Before the shooting started.

In the Presence of Mine Enemies

War in the Heart of America, 1859-63

Edward L. Ayres

W. W. Norton, $27.95, 480 pp.

A few years ago I spent an afternoon reading the correspondence of Arthur Schlesinger Jr., winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1945 for his brilliant The Age of Jackson. Schlesinger in the late 1940s was a young man on the make, newly ensconced in a position at Harvard. His letters conveyed terrific wit and energy, interspersed with invitations to dinners at the Century Club in New York, and reports of meetings with government officials and friends in Washington, D.C. (Only later, as court historian for his friends, the Kennedys, in whose Boston presidential library the letters are now collected, would Schlesinger's easy access to the corridors of power become a professional liability.)

One clutch of letters from 1949 was intriguing. There some of his friends, also ambitious young historians, congratulated Schlesinger on a recently published essay on the causes of the Civil War. The essay launched a searing attack on the "sentimentalism" of an older generation of Civil War historians, scholars who regretted the war as a "repressible conflict" caused by "blundering" politicians. This tenderhearted concern for peace--and widespread evasion of the centrality of slavery to Southern society--no longer swayed Schlesinger or his admirers. "The unhappy fact," proven by the American experience during World War II, Schlesinger explained, "is that man occasionally works himself into a logjam; and that logjam must be burst by violence." "Sentimental theories about the needlessness of the Civil War," Schlesinger also warned, in a reference to the just dawning cold war, must not lull Americans into the view that "our own struggles against evil [are] equally needless."

Half a century later Schlesinger's interpretation endures, among scholars if not battlefield reenactors donning Confederate gray. The aim of Edward Ayer's Bancroft Prize-winning study, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, is to nudge this familiar, even comforting, narrative off its moorings. The strategy is simple: Ayres and a team of scholars based at the University of Virginia have compiled an archive of diaries, census data, newspapers, and letters from the residents of two Shenandoah Valley counties, Augusta County in Virginia and Franklin County in Pennsylvania (most of this material is available and searchable at a superb Web site, http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu).

By comparing daily life in the two counties from 1859 to 1863, Ayres hopes to disrupt the inevitability that still marks Civil War narratives, the sense that the slaughter of more than six hundred thousand American men served noble goals of liberty and national unity. Where contemporary scholars like Princeton's James MacPherson or filmmakers like Ken Burns evoke a long march toward freedom, Ayres stresses contingency. Where most scholars focus on differences between North and South, he emphasizes similarities. As late as 1859, Ayres notes, whites from Virginia and Pennsylvania read the same Bible, worshiped in the same churches, honored the same flag, and parsed the same Constitution. They also conveyed the same sense of racial superiority. When Frederick Douglass spoke in Pennsylvania's Franklin County, for example, one newspaper editor worried that "if slavery was to be rooted out, and the blacks would remain among the whites, we honestly believe a war of extermination would soon be the result." When John Brown launched his doomed raid on Harper's Ferry, Pennsylvania Republicans and Virginia Democrats both dismissed him as a madman.

How, then, did the shooting start? Ayres emphasizes a remarkable and unpredictable shift of mood in the spring of 1861. In Augusta County, Virginia, for example, parties dedicated to union, not secession, dominated the 1860 elections. "To break up the government under these circumstances," one leading Virginian explained, "simply because Lincoln should be elected, would be adding madness to treason." Only Lincoln's call for federal troops and the squabble over Fort Sumter turned white Virginians from "civic-minded leaders" into "vengeful soldiers." In the North, similarly, only perceived Southern aggression in the spring of 1861 induced white Democrats and Republicans to join forces against a South now seen as eager to extend slavery across the nation.

As the residents of Augusta and Franklin counties plunge into the maelstrom of war, so too does the reader, propelled by Ayres's elegant prose and shrewd marshaling of sources. The only jarring notes come in sections printed in italics, where Ayres provides a heavy-handed overview of distant events--"like voice-overs in a film"--mistakenly losing confidence in his ability to carry the story of the war through his fascinating local protagonists.

Unlike the historians excoriated by Schlesinger, Ayres repeatedly identifies slavery--"the great engine of power and suffering that drove the war"--as the distinguishing feature of Southern life. At the same time, he dismisses any notion that the war, in its opening stages, was fought by Northerners to eliminate slavery. Indeed, the Southern determination to defend slavery seems to Ayres more significant than a handful of Northern abolitionists, most living far away from Franklin County, Pennsylvania. Ayres seems to believe that an unintentional benefit--the elimination of slavery--should not serve as glib justification for a war begun for other purposes. (One wishes he had addressed this interesting philosophical and historical question more directly.) More striking to Ayres than idealism, on either side, is the "tribal belonging" created by war on all sides, the ability of nationalist slogans to elevate "the worst human emotions" and to "call them virtues."

In this, In the Presence of Mine Enemies is a tract for our times, if not for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The bloody nationalism so characteristic of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, on display at Antietam, but also the Somme and Normandy, caused less anguish for Ayres's historian predecessors. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had served in France during World War II, and like most veterans of that war thought Nazi defeat justified horrific means. (And later, when rallying liberals against the Soviet threat, Schlesinger would be much influenced by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, another critic of "sentimentality.") By contrast, like many contemporary European intellectuals, Ayres wants readers to meditate on the cost of war before celebrating its accomplishments, to recollect the slaughter of the innocent along with the vanquishing of the evil. (And even to put a human face on slaveholders struggling to reconcile inherited institutions with new sensibilities.) The next phase of the story, a planned sequel that will trace the residents of Franklin and Augusta counties through the war, the end of slavery, and Reconstruction, will test Ayres's ability to meet this narrative and moral goal. Mean-while, the achievement of In the Presence of Mine Enemies is to make us eager to find out if he can do it.

John T. McGreevy is the author of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (Norton) and chair of the history department at the University of Notre Dame.