Ayers - In the presence of mine enemies: war in the heart of America, 1859-1863

Further Praise for In the Presence of Mine Enemies

Edward L. Ayers, one of Americas leading historians of the South, challenges this understanding of the wars inevitability in his well-researched and fast paced book.

Raleigh News & Observer

A brilliant work... a veritable model for how social history should be collected and presented.

Roanoke Times

[A] movingly human chronicle.... The transformation by civil war of two groups of Americans makes for fascinating reading and incisive instruction.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

[A] deeply researched and beautifully written study of the early years of the American Civil War.

Wilfred M. McClay, Chattanooga Times Free Press

Ayers breathes life into the way ordinary people experienced the coming and beginning of the warthat is, of historyas everyday life, concerns, and hopes become entangled with events beyond their control.

Alon Confino, Virginia Quarterly Review

As an intimate story of two communities, it is social history at its finest.

Civil War Times

The authors ability to humanize the past... makes this volume one of the few Civil War books to truly integrate political, military, and social history.

Americas Civil War

A glittering jewel of a book.... [Ayers] is a historian of considerable grace, imagination, and power.

Civil War Book Review

Ayers tells his complex story with a masters touch, shifting smoothly between North and South, and between the lesser worlds of his two counties and the wider events of the war that changed them both utterly.

Publishers Weekly, starred review

Original and gracefully written... should be required reading for Civil War enthusiasts and scholars alike.

Library Journal, starred review

A penetrating analysis... emphasizing the anxiety, excitement, and misery that war provoked.

Booklist, starred review

A first-rate study.

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

ALSO BY EDWARD L. AYERS

The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American

Civil WarThe Eve of War, CD-ROM and book (coauthor)

American Passages: A History of the United States (coauthor)

The Oxford Book of the American South:

Testimony, Memory, and Fiction (coeditor)

All over the Map: Rethinking American Regions (coauthor)

The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction

The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia (coeditor)

Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment

in the Nineteenth-Century American South

IN THE
PRESENCE
OF MINE
ENEMIES

WAR IN THE HEART

OF AMERICA

1859 1863

EDWARD L. AYERS

W.W. Norton & Company

New York London

Copyright 2003 by Edward L. Ayers

All rights reserved

First published as a Norton paperback 2004

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions,

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110.

Book design by Chris Welch

Production manager: Julia Druskin

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Ayers, Edward L., 1953

In the presence of mine enemies : war in the heart of America,

18591863 / Edward L. Ayers. 1st ed.

p. cm. (The valley of the shadow project)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-393-05786-0

1. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865. 2. Shenandoah River Valley (Va. and W. Va.)HistoryCivil War, 18611865. 3. PennsylvaniaHistoryCivil War, 18611865. 4. VirginiaHistoryCivil War, 18611865. 5. Franklin County (Pa.)History19th century. 6. Augusta County (Va.)History19th century. 7. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Causes. I. Title. II. Series.

E468 .A98 2003

973.7dc21

2002015989

ISBN 978-0-393-32601-7 pbk.

ISBN 978-0-393-24743-5 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

For Will Thomas, Anne Rubin,
and our companions in the Valley of the Shadow

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW PROJECT

T HIS VOLUME i s part of the Valley of the Shadow Project. That project presents, in digital form, thousands of letters, diaries, newspapers, census entries, photographs, maps, and military records for two counties in the Great Valley of the United States, one in Pennsylvania and one in Virginia, throughout the era of the Civil War. Gathered by a team of researchers at the University of Virginia, these sources serve as the basis for a large website and a CD-ROM dedicated to the coming of the war.

Those digital sources provide virtually all the primary sources on which this book is based. Readers can visit the archive of those sources at the Virginia Center for Digital History at http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu. There, they can explore in greater depth the stories, characters, and analysis of In the Presence of Mine Enemies or pursue aspects of life not covered in these pages. Visitors to the archive can also look ahead to the years of war, emanicipation, and the world yet to come to the people of this story.

William Smith Hanger Baylor, Picture Collection, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia

In the wake of Antietam, vol. ant86p4322a, MASS-MOLLUS, U.S.Army Military History Institute, Carlisle, Pennsylvania

A MERICANS COULD NOT have imagined the war they brought on themselves. Though people had long talked of conflict between North and South, no one could have foreseen battlefields stretched across an area the size of continental Europe or the deaths of more than half a million people. No one could have known that the most powerful slave society of the modern world, generations in the making, would be destroyed in a matter of years. No one could have known that a North long complicit in slavery would turn a struggle against disunion into a war against bondage. No one could have known that African Americans could so quickly rise to seize freedom from the turmoil.

Today, of course, we do know these things. Looking back to tell the story to ourselves, we search for opposites and contrasts to explain this overwhelming war, to set abolitionists against secessionists, industry against plantations, future against past. We look for impending crises and turning points, for the reassuring patterns that lead to the end of the story we already know.

This book tells a different kind of story. It offers a history of the Civil War told from the viewpoints of everyday people who could glimpse only parts of the drama they were living, who did not control the history that shaped their lives, who made decisions based on what they could know from local newspapers and from one another. It emphasizes the flux of emotion and belief, the intertwining of reason and feeling, the constant revision of history as people lived within history. It sets aside our knowledge of the wars outcome, starting before war could be envisioned and ending with everything in uncertainty.