Books by William Blair

Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays, Emancipation Day celebrations, and other remembrances in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His grassroots examination of these civic rituals demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remained far more contentious than has been previously acknowledged.

Commemorations by ex-Confederates were intended at first to maintain a separate identity from the U.S. government, Blair argues, not as a vehicle for promoting sectional healing. The burial grounds of fallen heroes, known as Cities of the Dead, often became contested ground, especially for Confederate women who were opposed to Reconstruction. And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation.

Blair's analysis shows that some festive occasions that we celebrate even today have a divisive and sometimes violent past as various groups with conflicting political agendas attempted to define the meaning of the Civil War.

Few issues created greater consensus among Civil War-era northerners than the belief that the secessionists had committed treason. But as William A. Blair shows in this engaging history, the way politicians, soldiers, and civilians dealt with disloyalty varied widely. Citizens often moved more swiftly than federal agents in punishing traitors in their midst, forcing the government to rethink legal practices and definitions. In reconciling the northern contempt for treachery with a demonstrable record of judicial leniency toward the South, Blair illuminates the other ways that northerners punished perceived traitors, including confiscating slaves, arresting newspaper editors for expressions of free speech, and limiting voting. Ultimately, punishment for treason extended well beyond wartime and into the framework of Reconstruction policies, including the construction of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Establishing how treason was defined not just by the Lincoln administration, Congress, and the courts but also by the general public, Blair reveals the surprising implications for North and South alike.

The Emancipation Proclamation, widely remembered as the heroic act that ended slavery, in fact freed slaves only in states in the rebellious South. True emancipation was accomplished over a longer period and by several means. Essays by eight distinguished contributors consider aspects of the president's decision making, as well as events beyond Washington, offering new insights on the consequences and legacies of freedom, the engagement of black Americans in their liberation, and the issues of citizenship and rights that were not decided by Lincoln's document. The essays portray emancipation as a product of many hands, best understood by considering all the actors, the place, and the time.
The contributors are William A. Blair, Richard Carwardine, Paul Finkelman, Louis Gerteis, Steven Hahn, Stephanie McCurry, Mark E. Neely Jr., Michael Vorenberg, and Karen Fisher Younger.

For many people, Pennsylvania's contribution to the Civil War goes little beyond the battle of Gettysburg. The North in general has received far less attention than the Confederacy in the historiography of the Civil War—a weakness in the literature that this book will help address. The essays in this volume reconsider the impact of the Civil War on Pennsylvania and the way its memory remains alive even today.

Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War contains a wealth of new information about Pennsylvania during the war years. For instance, perhaps as many as 2,000 Pennsylvanians defected to the Confederacy to fight for the Southern cause. And during the advance of Lee's army in 1863, residents of the Gettysburg area gained a reputation throughout North and South as a stingy people who wanted to make money from the war rather than sacrifice for the Union. But the state displayed loyalty as well and commitment to the cause of freedom. Pittsburgh served as the site for one of the first public monuments in the country dedicated to African Americans. Women of the Commonwealth also contributed mightily through organizing sanitary fairs or helping in ways that belied their roles as keepers of the domestic world. And readers will learn from an African American soldier's letters how blacks helped win their own liberation.

As a whole, the ten essays contained in Making and Remaking Pennsylvania's Civil War include courage on the battlefield but reflect the current trends to understand the motivations of soldiers and the impact of war on civilians, rather than focusing solely on battles or leadership. The essays also employ interdisciplinary techniques, as well as raise gender and racial questions. They incorporate a more expansive time frame than the four years of the conflict, by looking at not only the making of the war—but also its remaking—or how a public revisits the past to suit contemporary needs.

This last known work of noted historian Bell Irvin Wiley reveals the private mind of John White Geary, a Union general from Pennsylvania, through his Civil War letters to his wife, Mary. Wiley had selected these roughly 200 letters for publication, but the unfinished manuscript lay undiscovered for twelve years after the historian's death. The letters provide a rare glimpse of the two main theaters of war through the eyes of a general officer. Geary saw action at Cedar Mountain and Gettysburg in the Virginia theater and in the major campaigns in the west—from lifting the siege at Chattanooga to marching with William T. Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas.

The fascination Geary's letters held for Wiley, the quintessential scholar of the common person, is clear: the letters of an uncommon man reveal ordinary concerns about children, money, home, and religion that linked Geary to many on both sides of the war. Geary's letters also show another side of the officer, that of the consummate politician who knew that military service provided capital for future political campaigns. Through intense self-promotion, he had fashioned a reputation that served him well in gaining respected political posts both before and after the war: he fought in the Mexican War and served as the first mayor of San Francisco and as territorial governor of Kansas during the period known as "Bloody Kansas," in addition to winning two terms as governor of Pennsylvania after the war. Ultimately, the letters of John White Geary show how a political general plied his trade. They reveal the complexities of any historical figure, for Geary had both the admirable qualities of loyalty to the Union and the less attractive need to exaggerate his abilities to enhance his career.

This book tells the story of how Confederate civilians in the Old Dominion struggled to feed not only their stomachs but also their souls. Although demonstrating the ways in which the war created many problems within southern communities, Virginia's Private War: Feeding Body and Soul in the Confederacy, 1861-1865 does not support scholars who claim that internal dissent caused the Confederacy's downfall. Instead, it offers a study of the Virginia home front that depicts how the Union army's continued pressure created destruction, hardship, and shortages that left the Confederate public spent and demoralized with the surrender of the army under Robert E. Lee.

This book, however, does not portray the population as uniformly united in a Lost Cause. Virginians complained a great deal about the management of the war. Letters to the governor and to the Confederate secretary of war demonstrate how dissent escalated to dangerous proportions by the spring and summer of 1863. Women rioted in Richmond for food. Soldiers left the army without permission to check on their families and farms. Various groups vented their hatred on Virginias rich men of draft age who stayed out of the army by purchasing substitutes. Such complaints, ironically, may have prolonged the war, for some of the Confederacy's leaders responded by forcing the wealthy to shoulder more of the burden for prosecuting the war. Substitution ended, and the men who stayed home became government growers who distributed goods at reduced cost to the poor. But, as the case is made in Virginias Private War, none of these efforts could finally overcome an enemy whose unrelenting pressure strained the resources of Rebel Virginians to the breaking point.

Arguing that the state of Virginia both waged and witnessed a "rich man's fight" that has until now been downplayed or misunderstood by many if not most of our Civil War scholars, William Blair provides in these pages a detailed portrait of this conflict that is bold, original, and convincing. He draws from the microcosm of Virginia several telling conclusions about the Confederacy's rise, demise, and identity, and his study will therefore appeal to anyone with a taste for Civil War history--and Virginia's unique place in that history, especially.