| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Edmund J. Raus, Jr. Banners South: A Northern Community at War. (Civil War in the North.) Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. 2005. Pp. xiv, 333. $39.00.
The American Civil War has been looked at from almost every conceivable angle, and more of late from the perspectives of the home front and the men in the ranks. Because so many people in mid-nineteenth-century America were literate, and because so much of what they wrote about the war has been preserved, the Civil War is the first major armed conflict in human history in which we can know and understand a considerable amount about the ordinary people involved. In this book, Edmund J. Raus, Jr., adds to that understanding.	1
The object of his attention is the community of Cortland, New York, a small, not so prosperous, upstate town west of the Appalachians, located within a county of the same name inhabited in 1860 by 26,000 people. They were a highly homogeneous lot—white, mostly Methodists and Baptists, overwhelmingly Republicans. Only five percent of residents had been born outside the United States. Furthermore, they shared most of the same myths and opinions about their country and the reasons for trouble with the South. When war came they vociferously responded with bombastic speeches, mass meetings, and torchlight parades, and almost spontaneously out of the commotion arose the "Cortland Volunteers," an infantry company that soon became part of the Twenty-third Regiment of New York Volunteers. The average age of its members was twenty-two. Most were unmarried farm boys who had attended school and church together; they were more like a hometown athletic team than a military force. The town made a great fuss over them, and before they departed for Elmira in late May, local women made them a distinctive flag to carry southward into battle.	. . .

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