| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863. By Edward L. Ayers. (New York: Norton, 2003. xxiv, 472 pp. $27.95, ISBN 0-393-05786-0.)

For years Edward L. Ayers has headed a project at the University of Virginia called the Valley of the Shadow Project, in which a team of researchers assembled a vast amount of primary source material and presented it on both a Web site and a CD-ROM dedicated to exploring the coming of the American Civil War. Now Ayers draws on this vast archive in presenting a history of how the residents of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, some one hundred miles apart, experienced the coming of war and the first years of conflict. Commencing his account in 1859, Ayers describes how John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry shook both counties, increasing distrust between the sections, as that which divided white Americans north and south appeared in starker relief than that which united them. Franklin County voters chose Abraham Lincoln in the election of 1860; the following winter Augusta's delegates to the Virginia secession convention pronounced their support of Union, slavery, and Virginia, only to see support for the first collapse in April 1861, followed by Virginia's decision to join the Confederacy. Both counties raised volunteer forces, although Franklin lagged behind Augusta; during the next two years, as war waged and then escalated into a contest in which slavery was explicitly at stake, whites weighed costs of conflict versus prospects for victory while blacks sought freedom, some by enlisting in the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. Ayers gracefully draws the curtain just as the armies collide at Gettysburg.

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