The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front.

By J. Matthew Gallman (Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee Inc. 1994. 211pp. $22.50/cloth).

In 1989 a provocative essay by Maris A. Vinovskis asked: "Have social historians lost the Civil War?" Even as Vinovskis posed the question, scholars, including J. Matthew Gallman, author of the volume under review, were undertaking reconnaissance missions on a variety of Northern fronts. In the past several years, a number of important studies in the social history camp have focused on black and white soldiers, on soldiers and civilians, on the postwar experience of Union veterans, on Northern thought and culture, on political disorder and class conflict, and on gender issues during the war--to cite several topics of recent investigation.(1) In its synthesis of current scholarship, The North Fights the Civil War leaves little doubt that social historians now have the troops to win this particular scholarly campaign.

Gallman's book, intended primarily for an audience of college students, covers much ground in short space. Gallman highlights continuities in the North's wartime experience with antebellum patterns and practices. His argument reprises the theme of his earlier work, Mastering Wartime, a valuable case study of the Civil War's impact on Philadelphia. Maintaining that the North responded to the war's challenges with "an ongoing series of `adjustments' but very few dramatic changes" (p. 194), Gallman minimizes the war's significance as an historical watershed. "Adjustment" is a key term for Gallman, figuring in the title of six of the book's 11 chapters, which treat such topics as: military and manpower needs; emotional and intellectual responses to wartime; charitable and patriotic activity; the war's impact on the economy; its effect on racial attitudes and the status of African-Americans; and the fate of civil liberties and political dissent during the war. Throughout the volume Gallman maintains a steady focus on the wartime experience of Northern women and immigrants.

Like Phillip Shaw Paludan's 1988 study of the conflict's multifaceted impacts on Northern society,(2) Gallman integrates the new social and economic history to the more traditional political, constitutional, and military genre. Beginning with the election of 1860, Gallman charts how the experience of the war changed over time as it was prosecuted. Gallman uses early patterns of enlistment to foreshadow his major theme that much of the war effort relied on highly traditional, localized forms of voluntarism rather than on new centralized, bureaucratic initiatives. Although the call for volunteers came from the federal government and the governors directed state recruitment efforts, the first companies were formed from the bottom up. Private citizens often provided the impetus and even the funding for local companies and regiments. None of this information is new, but Gallman's chapter on mobilization is a remarkably concise and lucid description of recruitment and how the draft--with its intricate provisions for exemptions, substitutes, and bounties for enlistees--really worked. The chapter also provides a balanced and up-to-date answer to the questions "Who served?" and whether the conflict was in fact "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," as contemporary critics of economic biases and inequities in the draft system maintained.

Gallman is particularly adept at describing institutional responses to wartime exigencies, although not all developments fit his thesis equally well. He notes, for instance, that among the "patriotic adjustments" to the war was a dramatic increase in the amount of charitable activity. While most of this work followed traditional patterns of local voluntary effort, Gallman acknowledges that formation of the U.S. Sanitary Commission broke with past practices, especially in the leadership's passion for order, efficiency, and centralized control. Moreover, while men consistently filled leadership positions in most Civil War benevolent societies, a crucial core of young women cut their political teeth in wartime organizations, helping to shape the public consciousness of a crucial group of nineteenth-century female reformers. Similarly, the war expanded female occupational opportunities in nursing, teaching, and civil service work. Gallman consistently acknowledges such complexities, even though they qualify his argument about the war's limited significance.

The question whether the war was a watershed or had minimal impact on Northern society depends, in part, on the time frame chosen for discussion. Restricting the analysis to the immediate war years, as Gallman frequently does, tends to emphasize continuities; an eye toward the Reconstruction era and beyond highlights change. Gallman's concluding chapter on the war's legacy pushes the theme of continuity less insistently than most of the preceding chapters. Indeed, there is an attempt to square circles. On the one hand, Gallman maintains that Northerners "persisted in their faith in tradition and localism." On the other, he notes with James McPherson that the popular sense of the Union was transformed by the war. What was once a vague abstraction became an almost tangible entity synonymous with the nation, thus laying the intellectual basis for the national government's preeminence (p. 195). Such contradictions suggest that it is still too early in the campaign for those who share Gallman's minimalist view of the war's impact to declare victory. Too much local variation--the significant effect of the war on municipal politics in such cities as New York and Chicago, for instance--perpetuates this scholars" contest. Relatively unexplored topics also leave the outcome in doubt. Can a war that shrouded 250,000 American homes in mourning really have had as little impact on attitudes toward death and dying as Gallman intimates?

While the focused attention Gallman devotes to the continuity theme unifies his analysis, inevitably in so short a space it scants the development of other important issues. Several times Gallman points to wartime blurring of the boundary between public and private spheres. Communal ceremonies when troops marched off, newspaper reports on the fate of local regiments, and letters home that circulated with reports on the activities of relatives, friends, and neighbors in the same regiment blended personal and public experiences. A gendered interpretation of this distinctive homefront phenomenon could offer important insight into the meaning and operation of the nineteenth century's so-called "separate spheres," as well as contribute to our understanding of the evolution of public life. But Gallman sidesteps such analysis.

One also questions the editorial decision to forgo footnotes. Although a concluding "Note on Sources" is a valuable short introduction to the relevant literature, the absence of notes in the text limits its usefulness to scholars. These are quibbles, however. While Gallman's book does not supersede Paludan's more ambitious study, it is a good choice for classroom assignment, presenting students with a well-written synthesis of current scholarship and a forcefully argued but still controversial thesis about the significance of the nation's bloodiest war.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Maris A. Vinovskis, "Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations," Journal of American History 76 (June, 1989): 34-58. Subsequent studies include Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1990); Joseph T. Glatthar, Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White pacers (New York, 1990); Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill 1992), Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York, 1993); Anne C. Rose, Victorian America and the Civil War (Cambridge, Eng., 1992). Important essays appear in two edited volumes: Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York, 1992), which includes studies of the Union and Confederacy, and Maris A. Vinovskis, ea., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), which focuses exclusively on the North.

(2.) Phillip Shaw Paludan, "A People's Contest": The Union and Civil War, 1861-1865 (New York, 1988).