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• W4385060239 abstract "Reviewed by: At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War by Megan L. Bever Elaine S. Frantz (bio) At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War By Megan L. Bever. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. ix, 250. $99.00 cloth; $27.99 paper; $19.99 ebook) Megan L. Bever takes on the important question of how people used and thought about alcohol use during the Civil War. Many mid-nineteenth century Americans believed that choices about alcohol shaped individual lives and could bring national prosperity or ruin. The Civil War heightened anxiety about men's moral behavior and the national future while also producing an environment of dislocation, sickness and injury, boredom, stress and fear, hard labor, and exposure to the elements that motivated many to drink. Ultimately, this tension was not resolved: top-down control of drinking was flexible or ineffective enough to allow officers, and individual soldiers, a lot of freedom over alcohol use. Bever uses soldiers' writings and memoirs, newspapers, army records, temperance literature, [End Page 74] and other sources to guide readers through this chaotic landscape. She argues that the war simultaneously reversed antebellum temperance progress by fostering a masculine culture tolerant of alcohol use and magnified earlier temperance tropes about the dangers of alcohol to the nation. The book begins with a richly sourced exploration of official alcohol rations in the Union and Confederate military, for medical use and consumption, then moves to how officers and soldiers wrote about and drank (or avoided) alcohol. Chapters three, four, and five detail efforts to regulate the use of alcohol by soldiers and its sale and, occasionally, use, by civilians, focusing on the differences between northern and southern approaches. Chapter six considers public perceptions of the dangers that alcohol posed to the nation, the tendency to blame military defeats on drunken leaders and soldiers while imagining successful leaders and soldiers as sober, and the stigmatization of alcohol by its purported connection to racialized and immigrant others. In addition to characterizing the instability of the wartime relationship to alcohol, and noting the post-war consequences this instability would lead to, Bever shows that the Confederacy, which had been a less fertile soil for antebellum temperance, was more willing to control civilian sales of alcohol, because of shortages of grain and of medicinal alcohol, and because of concern about the safety of civilian populations, which may have set the stage for the nationalization of the post-war temperance movement. I would have liked to have seen Bever focus in a more sustained way on her claim that the Civil War weakened middle class values like that of a temperate and restrained manhood (pp. 35–36). Because the military context encouraged drinking, soldiers who at home had embraced temperance, became drinkers, and when reformers predicted that veterans would be tough to convert to the teetotaling army, they were correct . . . temperance reformers never convinced veterans to give up alcohol (p. 170). In characterizing a complex and decentralized set of ideas and practices, the book at times resorts to generalizations. Where it [End Page 75] identifies patterns, its evidence base is too often a vague many backed up by collections of anecdotes, without any way to assess how representative they might be. This is a common challenge in this type of broad social analysis, but I would welcome some simple quantification to help approximate the prevalence of the dynamics the book considers. In fleshing out how leaders, soldiers, and civilians, North and South, attempted to control, argued about, and, most importantly, drank alcohol during the Civil War, this book contributes an important, and surprisingly neglected, approach to the literature. It will be of the most interest to historians of the temperance movement, and to those who study the lived experience of Civil War participants. Elaine S. Frantz ELAINE S. FRANTZ is a professor of history at Kent State University. She is the author of Manhood Lost: Drunken Men and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth-Century United States (2002) and is currently writing a history of policing in Pittsburgh. Copyright © 2023 Kentucky Historical Society" @default.
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• W4385060239 title "At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War by Megan L. Bever (review)" @default.
• W4385060239 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/khs.2023.a902571" @default.
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