| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir's Civil War. By William L. Barney. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. xvi, 245 pp. Cloth, $22.00, ISBN 978-0-19-531434-2.)

Walter Lenoir is not an obvious candidate for extended biographical treatment, but our understanding of the nineteenth-century South would be the poorer had this project not been undertaken. William L. Barney's pocket-sized monograph explores a life of dramatic interest yet, on the face of it, little concrete achievement. However, as Barney notes in an unusually reflective afterward (curiously, the only chapter with conventional referencing), he became attracted to Lenoir because of the exceptional "clarity and directness of his thinking" (p. 203). The result is an absorbing account of one upcountry Southerner's struggle for identity and self-validation in the crucible of civil war and its aftermath. Barney claims neither too much nor too little for his subject; acknowledging the book's selective viewpoint, he skillfully marries conventional biography to a subtle consideration of the war's cultural and emotional resonance.

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