Editor's Overview

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Editor’s Overview
• Jim Downs, Editor (bio)

The December 2022 issue of Civil War History captures many of the exciting developments in the field. For a decade, prizewinning historian James Oakes has dominated the political history of emancipation with his book Freedom National. Taking his cue from Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner’s 1852 speech, “Freedom National,” Oakes argues that the war did not begin in 1861 to simply preserve the Union and then free enslaved people in 1863 but rather, as Oakes asserts, “liberty and union—were never separate for them” (Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 [New York: W. W. Norton, 2013], xxiv)

Many have hailed Oakes’s thesis. James McPherson, one of the war’s most prolific and celebrated historians, blurbed Oakes’s book calling it “the best account we have of the process of emancipation and the ultimate abolition of slavery.” In his review of Oakes’s work, Gary Gallagher posited, “James Oakes has written what should become the starting point for anyone interested in the complex web of factors that killed slavery in the United States” (Journal of the Civil War Era 3 [June 2013]: 262). Library Journal referred to it as “brilliant in analysis and compelling in argument” (November 12, 2012).

Given such raving reviews, it is surprising that anyone would want to challenge Oakes’s thesis; in fact, when books make such a splash, they often unwittingly become the last word in the field rather than generate further research or debate. Yet, Ivan Iverson counters Oakes’s idea. Drawing on a rich range of newspapers and private letters, including those written by Lincoln, Iverson shows that Republicans were not invested in abolition of slavery when the war began. He questions Oakes’s formulation that antislavery Republicans “constituted the left wing of the American political spectrum.” Iverson writes, “By imposing a left–right political dichotomy onto the mid-nineteenth century, Oakes creates categories that would have been unrecognizable to politicians of the period.”

It is this type of scholarly exchange that that the journal wants to promote. Readers will be left to decide for themselves: does Oakes have the last word, or has Iverson marshaled persuasive evidence to upend the “Freedom National” thesis?

In keeping with the spirit of scholarly debate, the next article in this month’s issue focuses on Civil War monuments and memory. Lindsey R. Peterson has written a compelling article on Jennie Wade, the only civilian casualty of the Battle of Gettysburg. While Wade is a household name among Gettysburg aficionados, Peterson introduces Wade to readers who have not heard of her story but also, more importantly, charts the polemics surrounding the efforts to commemorate her [End Page 347] memory. In “‘We Are Now at Gettysburg’: Gender and Place in the Iowa Woman’s Relief Corps’ Monument, to Jennie Wade,” Peterson expertly examines how Gettysburg residents’ reticence to memorialize Wade was deeply rooted in nineteenth-century notions of gender. Thus, this article not only contributes to the growing field of Civil War memory, but it also offers keen insight into how nineteenth-century Americans thought about the status of women.

This issue also features a continuation of the journal’s mission to both produce interdisciplinary scholarship and to center the experience of Black soldiers during the war. To that end, in conjunction with the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery at Yale University, Civil War History hosted an online conversation on curator and art historian Deborah Willis’s magnificent book, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, a dazzling collection of Civil War images of Black soldiers, female anomalies as well as depictions of archival records about the people in the pictures. We are publishing the conversation in this issue similarly to our roundtable on Thavolia Glymph’s research (March 2022).

To truly interrogate these evocative images, our panel included a range of experts from a number of fields, among them art historian Cheryl Finley; historian of slavery and visual culture Matthew Fox-Amato; art historian, author Sarah Elizabeth Lewis; artist and historian Nell Painter; curator Ann M. Shumard; and curator and art historian Deborah Willis. Since this...