Citizens and Communities

Description

Trailblazing essays on the home front from Civil War History For more than sixty years the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America's greatest struggle. Civil War History Readers reintroduce the most influential articles published in the journal. From military command, strategy and tactics, to political leadership, race, abolitionism, the draft, and women's issues, as well as the war's causes, its aftermath, and Reconstruction, Civil War History has published fresh and provocative analyses of the determining aspects of America's "middle period."In this fourth volume of the series, editor J. Matthew Gallman includes sixteen pioneering essays by Daniel E. Sutherland , Gary Gallagher, James Marten, Alice Fahs, and other scholars that examine the Civil War home front. Topics include voluntarism; science and medicine; communities at war; recruitment and conscription; welfare, dissent, and nationalism; and literature and society. Gallman's introduction assesses the significance of each article in providing a clearer understanding of the era.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• History of the Americas
• American Civil War
• États-Unis
• Guerre de Sécession

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 22 novembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781631011405
• Langue: English

Extrait

Citizens and Communities
CIVIL WAR HISTORY READERS
Since 1955 the journal Civil War History has presented the best original scholarship in the study of America’s greatest trial. In commemoration of the war’s sesquicentennial, The Kent State University Press presents Civil War History Readers, a multivolume series reintroducing the most influential articles published in the journal. Conflict and Command Edited by John T. Hubbell Race and Recruitment Edited by John David Smith On Lincoln Edited by John T. Hubbell Citizens and Communities Edited by J. Matthew Gallman
CIVIL WAR HISTORY READERS VOLUME 4
CITIZENS AND COMMUNITIES
Edited by J. MATTHEW GALLMAN
THE KENT STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Kent, Ohio
© 2015 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2015009653
ISBN 978-1-60635-247-2
Manufactured in the United States of America
L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA
Citizens and communities / edited by J. Matthew Gallman.
4 volumes ; cm. — (Civil war history readers ; volume 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60635-247-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) ∞
1. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865—Social aspects. 2. Confederate States of America—History—Social aspects. I. Gallman, J. Matthew (James Matthew) II. Civil war history.
E468.9.C47 2015
973.7′1—dc23
2015009653
19   18   17   16   15        5   4   3   2   1
Contents
Introduction
V OLUNTARISM ON THE H OME F RONT
Sanitary Fairs of the Civil War
William Y. Thompson
The Impact of the Civil War on Philanthropy and Social Welfare
Robert H. Bremner
The Woman’s National Loyal League: Feminist Abolitionists and the Civil War
Wendy F. Hamand
“A Profound National Devotion”: The Civil War Union Leagues and the Construction of a New National Patriotism
Melinda Lawson
S CIENCE AND M EDICINE
Yankees versus Yellow Jack in New Orleans, 1862–1866
Jo Ann Carrigan
Civil War Anthropometry: The Making of a Racial Ideology
John S. Haller
C OMMUNITIES AT W AR
Sons and Soldiers: Deerfield, Massachusetts, and the Civil War
Emily J. Harris
Introduction to War: The Civilians of Culpeper County, Virginia
Daniel E. Sutherland
F ILLING THE R ANKS
Was It a “Poor Man’s Fight”?
Eugene C. Murdock
Confederate Volunteering and Enlistment in Ashe County, North Carolina, 1861–1862
Martin Crawford
Which Poor Man’s Fight? Immigrants and the Federal Conscription of 1863
Tyler Anbinder
W ELFARE , D ISSENT, AND N ATIONALISM
“The Cry of the Sufferers”: The Problem of Welfare in the Confederacy
Paul D. Escott
Dissent in the Confederacy: The North Carolina Experience
Marc W. Kruman
Disaffection, Persistence, and Nation: Some Directions in Recent Scholarship on the Confederacy
Gary W. Gallagher
L ITERATURE AND S OCIETY
For the Good, the True, and the Beautiful: Northern Children’s Magazines and the Civil War
James Marten
The Sentimental Soldier in Popular Civil War Literature, 1861–65
Alice Fahs
Contributors
Index
Introduction
For just over sixty years, Civil War History (CWH) has stood as one of the best places to find top scholarship on “the middle period” in American history. Moreover, as John T. Hubbell— CWH ’s editor for a miraculous thirty-five years—explained in the first volume of this retrospective series, the “journal was founded, at least in part to enlist the academy … into the mission of describing the Civil War to the public.” 1 A journey through six decades of the quarterly journal, spanning over nine hundred scholarly articles, is a marvelous tour of both the evolving trends in academia and, perhaps, in the interests of that broader reading public.
I am pleased to have been invited to edit the Civil War History Bookshelf’s volume on the home front. As expected, the task of selecting just sixteen essays proved formidable. Home front is a term that allows for multiple definitions. Often home front scholarship, a close cousin to social history, is defined by what it is not. The term generally refers to scholarship that is not military history, political history, economic history, or diplomatic history. Sometimes that scholarship asks how the Civil War affected civilians who stayed behind. Other work focuses specifically on the contributions of noncombatants to the war effort; thus, the folks at home are seen as presenting another “front” to the conflict. Much home front scholarship integrates many themes into a single narrative, often focusing on a particular community.
Sixty years of Civil War History are particularly interesting in this context, since the home front only emerged as a coherent field of inquiry in the early 1980s, or roughly halfway through the life of the journal (up to now). A glance at six decades of the journal reveals considerable attention to home front themes, long before the principle theoretical questions had emerged. In fact, readers who expect to find the early issues of Civil War History full of “traditional” military and political topics are likely to be surprised. In its first six years, the quarterly ran entire special issues on “humor,” “theater,” “music,” and “religion,” as well as an article titled “The Civil War in Fiction.” 2 A half century later, the contents of Civil War History had changed considerably. The essays are longer and generally more theoretical. New questions and scholarly perspectives emerge. As scholars reexamined familiar questions and raise new ones, the boundaries between battlefield and home front blur, producing fine essays that defy received categories.
I approached the selection of these essays with an open mind. The initial list of candidates was long. I narrowed the field by excluding worthy essays on economic mobilization and on how each side made use of railroads or adjusted manufacturing to further the war effort. I did not include Mark Neely’s wonderful essay “Total War,” on the grounds that it is essentially a piece on military mobilization, not the home front. But at some point, those lines become arbitrary, reflecting the complexity of the issues themselves. I thought hard about matters of representation or collective balance. Are the six decades of the journal’s history adequately represented? Does the book show a reasonable balance between Union and Confederate topics? Will readers get a taste of all the important questions that have framed the scholarship on the home front? In the end, I settled on the essays I could not live without and let the chips fall where they may. Some contributions have been central to my own work on the home front. Quite a few are essays I have admired for years, some authored by good friends. Others I only discovered as I prepared this volume. Several anticipated important monographs; others stand alone. When all the dust settled, the balance between Union and Confederacy, between old essays and new pieces, and across fields seemed close enough.
The essays that follow are arranged by topic, not by chronology. But most really touch many topics. That is the nature of home front studies. Readers are encouraged to browse and read as the spirit moves them.
Some of the most important early essays on the home front examined the scope and character of voluntary societies dedicated to assisting the war effort. The first two essays are true classics that have stood the test of time. In his 1958 essay on “Sanitary Fairs of the Civil War,” William Y. Thompson presented an impressive piece of empirical research. The United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) was a crucial Northern organization, dedicated to raising funds and distributing supplies and agents to regiments in the field. Midway through the war, the local branches of the USSC turned to fund-raising fairs to replenish coffers and stimulate patriotic enthusiasm. Thompson, who had previously published an article in CWH on the Sanitary Commission, packed in details about several dozen Northern sanitary fairs. Nearly a half century later, no scholar has improved upon Thompson’s superb research.
Robert H. Bremner’s 1966 essay on “The Impact of the Civil War on Philanthropy and Social Welfare” is, like Thompson’s two essays on the Sanitary Commission, an absolutely foundational piece for students of the Northern home front. Bremner, one of the great historians of American philanthropy, asks how the Civil War affected Northern welfare organizations. This was a particularly important framework because Bremner explicitly considered the Civil War years within the longer historic context. Thus, he treats the war as an enormous event demanding massive institutional responses from patriotic and philanthropic civilians. During those four years, however, other charitable organizations unrelated to the war continued to grow, evolve, and compete for donations in an economy that was generally doing very well.
Wendy F. Hamand published “The Woman’s National Loyal League: Feminist Abolitionists and the Civil War” a full generation later, speaking to a very different scholarly audience. 3 Founded by prominent abolitionists and woman suffrage advocates Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the Woman’s National Loyal League (WNLL) organized a nationwide petition calling for a constitutional amendment banning slavery. Hamand’s essay details the activities of this largely neglected organization, while also placing its work within the broader narrative of women’s rights. As Hamand notes, historians had traditionally reported that the movement’s leaders had set aside their political goals for the duration of the Civil War, but in fact the WNLL constituted a highly successful—and distinctly feminist—wartime organization that mobilized women as political actors in time of war. Hamand later incorporated these findings into her important book on women abolitionists and the Civil War. 4
Melinda Lawson’s “‘A Profound National Devotion’: The Civil War Union Le