The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (American Ways Series) - Hardcover

Gallman, Matthew J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1566630495 ISBN 13: 9781566630498

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, 1994

Synopsis

A fresh look at how Northern society mobilized to fight the first great modern war. From Gallman's analysis of continuity and change, it seems clear that the conflict was not the great watershed in political, economic, and social development that is often supposed. A concise, readable account....Gallman challenges some conventional wisdom while telling an important and dramatic story. -James M. McPherson. American Ways Series.

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Reviews

This brief survey, synthesizing a broad spectrum of scholarly monographs, argues that the North's wartime experience emphasized continuity rather than disruption, that the Union responded to the challenge of civil war with adjustments rather than changes. Despite the steady expansion of government authority over such matters as recruiting and supply, the North, contends Loyola College history professor Gallman, maintained an essentially private, local, voluntaristic structure ("The Civil War was truly a national war fought by local communities"). Race relations were altered by African American participation in the war effort, and the Civil War opened some economic and social doors for women. But market forces rather than government controls drove economic development, while conscription ironically encouraged volunteering. "The Civil War stretched the bounds of political discourse in all directions," argues Gallman, "even while it left the shape of that discourse largely unchanged." The author convincingly concludes that while the beleaguered South was "forced to accept far more dislocation" as its "price of war," the North found it unnecessary to wage "total war" in order to achieve its essentially conservative objective of restoring the Union.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gallman (Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1990) looks at the impact of the Civil War on the political, social, and economic developments in the North as well as the South. The result is an interesting study of the war's effects upon the civilian population in the North especially. Gallman examines the traditions the North relied upon in preparing for war and the adjustments made to compensate for the large number of troops and supplies needed. The author disagrees with most historians on the war's impact upon economic growth in the late 19th century, arguing that economic growth actually slowed after the war. He also looks at the role that women, blacks, labor unions, and politicians played. It is evident here that the North did not fight in search of change but to restore the union, and it was willing to endure all hardships to achieve that end. Recommended for collections emphasizing the Civil War.
W. Walter Wicker, Louisiana Tech Univ., Ruston
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

This topical survey of the issues behind the military campaigns ventures no startling conclusions. Gallman argues that the North's total victory was built on only partial realization of its revolutionary innovations. In terms of policies expressed in legislation, economics, and finance--and, less instrumentally but more emotionally, in feelings of nationalism, class, and race--the war (for the North) was not such a sharp departure from antebellum years, Gallman shows. A student of wartime Philadelphia (Mastering Wartime [1990]), Gallman examines his subjects through the prism of the domestic political winds that buffetted them as the conflict stretched on year to year. In formal politics and popular pressures (exhibited by the press, or riots), he shows how the dynamic of centralization competed with local efforts, producing "adjustments" in recruitment, benevolent associations, industrial expansion, and--when 35 percent of the white men and 180,000 black men were in uniform--family relations. A tenable thesis, capably rendered, on aspects of the epic seldom visited in the steady stream of Civil War books. Gilbert Taylor

Edition details

• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566630495
• ISBN 13: 9781566630498
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224