{"title":"A Man of Bad Reputation: The Murder of John Stephens and the Contested Landscape of North Carolina Reconstruction","authors":"Evan Rothera","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.12","url":null,"abstract":"A Man of Bad Reputation opens with John G. Lea’s confession that he had assassinated North Carolina State Senator John Walter Stephens in 1870. Lea gave his confession in 1919, nearly half a century after the murder. Stephens’s death, Drew A. Swanson contends, had profound repercussions. On the one hand, it “featured prominently in the US Congress’s investigation of Klan activities in the South,” which eventually led for the Enforcements Acts and the end of the first Ku Klux Klan. On the other hand, it sparked the Kirk-Holden War, which led to the impeachment of Governor William Woods Holden, his removal from office, the death of Reconstruction, and the rise of Jim Crow in North Carolina, “a new and even more effective form of white supremacy that used ‘soft’ terrorism in place of the Klan’s overt violence.” Swanson, currently Jack N. and Addie D. Averitt Distinguished Professor of Southern History at Georgia State University, offers a fascinating discussion of the life and death of Stephens, which also becomes a story about the North Carolina Piedmont, Reconstruction in North Carolina, and the ways in which people have remembered and misremembered this important period.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"138 S241","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140731593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Political Transformation of David Tod: Governing Ohio During the Height of the Civil War","authors":"Joseph Ricci","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.08","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.08","url":null,"abstract":"While studies of President Abraham Lincoln, as well as his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, and their military generals have dominated Civil War literature, rarely has attention to the politics of the war extended beyond the executive office. Joseph Lambert Jr.’s The Political Transformation of David Tod examines an often-overlooked facet of the political history of the Civil War – the governorship of loyal states. Few historians have ventured into this aspect of the political history of the war.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"114 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140731913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Governor's Pawns: Hostages and Hostage-Taking in Civil War West Virginia","authors":"Riley Sullivan","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.07","url":null,"abstract":"Throughout the American Civil War, both Union and Confederate forces engaged in guerrilla warfare throughout the border states. With the emergence of this activity, non-combatants often found themselves as the principal targets; particularly in regard to hostage-taking. Both sides engaged in this practice for a variety of reasons, however, for the newly formed state of West Virginia, the taking of hostages became crucial for the survival of the state. In The Governor’s Pawn, Randall S. Gooden—native of West Virginia and professor of history at Clayton State University—illustrates the unique hostage policy adopted by West Virginia and how it proved vital in the state’s experience in the Civil War.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"37 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140729434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Two Counties in Crisis: Measuring Political Change in Reconstruction Texas","authors":"Cameron Sauers","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.11","url":null,"abstract":"Robert Dillard’s Two Counties in Crisis explores three decades of political culture in two divergent Texas counties. Collin County, a frontier county largely home to emigrants from other Southern states, is contrasted against Harrison County, a cotton growing county with 145 planters who each owned more than 20 enslaved peoples. Dillard claims that these counties, and Texas more broadly, did not neatly align with the political culture of the rest of the Confederacy. In a combination of political science and history, Dillard argues that a culture of backlash and resistance to federal authority defined Texas state politics in the Civil War era. While the author’s claims of exceptionalism are unconvincing and unsubstantiated, Two Counties in Crisis demonstrates the contentious state level politics of Reconstruction.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"117 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140731409","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Abolitionist Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union","authors":"Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.14","url":null,"abstract":"In The Abolitionist Civil War, Frank J. Cirillo offers a much-needed study of abolitionist activity during the Civil War. In twelve tightly chronological chapters, he highlights the ideas, interventions, and arguments of abolitionists from Secession Winter through May 1865. Cirillo focuses on ten abolitionists ranging from well-known figures William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to lesser-known folks such as George Cheever and Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster to the Virginia outlier Moncure Conway, and he sorts them into several fluctuating camps based on how they chose to engage with Civil War politics. Ultimately, he argues that in the majority’s wartime shift from moral reformers to political interest interventionists, their radicalism tempered.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"238 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140730651","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Onward to Chicago: Freedom Seekers and the Underground Railroad in Northeastern Illinois","authors":"Michelle Norello","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.15","url":null,"abstract":"Larry A. McClellan, drawing on a breadth of archival sources, brings an invigorating narrative to freedom seekers in Northeastern Illinois. McClellan’s compelling account tells the “complex and deeply human stories of freedom seekers” while underscoring “that the Underground Railroad did not shape the movement of freedom seekers.” Rather, as McClellan contends, their movements “gave shape to what became the networks known as the Underground Railroad.”","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"7 3","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140729095","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History","authors":"David Gerleman","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.05","url":null,"abstract":"In Silent Cavalry: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta and Then Got Written Out of History, Howell Raines seeks to publicize the story of loyal Alabamians who fought for the Union. The First Alabama Cavalry is little known, he argues, due to early twentieth century collusion between unreconstructed Alabama officials and an influential cabal of Lost Cause scholars trained by William Dunning at Columbia University.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"110 S131","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140731939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"\"To the Manor Born\"","authors":"Jacob Long","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.04","url":null,"abstract":"Matthew Speiser’s To The Manor Born is bold, but bold by the attempt alone. Speiser’s history where the American Civil War never ends is a work of fiction whose high-water mark is its own synopsis. Of course, same as anything in the world of imagination, Speiser’s America could have conceivably existed.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"12 2","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140727904","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Lost President: A.D. Smith and the Hidden History of Radical Democracy in Civil War America","authors":"Stephen Maizlish","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.09","url":null,"abstract":"At the very outset of her deceptively titled book, Ruth Dunley admits that the subject of her biography, A.D. Smith, is a person of “secondary historical importance.\" Even so, she is drawn to him by the mystery involved in attempting to uncover his life story. Her journey of discovery, recounted in The Lost President, is a long and challenging one. Her persistence in pursuit of that story is impressive and unyielding. In the end, Dunley succeeds in uncovering a life dedicated to republicanism as a would-be president of Canada, a judge who declared the Fugitive Slave Law unconstitutional, and a tax commissioner in the Sea Islands of South Carolina who sought to give land to former slaves during the Civil War. Throughout, Smith, argues Dunley, was a representative man of the Jacksonian era. He was moved by its vision of the possible and subject to its many contradictions. But, above all, he was a radical Democrat, committed to the principles of majority rule and opposed to the empowerment of the few.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"28 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140729950","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"War, Politics, and Change","authors":"Kennon Keiser","doi":"10.31390/cwbr.26.2.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31390/cwbr.26.2.01","url":null,"abstract":"Historians have long documented the ways in which war and politics bring about social, economic, and cultural change. Nowhere is this more evident than during the American Civil War and Reconstruction. The war devastated the South; it upended the system of chattel slavery and instigated remarkable transformations to the region’s demographics, political, and economic structures. Reconstruction emerged out of the ashes of war. This critical and hotly debated period redefined U.S. citizenship, expanded suffrage rights, and altered the relationship between the federal government and the states. Many of the lofty goals of Reconstruction, however, fell short as southern “Redeemers” regained political power and enshrined a new system of white supremacy. While many of the changes during this era were structural, individuals also experienced personal metamorphoses. Each of the manuscripts reviewed in this issue explore these various transformations, shedding new light on military command and contingency, national and regional politics, and individual struggles as the American nation navigated disorienting change during these fateful years.","PeriodicalId":500483,"journal":{"name":"Civil war book review","volume":"78 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140729226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}