Having written earlier books about African Americans in the Union Navy (2002) and discipline in the Union Army (2009), Steven Ramold is well grounded in the history of northern fighting men in the American Civil War. This time, he takes a broader view, distancing himself at least partly from the front lines to explore the connections between Union soldiers and the families, communities, and government they fought to defend. More to the point, he examines the forces and issues that divided, even alienated, men from the home front. Ramold believes that soldiers came to see a “gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them,’” and that “as long as the war lasted, they were members of a separate army community” (2). Hardened by battle, coarsened by service, and brutalized by their circumstances, they gradually abandoned the civilian rules, customs, and “traditional social mores” (9) that had shaped them. A physical separation from hearth and home became a social, cultural, and political chasm that spawned any number of disagreements and misunderstandings about the purpose, consequences, and meaning of the war.

Ramold devotes entire chapters to five of the most vexing issues created by these divisions. Chapter 2 identifies changing gender roles as one of the first wedges between home front and battle front. Wives and sweethearts had to assume new responsibilities not traditionally associated with the “fair sex,” even to the extent of running businesses and operating family farms. When soldiers then encountered other women in unfamiliar roles, including nurses and camp followers, the prescribed places for men and women became even more blurred. Chapter 3 deals with the equally revolutionary challenge of racial adjustment. Long after northern civilians embraced the abolition of slavery, Ramold says, opinion in the Army remained mixed. Having more immediate contact with blacks than did most of the northern public, soldiers could be appalled by slavery yet oppose the right of blacks to citizenship and balk at the prospect of serving beside them in the Army. Only the growing realization that the end of slavery would hasten the end of the war brought men grudgingly into the “emancipationist,” if not the “abolitionist,” ranks.

Chapter 4 explores the civil–military split over conscription, which Ramold believes is the best example of the “division between soldiers and the communities they left behind” (88). Many northerners, for a variety of economic and political reasons, opposed the draft, but most soldiers saw conscription as a dire necessity. Chapter 5 looks at the closely related northern antiwar movement, much of it associated with resistance to the draft, but much of it, too, taking on a more distinctive political character, with Copperhead Democrats opposing Republicans. Ramold carries this largely political narrative into the final chapter, which analyzes the presidential election of 1864. By that time, the soldiers’ break from public thinking was nearly complete. While Abraham Lincoln won reelection handily, support for the commander-in-chief, even among many Democrats, was far stronger in the Army.

Some parts of Ramold's generally perceptive analysis are problematic, even contradictory, especially concerning some of his broader conclusions. For instance, in discussing the coarsening effect of military service, his explanation for why men became “perfectly willing to make [southern] civilians victims of property crimes and other offenses” (10) seems incomplete. Ramold quickly shifts this discussion to note the willingness of Union soldiers to kill rebels on the battlefield, but that is quite a different thing from looting or burning homes, and must have been inspired by something more than the experience of combat or the rigors of campaigning. One suspects that the hostile environment and the Confederacy's guerrilla war also played roles. Similarly, Ramold's analysis of the gender divide is not entirely convincing, certainly not when it comes to gauging its depth or long-term consequences. But then it is unclear how deep or enduring any of these ruptures proved to be. Far from being “numerous, complex, and long-lasting” (1), as he characterizes them at the start of the book, he concludes by saying “the divisions lasted only as long as the war” (169).

Still, this is a book worth reading, and it adds immeasurably to our understanding of the human face of the Civil War. Ramold has based his conclusions on evidence drawn from scores of archival collections and published sources, and while other historians have dealt in more detail with each of his principal themes, few scholars have plumbed the discord between soldiers and civilians as effectively as has Ramold.