Previewing the September 2025 JCWE

This issue exemplifies the wide sweep of the Civil War Era as scholars understand it, and the success of the journal’s now fifteen-year-long effort to promote broadminded interrogation of the many forces that shaped the middle of the nineteenth century and reveal their impacts.

The issue opens with Yael A. Sternhell’s “The Archive / An Archive,” an exploration of the transformed view of archives among historians and of the creation of canonical Civil War archives. The essay is in dialogue with December 2022 special issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris, and it is drawn from Sternhell’s November 2024 address at the Southern Historical Association meeting, where her book War on Record: The Archive and the Afterlife of the Civil War (2023) received the Tom Watson Brown Book Award. The book examined the creation of the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, historicizing the drive to fashion such an archive, the ways the archive was shaped to reflect contemporary interests and concerns, and the impact of those archival choices on later scholarly production. The essay not only summarizes some of those findings but also draws Sternhell more deeply into the productive debate over how scholars should approach archives not simply as consumers of them but as analysts and critics, part of a broader archival turn in the humanities that asks how we have access to sources and what to do about the silences and absences in archives.

James Howard’s “‘Enlarged by Caucus and Compromise’: Freethinkers, Celebrity Preachers, and the American Anti-Slavery Society” examines the 1850s accommodations between Garrisonians and politically oriented evangelicals like Henry Ward Beecher and George Cheever, as they sought to build an antislavery movement capable of encompassing a wide range of religious beliefs. He demonstrates that Garrisonians in the American Anti-Slavery Society marginalized freethinkers like AASS original member Orson Murray in hopes of diminishing religious critique of the abolitionist movement. The article joins a growing wave of revisions of Garrisonianism that question prior portrayals of its radical rigidity and also contributes to recent scholarship that advances our understanding of the varieties of Northern religion in the antebellum period, several examples of which have appeared in recent issues of the Journal of the Civil War Era.

In “The Crisis of Household Government and the Rise of Democratic Conservatism before the American Civil War,” Mark Power Smith explores the rise of a particularly partisan form of conservatism in the 1850s United States. Through analysis of editorial coverage of two high-profile legal cases involving prominent Democratic men who punished their wives’ lovers, Power Smith argues that Northern Democratic editors created a defense of patriarchal households against what they saw as the corrupting family forms espoused by foreign radical movements and their partisan adversaries. Through these cases, Power Smith connects the cultural debates over masculinity and family structure to the emerging Democratic embrace of conservative patriarchy.

In this issue’s review essay, Rana Hogarth analyzes how historians have approached eugenics and the gaps in scholarship concerning the Civil War’s impact on racial science. Hogarth argues that Civil War scholars have focused on the relationship between US victory and the growth of racial egalitarianism, while historians of eugenics have ignored the era completely. By reading these literatures together and emphasizing more recent scholarship, Hogarth illuminates connections between Civil War debates about race and the untidy origins of eugenic thought and the ways the Civil War left its mark on twentieth-century race science.

The issue also includes the usual run of excellent book reviews, a tribute to the hard work of associate editor Megan Bever, to the scholars who continue to write provocative works, and to the enduring commitment to professional engagement in our field who agree to review books in a busy and tumultuous time.