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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South
by Stephen W. Berry II.
Illustrated, notes, bibliography, index, 286 pp., 2003. Oxford University Press, 198 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10016-4314, $26 plus shipping.
About 35 years ago historians made an amazing discovery. They realized that approximately one half of the human race was, is, and always had been female. This startling revelation led, in time, to an explosion of interest in “woman’s history” (sometimes called “herstory”). As a result of this welcome development we have learned a great deal more about the human experience and have come to see many facets of the past in a new light. Historians working in the field of “gender studies” have taken a new look at the American Civil War. In this provocative book Stephen Berry, using insights gained from the study of women and men and the relationships between them, undertakes to explain why some Southern white men welcomed the coming of war in 1861 and rushed to arms. He also speculates on how their wartime experience changed them. (Berry calls it “the study of male Civil War experience and motivation,” “men’s inner experience of themselves,” and their “inner emotional lives.”) These Southern males, Berry writes, grew up studying the classics and classical languages (Greek and Latin). From their studies they learned that men were to be heroic, striving to establish empires, conquer worlds, build civilizations, and in general take charge of history and gain immortality. Women, on the other hand, were to be “repositories of divine grace,” to sustain and inspire their men, and to provide them with a secure base (i.e. home) from which they could go forth to achieve greatness. In the late 1850s, with U.S. territorial expansion seemingly at an end, these men found themselves would-be heroes and empire builders trapped in a humdrum world of dull work routine. Many came to blame themselves for failure to live up to standards of manhood. This “constriction of their prospects” led to frustration from which the coming of the war offered the opportunity to escape and to live as men should (“a test of manhood”). They could now strive to do great deeds for their reputation, their women, their country, and their posterity. Military service, however, soon proved anything but a heroic experience. Dirt, disease, filth, hospitals, wounds, death, suffering, and other unpleasant features of army life quickly disillusioned Southern males. Invading Union armies threatened their homes and their women. Even worse, many came to fear, their women might discover that they preferred the invading Yankees. (Invasion could have more than one meaning.) As a result of this experience, Berry concludes, white Southern males abandoned their fruitless quest for greatness. Instead they settled back into a postwar domestic world in which they sought simply to be good, rather than great, men. Readers might wonder how representative of white Southern males Berry’s subjects are. Most were older than large numbers of Confederate soldiers. One was not in the military. They enjoyed a better education than did almost all other 19th-century Americans, and they were economically better off than were most Rebels. Apparently none ventured west of the Mississippi River before the war or into many other parts of what was to become the Confederacy. None hailed from Virginia, although one died there during the war and another contacted syphilis while in the Old Dominion. We might also wonder how their wartime experiences affected their postwar roles as veterans and their attitude toward the Lost Cause myth. How greatly did their education and reading of the classics differ from the experience of white Northerners of a similar socioeconomic class? Civil War News readers concerned with tactical details, strategy, and similar subjects can safely bypass this work. Readers who seek a deeper insight into the lives of those who lived in the Civil War years will find here much to ponder. They will see another dimension of Civil War soldiers, what Berry calls “their humanity,” and this insight will help them appreciate those men as soldiers, as Confederates, and as human beings.
Richard McMurry
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