...constructs an extended, elegant study of rifts, of chasms, beginning with a spectacular rift in the Earth itself: the Great Appalachian Valley...forming the chasm between the two counties that serve as Ayers' focus in this book, Augusta County in Virginia and Franklin County in Pennsylvania ...wise decision to anchor the sweep of his historical narrative in a small cast of ordinary people trooping in and out of his two counties...book kicks off with that doomed invasion of Pennsylvania and extends through the end of the war and the miseries of Reconstruction to 1870 and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment ... It's through these individual stories that Ayers's book achieves its most gripping reading stretches... The Thin Light of Freedom gathers the stories of all these different aspects of the war's final years and transmutes them into a dark and oddly uplifting tale of the forging of modern America ...a necessary addition to Civil War libraries.
[Ayers] avoids traditional surveys, military histories and biographies of central political and military leaders, instead inviting readers into the private lives along a borderland, telling stories in real time through diaries, letters, photographs, military records and newspapers. We follow the ebb and flow of beliefs and emotions, hopes and fears, from the invasion of Confederate forces into Pennsylvania in 1863 through the tumult of Reconstruction … Ayers is not only a seasoned historian, with a lifetime of writing about the American South and the Civil War behind him, he is also a compelling writer. He orchestrates many different voices into a steady rhythm, with a tempo that is fast-paced. He is extraordinarily sensitive when it comes to letting the crescendo of a story speak for itself through a particularly telling sentence from a diary or letter.
Edward Ayers’s The Thin Light of Freedom is a kinder, gentler version of Civil War social history ...extends the story from Gettysburg into the Reconstruction era and features many of the individuals whom Mr. Ayers introduced in In the Presence of Mine Enemies...the dominant tone is regret ... Franklin and Augusta counties were active theaters of war, but military events are not Mr. Ayers’s long suit ...is beautifully, even spaciously written and paced at an adagio — an elegy for people trapped in webs of politics and war that they had, for the most part, spun for themselves ...may not quite persuade us that the evaporation of the war’s political and military history is easily acceptable, but does remind us that not everyone who fought or endured the war’s agonizing conflicts was a soldier.
...few of them succeed as well as these volumes in capturing the day-to-day experience of the war without losing sight of military operations or the political issues at stake ... One of Ayers’s recurring themes is the terrible contrast between the beauty and agricultural richness of the valley and the violence and bloodshed of the war and its aftermath ... The irony, for Ayers, is that as the war became more brutal, its moral significance became clearer ... Whether these were contingent reversals or extensions of prewar patterns is hard to tell because Ayers starts his history of the war in 1859 with John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry ... Fortunately for readers, such contentious issues are played out in the background, offstage as it were. Ayers set out to re-create the lived experience of the Civil War — for Northerners and Southerners, blacks and whites, men and women, soldiers and civilians — without losing sight of the political turmoil and destructive violence that affected all of them ...succeeded brilliantly.
The Civil War was fought on many fronts but perhaps none more malleable than that in the Great Valley, which runs from Pennsylvania through Maryland and into Virginia. There, writes University of Richmond president emeritus Ayers...this luminous account ... More than any other place, Ayers argues persuasively, the valley had special reason to fear the resumption of campaigning in the spring of 1864, when it 'could come under assault from north and south, east and west, inside and outside' ... As elsewhere in the South, the narrative on the war and its causes diverged from that favored in the North, building a lasting division... An exemplary contribution to the history of the Civil War and its aftermath.
Like its predecessor, this book is grounded in the experiences of combatants and civilians alike, enslaved and free, harrowed by bitter war and at the mercy of uncontrollable forces. Rather than centering the story on leading figures, politics, and military strategy, Ayers shares riveting details about average, resilient people trying to survive the devastation around them ... Readers looking for a conventional history of the Civil War or a fresh interpretation of it will find neither here. They’ll instead discover on-the-ground, local history of ravaged communities and besieged Americans struggling through a terrible war and the vexations of Reconstruction ...focuses on the thoughts, fears, and hopes of normal people struggling to stay alive and make sense of the murderous events taking place around them ...a superb, readable work of history.
