| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Paul Christopher Anderson. Blood Image: Turner Ashby in the Civil War and the Southern Mind. (Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2002. Pp. xxii, 258. $34.95.

Turner Ashby's Civil War career began in the spring of 1861, when the volunteer cavalry company he had assembled from his home in the northern Virginia piedmont was accepted for Confederate service. He served with some distinction as a colonel in the Seventh Virginia Cavalry, fighting under Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley campaign. In June 1862, he was killed in a skirmish near Harrisonburg, Virginia. 1

Paul Christopher Anderson's book, the most recent of a half-dozen works on Ashby, will disappoint readers hoping to find a new study of Ashby's brief military career. As the title suggests, Anderson places more emphasis on Ashby's image than on his exploits on the battlefield. The phrase "cultural biography" has been much used lately, and sometimes misused as simply an alternative to the old "life and times." But this book is truly a cultural biography. The subject is not Ashby; it is southern society before, during, and after the war, explicated through a discussion of Ashby's life. 2

Anderson organizes his study around Ashby's "four faces," each treated in a separate chapter. The first looks at Ashby as "ideal horseman" (p. xvi), a way of getting at the South's sense of honor and chivalry. Anderson's discussion of the role of chivalry in southern society is reminiscent of T. H. Breen's "Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling among the Gentry of Virginia" (William and Mary Quarterly [1977]). This image of Ashby provided just what the Confederacy and its soldiers needed at the beginning of the war. "Ashby the horseman served as an illustration of what was valuable in life," Anderson writes, "a vivid representation of their idea of home and what they were fighting for" (p. 62). Significantly, Ashby was known as "The Knight of the Valley." . . .

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