Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South [Hardcover]

Stephen V. Ash (Author)

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Stephen V. Ash is Lindsay Young Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865, coauthor, with Paul H. Bergeron and Jeanette Keith, of Tennesseans and Their History, and co-editor, with W. Todd Groce, of Nineteenth-Century America: Essays in Honor of Paul H. Bergeron.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press; First Edition edition (January 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807114006
• ISBN-13: 978-0807114001
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,834,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Civil war was a war of change, October 11, 2008

By 

George C. Bradley (Carlisle, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860-1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Paperback)

For people interested in the life experience of Southern civilians in the 1860's, Stephen Ash should be a prime resource. And for those interested in the totality of our civil war, there is no better place to gain a view than in Middle Tennessee. In 1860, Middle Tennessee was one of the most prosperous sections of the South, filled with successful, even rich, farms and farmers, many of them slaveholders. However, the people of the area were hardly of one view, and when it fell to Union forces in the spring of 1862, Professor Ash paints a vivid picture of the section's rapid decline into "utter social and institutional anarchy."

One of the debates among historians over the time since this book came out relates to the question, was the Civil War a total war? Regardless how one defines total war, or the conclusion one reaches, this book brings into view one great cost the people of the South paid when they entered into a war that would be lost. They had a stable government and a safe living situation before the war began. When Tennessee left the Union to join a new government, and that government was driven away and destroyed, the real terrors and scourges of war, terror and anarchy, filled the void. Anarchy was just as sharp an instrument of harsh war as were any official Union policies designed to destroy the war-making capability of the Confederacy.

I can here some of you now: "Well, I'm not interested in social history; I wanna read about the real war." If so, heed the words of Gary Gallagher, who hailed this book as a new and necessary sort of military history, "connecting the experiences of soldiers in the field and civilians on the home front ... providing a social context within which to understand military events." War isn't hell? Look here. You'll think otherwise.