Banners South: A Northern Community at War.

Banners South: A Northern Community at War. By Edmund J. Raus Jr. Civil War in the North. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, c. 2005. Pp. xiv, 333. $39.00, ISBN 978-0-87338-842-9.)

Edmund J. Raus Jr. served as a historian at the Manassas, Gettysburg, and Fredericksburg-Spotsylvania National Battlefield Parks. Family stories and Civil War letters from a relative, George Washington Edgcomb, inspired the author to write this book. Banners South: A Northern Community at War is a regimental history of the Twenty-third Volunteer Regiment from Cortland County, New York. It follows the regiment's experiences during its two years (1861-1863) of service in the Virginia theater. Raus, however, seeks to provide a broader examination than traditional regimental histories offer. Through the use of the soldiers' correspondence with home and letters to the editors of local newspapers, Raus portrays some of the Cortland soldiers' attitudes and sentiments about the war and toward southerners. He hopes to give a sense of the soldiers' thoughts as well as a general profile of the Cortland men, and he succeeds. One of Raus's objectives is to illustrate that in general the Cortland soldiers "retained their strong commitment to the Union cause and the defense of constitutional freedoms even after they had become disillusioned with war and military service" (p. 263n32).

The book's greatest strength is its use of soldiers' letters, reminiscences, journals, and histories, albeit based on relatively few sources, to paint a rich portrait of how the New York volunteers viewed southern white citizens, soldiers, and enslaved African Americans. The author supplies another valuable insight in his discussion of the tremendous environmental havoc wrought by normal nineteenth-century military operations, including the building of camps and defensive works.

The subtitle of the volume, A Northern Community at War, is misleading, giving the impression that the work is a home-front study. Thus this reader was disappointed by the paucity of discussion on Cortland County during the war. As already noted, this book is a regimental history--not a study of a northern community at war. The connections that Raus does make between the soldiers and the Cortland community boil down to the soldiers' determination to stay and fight rather then risk marring their reputations at home. At various points Raus endeavors to tie the regimental history to the larger context of the county, state, and Union, but discussions of the Cortland community are confined to a brief history of this rural area, creation of the regiment in 1861, later recruitment efforts, effects of the draft in 1863, and a summing up of the lives of some of the men after they returned home.

Raus sometimes overstates military situations, such as his comment that when Confederate general Joseph Johnston switched to a defensive position at First Bull Run, he "lost the best chance the South would have to bring the North to its knees" (p. 41). However, Banners South is overall a well-written and interesting book that adds to the growing works on the Civil War from the soldier' s perspective.

JEAN RICHARDSON

Buffalo State College