George M. Fredrickson’s untimely death on February 25, 2008, elicited an outpouring of admiring tributes to his long and distinguished scholarly career. Most singled out for praise Professor Fredrickson’s ground-breaking use of comparative history inWhite Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History, published in 1981. His legacy is firmly rooted in subsequent works exploring the powerful effects of racism within a global context. Seldom mentioned in the testimonials was the first of his eight books,The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. Appearing in 1965, and reprinted in 1993 with a...

Modern Americans often turn for ideological inspiration to Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, in which Lincoln posits a nation dedicated to the “proposition that all men are created equal.” Lincoln asserted that an idea underlay the Union, one that he traced to its founding, and one that he asked the American people to save before it perished. Their task was to ensure the endurance of a nation “so conceived and so dedicated.”¹ Although Lincoln claimed in his address that he sought to transmit a transcendent national “proposition” unchanged to the next generation, the historian Garry Wills argued that Lincoln’s words and...

By the mid-nineteenth century, American health care for the sick had become fundamentally associated with democratic expression. Americans could choose among a dizzying array of healers, from the traditional to legions of alternative practitioners, but most commonly relied on family members and folk cures. Even the medical licensing system crumbled under the weight of Jacksonian zeal, as homeopaths encouraged most states to repeal their licensing laws by the 1830s, eroding the very notion that medical expertise could exist. The Civil War, however, provided a singular opportunity for professional physicians to reassert their authority in Americans’ lives, especially in the North,...

In April of 1861, the month in which the surrender of Fort Sumter to Confederate forces signaled the beginning of the American Civil War, theAtlantic Monthlypublished a ground-breaking novella,Life in the Iron Mills, by Rebecca Harding Davis. Echoing Charles Dickens’s famous opening toBleak House, but with the fog replaced by smoke that “rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries” of an unnamed mill town, Davis portrayed a grim image of human existence in an industrial world. This is a quasi-military world, alien even to those who live proximate to it yet...

Civil War Americans were obsessed with notions of civic as well as bodily health. From the secession crisis to war and battlefronts to home fronts, medical officials, politicians, university presidents, reformers, and average citizens alike often framed the turbulent series of events facing the American nation through discourses of disease, health, and well-being. For instance, although proslavery forces had long since characterized abolitionists as deluded and even insane, members of the northern intelligentsia read disunion as a disease and began calling disunionist disciples a cancerous blot on the American body politic. By eradicating bondage via sectional war, Unionists would restore...

Locating John Codman Ropes, the founder of the Military Historical Society of Massachusetts (MHSM), in the intellectual currents of his time only looks easy. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1836 to the “Russia trader” William Ropes and descended from two distinguished Salem and Boston families, John Codman Ropes belonged to the social class at the center of George M. Fredrickson’sThe Inner Civil War: the “group of old-stock New Englanders” who “combined high social status with intellectual interests and accomplishments.” Indeed, by class credentials and education, Ropes, educated at Harvard College (1857) and Harvard Law School (1861), was an...

Edward G. Miller returned to the University of Wisconsin in the fall of 1861, following three months’ service in the Union Army. The underclassman had left the university in haste after the attack on Fort Sumter the previous April, abandoned his freshman year, and headed to the front. “At 11 a.m. the book was opened at the armory, and my name was the 13th enrolled,” he recalled later. After experiencing military life, Miller struggled to adjust to being back on campus. As the leaves changed color in Madison and war news dominated the headlines, he recognized that “the war spirit...

In 1874, less than a decade after Union armies had suppressed the Confederate rebellion, one of the heroes of the American Civil War found himself faced with another uprising amid the usually placid pines of Bowdoin College’s campus in Brunswick, Maine. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had returned home from war after having suffered terrible wounds, defending the Union army’s left flank at the Battle of Gettysburg, and receiving the surrender of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Courthouse. The residents of Maine thought he would make a good governor and sent him to Augusta four times. Chamberlain then accepted...

During the hot summer months of 1863,Harper’s Weeklysketch artist Theodore R. Davis embedded himself with a regiment of Union soldiers digging trenches around Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina. One evening, as Davis observed the soldiers carefully removing a series of explosive devices planted underground, an “accidental explosion” startled him. A “torpedo” had “blown out of the [trenches]” a black corporal from the Third United States Colored Regiment. The next morning Davis awoke to find that nearby Confederate soldiers had captured the dead corporal, stripped him of his uniform, and attached his nude body to a fresh explosive...

In 1838, John C. Pemberton, a Pennsylvania native, told his father, “I should like to become a Virginian by adoption.”¹ Pemberton, who had married the daughter of a prominent Norfolk family in 1845, straddled two sections and kept close ties with the rest of his family back in Pennsylvania. The secession crisis in 1860 forced the U.S. Army officer to make a gut-wrenching decision. He thought long and hard about his choices and his ultimate loyalty. After Fort Sumter, Pemberton weighed pleas from both his family in Pennsylvania and his wife in Virginia. Although he left no contemporary record of...

Late in the Battle of Gaines’s Mill outside Richmond on June 27, 1862, the Ninth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry served as its Fifth Corps’s rear guard after repeated Confederate assaults caused the entire blue line to buckle. Illness caused Colonel Thomas Cass to relinquish command to the regiment’s young lieutenant colonel, Patrick R. Guiney, who ordered his flag-bearers forward in the face of a Confederate onslaught. At his call, “Follow your colors, men,” Guiney’s soldiers, Irish Americans recruited from the Boston area, lunged toward the Confederate line with their green regimental and Union banners waving, buying precious moments for the rest...

The outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 tore apart not just the nation but the American Catholic Church as well. Shortly after the Battle of Bull Run, Patrick Lynch, Charleston’s Catholic archbishop, wrote his fellow clergyman, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, “The Separation of the southern States is un fait accompli. The Federal government has no power to reverse it.” Blaming “black republicans” for the conflict and boasting that the South could never be defeated, Lynch, appealing to their common ancestry and religion, told Hughes to keep Irish Catholics out of the conflict. Hughes, however, proved to...