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Summary
Summary
Moving beyond Presidents and generals, A People's History of the Civil War tells a new and powerful story of America's most destructive conflict. In the first book to view the civil war through the eyes of common people, historian David Williams presents long- overlooked perspectives and forgotten voices offering a comprehensive account of the war to general readers. The Civil War's most destructive battles, Williams argues, took place not only on the fields of Gettysburg, Antiesham, and Vicksburg, but also on the streets of New York, in prison camps, in the West, an on the starving home front. Labouring people, urban and rural, fought for economic justice. Women struggled for rights and opportunities and for their family's survival. Volunteers and conscripts demanded respect. Native Americans made the Civil War a war for freedom long before Lincoln embraced emancipation. Bottom up history at its very best. A People's History of the Civil War offers a rich and complex portrait of a nation at war with itself.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This hefty but readable social history by a confessed disciple of Howard Zinn reframes the Civil War as a conflict not simply between North and South but between the underclass and the power elites-both Confederate and Union. With populist zeal, Williams (Plain Folk in a Rich Man's War) catalogues the influence of the common folk-dissenters, resisters, women, nonslaveholding whites, laborers, African-Americans and Native Americans-locating the conflict's origins in class divisions in the wartime South. Williams illuminates both women's hardships and their shift into new roles (feisty Northern and Southern women became spies and soldiers). For the enlisted or conscripted common man, conditions were a far cry from those of the affluent brass, and the author emphasizes the actions of draft evaders and deserters (draft riots swept Northern cities in the summer of 1863). He details the role of resisting blacks who fought for their own freedom while Lincoln demonstrated an "ambiguous attitude towards" them. For Native Americans, Williams writes, the era marked their continued dispossession. Though Williams flattens history through a materialist lens, this account sheds fascinating light on neglected aspects of the period and will make a worthwhile companion volume to military histories. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
This is really not a history of the Civil War but, rather, a litany of the economic and social injustices of mid-nineteenth-century America, followed by a recounting of some of the efforts to resist those injustices. Williams sheds interesting light on aspects of the Civil War era that are often given scant attention in more conventional histories. He shows the spirit and surprising strength of anti-secessionist movements in the South and explores, in depth, the resentment of many Southern soldiers and civilians over what they perceived as a rich man's war, poor man's fight. Unfortunately, Williams' populist agenda leads him to frequent exaggerations, distortions, and constant utilizations of vague generalities. For instance, he repeatedly blames North and South elites for the war while failing to acknowledge that abolitionist sentiments generally sprang from those of the middle and upper classes. This work has value as an alternative view of the era. --Jay Freeman Copyright 2005 Booklist
Choice Review
Williams (Valdosta State Univ.) presents a history of the Civil War from the viewpoint of the common citizen. He describes the war from a decidedly leftist viewpoint in the manner of Howard Zinn, and therein lies the book's shortcoming. The author allows his political viewpoint to predetermine the outcome of the book, leaving only half a picture of the Civil War. Williams expounds at length on how the war benefited only the rich and how predatory the draft was, but totally ignores the essential fact that tens of thousands of men volunteered to fight. According to Williams, industrial development triggered by the war was invariably exploitive and had no positive value at all. He devotes pages to women and Native Americans in the Civil War far out of proportion to any other comprehensive work on the conflict. Also in the pattern of Howard Zinn, Williams uses no primary materials, relying entirely on the research of other historians. The premise of the book is ambitious and worthwhile; unfortunately, the author preferred to use the book as a political soapbox. ^BSumming Up: Optional. Graduate students/faculty. S. J. Ramold Eastern Michigan University
Kirkus Review
A reconsideration of the Civil War that addresses its impact on ordinary people. Williams (History/Valdosta State Univ.; Plain Folk in a Rich Man's War, 2002, etc.) argues that the war was created by monied elites in the North and South looking to maximize profits. Working men and women widely opposed the war from its inception. Williams offers evidence of strong opposition to secession among poor Southerners, who owned few slaves and stood to gain little from independence. Nor did Northern workers support a war to free the slaves, whom they saw as competition for their jobs; Lincoln's delay in endorsing emancipation was primarily intended to defuse opposition to the war among his own citizens. War fervor declined rapidly after the initial battles, and both sides were forced to institute conscription--with ample loopholes for the wealthy. That led to the popular byword, "rich man's war, poor man's fight," which becomes Williams's mantra. It also led to draft riots and armed rebellion on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Desertion was also a problem--Robert E. Lee blamed his loss at Antietam primarily on defection from the ranks of his army. By war's end, over half the Confederate army was AWOL. Many had gone home to families whose inability to feed themselves was largely caused by the rich planters' decision to raise lucrative cotton and tobacco instead of food crops. Women often took matters into their own hands, launching raids on food depots and funneling aid to deserters and draft dodgers. Meanwhile, slave revolts and Indian wars on the western frontiers divided the attention of both sides. At times, it seems a wonder either side managed to win--and at war's end, the same old monied elites remained in control in the North and the South. A useful, if sometimes depressing, counter to the sanitized picture many historians paint of our nation's greatest struggle. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Stereotypical images of patriotic men who unblinkingly fought to the death to defend the Union and Confederacy, women who remained at home encouraging enlistment and otherwise supporting the cause, and African Americans who patiently waited for Father Abraham to free them have been in recent years increasingly challenged by modern historians, who have moved beyond a study of the era's presidents and generals to one of its men, women, and children of different races, regions, and social classes. Williams (history, Valdosta State Univ.; Rich Man's War) presents views of the war that focus on lower-class Southern whites who resisted and resented the war; women who cursed the fighting that killed their male kin and starved and physically threatened themselves and their children; and African Americans who boldly pushed the war toward emancipation. Dealing more with class conflict than military conflict, this book does for the Civil War period what Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States did for the study of American history in general, providing alternative interpretations to counterbalance traditional historical views. Highly recommended.-Theresa McDevitt, Indiana Univ. of Pennsylvania Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| Introduction: "The People at War" | p. 1 |
| 1 "All for the Benefit of the Wealthy" | p. 13 |
| 2 "The Brunt Is Thrown upon the Working Classes" | p. 73 |
| 3 "The Women Rising" | p. 131 |
| 4 "We Poor Soldiers" | p. 191 |
| 5 "Come In Out of the Draft" | p. 253 |
| 6 "My God! Are We Free?" | p. 325 |
| 7 "Indians Here Have No Fight with the Whites" | p. 389 |
| 8 "Was the War in Vain?" | p. 451 |
| Afterword | p. 497 |
| Notes | p. 499 |
| Bibliography | p. 543 |
| Index | p. 567 |
