McPherson - Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

Re-reading a book that I wrote more than fifteen years ago is a humbling experience. I see small things that could have been improved at the time and more substantial elements that I could make better if I were writing it now. The large quantity and high quality of Civil War scholarship during the past fifteen years has deepened and broadened our knowledge of many of the era's events. If I were writing the book today I could incorporate the findings of this scholarship to enrich my own narrative and interpretation.

But as the novelist Thomas Wolfe said, "you can't go home again." A book is the unique product of the time and circumstances in which an author wrote it. To revisit the book two decades later and attempt to revise the product of a particular cultural environment would be a mistake. Besides, my ego continues to be flattered by letters and other communications from strangers who tell me that Battle Cry has stimulated in them an insatiable interest in the Civil War era and is the best single volume on the subject they have read. The book continues to be assigned in many college and advanced placement high school courses.

A year after the initial publication of Battle Cry, the historian Maris Vinovskis published an article with the double-entendre title "Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?" Social history had been the

. "Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War? Some Preliminary Demographic Speculations," Journal of American History 76 (June 1989), 3458.

most active and innovative field of American historiography since the 1960s, but so far, said Vinovskis, social historians had given little attention to the Civil War, which remained the province of military and political historians. Since 1989, social historians have found the Civil War and they may even wind up winning it.

Because the number of books and articles published on Civil War social history as well as other themes in the past fifteen years is so large, to cite only the few titles for which there is room here would be invidious. What I can say is that work on the experiences of civilians on the home front, especially women and even children, has been a rich field of inquiry. Gender history has become an important field of Civil War scholarship, and this includes a new emphasis on ideas of masculinity among soldiers. The social backgrounds and ideologies of soldiers have also been the subjects of numerous books. The several hundred women who dressed as men and managed to enlist as soldiers have received a great deal of attention. Even the narratives of military campaigns and battles, which still constitute a large proportion of Civil War studies, now focus much more on the backgrounds and experiences of men in the ranks than earlier studies. Civil War prisons and prisoners have finally begun to get the attention they have so long needed. Historians are finally beginning to investigate the importance of religion to the Civil War generation. The experiences of slaves during a war that enabled them to win freedom had been the subject of many studies before 1988, but have become the focus of even more scholarship since then.

Nor have traditional subjects been neglected during the past decade and a half. New books about Abraham Lincoln appear virtually every year, and three major biographies of Jefferson Davis have been published. Several new biographies of Ulysses S. Grant have offered a long-overdue positive reappraisal of his generalship and even his presidency. By contrast, several books critical of the once-untouchable icon Robert E. Lee have come out since 1988 and have been answered by a legion of Lee defenders. New books on William Tecumseh Sherman have almost equaled the number of Grant or Lee biographies during that period, while books and articles about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain have become something of a cottage industry.

. For summaries of scholarship through 1998, see James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper, eds., Writing the Civil War: The Quest to Understand