Themes of the American Civil War

Acknowledgments
An additional chapter that did not appear in the original volume, on women in the Civil War by one of the editors, is an expanded version of apiece that first appeared in S. Jay Kleinberg et al., eds, The Practice of US. Women’s
History: Narratives, Intersections, and Dialogues (Rutgers University Press,
New Brunswick, NJ, 2007). The author is very grateful to Jay Kleinberg for making her write it in the first place, and to Rutgers University Press for permission to reprint it here. The editors also wish to express their thanks to the anonymous readers for Routledge who stressed, among other things,
the necessity of a chapter on women in the Civil War. A single chapter cannot hope to coverall that has been written on this important topic since
2000, but the notes will hopefully provide, and are intended as, a guide to the literature. The editors would also like to thank all the original authors who revisited their chapters to revise them for this volume. It is hard to dust off and to rewrite work that one had put to bed almost a decade ago, a fact the editors are fully aware of, and it was gratifying that those involved took the time and care to do so. Last, but certainly by no means least, the editors wish to thank Kimberly Guinta, their editor at Routledge, whose support for this project has been invaluable and whose patience, apparently, inexhaustible.
S-M.G.,
Newcastle University
B.H.R.,
King’s College London

Introduction to the Second Edition
SUSAN-MARY GRANT
When this volume of essays—in a rather different form—first appeared in, the editors had conceived of it as an accessible collection of work aimed at both an academic and a broader market, and one that would offer genuinely new assessments on the American Civil War. Originally intended—
as the introduction to the original edition makes clear—as a tribute to Peter
J. Parish, author of, among other books, The American Civil War (1975), the focus on the Civil War was decided upon not just because it reflected his central preoccupation over many years, but because a single volume of this kind could, the editors hoped, serve both as a vade mecum for students
—an accessible introduction to avast, and growing, area of study and publication—and a useful tool for both teachers and those interested in the Civil War more generally, or simply wanting to read more about a particular topic. Works on the Civil War are hardly in short supply. ABC-CLIO
estimates some 50,000 books on the subject exist so far, or, to put it another way, at least one a day since Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. As far as the Civil War is concerned, there is little sign of war weariness among either scholars or the general public, and, with the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in and the start of the sesquicentennial of secession and the war approaching in 2010, the rate of output on this topic can only increase.
In the years between this volume’s first, and brief, appearance the World
Wide Web, too, has expanded, and Civil War enthusiasts—within and beyond the academy—have been quick to take advantage of, and contribute to, the quite startling, at times overwhelming, amount of information available,

from detailed battlefield maps and descriptions of individual contests to avast array of original source material made available through, among others,
the Library of Congress and the Making of America sites. Material which only a decade ago had to be tracked down to a specific and usually distant repository, identified through arcane file cards, microfiche or bound catalogues housed in dark basements is now frequently available, and usually in searchable format the click of a mouse. Newspapers, which one either approached with trepidation and, for some, with cotton gloves, or peered at in the gloom of a microfilm reading room are available—for those with institutional subscriptions, at least—from any computer. Civil War historians are doubly fortunate in the breadth and depth of material they can access,
most of it out of copyright, most of it probably appearing arcane to many of our contemporaries, for whom the battle of Gettysburg, as Union general
Daniel Sickles once observed, is little more than an historical event, like the battle of Marathon.”Yet these sources, from the Congressional Globe through
Civil War soldiers letters, are invaluable to historians and their students;
they open up the field and, insignificant ways, their very availability is changing the field. If much material still languishes relatively underused in libraries and historical societies across the United States and beyond, the chances of enabling a student to begin to look for what is not available in easy online access is made that much easier by the sheer wealth of what is. With such an embarrassment of riches on offer, however, a straightforward, introductory guide is more than ever necessary this volume is intended as just such a guide, although the editors, being Civil War historians, hope that it will provide a starting point, not an endpoint, for much wider reading on this most destructive and yet simultaneously constructive nineteenth-century
American conflict.
Yet there is a difference in context between 2000, when the original version of this collection appeared, and today, a difference in what the Civil War means for the American nation, and how it is approached and understood.
When Dan Sickles dismissed the younger generation’s lack of interest in the
Civil War from the perspective of 1890, in fact the war was of greater interest than ever, albeit in someways mainly to its participants, who seized the opportunity offered by Century Magazine’s “Battles and Leaders series,
begun into refight some old battles, in some cases to reopen old wounds. The sesquicentennial is the remit of another generation entirely, but it is also a generation touched with fire to use Civil War veteran, later
Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr’s famous phrase from his Memorial Day address of 1884. In the aftermath of the attacks on America on September 11, 2001, in the memorial ceremony it was to the past that
Americans turned for solace and for confirmation it was the Battle Hymn of the Republic that rang out in New York. Ina very different, and more positive context, the Civil War, and particularly Abraham Lincoln, has come
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to the fore of public consciousness again not just because 2009 is the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, but because the United States in that year elected anew President who consciously invoked the spirit of Lincoln, whose favorite reading matter is, we are advised, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s study of
Lincoln’s particular political dexterity, Team of Rivals The Political Genius
of Abraham Lincoln (2005), and who took the oath of office (several times,
as it turned out) on the Bible Lincoln had used the first time it had been used since Lincoln himself had been sworn in on it. It was Lincoln’s face that was projected on the widescreens on the Mall on inauguration day, Lincolns spirit that was being hailed, consciously so, as a symbol of the new birth of freedom that Lincoln himself had predicted for his nation at Gettysburg in 1863. It is hard to think of another nation that retains such strong emotional links to its past, and especially to a pastas divisive as the
Civil War was. Yet the United States does retain such links, and only in part because so much of the Civil War’s legacy—as many of the chapters in this volume highlight—remained unfinished business for the remainder of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth some would argue,
it remains so still.
For all these reasons, the persistence of interest in the Civil War, the increasing availability of the sources we use to explore it, to bring it closer to our consciousness and to contemporary lives, the sometimes contentious online debates about the war’s meaning and its legacy and, of course,
the sesquicentennial, the editors felt that updating and reissuing this volume would be timely and, they hope, useful. Many of the chapters, but not all,
have been revised some have not, for the simple reason that, in the intervening period since 2000, their authors have produced book-length studies of their subjects. This applies to Richard Carwardine, whose biography Lincoln (2003) won the Lincoln Prize in 2004 (and was republished in 2006 as Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power). Bruce Levine’s chapter on Confederate emancipation, similarly, was a precursor to another prizewinning volume, Confederate Emancipation Southern Plans to Free and
Arm Slaves during the Civil War (2005), which received the Peter Seaborg
Award for Civil War Scholarship. John Ashworth has, in the period since this volume first appeared, produced the second volume of his magisterial study Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Vol. II,
The Coming of the Civil War, 1850–1861 (2007), while Robert Cook pursued several of the themes in his chapter into not one but two books, Civil War
America: Making a Nation, 1848–1877 (2003) and Troubled Commemoration:
The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (2007). In the face of such a prolific outpouring of scholarship, the editors felt that revision of the original chapters would be nugatory instead, the editors have included a short Guide to Further Reading to highlight, for students especially, the major developments in the field since this volume first appeared.
Introduction to the Second Edition
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This collection endeavors to focus on those areas of the Civil War that students new to the subject are most likely to encounter first the origins of the war, and the strength of the American Union in 1861; the nature of leadership in the Union and the Confederacy respectively the actual process of fighting the war, but placed in the context of the society in which the war was fought, and taking full account of the wider issues which the war threw up the centrality of the subject of slavery and emancipation, both to the
Union and, in rather different ways, to the Confederate war effort and,
finally, the longer-term impact of the war on American society, on the
American constitution, and on American nationalism. Inevitably, a volume such as this can offer only a gateway into the larger scholarship on the Civil
War, and into the debates that form and inform this scholarship. When they first conceived of this volume, the editors deliberately did not attempt to impose anyone perspective on the Civil War era, but encouraged each contributor to produce an essay reflecting his or her particular interpretation of the subject. For example, in Chapter 1 Donald Ratcliffe emphasizes the durability of the bonds of Union before 1860, while in Chapter Professor Carwardine argues that in certain respects these bonds were
“chronically weak Here is an instance of a clash of interpretation among historians, and in the course of their studies undergraduates need to grapple with such complexity, and discover that the cliché History will say . . .” is meaningless. Similarly, several of the chapters in this volume, particularly those which look at the experiences of African-Americans during the Civil
War, cover the same ground, but from different angles here, too, the editors chose not to intervene in 2000, and have taken the same position in Alternative conclusions—even those based on the same or similar evidence
—are in no sense contradictory, but complementary. Only from the elaboration of debates between historians, and from an understanding of the wide range of interpretations that similar evidence can produce, can a fuller sense of the complexities of the period be achieved. For this reason the editors have sought to avoid imposing any kind of uniform approach to this complex subject. Consequently, this volume reflects, and adds to, the continuing debate on this central era in American history.
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