All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South.

All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South. By Stephen W. Berry II. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 286. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-19-517628-6; cloth, $26.00, ISBN 0-19-514567-4.)

Stephen W. Berry's ambitious book explores the "emotional" history of white male southerners in the Civil War era (p. 11). Although there exists no shortage of recent books on "why men fought," Berry contends that "the central fact that brought them to the field in the first place--the fact that they were men--has not been given due scrutiny" (pp. 9, 10). Manhood--its meanings, its demands, and its costs--forms the core of Berry's provocative, often moving, but only partly persuasive book.

Berry's introduction clearly establishes the central objectives of his study. Lamenting that the "revolution in women's studies has not been matched by a comparable advance in our understanding of men as men," Berry sets out to probe the "general tenor of men's inner, emotional lives" (pp. 10, 11). For Berry, this "inner experience of masculinity" consisted of a desire, in James Henry Hammond's words, for "love in life, immortality after death" (p. 12). Love and ambition, Berry maintains, constituted the "only two features" of the male "project" (p. 12). Neither ambition nor love existed outside of the other; a man's ambition only made sense if a woman's love confirmed it, and only ambition merited a woman's love.

Berry develops his argument in three sections, each of which contains two chapters. Although not a conventional narrative, the book proceeds chronologically. Part 1, "Men and Ambition," looks at southern men in the 1850s and the emotional dilemmas they faced as captives to a masculinity that demanded that they "live up to increasingly romantic ideals of civilizing manhood when the expansive work of winning the empire was giving way to the more mundane work of administering it" (p. 35). Part 2, "Men and Women," examines the critical role that women played in men's efforts to fulfill their complementary projects of worldly ambition and intimate love. Men's understanding of themselves led them to see women and the femininity they expressed as the end of men's labors, the epitome of the male project. As Berry smartly puts it, "men were to build a Civilization; women were to embody it" (p. 113). The final section, "Men and War," demonstrates how, for many men, the war, "Unlike their prewar professions ... combined with a felicity too perfect to be possible the twin drives of the masculine enterprise" (p. 171). Although Berry acknowledges that "men joined the army to fight for cause, comrades, and country," he insists that "privately they were fighting, as they always had, for women and for eminence, and they confused the two as liberally as ever" (p. 171). For many soldiers, their women became their cause and their country. Berry repeatedly downplays political and ideological motives; for him, "the meaning of [soldiers'] sacrifice, their emotional experience of it, was, like all men's sacrifices, only possible because a woman bore it witness" (p. 192). In Berry's analysis, the Confederate war becomes a doomed effort by men attempting "finally to measure up to their own standards for themselves" (p. 9). This hideous "test of manhood" crushed men rather than fulfilled them (p. 9). Berry ends his book suggesting that the war destroyed not only slavery and the Confederate nation but also the formidable altar of southern manhood that consumed so many men.

All That Makes a Man raises important questions, and Berry's careful mining of personal papers yields many insights. He writes with eloquence and power, especially in his wonderfully evocative portraits of elite southern white males grappling with the demands of manhood. But Berry's is a book wherein the parts are greater than the whole. He acknowledges that "The confusing mess men made of ambition and love was, of course, distinctly personal and should not be overgeneralized" (p. 47). Yet, like most of us, he seeks to generalize broadly from his elite subjects' personal experiences; one wonders, for instance, to what extent common soldiers struggled in the same way as gentlemen with the demands of ambition. And one need not reject his claims about the motive force of manhood to question strongly his subordination of ideology, slavery, religion, and politics. Nonetheless, Berry has forcefully and intelligently advanced the case for "emotional" history.

Hamilton College 

DOUGLAS AMBROSE