As people gather across the United States for Civil War sesquicentennial commemorations, scholars are seizing opportunities to rethink the stories we tell about that conflict. The essays that comprise This Distracted and Anarchical People unite in an effort to reexamine the essential nature and meaning of the war that tore the United States apart. Editors Andrew Slap and Michael Smith directly challenge the work of the “Freedom School,” which centralizes race and national transformation in narratives of the era (1). In eleven essays covering a wide range of subjects including political partisanship, battlefield experiences, and the lives of Americans on the margins, authors present a number of intriguing interpretations and reassert the importance of the Civil War's nineteenth-century context.

Michael Bennett exemplifies the collection's revisionist aims, taking an alternative approach to questions about the totality of the Civil War. Calling total war an anachronism given that context, Bennet instead seeks to understand why the conflict involved such horrific violence. Confederate troops occasionally waged “black-flag” warfare, refusing to take Union prisoners, which led to atrocities both during and after battle. Soldiers sometimes continued an assault after a cease-fire order or attacked enemies who had already been maimed in a practice known as “rewounding” (148). Bennett attributes such actions to drugs and alcohol, to the “heat of battle,” and to the strong emotional connections that bound together small groups of soldiers (150–51). In an especially compelling passage, he reveals the extent to which Confederate cavalrymen killed Union stragglers from Sherman's march, highlighting the prevalence of retaliation during the war and vividly contextualizing specific atrocities.

A number of the collection's authors examine wartime politics, including Jonathan White, who reconsiders claims that Union soldiers overwhelmingly supported the Republican Party. While statistics indicate that about 80 percent of soldiers in the field voted to reelect Abraham Lincoln, White complicates that data with evidence of voter intimidation, disdain for the Democrats, and general apathy among the troops. Many who voted for Lincoln did not enthusiastically embrace the Republican platform. Like other nineteenth-century voters, soldiers exhibited an array of strong and shifting political opinions and ideals.

As they challenge older interpretations, three of the authors also engage with one another in studies of partisan struggles in the mid-nineteenth century. Robert Sandow rejects the idea that there existed a violent, national Copperhead conspiracy, emphasizing the relative restraint that characterized Democratic dissent in Pennsylvania, thought to be a hotbed of such opposition. He calls for more localized studies on the meaning and shape of wartime dissent, which was then “the norm of American democracy” (159). In response, Matthew Warshauer argues that Connecticut fostered a Democratic peace movement that posed a real threat to the Union war effort. A partisan paper war during the 1863 gubernatorial race captured the attention of soldiers in the field and sparked outrage over the potential election of a Copperhead governor. And Timothy Orr follows, showing that Democratic officials shaped the war effort by appointing and promoting fellow party members to lead volunteer regiments at the expense of more qualified Republicans. Taken together, these articles suggest the prevalence of politics as usual during the war: parties remained quite influential, people engaged extensively with local and state government, and political disputes occasionally turned violent.

Similarly, freedpeoples’ experiences convey important continuities of life amidst the chaos of war. Through a series of anecdotes, Andrew Slap pushes against the narrative of enslaved people rapidly seeking to legalize marriages in the wake of emancipation. He suggests that practices like “sweethearting” and “taking up” may have been far more common than records indicate, in part because archives overrepresent the middle class (176). While Slap might have dug further into the reasons why people held on to those relationships, his essay raises critical questions about the meaning and shape of black resistance, freedpeoples’ relationships with American legal structures, and the realities and limits of emancipation as a transformative experience.

Many of the collection's authors rightly problematize the notion of the Civil War as a transformation of the country. It is less clear, though, that scholars should move away from race in studying the era. Ideas about black people and their enslavement undoubtedly influenced soldiers’ battlefield conduct as well as conflict among political parties. Examining the process and shape of emancipation can offer important insight into American legal and cultural development. As the editors note in their introduction, the book as a whole is quite “suggestive” (10). It raises valuable questions and marks out important territory for future scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States.