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A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom

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I am a 50 year old American who has been teaching college level history classes for over 20 years. The Civil War is not my field of study, but until this book came along, certainly thought I knew the story of my country's greatest conflict.

Not so! "A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom," proved me wrong. Now I have a better understanding of the Civil War as not simply North vs. South, free vs. slave, or Abe vs. Jeff, but rather a series of conflicts all connected by political, social, and economic issues of mid-Nineteenth Century America.

It is a dark history of the Civil War, showing how elites on all sides used the lower classes to further their interests. By the time I was done reading about "Captains of Industry" selling defective muskets; plantation owners producing cotton over food, and elites paying for substitutes to perform their military duty, I wanted to toss Jeff Davis and Abe Lincoln into a pit full of hungry badgers!

You may not share my conclusion, or agree with Williams' thesis. His words, however, are backed by considerable research. In most cases, he allows an eyewitness to drive home each point about the many conflicts within this monolith I used to think I understood. Hope you will enjoy this book as I did. Read it, and no matter what your label - Civil War, the War of Yankee Aggression (or the War of Southern Treason) - you will come away with some new ideas on events of 1861-1865.

Despite being recounted innumerable times in print, the Civil War is often examined in very narrow terms, usually involving the decisions of commanders and the movement of units on the battlefield. David Williams's book is much different. In chapter-length accounts, Williams looks at the how the war impacted the lives of men and women on the home front, draftees, African Americans and Native Americans - groups often neglected in traditional accounts of the war.

Such a focus brings a refreshing perspective to a well-worn subject. The war depicted in these pages is a much more complex one than in previous books; class tension fuels resentment towards the conflict, while the South struggles to cope with unionist sentiment that is overlooked in many accounts. Though Williams's continual resort to class as the paradigm for evaluating events wears over the course of the book (the "rich man's war" line got a little old after awhile), his conclusions - backed by a solid command of Civil War historiography - are impossible to ignore. The result is a valuable corrective of the standard "guns and generals" account of the Civil War, one that should be required reading for any student of the conflict.

In the name of full dislosure: I majored in American History (concentrating on Southern History) at the University of North Carolina, graduating in 1975. My father's father's father (my greatgrandfather) died in Confederate military service, leaving my grandfather fatherless.

My mother's father served in a noncombatant role in the first World War (he was married and had a child by that time), and my father (the son of a man whose father died in the Confederate service) served as a First Lieutenant in transport/logistics in the U.S. Army's 8th Air Force during the second of the World War's.

As for me, I graduated from high school in 1970, the last year in which college graduates could gain draft deferments by going to college. So, I avoided serving in Vietnam with the full support of my father.

Of all the books that I have ever read on U.S. and Southern History, there are three that opened my eyes more than another other. And this is one of those three books. The others are:
* "American Colonies: The Settling of North America" by Alan Taylor, a summary and review of modern scholarship on the history of North America until 1810, and
* "Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America" by Lawrence Goodwin, a study of the progressive outbreak among Blacks and whites in rural America at the end of the 19th century.

What's powerful about David Williams book is that it -- like the Taylor book -- summarizes and makes available to general readers a ton of solid scholarship about the Civil War period that has emerged over the last 20-30 years. Its voice is the voice of the majority of the population at that time: small farmers and tradesmen, western settlers, African slaves, free Blacks, new immigrants, war widows, female nurses and spies, small business people, native people who wanted to be left alone as neutral noncombatants.

One of the more powerful things that this book does is to recall some of the verbal histories that people in the South have passed down from generation after generation concerning the war. These are unedited stories, truth that has been passed down without the usual filtering of nationalistic American historians from the North or the "Lost Cause" crowd down home in the South. Wiliams recalls stories from his own family in Georgia, true stories reminiscent of the one that Charles Frazier, author of the novel Cold Mountain, used as a framework around which to build the story of his book and movie about a Confederate deserter in western North Carolina in 1864.

In my family, we have no such stories, probably because my great-grandfather was killed (most likely as a result of a disease caught at the front) during Confederate service and didn't live to tell the tale. For my grandfather and his siblings -- growing up in poverty, with a fourth-grade education and without a father in Nash County, North Carolina, I'm sure that they had little desire to dwell on any war stories, either good or bad.

Fortunately, the great-great grandfther of my friend George from Columbus County, North Carolina DID survive the war, as a Confederate officer. According to the family story, when this Confederate army officer returned from the war he said, essentially, " Well, the war is over. I don't want to think about it any more, and I'm glad it's over."

Perhaps the most interesting part of this story is that when my friend George's ancestor returned to Eastern North Carolina from the front, his community was FULL of men who had resisted the Confederate draft and deserted the Confederate armed forces. Even though this gentleman was an officer, he told his family that he felt no ill feelings towards any man who avoided the draft or deserted the Confederate service, because he knew that they all had families to feed and they did what they had to do. (Remember: there was no military housing for families, no G.I. Bill of Rights and no Veterans Administration in those days).

Truth be told, all the horror stories and social trends associated with ANY modern war can be found in David Williams' Peoples History of the Civil War: a rush to war based on misinformation, violent repression of people opposed to war and/or secession, creating incidents in order to manipulate public opionion in favor of war (i.e., Fort Sumter, "Remember the Maine," the Gulf of Tonkin and the fanciful "rescue" of the American medical students in Grenada in 1982 come to mind) resistance to the draft, war profiteering and black marketeering by the politically well-connected, resistance to paying taxes to support the war, mass desertion, suspension of civil liberties, separated families, war refugees, starving women and children, forced labor, torture, abuse and medical neglect of prisoners, women taking on new roles in wartime, dispossession of native people, and finally the usual wartime scenario where rich boys find legal excuses not to fight while poor men are slaughtered at the front.

Yes, sports fans, it's all there, but this time it is presented without all the usual glorification of and rationalizations by generals, politicians and the opportunist crowd that President Eisenhower later called the military/industrial complex. This book is refreshing, because it shows again what pure hell war really is and why it is almost always so horrific for working people anywhere in the world.

For a long time, the American Civil War became a war of valiant white Southerners fighting for "their way of life". History was re-written to be not about slavery or profits, but about "state's rights" against the government. Such figures like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis became heroes in the post-war South, while the people who fought the war were largely white-washed. Movies like "Gone With the Wind" or "Birth of a Nation" romanticize slavery and the ruling planter class. More importantly, dissenters against the war, especially in the South, were nearly written out of history. Only in the last 50 years has the swing back to the war being about slavery and a rich man's war, where nearly a million people lost their lives.

"A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom" does a superb job of explaining why the Civil War happened, as well as the struggles of all people, not just the politicians or generals during the war, and the major reasons for the defeat of the South beyond just plain military reasons. To every war, there is multiple reasons. The Southern Plantation owning class feared race war if their African slaves ever became free, then poor whites and poor blacks might unite against them. Throughout the 1850s and especially in the months prior to the start of the war, numerous bouts of paranoia of abolitionist plots to spark slave revolts appear in Southern Press (which the militant John Brown used to fan the fears of the planters.) The planters believed that their control of the South would be safer in a Slaveholder's republic than compromise with Northern industrialists. In the North, wealthy industrials and emerging capitalists feared losing access to cheap Southern cotton and agriculture, and therefore pressed their government not to let the Southern states leave. In that, they had a stake in continuing the slave system. Copperheads and pacifists throughout the North opposed the war, but were routinely shut down by Lincoln's government, who suspended habeas corpus.

Williams explores the hidden history behind the war which has seemingly been erased from history, such as the incredible amount of dissent against the war on both sides, but especially in the South where whole regions were strongly pro-union (especially poor white farmers who hated the ruling plantation owner class), in parts of the South like East Tennessee, West Virginia, North Alabama, West North Carolina, North Louisiana.) Nearly 500,000 Southerners ended up fighting for the union side, both in the US Armies and as guerrillas struggling against the Confederates. It is noted that the Confederates were both fighting the union armies and anti-planter guerillas, destroying the notion that the American Civil War was a regional war and not a true civil war.

The role of women deviates as well, exploring how Southern women actually helped end the war. In the South, most men were away in armies, leaving women behind to tend the crops and other such work by themselves. They felt the starvation of the war first hand, as the Plantations of the South, a supposed breadbasket, continued to produce cash crops such as cotton and tobacco instead of food like corn and wheat. The first to demand bread from the government were women, and Williams documents several big bread riots in the South by women. He also documents several cases of female spies and nurses, women who dressed as men to serve in the armies, and women openingly telling men to desert the war effort.

There are also chapters of the struggles of the soldiers themselves, who deserted on mass near the end of the war in the South, Blacks who refused to work and fled for the union lines whenever they could get a chance (despite the very cool reception Union soldiers, generals, and politicians gave them), and Indians who continued to fight the centuries old war against white people theft of their land. I fully recommend it for anyone looking to get a sense of how the war actually effected people, and why the ruling classes still came out on top after the war's end, even if chattel slavery was abolished as a result of the war.

One of the great logical fallacies is to reason from a particular premise to a universal conclusion. Much of this book is based on that logical fallacy. Yes some people were starving and some planters were not planting food but extrapolating to a universal conspiracy of the rich against the poor is illogical. A Peoples History of the Civil War is not balanced. It is an attempt to make everybody with any power look evil and it contorts history to accomplish its goal. If you want to see the US Civil War through a Marxist lens then read this book but there are better books to read about the Civil War that give a much more balanced view.

this is a great book,I highly recamend it to all history buffs.You won't be disappointed and maybe very supprised at what th people thought!!

I liked speacially because introduces a critical view of the civil war.
Too much movies. It helped me to see war history from another
perspective.

it details the suffering of civilians in the North and the South. The insights provided into everyday problems of everyday people are enlightening. As an amateur history buff, I knew the civil war was not popular in either the North or the South, and this book details why and how it was opposed by civilians. In contrast to popular beliefs, common folks hated the war. Only politicians and speculators liked & wanted the war.

This is a very comprehensive history of the Civil War period. The author relates that most people of the South did not want to secede from the Union and most people of the North did not want to go to war against the South and were not anxious to end slavery in the South. A very small percentage of Whites in the South owned slaves. Life for those who were not slaveholders was not much above that of slaves. At times there was a great deal of friendliness between the soldiers of the North and the South. There were very vivid descriptions of brutality against slaves by slaveholders and also brutality against Indians by the Federal government. The author brings both President Lincoln and General Robert E. Lee down from the lofty pedestals upon which they have generally been observed in other historical writings. The book is rather long but interesting to read. It could easily serve as a college text book.

As I normally do, I read the above reviews before I read the book. This process usually gives me a "heads-up" as to what I might expect and what particular slants or bias to be aware of as I proceed. One of the above reviews noted that it was a "politically PC" rendition of history. I must very much disagree with this view. This is a history of the common people during the War years. If the reader is looking for flag waving, cavalry charges, last stands and colorful generals, he might look elsewhere. For the sake of brevity and since it's my review I will state what I think to be the strengths and weaknesses. Weaknesses: It is obviously slanted to the left. Most of the poor and downtrodden are victims while most of the rich are "elites" and have no other motives but profit, power and financial advantage. All quotes and references support these views. As is usual in most cases, the truth may be somewhere in between. My greatest problem with the book is it's almost total reliance on secondary sources, albeit well organized and utilized. The greatest strength of this work is to cast a light on the ordinary people, the folks who receive little ink in the history texts; Everyday farmers, soldiers, mechanics, women, blacks, both free and slave and American Indians. Over all, I would highly recommend this book to the Civil War student as a fine source of material that will help him to understand what the common people were doing and thinking during the war. However, the reader might keep in mind that, just as in todays' political climate, there are many different and varying views on what is truth. As a Civil War student who has read well in excess of 100 books on the conflict I found this particular book to be a great read about a less explored but very important subject.