Brooks and I have already given our prepared remarks for the session (see here and here). The third panelist was Lesley Gordon of the University of Akron.
She began by noting that in the popular imagination, the dominant interpretation of the Civil War is still the one reflected in Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels (1974). The novel’s attraction for many readers — including many historians (like Lesley herself, for whom it was an important early influence) — is that it avoids troubling motivations or causes and largely downplays slavery. “Instead, what triumphs is a celebration of pure military courage, sacrifice, and historical exceptionalism.”
The Killer Angels gave new life to a metanarrative already well established in Civil War military historiography, and a great deal of books, both academic and commercial, have reinforced it. But Lesley emphasized the existence of a “counter movement” of works that did not reflect this comforting “American Iliad” perspective and, at times, directly challenged it.
Lesley went on to focus on three themes in particular: the burgeoning literature on the common soldier of the Civil War, the steady stream of community studies that directly connected the war and the home front, and the ongoing interest in the public memory of the war and how it was constructed.
At the end of the 1970s, two books dominated the literature on the Civil War common soldier: The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Bill Yank (1952), both published by Bell Irvin Wiley. Both are classics that remain in print today. Together they offered not just the first but seemingly the last word on the subject. Historians did not really extend his explorations until the 1980s, when numerous important works emerged in quick succession, among them Michael Barton’s Good Men (1981); Gerald F. Linderman’s Embattled Courage (1987); Reid Mitchell’s Civil War Soldiers (1988), and Joseph T. Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle (1989). The trend continued in the 1990s with the publication of The Union Soldier in Battle by Earl J. Hess (1997); Lee’s Miserables by J. Tracy Power (1998); and two studies by James M. McPherson, What They Fought For (1994) and For Cause and Comrades (1997).
Wiley had concluded that Civil War soldiers were, in Lesley’s words, “everyman, humorous, profane, dependable, and quietly heroic, who fought because they had to, but were not driven by deep and complex ideologies.” The ideological divisions of the Vietnam War error rendered less plausible the apolitical nature of the Civil War soldier, while John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) influenced historians to take a closer look at the brutalizing experience of Civil War combat.
Lesley noted the emergence of a clear divide between historians of the common soldier that remains unreconciled. On the one side, historians like Gerald F. Linderman in Embattled Courage (1987), portrayed Civil War soldiers as animated by a constellation of values he called “courage,” not political awareness or commitment, and that by mid-war this ethos of courage had broken down, resulting in soldiers who became increasingly disillusioned with the war and with the civilian communities they left behind. On the other, a number of historians, notably James M. McPherson, Earl J. Hess, and Steven E. Woodworth, directly challenged Linderman’s conclusions, finding instead that Civil War soldiers were indeed politically aware and politically committed. This dialog has borne fruit in other works that have extended our understanding of Civil War soldiers as “whole and complex human beings who changed their minds and motives over time.” Lesley mentioned two in particular: Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s edited collection, The View from the Ground (2007), and Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over (2007). Manning’s book — which won this year’s Avery O. Craven Award — “in particular presents an extremely rich and nuanced portrait, backed up by exhaustive research, where she convincingly stresses the role of race and slavery as motivators to both sides. Hers is a long awaited corrective. And yet I would still argue that there is room for more, especially in appreciating differences between soldiers of differing regions and states and armies.”
Lesley went on to note “an explosion of home front studies and a refreshing attention to how the war came home to civilians. Works by Daniel Sutherland, Stephen Ash, Michael Fellman, Jonathan Sarris, Jacqueline Glass Campbell, just to name a few, have highlighted communities and regions directly touched and often torn asunder by the war as much by the armies themselves.” Southern and ‘border’ communities have gained the greatest attention; she called for a better appreciation of how the war affected northern, and notably Midwestern communities. It did not necessarily require the passage of an enemy arm through a community to create fear, despair, and panic. Just the extended absence, let alone the death, of a male family member, could have dire and bitter ramifications, and were no less important to understanding the war’s impact.
Finally, Lesley sketched the emerging literature on Civil War memory, exemplified by David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001) but also by the work of numerous other historians, including William Blair, Gaines Foster, Carol Reardon, and Kirk Savage, who have helped us to see how the popular memory of the conflict was “deliberately created,” at first by influential participants and later by historians themselves. The most prominent example of this public memory is the one enshrined in Shaara’s The Killer Angels: a memory that removed the politics of slavery from the struggle, emphasized white valor on both sides, pushed African Americans to the background, and created “a sanitized story of a heroic war that has settled into the fabric of American culture.”
Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 (coming)