My favorite books that lay bare the human ordeal of the Civil War

This book recovers—through diligent archival spadework and keen historical empathy—the human realities of emancipation for freedom-seeking enslaved persons. Emancipation, Taylor demonstrates, was a humanitarian refugee crisis acted out amidst the uncertainties of civil warfare. Embattled Freedom supplies a sweeping survey of a complex historical process, but it does so on a human scale—tracking a small group of protagonists as they wind their way to the uncertain asylum of slave refugee (“contraband”) camps. The author’s close attention to the material realities of “contraband” camps—hunger, shelter, and clothing—builds a sense of intimacy and emotional connection. Scholars have established that emancipation was a process, and that the enslaved played a vital role in their own liberation; here is the best account of how that struggle was lived.   

While this book treats the experiences of northern and southern women during the Civil War, it amplifies the too-long neglected voices of poor white and enslaved women in particular. The Women’s Fight is that rare work of historical synthesis that says something new and daring. It breaks down the fictive boundary between the home front and the battle front, demonstrating how real people felt, intuited, and experienced the disruptions of war in disparate ways. Most importantly, it reminds us that the Civil War both displaced people and brought them together in unlikely combinations. Erudite and eloquent.

John Matteson is a deft prose stylist who once more delivers in this engrossing narrative of the Civil War as seen through the eyes of five key protagonists—including the poet Walt Whitman and a young Louisa May Alcott. The characters wind up on the murderous battlefields and teeming hospital wards of Fredericksburg, Virginia. The title is admittedly deceptive; readers expecting an operational or tactical history of Ambrose Burnside’s rout on the Rappahannock won’t find it here. On the other hand, those interested in a searing meditation on all that the war did to individual human bodies and minds—and the collective American soul—will savor this haunting, smart, and elegant book.  

Before the past becomes history, it is lived in real-time by real people striving to understand it. From an avalanche of firsthand accounts, Hodes relates how Americans still reeling from civil war made sense of an unprecedented assassination. (Hint: they did so in a variety of ways, from expressions of grief and glee, from feelings of rage and resignation, from the margins of scrapbook pages to homespun mourning garb.) Hodes’ close and clever reading of sources recovers the anarchy and confusion of the Civil War’s aftermath.  

The Civil War snuffed out the lives of some 750,000 soldiers—more than two-and-a-half percent of the U.S. population. Drew Gilpin Faust’s powerful book tallies the physical, psychological, and emotional toll of living amid mass death. The author is especially interested in all that Civil War death demanded from the living—from a clever rhetorical alchemy to an expanded government bureaucracy; from new embalming technologies to the first national cemeteries. Though informed by deep research and the author’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War era, the book nonetheless communicates timeless universals. Indeed, few books have done more to drive home war’s enormous human consequences.