A People's History of the Civil War: Struggles for the Meaning of Freedom

Bottom-up history at its very best, A People’s History of the Civil War "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" (Library Journal). Widely praised upon its initial release, it was described as "meticulously researched and persuasively argued" by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Historian David Williams has written the first account of the American Civil War though the eyes of ordinary people—foot soldiers, slaves, women, prisoners of war, draft resisters, Native Americans, and others. Richly illustrated with little-known anecdotes and first-hand testimony, this pathbreaking narrative moves beyond presidents and generals to tell a new and powerful story about America’s most destructive conflict.

A People’s History of the Civil War is "readable social history" that "sheds fascinating light" (Publishers Weekly) on this crucial period. In so doing it recovers the long-overlooked perspectives and forgotten voices of one of the defining chapters of American history.

From Publishers WeeklyThis 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.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From BooklistThis 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 FreemanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved