Bright and Gloomy Days: the Civil War Correspondence of Captain Charles Frederic Bahnson, a Moravian Confederate.

Bright and Gloomy Days: The Civil War Correspondence of Captain Charles Frederic Bahnson, a Moravian Confederate. Edited by Sarah Bahnson Chapman. Voices of the Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Pp. lxii, 250. $37.00, ISBN 1-57233-226-3.)

Shortly after the fall of Richmond, Virginia, and three days before Appomattox, Confederate captain Charles Frederic Bahnson wrote to his father, a Moravian bishop in Salem, North Carolina, "Does it not appear to you ... that a good and all-wise God ... will make us come out successfully ... giving us freedom and independence ..." (p. 172). In spite of studying the Civil War with Bell Irvin Wiley, being a Moravian for thirty-five years, and carefully perusing all the letters in this collection, this reviewer is at a loss to understand that quotation. It does, however, reveal the basic character and determined outlook of Captain Bahnson.

This book starts with a brief biography of Bahnson, who was born in 1840 and was a jeweler in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when the war started. He came home to North Carolina as soon as possible and served throughout the conflict as an officer in the Confederate quartermaster corps. Following the biographical sketch is a lengthy and very useful introduction explaining the transformation of Salem from a German-speaking communal theocracy into a quintessential secularized southern commercial town. As early as the mid-eighteenth century, church fathers justified slavery; by 1860 almost all restrictions on the holding of slaves by individual church members had been removed. The introduction also has a good, clear discussion of why the Moravians appear to be pacifists in the American Revolution but avid Confederates in the Civil War. Both the acceptance of slavery and the demise of pacifism are explained as adaptations by the church to external society.

Almost all the letters presented are from Captain Bahnson to his father, although a few responses from his family are included. The period from April 1860 to September 1865 is covered, with considerable emphasis on 1864; that year includes lengthy segments of a diary he substituted for letters. Bahnson served in the Shenandoah Valley, the Gettysburg campaign, and later near Fort Fisher. His final service was during the movements of the army before the surrender to William Tecumseh Sherman at Bentonville, North Carolina.

The letters reveal that Bahnson was an extremely avid Confederate, probably as a result of his upbringing in the Salem environment described earlier-to him Lincoln was the "'Illinois Baboon'" (p. 140). The letters show very little about military operations but a great deal about Confederate logistics and Salem Moravians. Students of those subjects will need to examine this work.

The background research by editor Sarah Bahnson Chapman is thorough; she even identifies most of the soldiers mentioned by name and carefully points out the numerous military units in which they served. There are occasional lapses into antiquarianism and genealogy, but, in spite of the fact that Chapman is the great-granddaughter of her subject, she has avoided the cardinal sin of historians, filiopietism.

Wake Forest University

RICHARD L. ZUBER