A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction.

A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction. Edited by Lacy K. Ford. Blackwell Companions to American History. (Malden, Mass., and other cities: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Pp. x, 518. $104.95, ISBN 0-631-21551-4.)

A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction, edited by Lacy K. Ford, is a recent and welcome addition to the Blackwell Companions to American History series. This series, one among several by Blackwell Publishing on British, European, and world history, is intended to provide authoritative overviews of the scholarship and to identify recent trends and possibilities for further research in the field of U.S. history. The choice of Lacy K. Ford to edit this volume was an excellent one. Ford has assembled a stellar team of scholars, mostly well established but some up-and-coming, who have written a collection of historiographical essays on the Civil War era, broadly defined. Most of the essays are certain to become essential reading for specialists but are also accessible to nonspecialists who need a succinct primer on the scholarship on a given topic.

Following an introduction by Ford, the volume is divided into three parts. Part 1, "Sectional Conflict and the Coming of the Civil War," examines the causes of the war in ten essays that address such topics as slavery in the early Republic, the market revolution, the slave community, antebellum southern society, abolitionism, women (North and South), antebellum politics, and the secession crisis. Part 2, "The Civil War and American Society," looks at the war itself and comprises five essays that examine the scholarship on Abraham Lincoln, the military campaigns (Union and Confederate), the Confederate home front, and emancipation. Part 3, "Reconstruction and the New Nation," investigates the war's consequences and consists of eight essays that explore such issues as defining Reconstruction, politics, economics and labor, women (again, North and South), the legacy of Confederate defeat, and Reconstruction as a national experience.

Ford's introductory essay, "A Civil War in the Age of Capital," cogently foregrounds the main themes connecting the various essays that follow. The military conflict that engulfed the nation between 1861 and 1865 is best understood, for Ford, within the broader context of the era of disunion and reunion, which lasted from the mid-1840s through the late 1870s. Of equal significance, this extended framework corresponded to, and was inextricably entwined with, the period of European and Western history that Eric J. Hobsbawm labeled, in the title to one of his many classic works, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (New York, 1975). The present volume is organized around what Ford admits are the "traditional" themes of causation, war, and consequences, but the essays also incorporate, and indeed some are entirely the result of, new topics or modes of analysis since the emergence of the so-called new social history of the 1960s (p. 1). Indeed, the study of the Civil War era is no longer dominated by political and military history but now encompasses social, economic, and even cultural history. Ford provides an overview of the essays that is itself a masterful survey of the historical literature on U.S. society during the period of disunion and reunion. He observes that the final outcome of the war and its aftermath was satisfactory to neither the North nor the South, and that both sides had sought to defend, each in its own way, the antebellum world of Jeffersonian producers that had been destroyed by the market revolution and by industrial and finance capitalism. Ford concludes with David M. Potter's famous observation that the Civil War linked nationalism to liberalism, but he also suggests that the nation has yet to confront adequately the implications of that development.

This volume overall is first-rate, but some of the essays are better than others at providing an overview of the scholarship on the various topics. Essentially, there is an inherent tension among the essays between history and historiography. Some essays tend to deal more with the historical record, interweaving historiography when necessary or appropriate, while most of the essays are structured around historiography. Among the former group are the essays by Douglas R. Egerton on slavery and the early Republic, James B. Stewart on abolitionism and reform, and Heather Richardson on Reconstruction and the nation. Included as well in this group is Steven Woodworth's essay on the Confederate military campaigns, which provides a very effective historical overview but largely ignores the debates among historians on such vital issues as the generalship of Robert E. Lee, the efficacy (or lack thereof) of the Confederate command structure, and, indeed, why the South lost. Among the historiographically oriented essays, those of Larry Hudson on the slave community, Joseph P. Reidy on emancipation, and Gaines M. Foster on the legacy of Confederate defeat provide overviews of the scholarship while also advancing thought-provoking interpretations or suggesting new avenues of research. Perhaps the most theoretically sophisticated essay is that of Peter A. Coclanis and Scott Marler on the economics of Reconstruction, which is effectively complemented by R. Tracy McKenzie's on southern labor during Reconstruction.

A second important issue to which this volume gives rise concerns balance. Even readers who completely endorse (as this one does) an approach to the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction that places this period within the broader context of nineteenth-century history and that devotes considerable attention to the war's causes may detect a certain asymmetry among the three parts of the work. One need not be a military historian to suspect--considering that only five out of twenty-three essays deal with the war--that perhaps the war has been given short shrift. For instance, while two separate essays examine the military campaigns, Union and Confederate respectively, there is an essay on the Confederate home front but no corresponding essay on the Union home front, despite an increasing body of scholarship on that topic. One could also argue that Kevin Gannon's fine essay, "Saving the Union," which devotes considerable attention to the vast literature on Abraham Lincoln, could have been matched with a corresponding essay considering Confederate president Jefferson Davis as commander-in-chief and the Confederate high command. Conversely, the generous attention devoted to the war's causes results in a certain redundancy. Michele Gillespie's essay on women in the Old South is undoubtedly one of the best in the book, but separate essays on northern and southern women in both parts one and three inevitably leads to some repetitiveness. Likewise, the last three essays in part one--Michael Morrison's on the relationship between slavery and sectionalism, John Ashworth's on the formation and ideology of the Republican Party before the war, and Daniel Crofts's on the secession crisis of 1860-1861--are all excellent in their own right, but they also cover much of the same ground. (Morrison and Ashcroft even reproduce the same block quotation from a speech by Lincoln.) Perhaps a little less attention could have been devoted to the causes of the war and a little more to the war itself.

One hesitates to critique the proverbial book that wasn't written. But perhaps this question of balance results not from attributing greater importance to the causes of a historical event than to the event itself but rather from social history intruding upon the terrain of traditional political and military history. If the latter be the case, then a more comprehensive understanding of this period, one that incorporates persons and issues previously excluded from the traditional historical narrative, is not an unwelcome result. Because of its broad scope, this volume belongs on the "must-read" shelf of scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as of those of nineteenth-century southern and U.S. history.

JOHN C. RODRIGUE

Louisiana State University