’s assault on Fort Wagner did not necessarily elevate Black troops in the esteem of the white Northern public, as many historians have previously asserted. If the men of the 54th gave a good account of themselves as soldiers, nineteenth-century American culture dictated that they could not but be considered viable candidates for citizenship. Therefore, Brasher shows, Democratic newspapers set out to demonstrate that they had not in fact proven good soldiers. Republicans of course countered, though even abolitionists like Colonel James Montgomery similarly employed outrageously racist rhetoric. The jarring prevalence of racist assumptions among ostensible progressives and reformers ties these first two essays together and again demonstrates an important truth about the era.
Chapter 3, “Newspaper Advertisements and American Political Culture, 1864-1865,” by Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr., situates itself at the intersection of politics, the press, and material culture, and investigates the ways advertisements played on war-related themes to make their pitch. Kreiser discusses the sale of both products—goods available for purchase—and politics—the candidates and policies of both major parties—to the American public, and the ways that purveyors used news of military developments to get their foot in the door. The final essay of part 1, “The White Horse or the Mule: Lincoln in Civil War Music,” by Christian McWhirter, uses an analysis of song lyrics about Lincoln taken from “songsters” (song books) to trace the change in his characterization in Northerners’ minds through the lens of song. As McWhirter shows, Democratic anti-Lincoln songs relentlessly attacked him on issues of race, continuing the theme of a white supremacist Northern public in this section of the book.
Part 2, “Rippling Effects: Politics and Military Conflicts,” focuses on divisions within the Confederacy and United States; on gender roles; and on the environment. The first chapter, “Acts of War: The Southern Seizure of Federal Forts and Arsenals, 1860-1861,” by Rachel K. Deale, investigates the legal questions concerning the extent of federal authority over forts and arsenals within seceded states. Where Buchanan was utterly feckless, holding that states did not have the right to secede, nor did the federal government have the right to take any action to prevent them from seceding, Lincoln asserted his absolute prerogative to protect federal property. He and many other contemporaries felt that the Confederacy had committed the first act of war, well before firing on Fort Sumter, by seizing federal property before some states had even formally seceded. Confederates somewhat superciliously argued that the forts were state, not federal property, and that their actions had actually helped prevent unnecessary bloodshed. Deale also makes the noteworthy point that the forts often had pathetically small garrisons, totally unequipped to make any kind of serious stand anyway. Savannah’s Fort Pulaski, for example, apparently had a detachment of just two soldiers.
The next two pieces fall into the category of environmental history, currently one of the most vibrant areas of Civil War scholarship. “Contaminated Water and Dehydration during the Vicksburg Campaign,” by Lindsay Rae Privette, argues that finding and securing sources of drinking water represented a constant concern for both sides in the summer of 1863. Soldiers frequently had to expose themselves to danger in order to have a drink, and had to rely on local knowledge to learn what was potable and what was not—advice they ignored at their peril. Essays like Privette’s remind readers of the quotidian nature of soldiers’ concerns and their most elemental needs. A well-known idiom—attributed to both Frederick the Great and Napoleon—states that an army fights on its stomach. The same could rightly be said of water. Articles like this do a good job of reminding one of the physical realities of soldiering and what is required of living, breathing, drinking men.
Adam H. Petty’s essay, “Fires at the Battles of Chancellorsville and the Wilderness,” reveals how both sides projected onto the fires in ways reflective of their mindset at the time. At Chancellorsville, for example, Confederates thought that Union soldiers had set them to cover their retreat, whereas Union soldiers thought that Confederates had set them as part of their offensive. In reality, little evidence exists that either army set the fires intentionally. Interestingly, postwar reminiscences emphasized the willingness of both Confederate and Union soldiers to help one another avoid the particularly gruesome fate of burning alive, a reconciliationist narrative of events absent from wartime accounts.
The next chapter, “United States Colored Troops and the Battle of the Crater,” by A. Wilson Greene, relates a well-known episode of the war, but one that remains difficult to read about for its incredible brutality. The degree to which Confederates exercised the selectivity, in the heat and chaos of battle, to execute Black soldiers—and their apparent gratification in doing so—remains jarring, even with all one knows about the raison d’etre of the Confederacy and the fundamental white supremacist motivation of its soldiers. Remarkably, some accounts indicate that even some white Union soldiers killed their Black comrades as a demonstration to Confederates, in order that they themselves might be spared.
The following essay in the section, “Domesticity in Conflict: Union Soldiers, Southern Women, and Gender Roles during the American Civil War,” by editor Laura Mammina, switches gears, moving away from the arena of combat to examine the dynamics of social interactions between different groups during the war. Individuals faced a social minefield that they navigated in different ways depending on their race, class, gender, politics, and loyalty—a great deal to cover in a short essay. Mammina reminds readers that soldiers in the nineteenth century felt that they required contact with women to remain civilized, and that men and women complemented one another and required each other’s presence, which helps explain why white Southern women and Union soldiers appeared to seek each other out over the course of the war.
The final essay of part 2, “An Elusive Freedom: Black Women, Labor, and Liberation during the Civil War,” by Charity Rakestraw and Kristopher A. Teters, describes the ways that enslaved women used the skills they had learned in slavery to help them survive freedom in Union camps, which often proved unsanitary, dangerous, and unpredictable. The incredible degree of uncertainty that enslaved women faced in running away to the Union army, which they nevertheless did in large numbers, speaks to the atrocious conditions of slavery.
In the spirit of Rable’s 1984 book, But There Was No Peace, part 3 of American Discord moves into Reconstruction and the violent reaction of the white South to the profound social change wrought by the war. T. Michael Parrish’s essay, “Christian Paternalism and Racial Violence: White and Black Baptists in Texas during the Civil War Era,” profiles the substantial and highly influential religious community that founded Baylor University, where he teaches. White Baptists in general became emphatic Confederates, and many—incapable of conceiving of a biracial polity—supported the colonization of Black Texans out of the state after the war. Parrish also examines the Black Baptist community, who naturally had their own take on Christian theology that they endeavored to put into practice.
The next chapter, “Deriding the Democracy: The Partisan Humor of David Ross Locke,” by Daniel J. Burge profiles Locke and his cartoon character creation: Petroleum V. Nasby. Nasby, a caricature of Democrats, became extremely popular among Republicans. Indeed, no less a figure than Charles Sumner remarked that the cartoons “belong to the political history of this critical period” (p. 208). Locke, through Nasby, specifically accosted Democrats for their racism, and Burge argues that the character constituted not just a key comic, but also an important political, voice of the era. Burge explains that modern readers may find it difficult to understand why nineteenth-century Americans found Nasby so uproarious—a telltale sign of where cultural-historical analysis is called for.
T. Robert Hart’s essay, “Reconstruction and Historical Allusion,” demonstrates the ways that former Confederates used historical allusion, particularly to the French Revolution, to understand their situation during Reconstruction and thus “linked themselves to an imagined community of sufferers throughout history” (p. 224). Terms and phrases like “Jacobin” and “reign of terror” appeared frequently in Southern newspapers. For white Southerners, the radical, anti-hierarchical, anti-aristocratic, reckless social engineering of the French Revolution appeared uncomfortably similar to the measures of Congressional Reconstruction. Though they had hoped to wage a second American Revolution in 1861, they found themselves on the wrong end of a second French Revolution after 1865.
The penultimate essay in the collection, “Sherman and Grant: Different Men and Different Memoirs,” by John F. Marszalek, examines two different attempts to set the historical record straight. Sherman quite explicitly wrote his memoir out of concern that he would be defamed or marginalized otherwise (though he then proceeded to do just that to others). Marszalek argues that the two memoirs reflect the personalities of their authors and engages in a bit of pop psychology concerning the two men’s need for approval. Sherman himself acknowledged that Grant’s memoir was better, though, and, as during the war, seemed consciously to try to benefit from his association with Grant.
Finally, Kevin L. Hughes offers an apt concluding essay that looks forward to the future. “The Evolution of the Public Memory of the Hamburg Massacre” is a discussion of problematic Confederate and white supremacist memorialization and the growing awareness of the salience of public memory as a concept. Hughes traces the memory of the Hamburg (South Carolina) massacre, first through contemporary newspaper coverage and then in politics. Ben Tillman, the infamous governor, contended that the incident had proven necessary for the “Redemption” of the state, and successfully campaigned to erect an obelisk honoring Thomas McKie Meriwether, the one white man killed. Tillman argued that Meriwether symbolized the conservative white South’s gallant efforts against the excesses of Reconstruction. Only in the last decade or so, writes Hughes, has the monument received suitable critical reevaluation.
American Discord comprises a diverse collection of thoughtful essays and thus represents a fitting tribute to Professor Rable. It deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in the Civil War era and the direction of contemporary scholarship on that most important period of American history.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-nationalism.
Citation:
Clayton J. Butler. Review of Bever, Megan L.; Gordon, Lesley J.; Mammina, Laura, eds., American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era.
H-Nationalism, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56638
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |