924 The Journal of American History
The Revolution of 1861: The American Civil
War in the Age of Nationalist Conflict. By Andre
M. Fleche. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2012. xiv, 204 pp. $39.95.)
The Revolution of 1861 succeeds admirably in its
principal objective: to show that many North-
erners, Southerners, and Europeans interpreted
the American Civil War with reference to
nationalism and revolutions in mid-nine-
teenth-century Europe. Andre M. Fleche is by
no means the first to suggest such a connec-
tion, and his arguments build on the work of
many other scholars, but in a number of
important ways he expands and deepens our
understanding of the international context of
what is too often viewed as an exclusively
American conflict.
Fleche’s overarching contention is suc-
cinctly captured in the words of a Missouri
newspaper editor during the secession crisis:
“This is the American 1848” ( p. 44, emphasis
in original). With an initial focus on Europe-
ans who immigrated to the United States in
the wake of the revolutions of 1848, Fleche
builds his case that perceptions of the Euro-
pean revolutions informed reactions to the
developing sectional crisis. The year 1861 was
no exact replica of 1848, of course, and Fleche
is at his best when revealing the ironies and
problems generated by American efforts to
define their crisis in European terms. It was
difficult for Northerners to liken Southern
slaveholders to tyrannical European aristocrats
and at the same time justify the Union’s use of
military force for conservative political ends.
For their part, Southerners made much of the
similarity between the Confederacy’s claim to
national self-determination and the claims of
the Irish, the Hungarians, and the Poles, yet
slavery made it difficult to forge any real alli-
ance with liberal—and often antislavery—
European nationalists. Who were the revolutio-
naries here? Fleche rightly sees the Emancipa-
tion Proclamation as a turning point. Although
Confederates persisted in their efforts to create
a slaveholding republic that could fit into the
modern world of nation-states, it became a
more difficult project after the issuance of the
proclamation on January 1, 1863. Ongoing
Northern efforts to imbue the Union cause with
global significance were strengthened. And for
December 2012
Europeans, the Emancipation Proclamation
clarified what the two sides were fighting for
and made it easier to slot the American conflict
into the template of 1848.
There are, as always, other avenues the
book could profitably have explored. Outside
of the second chapter, there is little sense of
debate within the North or the South over the
meaning of 1848 for 1861. What did Southern
Unionists think? Northern Democrats make
the occasional appearance, but are mostly sub-
sumed within an emerging Republican hege-
mony with a uniform international vision. It
would also have been interesting to hear more
about how Latin American revolutions fit in.
Finally, the creation of the Kingdom of Italy
at almost exactly the same time as the creation
of the Confederacy surely deserves more exten-
sive discussion. Still, Fleche establishes styl-
ishly and persuasively that as Northerners and
Southerners redefined their conceptions of
nationalism in the 1850s and 1860s, they
paid close attention to transatlantic comparisons.
The Revolution of 1861 is essential reading for
anyone interested in placing the American
Civil War in broader international patterns of
ideology and politics.
Paul Quigley
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, Scotland
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas384
Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of
Music in the Civil War. By Christian Mc-
Whirter. (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2012. x, 321 pp. $39.95.)
Music in nineteenth-century America was
social and ephemeral. As a result, its power
and popularity remained largely situational.
Such a musical climate is the setting for
Christian McWhirter’s Battle Hymns—an exten-
sive, descriptive account of music during the
American Civil War. The author’s approach
is that of a Civil War historian more than a
cultural or music scholar. In thematic chapters,
written in clear prose drawn from detailed
archival research, the author handles such
topics as the Northern and Southern quests for
national anthems, popular music on the home
front, music in the armies, music of and about
 Book Reviews
freedpeople, and the politicization of music.
Although the book does not follow a chrono-
logy, it still describes how and why popular
music transformed over the course of the war
as peoples’ experiences with and attitudes
toward the war changed.
Stories on the creation of “John Brown’s
Body,” “Battle Cry of Freedom,” and “Dixie”
revisit common subjects in American music
history. McWhirter’s chapter on how whites
musically expressed their changing opinions of
blacks and how they musically conveyed their
newfound status as freedpeople situates Civil
War music within its racial context. His
description of how veterans used Civil War–
era music to promote their legacy begins an
interesting chapter that progresses through
later attempts to bolster the Lost Cause using
Civil War music and ends in 2009 with the
University of Mississippi football controversy
over using “Dixie” as the team’s unofficial
fight song—nicely emphasizing this history’s
relevance to the present.
The author best meets his goal of exploring
the role of music in daily life when describing
music and its meaning to soldiers—precisely be-
cause his sources tend to be from soldiers’
explicit recollections of music’s meaning to
them. He is less convincing when making larger
claims with thin evidence or making claims that
fall outside the purview of this study—for
example, his claim that soldiers served as distrib-
utors for music or that music became a more
prominent cultural tool during the war (but
without a comparison to antebellum music).
Although McWhirter wants to go beyond lyrical
analysis (and he does), this work still relies on
song lyrics as sources without enough critical
reflection on how such lyrics affected listeners.
How literally do song lyrics express opinion?
The evidence of music’s reception and ability to
transform a listener often appears speculative.
Finally, McWhirter’s use of the terms
popular, successful, highbrow, and lowbrow could
be defined more precisely and could be placed
more explicitly into the historiography of each
of these musical topics. Without using any
quantifiable measure of popularity, we have to
take his word that a song was popular, and we
have to accept what he means by the term.
Also, the author’s claim that a clearly visible
line existed in the 1860s between highbrow
925
and lowbrow music is an awkward framework
for the topics covered. Such analytical and the-
oretical deficiencies, however, do not take away
from his informative and detailed account of
music during the American Civil War.
Ann Ostendorf
Gonzaga University
Spokane, Washington
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas404
War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil
War North. By Frances M. Clarke. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011. xiv, 251
pp. $35.00.)
As the Civil War unfolded, Americans of all
stripes struggled to make sense of and find
meaning in the increasing carnage. Pro-Union
Northerners, argues Frances M. Clarke in her
textured analysis, consciously fused suffering
and sentimentality to create war stories with
the conviction that the telling and retelling of
such inspiring tales would ultimately foster
the creation of a noble wartime and postbel-
lum “society in which honorable men would
thrive and selfless women would continue to
wield salutary moral influence” ( p. 176).
Clarke rightly frames her study by arguing
that the definitions of suffering prevalent in Vic-
torian America informed and infused pro-
Union Northerners’ understandings during the
war. Short life expectancy and sweeping epide-
mics made antebellum Americans intimately
familiar with suffering, which “itself thus became
a marker of whiteness, refinement, and class
status” (p. 12). In the eyes of pro-Union North-
erners during the Civil War, the parameters of
soldiers’ and civilians’ suffering became the way
to distinguish between Confederates and Feder-
als. Through an investigation of five dominant
tropes in Civil War stories—namely, those that
depicted Union officers’ heroic deaths; those
that described the behavior of white enlistees in
confronting wounds and sickness; tales focusing
on the effects of voluntary efforts on suffering
men; those that imagined the beneficial impact
of Northern voluntarism on warfare itself;
and. . . thosefeaturingUnionamputeesasthecon-
flict’s most evident and inspiration victims—
Clarke convincingly argues that pro-Union
Northerners saw themselves as fundamentally
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