Highlighting recent and new directions in contemporary research in the
field, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers a complete and updated
picture of intellectual life in the Civil War-era Union. Compiling
essays from both established and young historians, this volume addresses
the role intellectuals played in framing the conflict and implementing
their vision of a victorious Union.
Broadly defining "intellectuals" to encompass doctors, lawyers, sketch
artists, college professors, health reformers, and religious leaders,
the essays address how these thinkers disseminated their ideas,
sometimes using commercial or popular venues and organizations to
implement what they believed.
Offering a vast range of perspectives on how northerners thought about,
experienced, and responded to the Civil War, So Conceived and So
Dedicated is organized around three questions: To what extent did
educated Americans believe that the Civil War exposed the failure of old
ideas? Did the Civil War promote new strains of authoritarianism in
northern intellectual life or did the war reinforce democratic
individualism? How did the Civil War affect northerners' conception of
nationalism and their understanding of their relationship to the state?
Essays explore myriad topics, including: how antebellum ideas about the
environment and the body influenced conceptions of democratic health;
how leaders of the Irish American community reconciled their support of
the United States and the Republican Party with their allegiances to
Ireland and their fellow Irish immigrants; how intellectual leaders of
the northern African American community explained secession, civil war,
and emancipation; the influence of southern ideals on northern
intellectuals; wartime and postwar views from college and university
campuses; the ideological acrobatics that professors at midwestern
universities had to perform in order to keep their students from leaving
the classroom; and how northern sketch artists helped influence the
changing perceptions of African American soldiers over the course of the
war.
Collectively, So Conceived and So Dedicated offers relevant and fruitful
answers to the nation's intellectual history and suggests that
antebellum modes of thinking remained vital and tenacious well after the
Civil War.
