Forthcoming---God's People During A Peoples' War

God's Almost Chosen Peoples, A Religious History of the American Civil War, George C. Rable, University of North Carolina Press, November 2010, 624 pp., 12 illusrations, notes, bibliogrpahy, index,$35.00.

Throughout the Civil War, soldiers and civilians on both sides of the conflict saw the hand of God in the terrible events of the day, but the standard narratives of the period pay scant attention to religion. Now, in God's Almost Chosen Peoples, Lincoln Prize-winning historian George C. Rable offers a groundbreaking account of how Americans of all political and religious persuasions used faith to interpret the course of the war.

Examining a wide range of published and unpublished documents--including sermons, official statements from various churches, denominational papers and periodicals, and letters, diaries, and newspaper articles--Rable illuminates the broad role of religion during the Civil War, giving attention to often-neglected groups such as Mormons, Catholics, blacks, and people from the Trans-Mississippi region. The book underscores religions presence in the everyday lives of Americans north and south struggling to understand the meaning of the conflict, from the tragedy of individual death to victory and defeat in battle and even the ultimate outcome of the war. Rable shows that themes of providence, sin, and judgment pervaded both public and private writings about the conflict. Perhaps most important, this volume--the only comprehensive religious history of the war--highlights the resilience of religious faith in the face of political and military storms the likes of which Americans had never before endured.

George C. Rable holds the Charles G. Summersell Chair in Southern History at the University of Alabama. He is author of Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism, The Confederate Republic: A Revolution against Politics, and Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!, which won the Lincoln Prize.

CWL---owns and has read Rable's work. He is an outstanding Civil War historian who handles well the military fronts, the home front and the ideas held by popular cultures of the era. He delivers his research with a fine narrative style.

Text and Image Source: University of North Carolina Press

Other Voices: The Real War Is Getting Into The Books

People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, 1854-1877, Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sherriff Oxford University Press, 345 pages, black and white photographs, maps, index, notes, bibliography. 2007, $28.00.

While reading People At War, a review of it by Randall M. Miller, of Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, came across my desk. Here it is.

"In a crowded field of books on the Civil War era. Nelson (Steel Drivin' Man) and Sheriff ( Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862), historians at the College of William and Mary, give us something new—an engaging, informed portrait of two peoples at war, with an emphasis
on how common soldiers and noncombatants adjusted to and were changed by the war.

The authors spend more time in recruiting halls, military camps, hospitals,and prisons than in battle to observe what moved men to war and some to flee it, as
well as how the physical and emotional demands of living away from home affected their sense of self and their national identity. At the same time, they discuss how the war came home to civilians, with the raids of armies and partisans, the demands of mobilization, the death and dismemberment of soldiers, the erosion of slavery, and the promise of freedom.

They are especially good at linking the experience of, and expectations about, the war with Americans' ambitions and interests in the West. Their vivid descriptions of disease and destruction will remind readers that war was hell even as it was also an instrument of social change. The new social historians' interest in "the people" gets its full due in this readable, reliable, and remarkably relevant book."

CWL --- Not a Brothers' War: How the Rebels Hated the Yankees

A Brothers' War?: Exploring Confederate Perceptions of the Enemy, Jason Phillips in The View From the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, Aaron- Sheehan Dean, ed., University of Kentucky Press, 2007, pp. 67-90, notes.

As the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia stood before Joshua Chamberlain's division in April 1865, his spirit welcomed back the Rebels into the Union. 'Thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and eyes looking level into our . . .' Confederates received a salute from Union troops. John B. Gordon, Confederate general, returned the salute. Authors, painters and filmmakers use this story frequently to suggest the notion of a Brothers' War. A second story, appearing immediately after the salute story in Chamberlain's memoirs, is much less frequently discussed and used.

The second story suggests that the Brothers' War is a creation of a post-war, post-Reconstruction mentality. The salute scene is followed by a scene in which an unrepentant Rebel pointed tells Joshua Chamberlain that he hates him. The identity of the Rebel is not disclosed by Chamberlain but the text gives enough evidence to suggest that it may have been Henry Wise. A former Virginia governor during the Harpers' Ferry Raid incident and a father mourning the death of his son during the war, Wise places a curse on Chamberlain and all Union soldiers.

Throughout the war caricatures of Northerners were predominant in the discussions and writings of Confederates. In diaries, private letters and newspaper columns Northerners were labeled as inept, inferior, evil, and barbaric. This way of imagining the foe shows that Rebels drained complexity and individuality from representations of their enemies. Jason Phillips, the author of this chapter, states that "unprecedented destruction of the war made any real notion of brotherhood across the lives contradictory and absurd." (p. 69)

What did the term 'Yankee' connote for rebels? Pathetic foe, hypocritical reformer, cold industrialist, money-grubber, self-righteous Puritan, and demonic or inhuman barbarian is the list provided by Phillips in reviewing Rebel primary sources. In particular, the Southern religious pressed heaped derogatory language on Northerners. In the Southern mind, restoration of the Union was not a Northern war aim in and of itself; this purported strategic goal covered a desire by Northerners to rape, pillage, burn and promote miscegenation throughout the South.

By 1864, Southern popular literature advanced the idea that 'the North was trying to erase Southern civilization and Southern manhood' from Dixie states Phillips. (p. 73)
He quotes lyrics of Southern popular music to make the point. Threats to "women and property, including slaves, pervades Confederate verses and soldiers' writings." (p. 76) Before, during and after the war, Southern culture retested on patriarchy, female submission, land ownership and racial superiority. In Confederate minds, to lose the war was to doom Southern culture of political slavery and personal subjugation. When the perceived barbarians conquered the pastoral homeland of Dixie, Confederates like former-Virginia governor Wise faced an desolate future. The effort to reconstruct the Union was challenged by not the memory of a Brothers' War but actual hatred of the conqueror by the conquered.

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