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High Private: The Trans-Mississippi Correspondence of Humorist R. R. Gilbert, 1862–1865 ed. by Mary M. Cronin (review)

in a “contrast of contexts” (the latter phrase he takes from an essay by Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers) shows that both “‘inner civil wars’” should be understood as products of two overarching developments: on the one hand, the formation of new nation-states, some by consolidation and others by separation from larger states; and on the other hand, conflicts between agrarian masses—slaves, serfs, and free peasants—and the agricultural elites who profited from their labor during the nineteenth-century expansion of international commodity markets (p. 9). Dal Lago’s study is based on a mastery of two different national historiographies as well as a deep familiarity with the methodologies of comparative history. It is also informed by his research in primary sources, both published and archival, in both countries. In a short review, it is impossible to do more than suggest some of the implications of his interpretations. His theme of “agrarian unrest” offers, from an innovative angle, support for scholars such as Steven Hahn, David Williams, and Stephanie McCurry, who have emphasized internal social conflict as an explanation for the end of slavery and the fall of the Confederacy (p. 19). At the same time, this approach largely ignores the questions that arise when we focus on the relationship, not of agrarian masses to agrarian elites, but of individuals to the state. For example, in the Confederacy, unlike in the Mezzogiorno, there was remarkably little overt violence by slaves against slaveholders and their families. Instead, former slaves killed white Confederates while serving as uniformed soldiers in the Union army and as prospective citizens of a reunited nation. And, as illuminating as Dal Lago’s comparison of pro-Bourbon legitimists to East Tennessee’s anti-Confederates might be, a comparison instead of the Italian legitimist insurrection to what Mark Grimsley has termed the insurgency of southern whites against Republican Party rule during Reconstruction might be more apt (“Wars for the American South: The First and Second Reconstructions Considered as Insurgencies,” Civil War History, 58 [March 2012], pp. 6–36). Like the Great Brigandage, that insurgency cost several thousand lives; unlike the Great Brigandage, it was successful. These are questions that only a thoughtful and innovative study like Civil War and Agrarian Unrest can provoke. It will repay close reading by all scholars of the Civil War and of the Confederacy in particular.