The best place to start studying the Northern home front experience is with the words of those individuals who lived it. Home-front correspondents, who sent their efforts to men in the army, remain underrepresented in the volumes of published letters. Soldiers’ letters dominate those publications because the home folks had safely preserved and passed them on through the generations, whereas it was more likely that soldiers would lose letters from home because of the circumstances of camp life, the march, and battle. Nevertheless, there are some published family collections that provide a good starting point. Among the best are Georgeanna Woolsey Bacon and Eliza Woolsey Howland, My Heart toward Home: Letters of a Family during the Civil War, ed. Daniel John Hoisington (Roseville, MN: Edinborough Press, 2001); Judith A. Bailey and Robert I. Cottom, eds., After Chancellorsville: Letters from the Heart, The Civil War Letters of Private Walter G. Dunn and Emma Randolph (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1998); Judy Cook, ed., A Quiet Corner of the War: The Civil War Letters of Gilbert and Esther Claflin, Oconomowoc, Wisconsin 1862–1863 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013); Barbara Butler Davis, ed., Affectionately Yours: The Civil War Home-Front Letters of the Ovid Butler Family (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2004); Donald C. Elder III, ed., Love amid the Turmoil: The Civil War Letters of William and Mary Vermilion (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003); Robert F. Engs and Corey M. Brooks, eds., Their Patriotic Duty: The Civil War Letters of the Evans Family of Brown County, Ohio (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Andrea R. Foroughi, Go If You Think It Your Duty: A Minnesota Couple’s Civil War Letters (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008); Richard L. Kiper, ed., Dear Catharine, Dear Taylor: The Civil War Letters of a Union Soldier and His Wife (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002); Charles F. Larimer, ed., Love and Valor: Intimate Civil War Letters between Captain Jacob and Emeline Ritner (Western Springs, IL: Sigourney Press, 2000); and Marti Skipper and Jane Taylor, eds., A Handful of Providence: The Civil War Letters of Lt. Richard Goldwaite, New York Volunteers, and Ellen Goldwaite (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2004). Arguably the best collection of letters written by immigrant soldiers and civilians to their families is Walter D. Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich, eds., and Susan Carter Vogel, trans. Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For an Irish Catholic perspective, see Lawrence F. Kohl and Margaret C. Richard, eds., Irish Green and Union Blue: The Civil War Letters of Peter Welsh, Color Sergeant 28th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986).
For an unusual collection that is especially revealing about the lives of women on the home front, see Nancy L. Rhodes and Lucy E. Bailey, eds., Wanted— Correspondence: Women’s Letters to a Union Soldier (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). Ruth Douglas Currie, ed., Emma Spaulding Bryant: Civil War Bride, Carpetbagger’s Wife, Ardent Feminist, Letters and Diaries, 1860–1900 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004) devotes only a short section to the war, but it is worth reading for the intelligent writing of Emma Bryant on a number of topics. Julie Holcomb, ed., Southern Sons, Northern Soldiers: The Civil War Letters of the Remley Brothers, 22nd Iowa Infantry (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004) is primarily a collection of thoughtful soldiers’ letters that illustrate what the home folks were learning of the war from their soldiers in the field, but it also contains some correspondence from family members at home. A good example of what soldiers told their children about their experiences and how they tried to maintain paternal involvement with their lives is Anita Palladino’s Diary of a Yankee Engineer: The Civil War Story of John H. Westervelt, Engineer, 1st New York Volunteer Engineer Corps (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), which consists of letters written in diary form and sent to Westervelt’s son. Nina Silber and Mary Beth Sievens, eds., Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters between New England Soldiers and the Home Front (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia 1996) is an excellent example of the kind of home-front material, scattered through a wide range of manuscript collections, that is available to the diligent researcher. So, too, is Jeffrey D. Marshall’s collection of Vermont correspondence, A War of the People: Vermont Civil War Letters (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999).
Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, is publishing a series of books, The Civil War in the Great Interior, which deals with the oft-neglected Midwest. Volumes now available are Christine Dee, ed., Ohio’s War: The Civil War in Documents (2006), Mark Hubbard, ed., Illinois’s War: The Civil War in Documents (2013), Richard F. Nation and Stephen E. Towne, eds., Indiana’s War: The Civil War in Documents (2009), Pearl T. Ponce, ed., Kansas’s War: The Civil War in Documents (2011), and Silvana R. Siddali, ed., Missouri’s War: The Civil War in Documents (2009), all excellent compilations that range over the spectrum of wartime and home-front topics. The press plans similar volumes for Michigan and Wisconsin.
Northerners not only kept up with the war through letters received from their loved ones at the front, they could also read letters by soldiers published in their local newspapers, some of which are now available in book form. For example, see Stephen W. Sears, ed., Mr. Dunn Browne’s Experiences in the Army: The Civil War Letters of Samuel W. Fiske (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), from the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican; and Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt, eds., Hard Marching Every Day: The Civil War Letters of Private Wilbur Fisk, 1861–1865 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), from the Montpelier, Vermont, Green Mountain Freeman . The African American community heard from one of its own in letters from Corporal James H. Gooding of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, printed in the New Bedford, Massachusetts, Mercury, now available in Virginia M. Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier’s Civil War Letters from the Front (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991).
Diaries and memoirs also help bring immediacy to the Northern home-front experience. Revealing diaries include Jennifer Cain Bohrnstedt, ed., Views from My Schoolroom Window: The Diary of Schoolteacher Mary Laurentine Martin (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2006); Harold Earl Hammond, ed., Diary of a Union Lady, 1861–1865 (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1962); James C. Mohr, ed., The Cormany Diaries: A Northern Family in the Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982); George Templeton Strong, Diary of the Civil War, 1860–1865, ed. by Allan Nevins (New York: Macmillan Company, 1962); Jonathan W. White, ed., A Philadelphia Perspective: The Civil War Diary of Sidney George Fisher (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006). For a different Philadelphia perspective in diary form, see Judith Ann Giesberg, ed., Emilie Davis’s Civil War: The Diaries of a Free Black Woman in Philadelphia, 1863–1865 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
For memoirs, see, for example, Mary A. Livermore, My Story of the War: A Woman’s Narrative of Four Years Personal Experience (1887; Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publisher, 1978); and Sarah Emma Edmonds, Memoirs of a Soldier Nurse and Spy: A Woman’s Adventures in the Union Army, ed. by Elizabeth D. Leonard (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999). Also see Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, ed. by Alice Fahs (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004), a fictionalized rendering of the author’s experience as a nurse. James Marten provides samples of what children on both sides read in Lessons of War: The Civil War in Children’s Magazines (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999).
There are several miscellaneous collections of original Civil War writings that supplement those volumes noted above. The best among them is Louis P. Masur, ed., The Real War Will Never Get in the Books: Selections from Writers during the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), which contains a good sampling of revealing journal entries, letters, and other writings by Northern authors. For an excellent collection of Walt Whitman’s writings, see Walter Lowenfels, Walt Whitman’s Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961; New York: Da Capo Press, 1989); and for Herman Melville’s poetry, see Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, with a new introduction by Lee Rust Brown (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995). George Winston Smith and Charles Judah, Life in the North during the Civil War: A Source History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1966) contains a range of primary material touching on all aspects of the Northern war experience. Marilyn Mayer Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs: The Women of the American Civil War (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1991) uses narrative to weave together excerpts from the writings of Northern and Southern women.
For the first-hand documentation of the African American experience, the best starting place remains James M. McPherson’s The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted during the War for the Union (New York: Vintage Civil War Library, 1991), supplemented with Donald Yacavone, ed., Freedom’s Journey: African American Voices of the Civil War (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2004). Any deeper understanding of the African American experience in the North must also rely on C. Peter Ripley et al., eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. 5: The United States, 1859–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992).
There are a number of general studies on everyday life and leisure and thought on the home front that cover both the North and the South, including Randall C. Jimerson’s The Private Civil War: Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Anne C. Rose’s Victorian America and the Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Joan E. Cashin, ed., The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Susannah J. Ural, ed., Civil War Citizens: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in America’s Bloodiest Conflict (New York: New York University Press, 2010). On the importance of baseball in the North and South, see George B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).
For an expansive coverage and analysis of the Northern home front, see Phillip Shaw Paludan, “A People’s Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996); and for a more compact treatment, J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994). Gallman has also written one of the most innovative recent books concerning the Civil War North: Defining Duty in the Civil War: Personal Choice, Popular Culture, and the Union Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). An important study that uses topics such as fairs and war bond drives to come to an understanding of the development of nationalism in the North during the war is Melinda Lawson’s Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).
Several essay collections advance our understanding of the Civil War North, including recent volumes that suggest that there remains much room for new approaches in the field. See Maris A. Vinovskis, ed., Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., An Uncommon Time: The Civil War and the Northern Home Front (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002); and Andrew L. Slap and Michael Thomas Smith, eds., This Distracted and Anarchical People: New Answers for Old Questions about the Civil War-Era North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
For how soldiers and veterans viewed and interacted with the Northern home front, see Reid Mitchell, The Vacant Chair: The Northern Soldier Leaves Home (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Gerald F. Linderman, Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: The Free Press, 1987); Steven J. Ramold, Across the Divide: Union Soldiers View the Northern Home Front (New York: New York University Press, 2013); and Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds., Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002). Edmund J. Raus Jr., Banners South: A Northern Community at War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2005), which follows the 23rd New York Volunteer Infantry, is a unique approach to a regimental history in connecting the soldiers’ experience with the home front of at Cortland, New York. On the persistence of Union as the fulcrum of soldiers’ and civilians’ support for the war, see Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and for the ways soldiers understood and argued for emancipation, and their effects on civilian thinking, see the chapters in Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).
There still is a serious need for more local studies that consider how the war influenced life in Northern communities. Some studies that are available approach the war’s impact on Northern towns, cities, and regions as part of the larger social and economic development of those communities over a longer period of time, while others focus explicitly on the communities at war and their men in the field. Both Grace Palladino, Another Civil War: Labor, Capital, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania 1840–68 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), and Robert M. Sandow, Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), look at dissent in working-class communities. Don Harrison Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community, Jacksonville, Illinois, 1825–70 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), and Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840–1880 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972) are excellent examples of community studies with large historical scope. For a similar approach but with a regional perspective, see Richard F. Nation, At Home in the Hoosier Hills: Agriculture, Politics, and Religion in Southern Indiana, 1810–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). See Alvin M. Josephy Jr., The Civil War in the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), for an overview of the understudied West. For studies of communities at war, see Nicole Etcheson, A Generation at War: The Civil War in a Northern Community (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011); J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia during the Civil War (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Theodore Karamanski, Rally ‘Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War (Chicago: Nelson-Hall Publishers, 1993); Thomas H. O’Connor, Civil War Boston: Home Front and Battlefield (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997); Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York, 1860–1865 (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2002); David D. Van Tassel, with John Vacha, “Behind Bayonets”: The Civil War in Northern Ohio (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006); and Kerry A. Trask, Fire Within: A Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995). Michael P. Gray, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2001) is a model study of a community reshaped by the war, while Margaret S. Creighton, The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Forgotten History, Immigrants, Women, and African Americans in the Civil War’s Defining Battle (New York: Basic Books, 2005) is a unique study of that famous town and its moment in Civil War history. Russell L. Johnson, Warriors into Workers: The Civil War and the Formation of Urban-Industrial Society in a Northern City (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), about Dubuque, Iowa, is an innovative look at how war affected a community. Stuart Murray’s A Time of War: A Northern Chronicle of the Civil War (Lee, MA: Berkshire House Publishers, 2001) looks at the people of Berkshire County in Massachusetts and their soldiers. David P. Krutz’s Distant Drums: Herkimer County, New York in the War of the Rebellion (Utica, NY: North Country Books, 1997) similarly explores the contribution of a New York county and the impact of the war on the people there. Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003), insightfully compares Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, as the first volume of an extended study. Also, in the above-mentioned essay collections, there are several chapters that deal with specific issues influencing individual communities. Some chronologically larger studies of towns and cities also have sections on the Civil War era worth attention.
The war also had an impact on white Northern communities that were united by their ethnicity. For the Germans in the North, see Christian B. Keller, Chancellorsville and the Germans: Nativism, Ethnicity, and Civil War Memory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); for the Irish, see Susannah Ural Bruce, The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865 (New York: New York University Press, 2006). For recruitment of German, Irish, and other immigrants and their communities, see William L. Burton, Melting Pot Soldiers: The Union’s Ethnic Regiments (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998). The newest study of immigrants and ethnic groups in the Union army is Martin W. Öfele’s True Sons of the Republic: European Immigrants in the Union Army (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008).
There remains a need for new state studies, a genre that too many historians believe to be old fashioned, but one that could provide historians with a manageable way to explore in depth the important issues of the war on the home front. For political studies of Northern states in the Civil War era, see Kenneth M. Stampp, Indiana Politics during the Civil War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1949, 1978); and Lex Renda, Running on the Record: Civil War-Era Politics in New Hampshire (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997). William Gillette, Jersey Blue: Civil War Politics in New Jersey, 1854–186 5 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995) is a detailed examination of the political history of the state, but also includes much information concerning all aspects of the war’s impact there. It serves as an example for future studies. For a supplement to Gillette’s work, see the later chapters in James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775–1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and William J. Jackson, New Jerseyans in the Civil War: For Union and Liberty (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). John Niven’s Connecticut for the Union: The Role of the State in the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965) remains satisfying for its detail and analysis. So too do Richard N. Current, The History of Wisconsin, Vol. 2: The Civil War Era, 1848–1873 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976); and Emma Lou Thornbrough, Indiana in the Civil War Era, 1850–1880 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society 1965, 1995). For a newer exploration of Connecticut and the war, see Matthew Warshauer, Connecticut in the American Civil War: Slavery, Sacrifice, and Survival (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011). Several essays in William Blair and William A. Pencak, eds., Making and Remaking Pennsylvania’s Civil War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001) suggest the diverse ways communities in one state responded to war, as do those in Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015). Also see Albert Castel’s classic Civil War Kansas: Reaping the Whirlwind (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997). Ginette Aley and J. L. Anderson, eds., Union Heartland: The Midwestern Home Front during the Civil War (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013) reminds readers of the significance of the Midwest during the war and just how rural the Northern states remained at the time of the conflict. It is a good preview of new scholarship that should soon see its way into several book-length studies that will revive interest in the role of the Midwest in the Northern war effort. Glenna Matthews, The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), points the way for studies of Western states.
For the popular literature available to Northern readers and the relationship between the publishing industry, books, and Northern nationalism, see Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and the South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Lyde Cullen Sizer explores the significance of women writers in The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Randall Fuller, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011) assesses the effects of war on writing. For newspapers and the Civil War, the starting point is J. Cutler Andrews’s The North Reports the Civil War (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1955). For an update on the topic, see Ford Risley’s survey Civil War Journalism (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012). It is also worthwhile to read Risley’s Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle against Slavery (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008).
For how Northern intellectuals interpreted the war, see George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). For new interpretations of this topic, see the essays in Lorien Foote and Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, eds., So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War-Era North (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
For Northern economics, see Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund Jr., Tariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2004), a brief study that looks at both sections, but in doing so illuminates the Northern home-front experience. For Northern financial matters, see also Jane Flaherty, The Revenue Imperative (London, UK: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). For Republican economic ideas and policy, see Emerson David Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War (New York: Macmillan, 1910; New York: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1963); Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968); Bray Hammond, Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Gabor S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); and Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies during the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Also see Kyle S. Sinisi, Sacred Debts: State Civil War Claims and American Federalism, 1861–1880 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003); and Melinda Lawson’s Patriot Fires, noted above. For economic developments and other aspects of the expansion of the federal government under the Republicans, see Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Mark R. Wilson’s The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) is an important exploration of the politics and economics of the North’s efforts to raise and maintain its armies as well as the process of demobilization at the war’s end.
For Republicans and labor, see David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967). More recently, Mark A. Lause, Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), argues that the war remade the labor movement. For an understanding of the work ethic that influenced free-labor ideology, see Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Robert L. Bee’s introduction to The Boys from Rockville: Civil War Narratives of Sgt. Benjamin Hirst, Company D, 14th Connecticut Volunteers (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998) is an excellent summary description of the life and work of New England mill operatives who entered the U.S. volunteer army.
For farm labor and the Northern agricultural economy around the time of the Civil War, see Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer’s Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860–1897 (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1945; Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1977); David E. Schob, Hired Hands and Plowboys: Farm Labor in the Midwest, 1815–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Paul W. Gates, The Farmer’s Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960); and Paul W. Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965). For a new survey of Northern and Southern Civil War era agriculture, see R. Douglas Hurt, Food and Agriculture during the Civil War (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016).
Randall M. Miller, Harry S. Stout and Charles Reagan Wilson, eds., Religion and the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) provides readers with a collection of innovative essays on religion North and South during the Civil War. George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) is a copious and considered examination of religion during the Civil War era. On politics, national identity, and religion, see Timothy L. Wesley, The Politics of Faith during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2013); and Sean A. Scott, A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For a still influential look at Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians in the North, see James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978). For Catholics and the war, see William B. Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). For an example of the role of churches in one community, see Doyle, The Social Order of a Frontier Community, noted above. For a general overview, see Robert J. Miller’s recent synthesis of the religious aspects of the sectional crisis, Both Prayed to the Same God: Religion and Faith in the American Civil War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007).
On the draft, see James W. Geary, We Need Men: The Union Draft and the Civil War (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991); Eugene C. Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1971). Grace Palladino, in Another Civil War, and Robert Sandow, in Deserter Country, both noted above, also suggest that draft resistance was a complicated matter that went beyond simple opposition to the war, as do various essays in Paul Cimbala and Randall Miller, eds., Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front, noted above.
For a detailed account of the draft riot in New York City, see Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); for a more analytical exploration of the riots, see Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Frank L. Klement believes that pro-Southern conspiracies were never a real threat to the Union war effort. See his Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), and The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998). For a work that takes seriously the threat, see Stephen E. Towne, Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War: Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015). For another modern interpretation that sees Copperhead threats as real and pervasive, see Jennifer L. Weber, Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Also for state studies of dissent, see Hubert H. Wubben, Civil War Iowa and the Copperhead Movement (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980); and Arnold M. Shankman, The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861–1865 (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980); as well as Frank L. Klement, The Copperhead’s of the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). One of the best recent studies of antiwar activity at the local level is Robert M. Sandow, Deserter Country, noted above. For how the Lincoln administration dealt with dissent, see Mark E. Neely Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Not all dissent was political and pro-Southern; on this, see Thomas F. Curran, Soldiers of Peace: Civil War Pacifism and the Postwar Radical Peace Movement (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Also see Philip E. Webber’s Zoar in the Civil War (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007), which explores the tension of conscientious objection to the war and support for the war in a German separatist community.
Despite the dramatic exceptions, Democrats generally worked within the political system. See Joel H. Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era, 1860–1868 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1977). For a broader study of the ideas and the people attracted by them into the Democratic Party, see Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid- N ineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983; New York: Fordham University Press, 1998). Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970) remains the essential study for understanding the ideas that shaped the Republican Party during its formative years. For how the war years influenced the party’s ideology, see Richardson The Greatest Nation of the Earth, noted above; Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans in the Civil War Senate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); Michael S. Green, Freedom, Union, and Power: Lincoln and His Party during the Civil War (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); and John Syrett, The Civil War Confiscation Acts: Failing to Reconstruct the South (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). By exploring cultural aspects of American life, Mark E. Neely Jr., in The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), reminds readers of the centrality of politics in the Civil War era. Also see his The Union Divided: Party Conflict in the Civil War North (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), which challenges the old interpretation of the positive influence of the two-party system on the Northern war effort. For a collection of essays on the character of the Republican Party during the Civil War era, see Robert F. Engs and Randall M. Miller, eds., The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). For a concise yet essential treatment of the values that propelled Northerners to fight secession, see Earl J. Hess, Liberty, Virtue, and Progress: Northerners and Their War for the Union (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997); James M. McPherson, For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); and Gary Gallagher, The Union War, noted above. An excellent new study of first-time voters during the 19th century is Jon Grinspan, The Virgin Vote: How Young Americans Made Democracy Social, Politics Personal, and Voting Popular in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai adds to our understanding of Northern thought, masculinity, concepts of honor, and the Yankee character in his Northern Character: College-educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). For Northern and Southern perceptions of the war, see Randall C. Jimerson, The Private Civil War: Popular Thought during the Sectional Conflict (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1988).
Many important new works dealing with Northern women and the war effort are available. Nina Silber, Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) provides a suggestive recent study that especially considers women’s relationship with the government. For Anna Dickinson’s role in the war effort, see J. Matthew Gallman, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson: The Story of a Remarkable Woman, the Civil War, and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Judith Ann Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), adds an important dimension to women’s wartime experiences by going beyond historians’ emphasis on middle-class women to explore the impact of the war on working-class and “marginal” women. For an innovative look at women and family in the North, including the impact of correspondence between unacquainted women and soldiers and its impact on courtship, see Patricia L. Richard, Busy Hands: Images of the Family in the Northern Civil War Effort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003). Three significant studies deal with Northern women’s involvement with benevolence and its consequences: Judith Ann Giesberg, Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000); Jeanie Attie, Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); and Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990). Also see Nancy Scripture Garrison, With Courage and Delicacy: Civil War on the Peninsula, Women and the U.S. Sanitary Commission (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003); Elizabeth D. Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994); Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991); and Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For the larger context of the sanitary fairs that women organized to raise money for the war effort, see Beverly Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998).
For the beginning of the involvement of women with the effort to educate the freedpeople, see Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964); Joe M. Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986); and Patricia C. Click, Time Full of Trial: The Roanoke Island Freedmen’s Colony, 1862–1867 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). For women and postwar educational efforts among the freedpeople, see Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
For the continuation of the efforts of Northern abolitionists and philanthropists to assist the ex-slaves, see James M. McPherson’s two books, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), and The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). For further insight, see Carol Faulkner, Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). For the larger context of philanthropy during the Civil War era, including the efforts to deal with the needs of women and children, see Robert H. Bremner, The Public Good: Philanthropy and Welfare in the Civil War Era (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980).
James Marten’s groundbreaking work The Children’s Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) remains the best place to start for an understanding of the war’s impact on the lives of children, but for the Northern home front in particular, see his Children for the Union: The War Spirit on the Northern Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004).
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), deals with the significance of the way soldiers died and families understood and memorialized death. On that subject, see also Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Also instructive is John R. Neffin Honoring the Civil War Dead: Commemoration and the Problem of Reconciliation (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). Neffdevotes a chapter to Lincoln’s assassination, but also see Thomas Reed Turner, Beware the People Weeping: Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), and Martha Hodes, Mourning Lincoln (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). For the handling of those involved in the assassination conspiracy and an exploration of related larger issues, see Elizabeth D. Leonard, Lincoln’s Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion after the Civil War (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004). For Northerners’ positive view of Lincoln in spite of the opposition, see Hans L. Trefousse, “First among Equals”: Abraham Lincoln’s Reputation during his Administration (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). For a treatment of the earliest constructions of Lincoln’s postassassination image and how it developed through the years, see Merrill D. Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
For the prejudicial treatment Northern blacks encountered before the war, see Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); and Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For the Civil War era, see David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality, noted above; and Margaret Creighton, The Colors of Courage, noted above. Much more work remains to be done on African American life during the war years, but in addition to the studies noted above, see the appropriate chapters in David A. Gerber, Black Ohio and the Color Line, 1860–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976); Graham Russell Hodges, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); and Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, Tasting Freedom: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), which also includes telling descriptions of blacks’ involvement in and response to emancipation efforts in one city. For the problems encountered by black veterans, see Donald R. Shaffer, After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).
For the government’s developing policies toward emancipation, see, for example, James Oakes, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012); LaWanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1981); Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy toward Southern Blacks, 1861–1865 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973); Herman Belz, A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedmen’s Rights, 1861–1866 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976; New York: Fordham University Press, 2000); Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004); Michael Les Benedict, A Compromise of Principle: Congressional Republicans and Reconstruction, 1863–1869 (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974); and Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988). All of the works on Reconstruction era noted above touch in some way on the North’s turning away from the promise held out by the war to African Americans throughout the reunited nation. On that process, see David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001); James M. McPherson, Abolitionist Legacy, noted above; Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
On the constitutional effects of the war, and the ways understandings of the Constitution and the law affected the conduct of the war, see Laura F. Edwards, A Legal History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Harold M. Hyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875 (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Mark E. Neely Jr., Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and Timothy S. Huebner, Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016).
How Northern soldiers became once again members of their communities remains one of the most important understudied aspects of Civil War history. Larry M. Logue pioneered the study of Civil War veterans in his brief but suggestive survey To Appomattox and Beyond: The Civil War Soldier in War and Peace (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996). Paul A. Cimbala, Veterans North and South: The Transition from Soldier to Civilian after the American Civil War (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2015), and James Marten, Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) provide newer analyses. Some of the above-mentioned community studies touch on the subject of the soldiers’ return. Also, newer regimental histories briefly review the topic in their final chapters or epilogues; for example, see Edward A. Miller Jr., The Black Civil War Soldiers of Illinois: The Story of the Twenty-ninth U.S. Colored Infantry (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998). Joseph T. Glatthaar shows the significance of such work in his chapter “Life after the USCT” in Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers (New York: The Free Press, 1990). For the political and fraternal activities of veterans, see Mary R. Dearing, Veterans in Politics: The Story of the GAR (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1952); and Stuart McConnell, Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Barbara A. Gannon challenges notions of veterans, race, and reconciliation in her book The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). For mental health issues of returning soldiers, see Eric T. Dean Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Dean’s book is a groundbreaking piece of work, but new advances in brain science, head injuries, and other physical problems that produce symptoms similar to PTSD suggest it needs revising and updating.
Thomas J. Brown’s The Public Art of Civil War Commemoration: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004) provides a brief introduction to the efforts of Americans to commemorate their great national drama. An interesting look at national memory and one battlefield is Thomas A. Desjardin’s These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003).