Virginia's Civil War.

Virginia's Civil War. Edited by Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 303. $35.00, ISBN 0-8139-2315-8.)

This volume originated with papers delivered in 2002 at the University of Richmond, the Virginia Historical Society, and the Tredegar Iron Works on the topics of "Virginia's Civil War and Aftermath" and the significance of Robert E. Lee. In the introduction, Peter Wallenstein and Bertram Wyatt-Brown note the relative lack of attention given to the social and cultural experiences of the Civil War in Virginia, as opposed to military and political issues. The essays in this book subsequently locus on themes such as religion, gender, and race. Wallenstein and Wyatt-Brown rightfully claim that the Civil War intersected in innumerable ways with private lives. There were many individual civil wars between 1861 and 1865, they conclude, "and also, later, in the ways people recalled the events and continued to be shaped by them" (p. 2).

Part 1 of this book includes four essays on Robert E. Lee written by established scholars, two of them (Emory M. Thomas and Michael Fellman) the authors of Lee biographies. Thomas, Fellman, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown each take a different approach to the famed Confederate general, exploring the ways in which Lee has been portrayed since his death, his views on Reconstruction, and his devotion to the concept of honor as exemplified in the Stoic tradition. Charles Joyner's essay weighs the interpretations of Lee offered by Douglas Southall Freeman and later historians, concluding that Lee's enigmatic character is filled with inconsistencies that are impossible to reconcile.

The remaining sixteen essays are largely the work of recently minted Ph.D's. These pieces exhibit the vibrancy of scholarly work being done today on the Civil War. The authors, exploring new perspectives and often mining seldom-used sources, show the great promise of studies that integrate events on the home front with those on the battlefield.

Three essays examine various cultural and religious factors that influenced Virginians to remain in the Union in the immediate wake of Lincoln's presidential election. Other essays look at the morale of white southern civilians and soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. Two of the pieces in this latter group, written by Jason Phillips and Lisa Tendrich Frank, stress the strength of Confederate nationalism. Phillips argues that Christian faith served as a powerful motivator for keeping men in the ranks of the southern armies, while Frank claims that the depredations committed by Union soldiers in the Shenandoah Valley hardened the pro-Confederate loyalties of the region's upper-class female residents. Ian Binnington examines the Richmond-based Southern Illustrated News and the paper's efforts to transform military men into nationalist heroes. Binnington's argument that "Stonewall" Jackson became a more popular wartime icon than Robert E. Lee is based on decidedly thin evidence.

Several essays focus on race and slavery. Ervin L. Jordan Jr. examines the published autobiographies of two escaped slaves, theorizing that their accounts may have influenced British acceptance of northern emancipation. David G. Smith looks at the capture of black civilians in Pennsylvania by Lee's army during the Gettysburg campaign. Lucinda H. Mackethan explores the multiple ways to interpret the wartime experience of Marlboro Jones, a Confederate army camp servant. The final essay in the section seems out of place in a volume otherwise devoted to nonfiction; it analyzes a 1998 novel entitled Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia during the War, by Donald McCaig (New York, 1999).

Part 3 of the book deals with postbellum Virginia. John M. McClure's essay looks at tensions that existed in Lexington, Virginia, between white college students, or "General Lee's Boys," and the local Freedmen's Bureau School. Other essays by Susanna Michele Lee, Monte Hampton, and Theodore C. Delaney explore the contested definitions of Unionism held by commissioners of the Southern Claims Commission and southern whites; the efforts of southern Presbyterian divine Robert Lewis Dabney to navigate modernity by opposing the New South program; and the struggles of Julia Gardiner Tyler, widow of ex-president John Tyler, to educate her children, restore her antebellum prosperity, and adjust to a new social order.

The contributors of these twenty essays undoubtedly labored under restrictions regarding page length. As a result, several leave the reader with unanswered questions. Amy Feely Morseman's piece on changing gender roles in Virginia planter families, for instance, presents highly intriguing conclusions. She claims that the hardships of the immediate postwar years forced Virginia planters and their wives to restructure their marriages, resulting in women gaining more influence in the household. This subtle shift in the balance of power did not endure, Morseman claims. Many of the children of postbellum planters, having been drawn to cities, did not need to replicate their parents' changes in gender roles. Instead, the children "ultimately may have chosen to embrace the gender norms of their grandparents' [antebellum] generation" (p. 252). Unfortunately, the ten pages of text and twenty-seven footnotes that make up the article do not offer sufficient space for detailed arguments or enough evidence to support them.

Caroline E. Janney's essay on the Ladies Memorial Association of Petersburg suffers from the same handicap as Morseman's work. Janney argues that in late-nineteenth-century Petersburg, enthusiasm for projects to memorialize the Confederacy waxed and waned depending on numerous factors, including funding, local politics, and economics. One hopes that Morseman's and Janney's essays will appear, along with a few others in this volume, in greatly expanded form as books in the not-too-distant future.

KEITH S. BOHANNON

University of West Georgia