Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives.

Edited by Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. [xxiv], 292. $27.50, ISBN 0-19-511509-0.)

Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon, the editors of this excellent book, set as their goal to "understand more deeply 'exactly what' the impact of the Civil War was on personal relationships, family, and marriage in mid-nineteenth-century America" (p. ix). These twelve original essays by a dozen uniquely qualified historians, on the marriages of five Union generals, five Confederate generals, a Union admiral, and the Confederate president, make an impressive beginning.

Bleser aptly describes the marriage of Varina and Jefferson Davis as volatile but notes that during the war the couple was as close as they would ever be in their forty-four years as husband and wife. Unfortunately, Bleser does not draw on the couple's correspondence from 1862 when Varina and the children left Richmond for safety in North Carolina, which reveals a gentle, loving side of Jefferson Davis that is otherwise rarely in evidence. Moreover, his discussion of military affairs in this correspondence suggests that the Confederate president habitually shared confidential information with his wife, supporting Bleser's belief that "Varina, perhaps working with some other close presidential associates, was more involved in the government of the Confederacy than her rumor-spreading detractors imagined" (p. 18), especially during his recurring illnesses.

Robert E. Lee's marriage to Mary Randolph Custis, related here with sly wit by Emory M. Thomas, helped him recapture the social status that his father had squandered. Mary Lee's devotion to her Virginia home made her husband's allegiance to the South in 1861 inevitable. Since she evinced little interest in the world beyond her family, it is surprising that Lee often wrote battle accounts to his wife that were "more vivid and descriptive" than his official reports (p. 47).

There is a common thread in the chapters on Thomas "Stonewall" and Mary Anna Jackson (by Sarah E. Gardner), George E. and LaSalle Pickett (by Lesley J. Gordon), George A. and Elizabeth Custer (by Shirley A. Leckie), and John Charles and Jessie Benton Fremont (by Pamela Herr): in each case these wives became their spouses' publicists. Mary Anna Jackson felt that her husband was too diffident to claim his share of the glory, so after his death in 1863 she took up her pen to secure his place as a hero and in the process made herself part of a legend. In the fifty years following the death of George Pickett, LaSalle gave public lectures and wrote books (and perhaps fabricated correspondence) that transformed her husband's spotted military career into an unvarnished success. Libbie Custer survived her husband by fifty-seven years and produced a series of books that established Custer in "the pantheon of national heroes as a martyr to westward settlement and a model hero for boys" (p. 196), when in fact he was neither. Jessie Benton Fremont championed her husband's career throughout their long marriage, collaborating on vivid reports of his western explorations that made him famous as "the Pathfinder," writing a defense of his ill-fated war command in Missouri, and, after his death, penning a long, never-published paean to her mercurial husband.

It was commonly held that "no man who married during the war was as good a soldier after, as before" (p. 73). In 1863 Richard S. Ewell wed Lizinka Campbell Brown, a wealthy Tennessee widow who, author Peter S. Carmichael reports, "saw herself as Ewell's chief of staff" (p. 73) and created the perception in the Army of Northern Virginia that her husband was "merely a puppet general" (p. 96). John F. Marszalek relates that William Tecumseh Sherman's wife, Ellen, offered advice about Union generals--advice her husband promptly ignored. She had become Sherman's foster sister in 1829 and his bride in 1850; yet despite their long acquaintance, they never reconciled deep differences and their marriage was tempestuous.

Josiah Gorgas performed prodigious feats as Confederate ordnance chief, but his postwar life, as related here by Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins, was tragic. When a stroke ended his ability to support his family, his wife, Amelia, worked as a librarian and postmistress. For Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Civil War was his defining moment, and his wife, Fannie, was not part of the experience. Their marriage was truly a war casualty, according to Jennifer Lund Smith. By contrast, two marriages that weathered the war well were those of Elizabeth Blair and S. Phillips Lee, as told by Virginia Jeans Laas, and Julia and Ulysses Grant. "Of the leading figures of the Civil War," John Y. Simon opines, the Grants "had the happiest marriage" (p. 123).

The relationships in these twelve marriages differ widely, but the differences arise less from any North-South divide than from the ways the couples departed from the Victorian model that we have believed to be the norm. This collection is a revelation as well as a great pleasure to read.

MARY SEATON DIX
The Papers of Jefferson Davis
Rice University