Abstract
The Civil War required mobilization on a scale not seen before it in American history. Men left their homes to travel miles away to fight others whom months before had been fellow citizens of the United States. Women stayed behind to tend to their homes that were often left without their heads of house. As scholarship has moved to examine these households and bring the home front into conversation with the battlefield, the ways in which whole families reacted to the war remain underexplored. Enter Keith P. Wilson's book Family War Stories: The Densmores’ Fight to Save the Union and Destroy Slavery. Wilson's book adds excellently to the scholarship by placing the home front in a position of prominence alongside the battlefront. Wilson sees the Civil War as a single struggle that combines the home front and battlefield, instead of two separate conflicts happening simultaneously. For families like the Densmores, the two conflicts were interconnected. Even at their home in Minnesota, miles away from battles, they still felt the turmoil of war.
This book does an excellent job of weaving two narratives together. The first is the individual Densmore family members’ involvement in and contributions to the Civil War and its impacts on the family's honor. Wilson's focus is on Orrin, Sr., his wife Elizabeth, and four of their children, Benjamin, Daniel, Orrin, Jr., and Martha. Orrin, Sr. was active in the Republican Party in their hometown of Red Wing, Minnesota, and held abolitionist beliefs that he ingrained in his children as well. The Densmores family represents a middle-class perspective on the Civil War, and is analyzed in Wilson's text to showcase the nineteenth-century view of family life as a protective sphere separate from public life.
Each chapter deals with a different Densmore family member by showing how their experience during the war contributed to both their own and their family's honor. He looks at the four Densmore children still at home at the start of the war: Benjamin, Daniel, Orrin, Jr., and Martha. It is these four children, still living and directly connected to their parents, who provide the letters that stand at the center of his analysis. Second, there is the collective participation of the family in navigating the effects of the war. Although each individual family member experienced the war differently, they all collectively experienced it as a familial unit while at the same time responded to each individual's particular circumstances. When a son was sick, injured, or captured in battle, as theirs would be, the entire family felt and suffered through periods of worry about their recuperation.
The Densmore sons, Benjamin and Daniel, both served in the United States Army during the war. Both eventually served as officers within the United States Colored Troops (USCT), something their abolitionist father greatly supported. To the abolitionist Densmore family, having two sons serving as officers in the USCT was a point of pride. In fact, Orrin's abolitionist views provide the background for the family's attitudes towards the Civil War in general. Having built a reputation in Republican circles, Orrin believed that the war provided an outlet for the family's future and honor. Benjamin and Daniel's service with Black troops brought honor to a family that was deeply supportive of abolition. It is this idea of the family's honor that provides the thrust of Wilson's analysis. When Benjamin's unit surrenders to Nathan Bedford Forrest in the summer of 1862, the family at home both worries for his safety, and for the stain the surrender would bring upon the family. His parole, though alleviating the family's worry about his safety, does little to bolster the honor of the family, something that Benjamin himself is determined to regain after his parole. As Wilson shows, Benjamin eventually gets the chance to regain his personal honor and uphold his family's when he begins to serve in the USCT. Yet appointment to the USCT, especially Daniel's, also drew the family into fears about the war. Though his parents, siblings, and even extended family were proud of his promotion to major and recognized it for its contribution to the Union war effort, they still worried about what would happen if Confederate soldiers captured him, as they had Benjamin. Leading Black soldiers was an honorable endeavor for the family, but they were still aware, as were many Unionists, what the Confederacy would do to white officers leading Black troops. Letters from the family to Daniel reflect this fear throughout Wilson's book.
It is Daniel's experience that Wilson uses to drive his historical narrative. Since Daniel was the most active writer of the Densmore children, his correspondence provides the narrative center of Wilson's book. His appointment to the USCT and the promotion that came with it provided him with the opportunity to lead Black troops stationed in Missouri. It was in Missouri where Daniel's abolitionist sentiments were on display through his military service. Understanding the importance of family, Daniel witnessed Black marriages throughout his troops. Believing that these marriages were fundamental to assertions of manhood and family for formerly enslaved individuals, Daniel saw them as opportunities for Black soldiers to move towards citizenship as emancipation came. Having served as a teacher in Tennessee before the war, Daniel was well aware of slavery's diminishment of family and honor. For him, as well as for the rest of his family, slavery undermined the core tenets of family life. The Densmore family believed that slavery denied enslaved men their rightful place as heads of households. Slave marriages that Daniel witnessed in Tennessee were done covertly in darkness, and an enslaver could break a marriage up at any time if they chose to sell one or the other spouse to another place. Daniel saw no honor in slavery for many reasons. But from his experience, the denial of the family structure of enslaved people was high among slavery's dishonorable actions.
The youngest son, Orrin Jr., did not see battle like his older brothers. When war broke out, Orrin Jr. was barely a teenager. He wished to join the army in the later years of the war and serve as his brothers did. Although his father, Orrin Sr., was supportive of the war effort in general and of Benjamin and Daniel serving in the war, he was not supportive of Orrin Jr. serving. No matter what the family opinion on fighting as a means to gain honor was, Orrin Sr. still saw his status and honor as a father of great importance. This meant controlling his children and denying them opportunities when it was not a good fit, as was the case with Orrin Jr.
Yet Orrin Sr. still allowed his youngest son opportunities for war. Although denying him the opportunity to serve, Orrin Jr. was allowed to travel to army camps where his brothers were serving and get a taste of army life. This tour allowed Orrin Jr. to see his brothers and experience firsthand how his brothers lived while away from the family. While Orrin, Jr. never joined the army during the Civil War, the visits to his brothers showed him that his addition to the family honor would have to come from other activities.
Wilson shows that the abolitionist attitudes that drove the Densmore sons into service of the Union were also prevalent within the domestic sphere as well. Martha, the Densmore daughter still living at home, was active within the war efforts organized in their hometown. Working with the Ladies’ Soldiers’ Aid Society, Martha participated more directly in the war effort than other women. While most women served the war by running the homes while men were away, Martha was still living with her father and mother and therefore sought a way to help the war from outside the typical private sphere of womanhood. Martha's welfare work demonstrates an extension of antebellum welfare work. But Wilson shows how the war changed the welfare work that women like Martha undertook. Wartime efforts expanded beyond the domestic sphere to the traditionally masculine public sphere. Public welfare efforts became the realm of women during the war. Martha and her fellow aid workers shifted the idea of women's influence as solely confined to the household to an idea where women had a public role to play in the welfare of society at large.
These stories are mainly told through letters. The use of these family letters is a great strength in Wilson's book. The letters of the Densmore family, whether Daniel's and Benjamin's letters home, or the family's letters to the two brothers in their army camps, provide a rich source bank for Wilson to mine for his narrative. It is a task that he accomplishes with particular strength. Family War Stories is a fantastic work of history. It becomes more than just a story about the Densmore family in Minnesota, as by building upon the family letters and papers, Keith Wilson has written a historical narrative that contributes to the understanding of the Civil War's effects on the home front. This book is a work for those with an interest in how the war affected families, how families navigated the stresses of war, and why families joined the war effort.