| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edward L. Ayers. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863. New York: W. W. Norton. 2003. Pp. xxi, 472. $27.95.

In this extraordinarily well-crafted volume, Edward L. Ayers compares social experience and shifting political sentiment among the peoples of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, during the late antebellum period and the first two years of the Civil War. In the context of that war, these counties of the Great Valley of Appalachia formed portions of the northern and southern borderland region—Ayers's titular "Heart of America." The Mason-Dixon line forms Franklin's southern border, while Augusta is situated about 150 miles to the south, in the upper Shenandoah Valley. Despite fundamental similarities between these two counties of open-country neighborhoods, rural villages, and small service towns—in the nature of their agrarian economies and the ethnic composition of their populations, for example—key differences existed as well. Not least among these, of course, was that Augusta was a slave society while Franklin was not; slaves comprised about twenty percent of the population of Augusta County. In their political views, as well as spatially, peoples of this borderland found themselves on middle ground between northern abolitionists and cotton South fire-eaters. Thus, although Franklin County was of the North, its population did not embrace abolitionism, and although Augusta County was of the slave South, its population remained staunchly Unionist until the very eve of the war.

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