In this five-part review of Civil War Era literature at the Virginia History Blog, we will take a look at period topics in politics, war commands, home front, economy, slavery and memory. Turning to the home front, we begin with titles related to the state as a whole during the conflict, “Virginia at War, 1861” and “Virginia at War, 1862”. We will review the rest of the series in a later blog.
The thought and ideology of Virginians is explored in “Why Confederates Fought”, “The Divided Family” and “Confederate Daughters”. Local histories include “Beleaguered Winchester”, “Civil War Petersburg”, and”Contested Borderland” (Virginia/Kentucky).
Current releases reviewed in Spring 2018 journals can be found at Civil War Era – Spring 2018.
Virginia at War, 1861
William C. Davis and James I Robertson wrote Virginia At War, 1861 in 2005. Available from the University Press of Kentucky, on Kindle and online new and used.
This first of a series synthesizes the local studies of Virginia during the Civil War. The conflict began for Virginians not at Manassas, but almost immediately, initiated during the Secession Convention by unauthorized Fire-eaters. Mobilization for the secessionist cause was widespread in the east, motivated by thoughtful intention as well as by emotion, yet there were apparent inadequacies among volunteers and political officers early on. The Confederate government’s decision to relocate its capital to Richmond had important strategic and local consequences for Virginia, the Confederacy’s largest state in population, agriculture and industry.
As events developed, the loyalties among Virginians in the Valley became mixed. Westerner industrial interests coincided with an insistence on fully representative government with equal white male suffrage, leading to western Virginia’s loyal government, and African Americans, both slave and the South’s largest population of freedmen, sought not only to survive but to better their condition.
To buy “Virginia at War, 1861” on Amazon, click here.
Virginia at War, 1862
James I. Robertson and William C. Davis edited Virginia at War, 1862 in 2007. Available from the University Press of Kentucky, on Kindle and online new and used.
This volume continues a narrative of Virginia beyond the battlefield in the civilian experience and the cultural milieu. Essays investigate daily life, industrial capacity and management, the army’s supply system and the hospitals. The book again concludes with a valuable selection from Judith Brockenbrough McGuire’s “Diary of a Southern Refugee”.
In the year 1862, Virginians came to the realization that the conflict would bring unprecedented blood-letting. Two thousand cobblers were detailed to government manufacture of shoes. The Second Confederate Conscription Act limited profiteering to 75%, expanded the draft upwards from 35 years of age to 45, and allowed exemptions for owners of 20 or more slaves. Unlike Kentucky, there was little looting in Virginia, yet General John Pope’s General Order No. 11 allowed for shooting civilians and confiscation of their property for violating an oath of allegiance.
To buy “Virginia at War, 1862” on Amazon, click here.
Why Confederates Fought
Aaron Sheehan-Dean wrote Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia in 2007. Available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used. It is one of the TVH top 300 titles for surveying Virginia History.
The Confederate Virginia among whites was remarkably mobilized for wartime service, perhaps 89 percent of eligible men, and after 1862 it suffered relatively low levels of desertion until the final months of 1865. Commitment to the Cause was manifested in a “diehardism”, so there was a distinction between initial and sustaining motivation. In Virginia the “War of Northern Aggression” was lost because the weight of Union arms destroyed it, as Robert E. Lee had explained in his fair well to the Army of Northern Virginia.
Throughout there was a racial preoccupation which saw military service as a means of protecting families, and that was extended during Reconstruction in a first massive resistance to the first race-based civil rights movement. The barely demobilized Confederate Army in Virginia continued to march together in politics as a continuation of war by other means to preserve Virginia as a white man’s country. In a way it was an obverse phenomenon of the “Bloody Shirt” and “Vote as You Shot” in the North.
To buy “Why Confederates Fought” on Amazon, click here.
The Divided Family
Amy Murrell Taylor wrote The Divided Family in Civil War America in 2005. Available from the University of North Carolina Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
This book describes the impact of the Civil War on families, focusing on the border states including Virginia and West Virginia, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Delaware and Maryland. It makes a contribution to gender and family history, narrating the divides between Union fathers and Rebel sons, between spouses and fiancés, and among siblings and cousins.
Seen as “the foundation of social and national stability”, popular Victorian literature did not admit to these family crises of loyalty prior to the conflict, and stories of intersectional romance following it contrasted with the realities of post war attempts at reconciliation. Family loyalties in both white and black families were torn.
To buy “The Divided Family” on Amazon, click here.
Confederate Daughters
Victoria E. Ott wrote Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age during the Civil War in 2008. Available from the Southern Illinois University Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
This is a generational approach to the Civil War era focusing on daughters of slaveholding secessionist families from antebellum times, through the war years and into Reconstruction. It serves as a complement to Peter Carmichael’s “Last Generation” on young white men of the time. Young elite women who came of age during the conflict remained dedicated to received gender ideals, class privilege and racial hierarchy.
They supported the Confederate cause to preserve their expected futures as wives and mothers ruling a slave society. In the post-war South, they used their war volunteer and paid employment, material and familial sacrifices, and support of Confederate veterans to defend the rebellion as politically and morally justified in a Lost Cause ideology perpetuated in the “Confederate belle image” found in their writing and recollections.
To buy “Confederate Daughters” on Amazon, click here.
Beleaguered Winchester
Richard R. Duncan wrote Beleaguered Winchester: A Virginia Community at War, 1861-1865 in 2007. Available from the LSU Press, on Kindle and online new and used. It is one of the TVH top 300 titles for surveying Virginia History.
Beginning in March 1862, Winchester may have changed hands between Federals and Confederates seventy-two times, more than once on some days. By the end of the Civil War, it was impoverished and badly battered. Both armies imposed martial law and confiscated property and supplies.
With each occupation came additional physical destruction, food shortages, economic inflation, sickness and death. The alternating occupations forced an uncertainly that townspeople reacted to by pragmatically befriending one another whether rebel or Unionist. Duncan’s narrative includes slavery and slaves, guerrillas and countryside.
To buy “Beleaguered Winchester” on Amazon, click here.
Civil War Petersburg
William Greene wrote Civil War Petersburg: Confederate City in the Crucible of War in 2006. Available from the University of Virginia Press, on Kindle and online new and used.
The setting for this study of the home front Civil War is Petersburg, Virginia’s second largest industrial city, important to southern Virginia and upper North Carolina. Unlike Richmond, Petersburg voted for Constitutional Unionist Bell, and remained Unionist in the Richmond Secessionist Convention until the firing on Fort Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers. Petersburg became a major military depot.
Petersburg’s 18,000 population was evenly divided between whites and blacks, with 3,000 free African Americans. Wartime rail traffic brought prosperity until after Lee’s 1863 defeat at Gettysburg, when the city found it increasingly difficult to tax revenues and police itself. The climax of the war was in Grant’s nine-month siege ending April 3, 1865.
To buy “Civil War Petersburg” on Amazon, click here.
Contested Borderland
Brian D. McKnight wrote Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia in 2006. Available from the University Press of Kentucky, on Kindle and online new and used.
This book is both military and social history. At the Central Appalachian Divide through the Cumberland and Pound Gaps, both Union and Confederate armies saw the remote borderland between Kentucky and Virginia as strategic, serviceable roads and rail lines connecting to the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad all accessed substantial resources of livestock, timber, iron and salt. Southwestern Virginia tilted Secessionist, southeastern Kentucky sympathies leaned Unionist.
Raiding columns of Federal and Rebel troops brought destruction, then guerrillas, bushwackers and family feuds perpetrated irregular depredations. After the conflict, many citizens complained of lawlessness and violence, with only occasional and limited assertion of law and order from civil officials.
To buy “Contested Borderland” on Amazon, click here.
John O. Peters wrote Blandford Cemetery: Death and Life at Petersburg, Virginia in 2005. Available from the Historic Blandford Cemetery Foundation, on Kindle and online new and used. To buy “Blandford Cemetery” on Amazon, click here.
Additional history related to Virginia during this time period can be found at the Table of Contents of TheVirginiaHistorian website on the page for Antebellum, Civil War and Reconstruction, 1820-1883. Titles are organized by topics, political and economic Virginia, social history, gender, religious, African American, and Wars in Virginia 1750-1824.
General surveys of Virginia History can be found at Virginia History Surveys. Other Virginia history divided by topics and time periods can be found at the webpage Books and Reviews.
Note: Insights for these reviews include those available from articles in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of Southern History and the Journal of American History.