From Publishers Weekly
Two counties, one in Virginia and one in Pennsylvania, are united by the vast Shenandoah Valley, but divided by the Mason-Dixon line. As late as 1859, these border counties, and by extension their respective states, saw themselves not on opposite sides of a divided nation but as the historic and contemporary heart of a country where such forces as a shared history and a common language made civil war inconceivable. The inhabitants of both counties initially prided themselves on resisting provocation by fire-eaters in the far North and the deep South. Ironically, they eventually committed themselves fully, sacrificing blood and wealth unstintingly to a conflict few of them welcomed. That process, however, was by no means straightforward, as Ayers (The Promise of the New South) brilliantly shows. If Confederate supporters in Augusta County, Va., ultimately accepted slavery as the touchstone of their social order, they also insisted they were fighting for the right to be left alone, free of a Northern influence perceived as increasingly alien. Their counterparts in Pennsylvania's Franklin County went to war not to destroy slavery but to prevent the South from destroying the Union by leaving it. Emancipation grew from the contingencies of war-and not the least of these was the increasing determination of black Americans to take charge of their own destinies, thereby challenging at its roots the social contract established by the revolution of 1776. Ayers tells his complex story with a master's touch, shifting smoothly between North and South, and between the lesser worlds of his two counties and the wider events of the war that changed them both utterly. He pauses with Lee's invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863, just before the Battle of Gettysburg-a decision both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying. This volume lays the groundwork; we are left to anticipate the climax and the denouement to be presented in its successor.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Two towns--Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and Staunton, Virginia, at opposite ends of the Shenandoah Valley, itself bisected by the Mason-Dixon Line--are historian Ayers' settings for his exploration of how sectionalism burst into civil war. The cities' urbane citizens--lawyers, editors, preachers--thought of themselves as sane Unionists in the intensifying crisis that ensued from John Brown's raid of 1859, yet they became, with the onset of fighting at Fort Sumter in 1861, as uncompromising as abolitionists of the North or fire-eaters of the South. Complexity collapsed into simplicity overnight; local newspapers fulminated against the enemy's iniquities; and exulted or despaired, as the results of battles warranted, in the fates of local boys gone soldiering. Ayers unfolds this historical process with penetrating analysis and relevant quotations, emphasizing the anxiety, excitement, and misery that the war provoked. He suspends his narrative (pending a sequel) with Staunton lawyer and now Confederate general John Imboden occupying Chambersburg and enslaving any black person, fugitive or free, his men could capture. Certain to absorb the Civil War set, Ayers' comparison of two towns reverberates with the local manifestations of the war's origins and direction.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
See all Editorial Reviews
(12)
(13)
$19.95
(13)
$18.50
