CWL---Twenty Good Reasons To Study The American Civil War

20 Good Reasons To Study The Civil War, John C. Waugh, 96 pages, McWhiney Foundation Press, 2004, $12,95.

In 20 chapters each three to five pages long, John C. Waugh provides a clear and succinct summary of the legacy of the American Civil War. Here is the list in CWL's words. The American Civil War . . .

is unique.: a new birth of freedom paid for by enormous causalities, Antietam 23,000 K/W/M, Gettysburg 53,000 K/W/M

is a watershed. with the destruction of slavery as a system of labor

is a war of firsts. submarine, telegraph, observation balloons, railroads, draft, hospital ships, organized medical/nursing/signals, active enlisted soldiers casting ballots, wide spread use of chloroform during surgery

saved republican government. the experiment in representative self-government survived and remained in a somewhat steady condition in a world that had a tradition of government by kings, dictators, overlords, and mobs invoking terror

killed slavery. the contradiction of race-based slavery in a republic premised on the notion that all men are equal before the law came to an end

generated new ways of waging war. the tools of killing and the practice of total war dispensed with the then popular medieval notion of chivalry in warfare

revolutionized naval warfare. the science of fast cargo vessels also produced the fast chase vessel; the science of metallurgy made iron float on water

teaches brotherhood of arms. the bonds of a West Point education allowed for a degree of reconciliation after the war

showcased undaunted courage. courage must not be assumed without a test

made heroes. civilians, untrained in warfare, showed bravery beyond their observable capacity

created an industrial nation. The implications Lincoln's phrase 'entirely free or entirely slave' implies wage paid and unpaid labor. The productivity of wage labor in an early industrial society was unknown in 1861 but by 1865 the productivity of wage labor was to become an American virtue.


created fabulous fortunes for individuals. Andrew Carnegie, J.D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan were not Union army veterans though they were in their 20s when the war began. The war was a management learning lab for these three young men. Iron and railroads, finance and railroads, petroleum and railroads were the fields of capital management exploration.

created political oddities. four presidential candidates in 1860, politicians demanding to be generals, a presidential election during wartime for a second term and the last two term president was Andrew Jackson 1828-1836, Lincoln's second term opponent was a general who hated politicians, first time voters in 1864 voted while on campaign.

pioneered a new print media. the telegraph, the Associated Press, the new presses.

inspired great literature. not just novels like Killer Angels, The Red Badge of Courage, Cold Mountain, and The Black Flower but the immense amount of personal diaries and correspondence like Frank Haskell's Gettysburg letter and Grant's memoirs.

tested the citizens religious faiths. From Lincoln's Second Inaugural to the personal diaries of soldiers, such as used in Faust's Republic of Suffering

is one of the nation's immediate ties to the past. government enlistment papers with physical descriptions and occupations and letters home are what genealogists' dreams are made of

causes the citizens to remember the past. Reunion, Remembrance, and Reenactments

is great drama. the human drama with 625,000 deaths and 4 million released from slavery

still speaks today. though letters, diaries and through Ken Burns' The Civil War, though the literary imaginations of Jeff Shaara and Howard Bahr, through the painters' hands Don Troiani and Keith Rocco, and the diligence of the National Park Service.

New---Clash of Democracy's Zealots, Full of Irony and Hypocrisy

Clash of the Zealots, Michael Kazin, New York Times, March 23, 2008, a review of the new book Throes of Democracy:The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, Walter A. McDougall, illustrated, indexed, 787 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95.

For historians of the United States, the middle years of the 19th century present an exceptional challenge. How does one capture the meaning of a half-century in which Americans elected first Andrew Jackson and, later, Abraham Lincoln president; fought the Mexican War and the Civil War; flocked to millennarian creeds; joined or clashed with movements for the rights of black people and women and workers of all races; endured the shift from a decentralized agrarian society to a united, industrial powerhouse; and lived in a country that more than doubled in territory and quadrupled in population?

The titles of major works attempt to convey the outsize significance of the times. “The Rise of American Democracy” and “The Market Revolution” produced “The Second American Revolution.” “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution” followed “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” The number of rich, absorbing narratives about this period easily outstrips the quantity of those devoted to any other slice of the nation’s past.

Walter A. McDougall is not impressed. He begins Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, his own fat survey, with a fire in 1835 that destroyed much of Lower Manhattan and concludes it with an admiring portrait of the prolific writer and editor Orestes Brownson, who abandoned his youthful radicalism for a steadfast conviction that the United States was doomed unless its citizens embraced the eternal truths of the Roman Catholic Church. While McDougall, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, covers all the major events and social forces of the era with great energy and wit, his tone is relentlessly ironic. All the sound and fury signify little to him besides Americans’ extraordinary talent for wrapping their bloodletting and money-making in thick layers of moralistic pretense.

McDougall keeps smiling at the foolishness of those mortals who spout and stumble across his pages. Daniel Webster, the great Whig orator, was “a man of strong Yankee principles, ... never religious except insofar as he worshiped himself.” The abolitionists, much honored by posterity, were actually “the most feeble reform movement” of the era, in part because their eccentric ideas and behavior alienated “ordinary Americans, just as the behavior of hippies damaged their peace movement in the 1960s.” And the unruly, plebeian throng that flocked to Jackson and made the Democrats the party to beat in the decades before the Civil War? “Americans of many sorts were in one bad mood or another between 1819 and 1850,” McDougall comments. “They were against many things and sensed that Jackson was, too.” Their discontent, he explains, was “an inevitable consequence of free markets in power, wealth and pursuits of happiness.”

Such judgments, like his regard for Brownson, reveal the author’s particular conservative worldview, an old-fashioned one closer to that of Edmund Burke than of Ronald Reagan (who was fond of quoting Thomas Paine’s line “We have it in our power to begin the world over again”). McDougall does not deny that the persistence of racial bigotry and urban poverty betrayed the ideals trumpeted ad nauseam by politicians and evangelical preachers. But all the mighty efforts to forge a more equal, more humane order strike him as overblown and oversold. The result is the most unromantic narrative of 19th-century America I have ever read.


McDougall is a Vietnam veteran, which may help explain why he is most sober when writing about war, both the war with Mexico and the bigger one between North and South. He goes beyond the now standard argument that the earlier conflict was an act of raw conquest justified by the messianic promise of Manifest Destiny. In McDougall’s mordant rendering, it was “the climactic achievement of the republic founded in 1776” because it exposed the notion of a peaceful democracy sharing its gifts with the world to be “a pretentious fraud.” The army that claimed the inglorious victory was a sorry lot as well. Large numbers of recruits “mutinied, deserted, malingered, rebelled and died.” And seven times more soldiers died away from the battlefield, mostly of disease, than in combat.

McDougall’s similar attitude toward the Civil War and its aftermath may elicit several gigabytes worth of academic controversy. He has no patience for the view that the fight to preserve the Union was justified because it led to the emancipation of four million African-Americans. In his view, zealots on both sides stoked an inferno of mistrust, as “each section’s rational measures of self-defense looked to the other like mad provocations.” The messy, incomplete Reconstruction that followed a war in which more than 600,000 died only increased the hatred white Southerners felt toward their former slaves. McDougall scoffs at those who praise Reconstruction as “a simple morality play” between crusaders for racial equality and their enemies. Instead, he compares it to the American invasion of Iraq, an adventure that began with high ideals and may end as an embarrassing failure.

The analogy is flawed: former Confederates had far more in common with Unionists than Iraqi insurgents do with American occupiers. But by proposing it, McDougall affirms his fundamental distaste for any attempt to remake one’s society, or any other. Like Mark Twain, a rare 19th-century figure whom he admires, McDougall mocks “in suitably palatable fashion” the myth that Americans were a decent people eager to share the blessings of democracy. Because he writes exceedingly well, this makes for a history that is bracing to read, even if one questions its premises and conclusions.

Yet the conception of the work is a good deal less satisfying than its parts. “Throes of Democracy” is the second installment in a projected multivolume history of America from its colonial birth pangs to the present. McDougall began the first volume, “Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585-1828,” with the arresting statement that the United States was “the central historical event of the past 400 years.” It is, he declared, “the mightiest, richest, most creative civilization on earth — a civilization that perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing. Not only was the United States born of revolution; it is one.” But to interpret the Civil War era as a history of self-deception on a grand scale ends up making that civilization look rather small.

It’s useful to have a rebuttal of the progressive views most contemporary historians hold, and McDougall does so with verve, if not always cogently. However, one can find mendacious and deluded souls aplenty in any land, during any era. The critical events that took place at the heart of the 19th century did much to transform the United States into the power for good and ill it subsequently became. Depicting most of the people responsible for these radical changes as hypocrites and fools undermines McDougall’s own argument. To debunk what Americans thought they were doing does not help us understand the meaning of what they did accomplish. McDougall may view the United States as a revolutionary success, but his image of those pivotal years looks more like failure.

Michael Kazin’s most recent book is A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. He teaches history at Georgetown University.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/books/review/Kazin-t.html?em&ex=1206331200&en=4b5437d21c751ebd&ei=5087%0A

CWL --- Writing History: Answers to the Name of 'Soldier'

"The Blue and Gray in Black and White: Assessing the Scholarship on Civil War Soldiers," Aaron Sheehan-Dean in The View From The Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, ed., University of Kentucky Press, pp. 9-30.

Accounts written by soldiers during the war are highly prized by researchers. Postwar memoirs and article length reminiscences on occassion substitute interpretations for how it actually was in the face of battle. Answers to questions, running the gamut from emancipation and race to family and masculinity, are being readily mined today from 1860-1865 primary sources. Sheehan-Dean traces this trend to the work of Bell Irvin Wiley during the 1940s and 1950s. The author also calls attention to Albert Burton, on CSA conscription, and Ella Lonn, on army desertions, as being forerunners of Wiley in his perusal of frontline soldiers primary sources.

The movement to rejuvenate soldier studies by using the primary sources of 1860-1865 was encouraged by a 1970s study of European soldiers, The Face of Battle by John Keegan. The emergence of this historiographic movement in the 1980s is due to the growth in the sophisication of social history, the immediacy of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement during the 1970s.

Sheehan-Dean surveys the work of Reid Mitchell, Gerald Linderman, Mark Grimsley, Earl Hess, Chandra Manning, Joseph Glatthaar, James McPherson, Drew Gilpin Faust and several others. In these authors' works the attitudes of families, communities, and soldiers are being explored in a manner unlike any previous effort during the 145 years of writing about the American Civil War. In particular these studies of Southern and Northern counties and the soldiers they provided are setting forth new understandings of the war. In this field the work of Peter Carmichael, Martin Crawford, and Ward Hubb are revealing.

Families set in the context of communities, as illustrated by the work of James Marten and others, provide a picture of men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers that is not like the Victorian paintings that provide illustrations for book jackets. The bibliographic notes to Sheehan-Dean's chapter provide a wealth of book and article titles that any reader having an interest in soldiers should examine.

Help Note: This chapter can be obtained by using your local library's inter-library loan services or by contacting me.

Now Available: Three Books about Civilians on Both Sides of the Mason Dixon Line

Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War, A. Wilson Greene,
Hardcover, 384 pages, University of Virginia Press (Spring, 2007), ISBN: 0813925703



In the past ten years, the urban and civilian aspect of the American Civil War has started to be addressed. Gettysburg, Atlanta, New York City, Charleston, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Knoxville have been received attention. Greene, historian working at Pamplin Park, Virginia and author of essays considering the character and memory Stonewall Jackson, addresses the urban wartime history of Peterburg, Virginia

Few wartime cities in Virginia held more importance than Petersburg. It's written history has lacked both an adequate military and civilian home front work. The noted Civil War historian A. Wilson Greene now provides an expertly researched and eloquently written study of the Virginia city that was second only to Richmond in size and strategic significance. Industrial, commercial, and extremely prosperous, Petersburg was home to a large African American community, including the state's highest percentage of free blacks.

On the eve of the Civil War, the city elected a conservative, pro-Union approach to the sectional crisis. Little more than a month before Virginia's secession did Petersburg finally express pro-Confederate sentiments, at which point the city threw itself wholeheartedly into the effort, with large numbers of both white and black men serving. Over the next four years, Petersburg's citizens watched their once-beautiful city become first a conduit for transient soldiers from the Deep South, then an armed camp, and finally the focus of one of the Civil War's most physically and environmentally damaging campaigns.

At war's end, Petersburg's antebellum prosperity evaporated under pressures from inflation, chronic shortages, and the extensive damage done by Union artillery shells. Greene's book tracks both Petersburg's civilian experience and the city's place in Confederate military strategy and civilian administration. Employing unpublished sources, the book weaves a uniquely personal story of thousands of citizen-free blacks, slaves and their holders, factory owners, merchants-all of whom shared a singular experience in Civil War Virginia.



A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, Scott R. Nelson and Carol Sheriff, Hardcover: 384 pages, Oxford University Press, $25.00 (Spring 2007)

Claiming more than 600,000 lives, the American Civil War had a devastating impact on countless numbers of common soldiers and civilians, even as it brought freedom to millions. This book shows how average Americans coped with despair as well as hope during this vast upheaval.

A People at War brings to life the full humanity of the war's participants, from women behind their plows to their husbands in army camps; from refugees from slavery to their former masters; from Mayflower descendants to freshly recruited Irish sailors. We discover how people confronted their own feelings about the war itself, and how they coped with emotional challenges (uncertainty, exhaustion, fear, guilt, betrayal, grief) as well as physical ones (displacement, poverty, illness, disfigurement). The book explores the violence beyond the battlefield, illuminating the sharp-edged conflicts of neighbor against neighbor, whether in guerilla warfare or urban riots.

The authors travel as far west as China and as far east as Europe, taking us inside soldiers' tents, prisoner-of-war camps, plantations, tenements, churches, Indian reservations, and even the cargo holds of ships. They stress the war years, but also cast an eye at the tumultuous decades that preceded and followed the battlefield confrontations. An engrossing account of ordinary people caught up in life-shattering circumstances, A People at War captures how the Civil War rocked the lives of rich and poor, black and white, parents and children--and how all these Americans pushed generals and presidents to make the conflict a people's war.

Scott Nelson is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction and Steel Drivin' Man: The Untold Story of John Henry and the Birth of an American Legend. Carol Sheriff is Associate Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862. (Text supplied by the publisher.)


Torn Families: Death And Kinship at the Battle of Gettysburg, Michael A. Dreese, McFarland Publishing, 232 pp. Spring 2007

The Battle of Gettysburg lasted only three days but involved more than 160,000 soldiers-Union and Confederate. Seven thousand died outright on the battlefield; hundreds more later succumbed to their wounds. For each of these soldiers, family members somewhere waited anxiously. Some went to Gettysburg themselves in search of their wounded loved ones. Some were already present as soldiers themselves. In this book are extraordinary-and sometimes heartbreaking-stories of the strength of family ties during the Battle of Gettysburg. Fathers and mothers, siblings and spouses all suffered together, even as they drew strength from one another. Their stories are told here with the help of excerpts from diaries, letters and other correspondence, which provide a first-hand account of the human drama of Gettsyburg on the battlefield and the home front. (Information taken from publisher)

Michael A. Dreese is the author of five books: 'The Hospital on Seminary Ridge at the Battle of Gettysburg' (2002) and 'The 151st Pennsylvania Volunteers at Gettysburg' (2000), 'This Flag Never Goes Down!: 40 Stories of Confederate Battle Flags and Color Bearers at the Battle of Gettysburg' (2004), 'Never Desert the Old Flag!: 50 Stories of Union Battle Flags and Color-Bearers at Gettysburg' (2002) and 'An Imperishable Fame: The Civil War Experience of George Fisher McFarland' (1997).

Forthcoming: The Age of Lincoln

THE AGE OF LINCOLN, Orville Vernon Burton, Hill and Wang Publishers, 432 pp, $27.00, Summer 2007.

(text from the publisher) Stunning in its breadth and conclusions, The Age of Lincoln is a fiercely original history of the five decades that pivoted around the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Abolishing slavery, though extraordinary, was not this age’s most profound accomplishment. The enduring legacy of the age was inscribing personal liberty into the nation’s millennial aspirations.

America has always perceived providence in its progress, but in the 1840s and 1850s, a pessimism accompanied a marked extremism. With all sides claiming God’s blessing, irreconcilable freedoms collided; despite historic political compromises, the middle ground collapsed. In a remarkable reappraisal of Lincoln, the distinguished historian Orville Vernon Burton shows how the President’s Southernness empowered him to conduct a civil war that redefined freedom as a personal right protected by the rule of law. In the violent decades that followed, the extent of that freedom would be contested by racism and unregulated capitalism, but not its central place in what defined the country. (text from the publisher) Amazon.com blurbs from McPherson, Donald, Foner, Wyatt-Brown.

Forthcoming: Women in the American Civil War

Women in the American Civil War, Volumes 1 & 2, Lisa Tendrich Frank, ed., ABC-CLIO Press, November, 2007, $195.00

These volumes provide 400 entries of individuals, organizations, issues and roles of women. Twelve essays address women in the North and South, slave and free, before, during and after the war. The books also include portions of documents, diaries and letters.

Forthcoming: The Army of the Northern Virginia, Social and Institutional History

The Army of Northern Virginia: A Social and Institutional History, J. Tracy Power, 333 pp., ABC-CLIO Press, December 2007, hardcover, $85.00

Thsi introductory volume features a chronology of the army's history from its orgins in 1861 until is surrender in a 1865. Also, the book contains photographs, paintings, and engravings of the army's generals, officers and enlisted men, their weapons and uniforms. Significant battles and other incidents in the army's history is covered. Theater maps of northern Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania along with maps of the army's campaigns and battles are included.

CWL --- The Story That Jackson Would Not Have Read: Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War

Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War: A Compendium, Thomas P. Lowry, 337 pp., index, endnotes, appendices, illus., Xlibris, 2007, $22.99.

Prostitution, rape, masturbation, homosexuality, bestiality, bad language and even a short history of illegal sexual behavior before, during and shortly after 1863 in Adams County, Pennsylvania are presented in 1,036 true stories gathered by Thomas Lowry. Delving into the National Archives, the Library of Congress and sundry other state and local libraries, Lowry has previously produced books on military justice, medical malpractice and sexual behavior. He has established a database of 90,000+ court-martial records of the Civil War era.

Reading this manuscript before its publication James I. Robertson, noted author of a biography of Stonewall Jackson, and Robert K. Krick, esteemed author of books on Stonewall Jackson's strategy and tactics, are enthralled with 'Sexual Misbehavior in the Civil War. "No historical endeavor delights me nearly as one that displays rich original material," blurbs Krick and this book for him is a significant contribution to the field of Civil War history. Robertson crows that Lowry's new book is "a necessary conpendium for any serious student of Civil War history." Possibly, 'Sexual Behavior in the Civil War' is the book that Stonewall Jackson wouldn't have read. Lowry addresses prostitution and rape in 19 chapters and covers it by state and region. Masturbation, homosexuality, bestiality, bad language, and Adams County are addressed with individual chapters.

The last chapter, A Vast Miscellany, contains a truely ghastly photograph of a victim of syphilis, clever horseshoe art, detailed minie ball sculptures, and casual coin disfigurement. As with any compendium, the reader should ask, "Is this trivia or is this obscure information?" Trivia is entertaining; obscure information is a detail that speaks to a larger and pertinent truth. Taken anecdote by anecdote, 'Sexual Behavior in the Civil War' presents trivia; yet, organized as it is, 'Sexual Behavior in the Civil War' presents obscure information that reveals that passion leads men to commit acts that are unlawful, stupid, and dangerous. Working from courts-martial records and surgeon general reports, Lowry has discovered that there were 183,000 reported cases of venereal disease in the Union army and that California regiments had infection rates of about 50%. Most prostitutes died in their mid-twenties as sufferers of alcoholism, syphilis and morphine addiction.

Lowry states that "it is apparent that the author (Lowry) has offered little in the way of comment, analysis or editorializing. This book is not a book of analysis, nor would the sheer volume of material allow for such pontificating." (p. 14) What value the book gives, is directed to academicians and graduate students. He sees it as a type of Rosetta Stone, a "vast finding aid for future research, a beginning point for monogpraphs, dissertations and other learned works." Lowry quoutes Lincoln (p.7), "sexual contact is a harp of a thousand strings." This book will play many melodies for many casual readers and diligent researchers.

CWL --- Unconquerable Rebels: Self-Deluded? Faithful to God?

Religious Belief and Troop Motivation: "For the Smiles of My Blessed Saviour," Jason Phillips, in Virginia's Civil War, Wallenstein and Wyatt-Brown, eds., Univesity of Virginia Press, 2005, pp. 101-113.

The movements of a soul can be glacially slow, covering years. Captain Joseph Manson, 12th Virginia Regiment, instead of detailing camp life and the movements of regiments, described his "search for God and salvation beyond the terrors of war." Many soldiers stated that they wished to die facing the enemy; conversely, Manson hoped to be found at the moment of death facing "towards the Celestial City & my Armor on." Beginning the chronicle of his soul while in the summer trenches of Petersburg, Manson like many others in those trenches pondered religion because it afforded to gifts: an explanation which made sense out of war and a code of behavior to guide them through vices of camp life and the mortal peril of combat.

In Jason Phillips' essay on CSA troop motivation, the conviction that God would deliver indendence to the South is considered. The belief was embedded deeply into the soil of Southern religious culture. The Confederate nation came to be viewed as being sacred, that is set aside for a special destiny. In part, this belief motivated Southern troops. Nineteenth century Christians understood that God was an active force in the affairs of the nation; these Christians believed that God governs the universe, constantly improving it until it reaches a conclusive end. For them all history is the progess of Providence toward a Judgement Day that marks the final triumph of good over evil.

Phillips cites literature of the time as presenting that the "only proper view of this Revolution, is that which regards its a a child of Providence." Wearing these worldview spectacles, religious Southerners understood the carnage to be directed by spiritual agents and felt that they were pawns in the hand of a higher power. This reader recalls several of Robert E. Lee's remarks that reflect these sentiments. CSA soldiers, to a degree, were fatalists. "In a world where God's hand touched everything, a person's conduct could have far-reaching consequences," states Phillips.

The notion that God would trick and forsake the Confederacy was unthinkable. Confederates believed that the work of Providence would ensure Confederate victory and that Confederates were holier than the Yankees. These beliefs fostered the conviction that CSA soldiers were invincible. For many pastors in the South, God was unknowable but Providence was evidence of his movement. Providence's progress would be aided by the repetentant hearts of the soldiers.

Posssessing this point of view, the Confederate soldier repented and followed Providence, even into their deaths. The Army of Northern Virginia passed through three revivals: autumn 1862, and the winters of 1863-1864 and 1864-1865. Many CSA soldiers persisted beyond the point of logical endurance and optimism. Was the "unconquerable mentality a product of wartime self-delusion" or a product of Southern religious beliefs? Historian Reid Mitchell has calls it "insane Confederate optimism"; historian Richard Beringer has labels it "unrealistic bravado." (p. 110)

Phillips sees Confederate religion encouraging self-delusion, escapism and unwarranted optimism. Was the Confederate acceptance of their own invincibility insane and unrealistic?
"Our knowledge of psychology and the war's outcome must not supplant the fact that Confederates had a worldview different from our own today." Phillips understands that the Confederate worldview ill prepared them for the war's outcome; but the worldview's optimism was consistent with their religion. The naval blockade, the disintegration of slavery, and the deficient of supplies and manpower could be overcome by Providence so as to meet Providence's goals.

For this reader, the Confederate faith is similar to the faith of John Brown of Harper's Ferry fame. David Reynolds' John Brown, Abolitionist (2005) and John Stauffer's The Black Hearts of Abolitionists (2002) thoroughly describe the worldview of the abolitionists. Historians, writing from 1900 to 1975 found John Brown to be insane; currently there is little academic doubt that Brown was sane and believed that Providence would find a way to free the slaves.
Confederates were sane and believed that Providence would sustain the Confederacy's independence. Currently, this reader is looking for an essay entitled God's Will and Northern War Aims.

Thinking about that topic, maybe the essay has already been written and it's entitled The Second Inaugural Address delivered in March 1865.

CWL --- A Thin Line: Christian Love, Christian Hate

Christian Love and Marital Violence: Baptists and War--Danger and Opportunities, Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh, in Virginia's Civil War, Wallenberg and Wyatt-Brown, eds., Univesity of Virginia Press, 2005, pp. 87-100.

Of all Virginians who were church members, 42% were Baptists; Virginia Baptists represented a substantial segment of white popular opinion during the war. Reconciling Christian love with state sanctioned violence was a delimma that fostered both despair for the cause of Christ and hatred for Northerners. The Army of Northern Virginia's religious revivals during winter encampments helped Baptists set aside their despair but not their hatred.

Before, during and after the 1860 presidential election, Baptist clergy were extremely reluctant to to engage in open political activity. During this season, pastors offer jeremiads, the style and content of which harkened back to sermons preached in colonial New England. Special destinies were linked to special obligations. Unfulfilled obligations merited punishments. Punishments led to penitance; penitance led to awakenings. From Baptist pulpits, jeremiads supported the cause of Unionism during 1860 and early 1861. The political faith of the Virginia Founding Fathers was the cause of Unionism. Falling away from this political faith would bring about punishments.

Despite their avoidance of politics before Lincoln's April 17 call for troops, the pastors embraced the rebellion the President's line in the sand. "Evangelicalism and Confederate nationalism were intertwined in a complex braid of meaning and causality . . . ." states the author. He dismisses Charles Royster's contention that Southerners had a Bible-generated tendency toward the acceptance of violence. Royster sees violence being moved forward by the Biblical notion of atonement, "a sacramental mystery, the central act of which is bloodshed." What Royster proports, Virginia Baptists deny. They do not exalt military slaughter as a necessary religious sacrafice states Hsieh.

Baptist clergymen did not call "for destructive and patriotic warfare but for a cautious recognition that the ends of God and man" may be vastly different. Did Virginia Baptists see the war as a means for atoning for sin? No. Did the Virginia Baptists see the war as a "stimulant for sin and demoraliztion? Yes. The occassion of war was an occassion full of temptations.
Drunkeness, gambling, immoral sexual behavior, and swearing were soldier's vices. The influence of hearth and family for moral behavior was absent in soldiers' camps. Separation from the home community was a separation from the affections, sympathies and influences of the Christian family.

Baptist authors feared that Southerners at war would fail to keep half of the Golden Rule. Love your enemy, even though he was a Federal soldier. Christians would have to be careful while striking the enemy; it must be done in the spirit of the Master. If this spirit was lacking, then hope for the Master's help would be disappointed. Conversely, some pastors would embrace the bloodlust of the war. F. McCarthy, a civilian minister who joined the CSA army possibly as an enlisted man, wrote to a Baptist newspaper in Richmond, "if any Southern man lacks the anger
. . . to march to the battlefield and butcher the monsters that have invaded our soil . . . [he should sit and reflect uopon the] putrid qualities of the Northern heart and their base designs upon us and ours . . . [and] no chain will be strong enough to keep him from their throats."

Most ministers understood salvation would not be enhanced by destructive bloodletting, but would be advanced though revival in the camps. In the late fall of 1962, and during the winters of 1863-1864 and 1864-1865, revivals swept through the Army of Northern Virginia. Though spiritually revived, did the Rebel army begin to lose battles because it had lost divine favor?

Historians Drew Gilpin Faust, Harry Stout, and Richard Grasso show that the answer is No. Revival buttressed Confederate nationalism, even during days of defeat. The author believes that Virginia Baptist pastors never wavered in support of the Confederate cause and deeply mourned its destruction. After the war, he finds no pastor declaring that God had judged the South, the arm of the Lord was the Federal army, and that punishment occured when Southern property was destroyed and Southern slaves were freed.

CWL --- Walking Gettysburg's Battlefield: Civil War Minutes, Volume 3, Parts 1 & 2.

Gettysburg and Stories of Valor: Civil War Minutes Volume 3, Parts 1 & 2, writers: Michael Kraus, David Neville, director Michael Bussler, Inecom Entertainment Company, 90 minutes, 2004.

Inecom Entertainment Company is among the best small, independent producers of history documentaries. In terms of direction, content, writing, and production, I would pick an Inecom product over all others, including the History Channel. This pair of dvds is full of informative, but unpadded, and interesting, but unexaggerated, stories. The writers know the difference between trivia and obscure information. Trivia is humorous and superficial; obscure information is insightful and illustrates a larger truth. Part 1 of the set offers 14 topics on Gettysburg and part 2 sets forth 16 stories of the Civil War. Biographies and material culture, behavior and events are dual themes throughout Volume 3.

Interested in Civil War era medicine? On disk 2, there are short features about caring for the wounded, bullet wounds, and amputees. Looking for background on generals? On both disks there are stories of Winfield S. Hancock, Lewis Aristead, Alexander Hays and Felix Zollicoffer.

Haven't heard from Civil War era civilians recently? Meet John Burns of Gettysburg, and the men, women and children of Pittsburgh's Allegheny Arsenal who died on the afternoon of September 17, 1862. Take a look at one of the farmsteads that became a burial site for hundreds of Confederate dead at Gettysburg, the Forney farm. Explore Gettysburg's historic photographs that are faked. Walk through both the Evergreen and the National Cemteries on Cemetery Hill, Gettysburg. You'll find Confederates buried in the National Cemetery and the actual location of the podium for the Gettysburg Address in the Evergreen Cemetery.

The writers and director tell the stories of the men who carried the weapons by focusing on their material culture . Examine the path of shrapnel through a CSA major's coat sleeve. Carry a drum across the Emmitsburg Road, lose it and have it returned 20 years later. Go through the haverack and knapsack of a soldier. Cross the Dead Line at Andersonville; live in POW camps in the North.

Thankfully, reenactors are not in every shot; they are limited in their appearance to closeups as they handle their guns, bone saws, haversacks, and drums. Don't get me wrong; I am a reenactor and appreciate the 'living history aspect' of the hobby. But to show reenactors running through woods, up hills and across streams, ad nausem like the History Channel or MediaMagic frequently do, usually covers bad writing and unsupported generalizations.

The writers and directors show the actual implements of war as they are preserved in private and public collections throughout the country. The credits that run at the end of each disk will answer the question you will probably ask several times during your viewing of Civil War Minutes; "Where did they find that?" Civil War Minutes, Volume 3, Gettysburg and Stories of Valor, is recommended for all ages and all levels of interest in the Civil War.

CWL ---- Righteous Violence: Quakers in the Slaveholding Republic

The Dilemma of Quaker Pacificism in a Slaveholding Republic, 1833-1865, Jordan, Ryan, Civil War History, 53:1 (2007), 5-28.

During the Antebellum Era, The Society of Friends numbered slightly over 200,000. Possessing a variety of theological views within their community of Meetings, Quakers all agreed upon two tenents. They rejected human government and they embraced pacificism. The potential of anarchy was balanced by the fact that they would not violently overthrow government. The Quaker church was the first to disallow slaveholding among its members. As an organization, it formed the spine of the abolition movement though slaveholding among Quakers did not disappear overnight. Southern Friends gradually emancipated their slaves over decades and well into the 19th century.

Would the Quakers disobey the state and participate in the Underground Railroad?
Would the Quakers obey the state and support the Union war effort?
Would the Quakers embrace those Quakers who joined the Union army before the Emancipation Proclamation? Afterward?

There were those among the Society of Friends who rejected abolitionism since the Friends should not overthrow a government even though they could not consciously support the government. There were others who, by the 1830s, accepted the proposition of immediate abolition, with the abolition movement in England providing an example. A few Quakers proposed colonization of freed slaves and other sreject colonization due to the possible imposition of the horrors of the Middle Passage upon those returning to Africa.

Slavery was recognized a great humnitarian wrong but what behavior constitutes pacifistic resistence to this particular institutionalized evil? Immediate abolition and colonization were poloarizing issues that threatened to break the communion of Quaker saints. Additionally, Quakers debated whether non-violent resistence could be implemented with violent consequences, particularly in the South. The solutions offered by Levi Coffin, Quaker and Underground Railroad activist, and the Indiana Friends were polar opposites. Coffin would in all circumstances assist runaway slaves; the Indiana Society of Quakers asserted that in all circumstances they would not assist runaway slaves.

Castner Hanaway, a Christiana, Pennsylvania Quaker was arrested and charged with treason for inciting runaway slaves to resist slave catchers. Generally, Quakers held to the notion that righteous ends should be sought through righteous means. Quaker settlers in Kansas were attacked and their missionary schools for Shawneees were burned. In Virginia, during a 1859 meeting, a Quaker minister spoke out against Abolitionists and was shout down by female who quoted scripture to the minister, likening him to the Scribes and Pharisees who acted hypocritically and who were confronted by Jesus.

Confronted by violent slaveholders backed by a violent government, some Quakers dispensed with pacificism and employed violence as a means of self-defense. An unknown number of Quakers supported John Brown while he lived in Kansas and when he moved back to New York.
Two men raised in the Quaker tradition, set pacificism aside and joined Brown for the Harper's Ferry Raid. Barclay Coppoc died during the October fight; Edwin Coppoc was executed by the state of Virginia for treason and insurrection. Levi Coffin believed that Providence would use the violence of John Brown for Providence's own end, emancipation.

Quakers in the Union army understood resistence to the rebellion of the South as being similiar to the resistence of the angels to Lucifer, who was an angel lead a revolt in Heaven. Recent detective work has revealed that 25% of the eligible Quaker men in Indiana served in Union armies; a second historian revealed that the number of Quaker soldiers from Indiana may have reached 66% during the war. Other studies show that most Quakers voters in the 1860 election cast Republican ballots.

The violent resistance of Southerners to moral suasion of the Friends created a dilemma. Understanding life and religion to be integrated, the Quakers allowed for freedom of conscience within their meetings. Some embraced the state sanctioned violence of war; others embraced the kingdom sanctioned mercy towards the freedmen. It appears that Quakers did not condemn Quakers for exercising individual consciences and walking the path the Providence had set before them, individually.

CWL --- A Poor Man's Fight in 1863? Not So! But Maybe?

Which Poor Man's Fight? Immigrants and The Federal Conscription of 1863
Tyler Anbinder, Civil War History, 52:4, 344-372, 2006.

George Washington University professor of history, author of 'Five Points: The 19th Century Neighborhood . . .,' and contributor to the History Channel regarding the film 'Gangs of New York,' Tyler Anbinder breaks a myth of the 1863 Northern draft and NYC riots of July 1863.
Myth: The rioters' fear that they would be disporportionately affected by the draft caused the civil disturbance. The fear was well founded.

Anbinder has discovered in the National Archives the Provost Marshall reports of that year. Parsing and perusing the reports, he concludes that the rioters' fear was unfounded, that the military draft did not disportionately pull the immigrants into the army and navy. Indeed, the Provost Marshall's reports show that the number of impoverished immigrants forced into the military was below the national average. "Immigrants were not disproportionately forced into the army as a result of the draft. (346)

"If one considers all those forced to contribute to the war effort as a result of the draft, by combining those forced to serve with those who hired substitutes or paid the communtation fee, then immigrants lag even further behind natives in their contributions." Native-born rural laborers are those, as a group, do appear to "have been disproportionately forced into service as a result of the draft." (347)

The commutation fee of $300 was not placed into the 1863 draft law in order to allow the wealthy to escape military service. Lincoln and others in both houses of Congress understood that if a 'cap' of $300 was not in place then the wealthy would bid up the price of a substitute to a point were middle income individuals could not afford one. In the three drafts of 1864, the second and third ones had no commutation fee and the cost of a substitute rose from the 1863 price of $250-$275 to over $500 in the summer of 1864. The inflation in the cost of a substitute did indeed make the last two drafts during 1864 more of a poor man's fight than did the 1863 draft. (354)

The majority of draftees in 1863 avoided service by claiming any of the following exemptions:
17 years of age or younger, 45 years of age or older and single, 35 years of age or older and married, only son of a widow or infirm parents, father of a motherless child, two or more brothers in the federal armed services before March 3, 1863, and a variety of physical ailments.
Those included sensitive feet, crooked toes, hernia, excessive stammering, inflamed testicles, and imbecility among others. Of all those who reported for the draft 40% were exempted for medical reasons.

The 60% who reported for the draft and had no physical excuse had three choices: serve in the military, hire a substitute, pay the commutation fee of $300. This fee was applicable until the next draft. At that time another commuation fee would have to be paid if a substitute was not purchased and the draftee, the second time around, did not want to serve.

'Immigrants, it turns out, had far more agency in controlling their draft fate than most observers--both then and now--have imagined." They could claim exemption by not supplying court documents regarding their application for citizenship. Immigrants that were in the process of receiving citizenship were eligible for the draft. Very few immigrants were forced into the military during the 1863 draft; but, about half the soldiers who entered the armed forces as a result of the 1863 draft were immigrants. Primarily, these immigrants enlisted as substitutes.
'They chose to join the army, gambling that the benefits of subsitition fees and enlistment bonuses were worth the risk of disease, injury, or death . . . ." (373)

So were the immigrants forced into military service? In most cases, no, not in 1863.

So did the immigrants choose to join the military service due to monetary incentives? In most cases, yes, in 1863.

So which nationality were these immigrants who choose to join the military service for money?
In most cases, Irish, in 1863.

So were the immigrants, who choose military service because of economic incentives, poor.
In most cases, probably, I think. I've read Anbinder's 'Five Points: . . . " and if the immigrant was living in NYC and was Irish, than more times than not, that immigrant was economically disadvantaged.