| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Divided Family in Civil War America. By Amy Murrell Taylor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi, 319 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2969-2.)
Many Americans continue to believe that the Civil War bitterly divided families, just as much as they insist that those same families quickly reunited, as the nation did, to survive and prosper. One of the most common clichés still associated with the war is that it pitted "brother against brother." Amy Murrell Taylor examines this popular assumption through a fascinating study of actual families, North and South, white and black, divided by war. Focusing on the "border states" of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Missouri she tracks intimate relationships tested, strained, and sometimes severed by the conflict. Taylor more than simply presents dramatic family stories, she considers the concept of family as a popular cultural metaphor that enabled nineteenth-century Americans to understand better disunion and reunion.	1
Taylor reminds readers of the importance of the family as an institution to nineteenth-century Americans. For middle-class whites especially, the family was idealized as "the foundation of social and national stability" and an "emotional sanctuary" (pp. 4, 6). National and familial loyalties were supposed to coalesce; instead, as Taylor finds in her study, those allegiances often clashed.	. . .

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