Book Review

Intimate Strategies of the Civil War is a collective biography of six Confederate and six Union military commanders, their wives, and their marriages. What a task the biographers have set for themselves: they must write intelligently about two individuals, the marriage in which those people found themselves, and the world in which they lived as it was disrupted by civil war. That task has been accomplished admirably in this work, which traces the effects of the war on the marriages.

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The six Confederate marriages run the gamut. Carol K. Bleser's unflinching examination of Jefferson Davis's mistreatment of his wife Varina expands upon her clear-eyed address to the Southern Historical Association in 1998 and provides a more balanced portrait of both Varina and the marriage of the Confederacy's first couple than is present in standard biographies. "The Marble Man," Robert E. Lee, becomes far more human, even roguish, in Emory Thomas's examination; he argues that Lee's marriage, dismissed as "unsatisfactory" by biographers, was, rather, a "series of concessions, slipknots within the marriage bond that allowed their relationship to function" albeit at times in a pattern of near-abandonment by Robert, who would preach of "duty" while he left his wife, Mary, and family alone despite her frequently debilitating ill health. The marriages of Mary Anna and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson and of George and LaSalle Pickett featured wives who put together myths that ignored their husbands' shortcomings in favor of icon building, while the marriages of Lizinka and Richard Ewell and of Amelia and Josiah Gorgas are evidence of the effect of strong and independent wives on nineteenth-century partnerships; those couples are the healthiest of the lot.

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