| 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

Cheryl A. Wells. Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861–1865. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 195. $39.95.
Extending the work of her mentor, Mark M. Smith, Cheryl A. Wells offers an intriguing analysis of the ways in which the Civil War warped Americans' experience of time. According to Wells, the life rhythms of antebellum Americans were driven by four overlapping tempos: "natural time" (the weather and the seasons); "God time" (the Sabbath); "clock time" (daily work routines); and "personal time" (the need for sleep and the desire for leisure). All were disrupted by "battle time," the tendency of the Civil War to pace the lives not only of soldiers but also of hospital workers, prisoners, and civilians caught in the crossfire. This disruption was only temporary, however. The war, Wells contends, threw Americans back on a tempo akin to the premodern task system, but, after Appomattox, people again looked to their watches to determine the pulse of their lives.	1
Wells's book is split into two parts. The first examines the role of timeliness (or rather the lack of it) in two major military engagements: First Manassas and Gettysburg. At Manassas, Irvin McDowell's offensive was, according to William Tecumseh Sherman, "one of the best planned ... and one of the worst fought" (p. 23). It required a kind of discipline his troops did not have: an ability to stay on schedule. Wells nicely multiplies her examples. The federals moved with a slowness that was almost farcical. They were green volunteers, she notes, soldiering on their own time; and, in the case of those who fell out to pick blackberries, they took their own sweet time getting into position.	. . .

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