Frances M. Clarke. War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2011. Pp. xiv, 251. $35.00

Extract

For more than a century, Americans have consumed realistic and bittersweet (often simply bitter) accounts of war and the effects of war. This has left many readers, including historians, unable to stomach, much less understand, the moralistic and overtly triumphal fiction and non‐fiction produced during the American Civil War. In her excellent book, Frances M. Clarke offers a nuanced and moving interpretation of these sincere efforts to make sense of the carnage, sacrifice, and disappointment of war. Rather than seeing them as “mere curiosities” reflecting their “Victorian origins” (p. 3), Clarke argues that Civil War stories showed not only how northerners justified the unprecedented blood and treasure expended to preserve the Union, but also how they articulated the values that sustained them via stories of suffering and perseverance by soldiers and civilians.

But not all suffering meant the same thing, and not all sufferers were equally noble. Indeed, members of the lower classes and African Americans were largely absent from the stories Clarke analyzes. The hardships they endured elicited pity more than admiration and, as a result, were thematically useless to middle‐class authors and readers. And while acknowledging that Confederates also suffered, northerners believed southern society was too corrupted by slavery for its suffering to have any redemptive value.