Guarding Greensboro: a Confederate Company in the Making of a Southern Community.

By G. Ward Hubbs. (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, c. 2003. Pp. xvi, 325. $34.95, ISBN 0-8203-2505-8.)

Community studies and military unit histories have long been mainstays of American historiography. In Guarding Greensboro, G. Ward Hubbs draws from both genres to argue that the Greensboro Guards, more than part-time militiamen who defended their Alabama community against rebellious slaves and invading Yankees, were in fact the driving force that transformed a disparate collection of self-interested antebellum individualists into a postwar community of unified citizens.

From its incorporation in 1823, Greensboro, Alabama, was a town on the make. Men came to cash in on the Black Belt's most fertile land and its ability to bring forth a white sea of cotton. Pursuit of profit initially left little time or inclination for unrewarding ventures like community building, until some locals realized that long-term fortune would not come easily to those isolated by self-interest. Town residents therefore organized a range of social institutions dedicated to such concerns as temperance, town boosterism, and educational reform. But such "Voluntary associations," Hubbs writes, "were more tools for realizing selfish purposes than products of selfless concern" (p. 48). One organization, a volunteer militia company called the Greensboro Guards, had the responsibility of community safety, specifically of being vigilant for signs of a slave uprising.

Heightened sectional tensions in the 1850s moved Greensborians to seek unanimity against the northern threat. Rallying behind the Guards, town residents "meld[ed] themselves into a single community based on mutual dependence and constancy" (p. 83). When war came, the Guards went as members of the Fifth Alabama Infantry Regiment, participating in engagements from the Seven Pines in 1862 to the trenches of Petersburg in 1864 and 1865. Those who survived returned as "war-weary veterans," not the "proud individualists intent on advancing their personal self-interests" who had volunteered four years and a lifetime ago (p. 201). Experiencing the trials of war through the Guards, Greensboro was transformed into a "community based not on self-interest and contract but on loyalty" (p. 6).

The war had forever changed the community, but was the impetus of change the Greensboro Guards or the war experience as a whole? Hubbs's suggestion that the Guards were the primary architects of the town's postwar unity is plausible, if not likely, but additional evidence that differentiates the Guards' significance from the influence of the war experience would make for a more convincing argument. As Hubbs points out, after the war residents "formed a closed community based on the exclusive bonds that the war had forged" (p. xii). Nevertheless, his findings hint at the inherent community-building power of the militia. The Guards. Hubbs observes, imparted "ideals of manliness, patriotism, camaraderie, and local pride. They formed the town's only institution capable of uniting everyone, because they had responsibility for protecting everyone. And by inviting all men to join, the Guards established a standard for inclusion in the community that cut across the financial, religious, or ideological differences ..." (pp. 49-50). Pursuing this path further, Hubbs might have explicitly shown what his argument implies, that the Guards were at the center of Greensboro's social evolution, Civil War or not. This is a fine study of a southern community, its citizen-soldiers, and how going to war forever changed both.

Southeastern Louisiana University 

HARRY S. LAVER