Civil War Stories.

Civil War Stories. By Catherine Clinton. Georgia Southern University, Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Lecture Series, No. 7. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 1998. Pp. xii, 130. Paper, $14.95, ISBN 0-8203-2074-9; cloth, $30.00, ISBN 0-8203-2028-5.)

The death of narrative history has long been predicted, both with glee by those who consider it to be old-fashioned, lacking in intellectual rigor, and hopelessly naive, and with regret by those who consider it to be an honorable, creative, and effective way to examine the past. Many historians--whether academics and other professionals, or other authors writing books all too often dismissed as "popular" studies--remain firmly committed to the narrative, however, and also to the idea that it is possible to write good history without forsaking literary concerns. As George Garrett observed of recent Civil War scholarship, "it is no accident ... that narrative history invites multiple points of view and diverse interpretation" (George Garrett, "Such Scenes I Never Dreamed Of: Recent Books About the Civil War," Sewanee Review, CVIII [Spring 2000], p. 262). Catherine Clinton's Civil War Stories is an excellent illustration of Garrett's point.

Clinton's slim but engaging volume collects three lectures she presented in 1996 for the seventh annual Jack N. and Addie Averitt Lecture Series at Georgia Southern University. She focuses on the human dimensions and costs of the Civil War and its aftermath in order to chronicle the experiences of women and children caught up not only in the war itself but caught up as well by its causes, results, and larger meanings. "Sister against Sister: Fanny Kemble's Divided Daughters" may be the most interesting of the three. It introduces readers to Sarah and Fan Butler, sisters born three years apart who were forced to choose between their parents--and their parents' allegiances, to North or South as well as to slavery and the southern way of life--before, during, and after the war.

Kemble is familiar to southern historians primarily as the author of Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation in 1838-1839 (repr., New York, 1961). That scathing portrait of the peculiar institution was written in 1838-39 but was not published until it appeared in England in 1863. Kemble's stormy marriage to Pierce Butler was crippled by his many affairs, by a long string of financial disasters, and by his attempts to control his headstrong wife, particularly to silence Fanny's outspoken hatred of slavery. When the marriage finally ended in a bitter divorce in 1849, daughters Sarah and Fan sided with their father and became estranged from Kemble. Sarah shared her mother's disgust for slavery, however, became a Union sympathizer, and shortly before the war married Philadelphia physician Owen Wister. Fan, on the other hand, became a staunch Confederate. The sisters disagreed sharply on the merits of their mother's Journal and whether it should have been published. Sarah and Fan were reconciled somewhat at the war's end, when their father was ruined and soon to die, but they could never really repair their relationship with their mother. The story of the Butlers shows that the Civil War was at its core a human tragedy. As Clinton writes: "Those families who survived the American Civil War did not remain unscathed. Evidence indicates their children, and their children's children, found peace alone could not heal all the wounds" (pp. 38-39).

The other two essays also have much to recommend them. Both "Orphans of the Storm: Steering a New Course" and "Legendary Valor: South Carolina Women Reconstruct the War" raise questions about the ways in which historians have long viewed the Civil War and its aftermath, and also suggest several intriguing new avenues for historians to explore. Civil War Stories makes a worthwhile if rather modest contribution to the literature: written with multiple points of view and diverse interpretations, the book demonstrates anew the rewards of narrative history based on imaginative research.

J. TRACY POWER

South Carolina Department of Archives and History