Customer Reviews

Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Knoxville played a pivital role in the Civil War both on the battlefield, and politically. Why more isn't written on it is a mystery to me. Digby Seymour's pioneering "Divided Loyalties" has been the standard of years, now McKenzie has offered a wealth of more in depth studies where Seymour left off. The only real criticism that I have, is that I so wish that the author had made use of all the photographs that could have broken up the lengthy text more and given the reader a better visualization of an otherwise splendid text. "Divided Loyalties" would make a great companion piece if you don't have one already (the one published by The East Tennessee Historical Society being the best version printed).

Professor McKenzie has published the definitive history of East Tennessee during the Civil War to compliment Temple, Humes and Seymour. Not since Dr. Digby Seymour's book, written for the Civil War Centennial Years (1961-65), has a book of this significance appeared. McKenzie explores fully both the events and the personalities of the period from the inimitable Unionist, "Parson" Brownlow, to the Secessionist, Dr. J.G.M. Ramsey. This is a "must have" for anyone studying the wartime history of a region so evenly split between North and South. Highly recommended!

Actual history that has all the makings of a pot-boiler novel. Knoxville and its citizens went through the Civil War mostly under the occupation of the Southern Army, then the final year occupied by the north, with great personal devastation and communal unrest.

Lincolnites and Rebels is not a general history of the Civil War, rather, it tells about Knoxville Tennessee, which author Robert Tracy McKenzie calls a divided town. Within, he explores the history of the people there, and their unique and conflicting loyalties during that time. Almost all of the attitudes and political sympathies he describes are new to me, aside from those of rabid abolitionists and absolute slave-holding secessionists. McKenzie did a good job of explaining the middle ground and grey area occupied by union supporters who favored slavery and the mixed feelings of non-slave owning secessionists. This is not a book about war as seen by soldiers, but the way a civil war affects an ordinary town and the citizens living there.

McKenzie basically goes through events chronologically, beginning with reactions to Lincoln's campaign for the presidency till somewhere around the end of the war, including some of the reconstruction in less detail. Basically, it is a proper history, the kind used as reference material or in a class on the Civil War, but it isn't unreadably dry. There is a lot of speculation, and McKenzie is clear about the ways in which his research is inherently incomplete. Neither the Lincolnites nor the Rebels are portrayed as the better or worse parties in this book, especially given the overlap, but there was a bit more brutality reported during the union occupation compared to that of the confederacy. However, he makes it clear that tempers of all parties were far worse later into the war, which was when the union had control, than they had been at the outset. Throughout the book, he does a good job of this kind of explaining the how and why of what people felt and did at any point.

I would recommend this book very specifically to Civil War enthusiasts and scholars, or for any college course on the topic. It really isn't light reading, though, or the kind of thing I would expect even precautious high schoolers would want to read. There are some illustrations and images from the time, but not very many, and few are photos. Overall, though, it is well put together, with notes at the end, which I prefer over placing them at the end of chapters.