Cultures in Conflict: The American Civil War. (Book Reviews).

Cultures in Conflict: The American Civil War. By Steven E. Woodworth. The Greenwood Press Cultures in Conflict Series. (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, c. 2000. Pp. xx, 220. $45.00, ISBN 0-313-30651-6.)

In Cultures in Conflict: The American Civil War, Steven E. Woodworth has assembled an assortment of soldier and civilian accounts into an accessible reader suitable for introductory Civil War classes. Woodworth's chosen voices speak on a variety of issues, ranging from why men enlisted, wartime demands on the home front, religion in the ranks, and how veterans dealt with the brutality of conflict. Many of these are from manuscript sources that have never been published before. While these documents will not seem extraordinary to many scholars, they provide a useful starting point for beginning students of the war. But Woodworth does not let these primary sources stand alone. He carefully places them within a broad interpretive framework, one that not surprisingly stresses cultural differences as causing and sustaining the war. "The swirling maelstrom of political conflict," the author asserts, "... is often merely the surface manifestation of deep cultural currents" (p. xi).

Woodworth should be commended for seeing culture as an outgrowth of specific material and political conditions of society, not as an autonomous creation that has a life of its own, or something that is merely passed along like an old book. He begins by explaining how slave labor and free labor created competing sets of values that twisted sectional perceptions. Each side could not help but look at the other with fear and suspicion. Woodworth's discussion of why southerners saw themselves as the true defenders of Christianity, fighting against people whom they considered morally bankrupt, is especially strong. Nowhere does Woodworth exaggerate his characterizations of the two sides to try to prove his argument about cultural differences. He acknowledges that the South shared the northern enthusiasm for progress: While also desiring railroads, scientific advancements, and other internal improvements, the region hoped to obtain these via an alternative route--one that did not lead to "Black Republicanism" and abolitionism, as had happened in the North.

Woodworth loses sight, however, of the interplay between culture and politics. He does not adequately explain how questions of power gave meaning to cultural and ideological debates, something worth fighting and dying for. Two distinct ruling classes emerged because of the regions' different labor systems, a crucial point that gets lost in Woodworth's overview of the political crisis of the 1850s. Here his interpretation breaks down somewhat, and he does not offer a convincing argument that the Civil War was caused primarily by the "explosive significance" of cultural conflict (p. 24). (The author might have profited from other works on the construction of American national identity, such as David M. Potter's People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character [Chicago, 1954].) Nonetheless, with his judicious selection of primary sources, Woodworth accomplishes his main goal of conveying human experiences of the war. This book should appeal to a wide audience and will find a home in many undergraduate classrooms.

PETER S. CARMICHAEL
University of North Carolina at Greensboro