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Reviews of Books
independent human beings, and they took this new
self-consciousness of their autonomy into the postwar
South, where property laws and other aspects of state
intervention were designed to protect women from
men. But even amid this change, ancient paradoxes
were at work. Some women came-logically-to work
both for female suffrage and the Lost Cause.
In making this latter connection, Faust offers speculation in a book whose arguments mostly emerge
organically from the letters and documentary evidence
and not from what David Hackett Fischer once called
"the Fallacy of the Lonely Fact." One exception is
Faust's assertion that "Many wives, though, feared the
loss of their husbands' affections almost as intensely as
they worried about the loss of their lives" (p. 120). And
while it is surprising to learn that the secession winter
occurred in 1861-1862 (p. 9), this is complaining about
a book that will frame historical interpretations for
years to come.
JEAN H. BAKER
Goucher College
EMORY M. THOMAS. Rober! E. Lee: A Biography. New
York: W. W. Norton. 1995. Pp. 472. $30.00.
Since 1935, the Lee literature and legend have been
dominated in one way or another by Douglas Southall
Freeman's massive work. Scholars have contended
over Freeman's vision of Lee, while that vision has
itself become the stuff of legend. During the last
twenty years, Freeman's concept of Lee as a simple
and noble military genius has come under increasing
attack by scholars. Such historians as Alan T. Nolan
and the late Thomas L. Connelly have leveled harsh
criticisms at Lee, both as a general and as a man, but
the agenda has remained the one that Freeman set
sixty years ago. Emory M. Thomas carefully uses the
new scholarship to construct an image of Lee much
different from Freeman's.
Thomas offers less detail but clearer insight on key
points of Lee's life. He probes deeply into Lee's words
and particularly his actions to produce a psychological
portrait of the great southerner. Thomas's portrayal of
Lee is far more complicated than Freeman's, and his
life is characterized by paradoxes. Lee was a man who
desired freedom and so practiced rigid self-control. He
disliked conflict and so became a great warrior. He was
strict to the point of austerity but at the same time
could be indulgent.
Lee was also a man who could cope with adversity,
repeatedly making the best of very difficult circumstances. He overcame the horrendous irresponsibility
of his father, with its attendant shame and (relative)
poverty. He persevered in a career in which the pace of
promotion was "geological" (p. 414) as well as in a
marriage that was far from satisfying. He faced defeat
in the Civil War, increasing physical debility, and the
inability of his children to establish lives of their own,
and through it all he maintained his belief that "the
great duty of life is ... the promotion of the happiness
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
& welfare of our fellow men" (p. 414). Surprisingly,
Lee usually managed to live up to that creed. With all
of his faults-his depressing racial attitudes, his leading of armies in a war to make the world safe for
slavery, and his other inconsistencies-Lee the man
comes through this unblinking, deeply searching modern biography as a figure who can still excite intense
admiration.
As is fitting in a biography, Thomas's search for Lee
the man takes precedence over his examination of Lee
the general. Yet he offers important insights on Lee's
conduct of the war. He astutely recognizes both the
basic difference of strategy between Lee and Jefferson
Davis and the fact that Lee carefully concealed this
difference from the Confederate president. Thomas
correctly sees Lee as favoring an offensive grand
strategy, notwithstanding Lee's bland suggestions to
the contrary in his correspondence with Davis. Thomas
gives a fair and accurate assessaent of Lee and his
lieutenants, including a perceptive and balanced treatment of James Longstreet.
Like other books, this one has its faults. While most
of Thomas's analysis of Lee's psyche is fascinating and
convincing, some aspects seem unreasonable and overdone. In the area of Lee's religion, Thomas contrasts
characteristics that are in fact entirely harmonious.
Also, typographical and other inadvertent errors appear frequently enough to be disconcerting; for example, Sharpsburg, Maryland, is twice referred to as
"Sharpstown" (p. 261).
These quibbles aside, however, Thomas has produced an excellent work of biography that presents a
complex and very human portrait of one of the great
figures in American history and represents a mature
expression of the post-Freeman era of Lee studies.
STEVEN E. WOODWORTH
Toccoa Falls College
KERRY A. TRASK. Fire Within: A Civil War Na"ative
from Wisconsin. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University
Press. 1995. Pp. xiii, 279. $30.00.
On the eve of the American Civil War, Manitowoc,
Wisconsin was barely a generation old. Nestled against
Lake Michigan, the village had just over 3,000 residents, split evenly between immigrants and natives.
When South Carolina troops fired on Fort Sumter in
April 1861, Manitowoe responded with patriotic fervor. One of the first volunteers was nineteen-year-old
Scottish immigrant James Anderson, who joined Company A of the Fifth Wisconsin Volunteers.
The heart of Kerry A. Trask's book is Anderson's
wartime story, told largely through his own diary and
letters. After several months' drilling in Wisconsin,
Anderson and his comrades traveled east. For the next
three years, Company A fought in many of the most
important engagements in the eastern theater, including George B. McClellan's Peninsular campaign of
1862, the crucial battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg,
and Gettysburg (where the Fifth was held in reserve),
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United States
and Ulysses S. Grant's bloody campaign through Virginia in the spring of 1864. By the time they dug in
outside Petersburg, an exhausted Anderson wrote that
he was "hardly able to crawl" (p. 228). Only fifteen of
the original 104 cnlistees were still among their number when the company returned home in August.
Trask could have settled for telling Anderson's story
alone, but he has taken a much more challenging path,
attempting to tell the "interior history" (p. 2) of the
war as experienced by Manitowoc's citizens both at
home and on the battlefield. The account of Anderson's military exploits are interwoven with (less rich)
narratives of other Manitowoc volunteers scattered
across the nation. Thus, he moves from Company A at
the Battle of Gettysburg to the Fourteenth Wisconsin
outside of Vicksburg. In the meantime, Trask periodically turns to the home front, telling Manitowoc's
wartime history through the eyes of diarist Rosa
Kellner, who ran the local hotel, and through the pages
of the local newspapers. The result is an interesting,
highly readable narrative that perhaps falls short of its
potential.
The ever-expanding literature on the Civil War
includes more and more home-front studies, a growing
list of monographs examining soldiers' lives, and a
seemingly unending flow of diaries and letters. Trask's
book brings all these genres together in a single small
volume. But beyond the implicit insight that these
pieces must be more fully integrated. it is not clear
what this volume contributes to our understanding of
the Civil War. The military portions lean heavily on
detailed accounts of skirmishes and battles. Readers
less familiar with the war's military history may have a
difficult time keeping their bearings, whereas those
with more expertise will find no new insights into the
soldier's life. Similarly, Manitowoc's wartime chronology is so familiar-down to the hattling local newspaper editors-that some readers will swear they have
read it all before. But those who do not know the basic
home-front story will find a spotty rendition here, with
many crucial issues unaddressed and almost no attempt to place Manitowoc in any larger context. Those
reservations aside, this is an entertaining book that I
hope will point other historians toward a new integration of Civil War scholarship.
J. MATTHEW GALLMAN
Loyola College,
Maryland
JIM CULl.EN. The Civil War in Popular Culture: A
Reusable Past. Washington, D.e.: Smithsonian Institution. 1995. Pp. x, 253. $29.95.
The first book Jim Cullen read in graduate school was
Warren Susman's Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century
(1984). Like many of us, he was moved by Susman's
artistry and inspired by Susman's call to expand the
range of history'S acceptable subjects. Cullen took up
the Civil War, and in this book he explores five
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193
instances of the war's appearance in "popular memory": Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln,
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (the book and
the movie), white Southern rock musicians of the
1970s, and the film Glory and Civil War battle rcenaetments. His project seems to have been to reverse
the terms of Susman's title and to investigate history as
culture. How, he asks, have nonprofessional historians
used the materials of the past to comment on the
present?
Unfortunately, in his search for history as "communion," Cullen failed to learn several lessons crucial to
Susman's methods. The first is that good cultural
history requires both precise readings and supple
interpretations. It cannot be written with mere assertions of superficial similarities and easy generalizations. Cullen i~ guilty of both. He writes, for example,
"The very factors that shaped rock music-a tradition
of slavery and distinctive cultures arising from it, the
presence of blacks and whites in relative proximity, a
strong sense of (and belief in) regional identity-are
precisely those that helped bring on the Civil War" (p.
111). "If rock 'n' roll grew out of Civil War tensions,"
he continues, "the fact that it did not emerge until the
next century suggests that other factors must also have
been at work" (pp. 113-14). We also learn that Martin
Luther King, Jr., did far more for civil rights than Elvis
Presley and are reminded that "The United States won
World War II" (p. 149).
The bulk of the book consists of Cullen's readings of
his "texts," but he offers only the crudest means of
connecting his materials to the historical contexts in
which they were produced, read, watched, or performed. He sets up each of his chapters as a response
to a simplified sense of crisis. As he says near the end
of the book, "For Carl Sandhurg, this crisis was the
Great Depression. For Margaret Mitchell, it was uncertainty about women's roles in a South on the cusp of
increasing turmoil. For Southern rock performers, it
was the Civil Rights movement" (p. 199). For the
creators of Glory, it was Vietnam, and for the bobbyists
who reenact Civil War battles, it is multiculturalism.
The material set forth in the chapters is hardly more
enlightening.
The fault in Cullen's book lies not in its subject
matter nor in its methods but in its utter simplification
of all that is complicated, compelling, and interesting
in popular uses of the past. So careful is Cullen not to
condescend to his subjects that he has stripped them of
meaning. Cullen might have analyzed, interpreted, and
informed without either betraying those about whom
he was writing or baffling his nonprofessional readers.
He manages instead to insult both the intelligence of
his readers and the intelligence of audiences for the
popular materials he studies. For example, he offers as
explanation for the success of Alexandra Ripley's
sequel to Gone with the Wind that she addressed
"middle-aged white female readers for whom clothes,
shopping, and travel are relevant matters" (p. 104). His
footnotes indicate that he has read many studies of
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