Allen C. Guelzo, Wall Street Journal
Two counties separated by the Mason-Dixon line experience the Civil War and its aftermath differently, yet share a sense of anxiety and regret. Allen C. Guelzo reviews ‘The Thin Light of Freedom’ by Edward L. Ayers.
Image from article, with caption: Battle of Gettysburg.
Social history, once rare, is by now a full-fledged genre. Written from “the bottom up,” it passes by grand narratives of nations, wars and politics in order to chronicle the vast swaths of humanity who never made it to prime time. Still, it took a while for social history to catch up to the American Civil War, where politics and battles could hardly be ignored. In 1990, the historian Maris Vinovskis, in “Toward a Social History of the American Civil War,” issued a call for social historians to set their sights, however belatedly, on the Civil War. And did they ever: The common complaint now is that the military and political history of the war has been so nearly shoved off the table that the scholarly quarterlies devoted to the Civil War era scarcely notice war or politics.
Edward Ayers’s “The Thin Light of Freedom” is a kinder, gentler version of Civil War social history. Beginning in the early 1990s, Mr. Ayers began assembling a data bank on the experience of two counties on either side of the Mason-Dixon line: Augusta County in Virginia’s lower Shenandoah Valley and, to the north, Franklin County in Pennsylvania. Mr. Ayers’s data sets included newspaper articles, census and tax records, and the diaries and letters of small-role players. Because slavery was legal in one but not in the other, the two counties occupied very different social worlds and, naturally, belonged to different sides in the war. From the data he had amassed, Mr. Ayers assembled a pioneering online library and wrote a study, “In the Presence of Mine Enemies” (2003), that covered the counties’ experiences from the John Brown raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859 to the eve of the Gettysburg campaign in July 1863.
“The Thin Light of Freedom” extends the story from Gettysburg into the Reconstruction era and features many of the individuals whom Mr. Ayers introduced in “In the Presence of Mine Enemies,” especially Joseph Waddell, a decent and almost reluctant Virginia convert to the Confederacy. Mr. Ayers’s earlier book was dominated by a spirit of anxiety: The Virginians were anxious about the Brown raid and the rightfulness of slavery and secession, the Pennsylvanians about the fate of the Union during a period of repeated military defeats. In “The Thin Light of Freedom,” the dominant tone is regret.
Among much else, we see the confidence of the white Southerners in Virginia collapse as their economy implodes and their valley community is burned-over by Union armies. When news of Abraham Lincoln’s re-election arrives in November 1864, Waddell asks in despair: “How can we endure it!” The hollow-eyed Southerners who stare at us across Mr. Ayers’s campfires are not die-hards. Their emotional investment in the Confederacy is shallow, and as early as 1863 Waddell admits to his diary that he never believed the Confederacy was a good idea. “I never ceased to deplore the disruption,” he later conceded, “and never could have loved my country and government as I loved the old United States.”
PHOTO: WSJ
THE THIN LIGHT OF FREEDOM
By Edward L. Ayers
Norton, 576 pages, $35
Norton, 576 pages, $35
Nevertheless, the Virginians kept on filling the ranks of the Confederacy’s armies until nearly the war’s end, a fact that Mr. Ayers does not emphasize enough. And although they let slavery disappear without much reluctance, they fought aggressively against Republican efforts to educate the freed slaves and then grant them equal voting rights. By the same measure, there are no mythical “loyal slaves” in Mr. Ayers’s account of the war’s closing years; nor are there any “grateful” freedmen afterward. Infuriated whites raged against former slaves whom they thought had no proper idea of freedom. Of course the freedmen knew exactly what they wanted, which was precisely the freedom that their former masters had all along enjoyed.
In Pennsylvania’s Franklin County, the residents fared little better. They coped unhappily with invasion in 1863 (and the disgraceful kidnapping of free blacks by the Confederate army); retaliation for the North’s destruction of Southern property (in the form of the Confederate burning of Chambersburg, Pa., in 1864); and lethal political divisions. As late as 1865, Democratic voting power remained strong in Franklin County, and Democratic newspapers dismissed Lincoln’s majestic second inaugural address as “mere trash . . . unworthy of comment.” The Pennsylvanians were plagued by a fearful uncertainty about what role the newly freed slaves would play in a new American world, and while Republican policies staked out formal protections for black civil rights, the tidal return of Democratic majorities in Franklin County eroded the will to enforce them.
Franklin and Augusta counties were active theaters of war, but military events are not Mr. Ayers’s long suit. There are routine mistakes—about who was in command of what and what numbers were commanded when—in his account of the rebel invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863; and, in what is surely the misprint of the year, he dates the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox to April 9, 1864, one digit and a universe away. Yet he compensates for these slips with a shrewd assessment of Union Gen. Philip Sheridan’s scorched-earth campaign in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, which, Mr. Ayers shows, inflicted far less damage than either valley farmers or Sheridan later claimed. He also captures the tenterhook experience of Republicans in the 1864 presidential election, which fluttered in the balance in key states like Pennsylvania far longer than Lincoln would have liked.
“The Thin Light of Freedom” is beautifully, even spaciously written and paced at an adagio—an elegy for people trapped in webs of politics and war that they had, for the most part, spun for themselves. It may not quite persuade us that the evaporation of the war’s political and military history is easily acceptable, but it does remind us that not everyone who fought or endured the war’s agonizing conflicts was a soldier.
Mr. Guelzo, a professor of the Civil War era at Gettysburg College, is the author of several books, including “Gettysburg: The Last Invasion.”
