xvii:
Americans could not have imagined the war they brought on themselves. [...] No one could have known that the most powerful slave society of the modern world, generations in the making, would be destroyed in a matter of years. [...]
Today, of course, we do know these things. Looking back to tell the story to ourselves, we search for opposites and contrasts to explain this overwhelming war, to set abolitionists against secessionists, industry against plantations, future against past. We look for impending crises and turning points, for the reassuring patterns that lead to the end of the story we already know.
This book tells a different kind of story. It offers a history of the Civil War told from the viewpoints of everyday people who could glimpse only parts of the drama they were living, who did not control the history that shaped their lives, who made decisions based on what they could know from local newspapers and from one another. It emphasizes the flux of emotion and belief, the intertwining of reason and feeling, the constant revision of history as people lived within history. It sets aside our knowledge of the war’s outcome, starting before the war could be envisioned and ending with everything in uncertainty.
xviii:
Because the Civil War was such a vast and complex event, historians often approach it in the familiar and manageable forms of broad surveys, battle histories, and biographies of generals and presidents. In these accounts, the experiences of the majority of people, soldiers as well as civilians, tend to blur into generalizations, categories, and scattered quotes. It is easy to lose sight of the way the war continually changed its meaning and implications for most Americans.
In pursuit of a more inclusive and more intimate history, this book tells the story of two communities, one Northern and one Southern. Holding a tight focus across the complicated landscape of the Civil War, this book follows the people of Franklin County, Pennsylvania, and Augusta County, Virginia, from peace into the maelstrom of the war. It intertwines the stories of North and South, sometimes using sections in italics, like voice-overs in a film, to comment on the twin narratives.
xx:
The brute operations of economy and government continually interacted with the more subtle but no less potent power of culture and ideology. Sometimes people acted from personal or local motivations while at other times distant events drove their actions. A history of the Civil War must comprehend all of these facts of life as they connected in the flow of time.
An interpretation that focuses on deep contingency cuts against the grain of many Americans’ understanding of the Civil War. We usually look closer to the surface, seeing the North as a modern society in obvious conflict with an archaic South, the future in conflict with the doomed past. Such a view seems like common sense, for it embodies an understandable and useful desire to see American history as a path, albeit strewn with challenges, to the realization of our best selves.
97-98:
In January 1861 white Virginians thought and acted in non sequiturs. They declared their love for the Union and threatened to leave it. They declared their faith in peace yet imagined the worst conceivable kind of war. Old beliefs and loyalties were forced into new combinations, twisted and torqued, distorted and deformed to fit unimaginable circumstances.
114:
J. McD. Sharpe, 29-year-old attorney from Chambersburg, writing in the newspaper Spirit:
Even if the North could muster the force necessary to conquer such a vast and well-fortified land, what then? “Commerce destroyed, cities burned to the ground, fields uncultivated, the people debauched, the arts of peace banished, and the fruits of industry relinquished for the more easily acquired spoils of robbery.” Moreover, “what would we do with the South, after we had conquered her. Could we hold her in the Union by force? The idea is preposterous.”
141:
Had pro-Confederate sympathizers attempted to stage a coup against the Virginia Convention, as some dreamed and advocated, the upper boundary of the Confederacy might have been drawn to the south of Virginia or even North Carolina. Ideals and emotions might have gone to the Unionist side, as they did in Kentucky and Maryland when pro-Confederates pushed too hard.
147-48:
The Civil War did not approach the border like a slowly building storm. It came like an earthquake, with uneven and unpredictable periods of quiet between abrupt seismic shifts that shook the entire landscape. It came by sudden realignments, its tremors giving no indication of the scale of the violence that would soon follow. People changed their minds overnight, reversing what they had said and done for years.
[...]
Indeed, the inconsistencies were striking. The North went to war to keep people in a Union based on the consent of the governed, to maintain connection with a slaveholding society it despised. Northern leaders expressed barely a word of concern for the millions of people currently enslaved. The South, for its part, went to war under the flag of freedom to maintain a massive and growing human slavery. The South risked war and the disintegration of a nation it had dominated to maintain rights that remained unchallenged in any concrete way.
151: “Union proved an ideal whose form could change, whose boundaries could be redrawn without changing the ideas to which that Union devoted itself.”
153-54:
The final popular vote on secession in Virginia arrived on May 23, weeks after the state had seceded in deed. The tortured and hopeful language of compromise had been replaced by simplistic and superheated rhetoric. “Is it not the threatened policy of the North to invade our State and take from us by brute force, our lands, our houses, and all that we possess, and divide it among themselves?” asked a former Augusta Unionist. “Their cry is ‘booty and beauty,’ which means, in plain English, as I understand it, to steal our lands from us, and ravish our females. Any one that doubts can get the newspapers and read for themselves.” Northern newspapers said nothing like this, but Virginians felt certain they did.
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