No open-access location is known for this record yet.
No open-access location is known for this record yet.
In this book, Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff promise a “story [that] focuses on returning to visibility as many people as possible” (p. xi). In some respects they succeed. Americans of every stripe—immigrants, slaves, Jayhawkers, planters, abolitionists, soldiers, Native Americans, factory women, and many more—invigorate this social history of the Civil War era. Nelson and Sheriff deliver a concise text well suited for undergraduate courses. They do not, however, tell a story. Instead of building a narrative, the authors divide their book into five thematic sections. Part one's coverage of the war's origins and part five's discussion of its outcomes offer few fresh insights. Throughout, the authors' specialty—transportation history—offers a prevailing theme, and they stress the importance of railroads and the superior efficiency and organization of the North. Part two examines why belligerents intensified the war in 1862 instead of recoiling with horror. Nelson and Sheriff show how two Confederate laws, the Conscription Act and the Partisan Ranger Act, stoked guerrilla warfare across the South. Donning blue or gray, partisans and draft dodgers tested civilians' loyalties with trickery and terror. Families could never tell whether armed men at the door fought for the Union, the Confederacy, or themselves. According to the authors, Union soldiers who hunted guerrillas “became crueler, brutalized by the constant watchfulness and fear that accompanied their attempts to capture men who ignored the rules of warfare” (p. 100). If Confederate guerrillas ignored the rules, Union troops rewrote them. Their stern handling of southern civilians and property preceded Francis Lieber's Code and William Tecumseh Sherman's March to the Sea. This aggressive warfare, begun in the ranks, foreshadowed emancipating and enlisting the enemy's slaves. The theme of northern efficiency propels an intriguing chapter that studies how each side combated death. The authors try to explain why Johnny Reb had a one-in-four chance of dying while Billy Yank faced odds of one in six. Nelson and Sheriff contend that the Union provided better care for the sick and wounded “by drawing on its prewar resources, both material and ideological” (p. 106). Northern reformism spawned aid societies like the United States Sanitary Commission; however, “no similar national organizations existed in the Confederacy,” because of southern localism and aversion to reform (p. 114).
Loading…
Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.