Book Review

Historians of the Confederacy have a problem. On the one hand, everyone knows the South came together, formed a national government, raised an enormous army, and held off the largest industrial nation on earth—the North—for four years. Quite a success story. Yet we also know that there were many in the South opposed to the war. As John C. Inscoe points out in his cogent introduction to the essays in Enemies of the Country, dozens of historians have documented Unionist activity in virtually every state in the Confederacy. Yet the pattern in all this opposition remains elusive. Moreover, I would argue, the mounting evidence of Unionism in the South confounds our best efforts to account for its sources and its effects. If Unionist sentiments and activities were so widespread, how did the Confederacy come into being in the first place? How did it succeed in maintaining its structural integrity as a nation for four years?

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The essays in Enemies of the Country suggest several possible approaches to these questions. Jonathan Berkey and Thomas Dyer, writing on Unionist Northerners in the South, argue that Northerners' lack of local connections made them easy prey and forced them either out of their home communities or underground. And Robert Tracy McKenzie points to the power of Confederate troops to stifle the dissent even of the most famous and well-connected Unionist in Tennessee, William Brownlow. In other communities, however, Unionists organized themselves along kinship lines to resist and survive. The essay by Inscoe and Gordon McKinney on households in Appalachia is particularly suggestive. It documents how families "found themselves perched precariously atop a barbed-wire fence during the war," scrapping not only with Confederate neighbors and conscription officers but also among themselves as families divided but did not break apart during the war. And Kenneth Barnes documents how one clan in Arkansas was forced to resist violently in order to survive. The upshot of these accounts is that Unionist actions varied by time and place, each dissenter trying to avoid the Confederacy and its agents whenever possible, engaging only when cornered.

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