Material culture is one of those important new approaches that are beginning to be applied to Civil War studies and no scholar has done more to promote material culture in our field than Joan E. Cashin of Ohio State University. She edited and contributed to an anthology highlighting the potential inherent in this new way of understanding the Civil War which has recently been published as War Matters: Material Culture in the Civil War Era (2018).

Along with the monograph under review, War Matters will be considered the foundational literature of material-culture studies of the Civil War era. War Stuff contrasts with War Matters in that it is a focussed look at the struggle for resources by both belligerents during the course of the Civil War. Moreover, it includes human resources as well as material resources. Cashin scoured a wide variety of sources, including personal accounts and official documents, to understand how and why armed conflict inevitably draws the participants into grabbing and utilizing material to prosecute their war effort. Conflict also promotes the manipulation and control of people. Cashin's vision is broad, including discussions of food, timber, housing, loyalty oaths, hostage holding, smuggling, and coercion of civilians.

Cashin's line of interpretation takes in the pre-Civil War era's attitude toward material resources. Her view is that the Civil War generation went from a generally respectful attitude toward the management of resources before the war to a flagrant disregard of that attitude under the pressure of armed conflict. Thousands of soldiers plundered material from friend and foe alike during the conflict, oftentimes simply destroying it rather than using it. Of course systematic destruction of enemy resources became official policy by both armies at different times of the war, but Cashin focusses more on private, unauthorized destruction and use than on official policy. The latter has been the subject of a string of studies over the past couple of decades while the former needs more attention of the kind that Cashin devotes to it.

In fact, the most intriguing aspect of Cashin's book is her exploration of why soldiers so vigorously grabbed enemy resources. She recognizes that both armies had regulations detailing a humane way of feeding off the countryside when it was called for, but officers and enlisted men alike more often ignored these regulations than obeyed them. In speculating as to what made soldiers turn into plunderers, she opens an important debate on human nature and on Civil War soldiering. This reviewer feels she tends to overstate the level and intensity of plundering. It certainly was a major feature of the war experience but not an overwhelming phenomenon. There are many examples of restraint on the part of Union and Confederate soldiers when it came to pillaging resources.

One would like to see a tighter focus on the connection between military operations and plundering as well. They were intertwined in that federal soldiers tended to increase plundering every time their units entered “virgin” Confederate territory that had not previously been invaded. Thus there was a rhythm to the destruction that depended on circumstances. Cashin tends to see it as a continual or steadily increasing phenomenon.

But this criticism takes nothing away from the significance of Cashin's book. She points toward a deeper way of studying soldiers in wartime. She identifies the processing and manipulation of civilians as an under-studied feature of Civil War history. The story of using human resources alone deserves a monograph of its own laid out along the lines of this admirable study. Cashin proves that the armies desperately needed a wide variety of material resources and saw their enemy and the environment as sources to fill that desperate hunger. Her book is not the last word on any of these three areas wherein her contribution lies, but it should be looked on as a stimulus and inspiration for further work in all of them.

The social, cultural, and military history of the Civil War is well served by a study like this which ties together new approaches and themes. Cashin is doing much to promote integration of this kind.