Journal of Southern History

Lauren K. Thompson's Friendly Enemies: Soldier Fraternization throughout the American Civil War is the kind of book that immediately becomes useful for teaching classes on the U.S. Civil War; scholars and general readers alike will want to be sure to have this volume at hand. Thompson thoroughly explores the topic of fraternization among Union and Confederate soldiers in six briskly written and expertly researched chapters. The author documents many specific moments when Union and Confederate soldiers met and traded newspapers, food, and conversation—all of which she places in specific military contexts. Friendly Enemies is an excellent example of how much texture a tight focus on the soldier experience can add to both the social and the military history of warfare.

Thompson's thorough research provides evidence of Union-Confederate fraternization from the beginning to the end of the Civil War in various battlefield contexts. She is careful to provide details of when and where soldiers met, placing them in circumstances of specific campaigns, even though the chapters are organized by theme rather than strictly by chronology. In the introduction, Thompson asks, "Why … would men risk their standing in the army or even their lives to trade with men they were moments earlier trying to kill?" (p. 2). She answers that essential question by arguing, "Men who fraternized described it as enjoyable, peaceful, and beneficial. … At the heart of all these reasons, however, was the notion of choice. Men fraternized because the military hierarchy and the harsh realities of warfare caused an identity crisis for citizen soldiers" (p. 2). Thompson's extensive evidence is quite persuasive that soldiers sought out cross-regional kinship to help salve this identity crisis and the rigors of war. Specific chapters place soldier fraternization in the context of other types of mid-nineteenth-century masculine, fraternal socialization and stress the exchange of goods, newspapers, and information across enemy lines as an expression of manly agency in an otherwise controlled and frightening existence. The interesting chapter on ceasefires especially illuminates the usefulness of such moments toward the end of the war, and the concluding chapter on memory focuses on how soldiers framed their contacts in their memoirs and on how fraternization may have paved the way for some kinds of fraternal exchange between Union and Confederate veterans.

Thompson's argument that fraternization created moments of common soldier identity among enemies ultimately raises some important historical questions that her own analysis does not resolve. She is very clear from the start of the book that soldier fraternization was reserved for white men: "fraternization was a ritual denied to black men, and would be indicative of race relations in postwar America" (p. 8). She vividly recounts how, for example, white Union infantrymen could tell when Black troops were assigned to picket duty "because the Confederates did not honor the neutral zone and never ceased fire," as they often did when white soldiers approached (p. 133). Thompson suggests repeatedly that fraternization among white troops created a racialized "soldier" [End Page 346] identity that influenced both Reconstruction and the strains of Civil War public memory that downplayed emancipation and the Black war experience. Thompson could enhance the significance of her work if she emphasized this theme even more explicitly throughout and showed directly how wartime experiences set the stage for white men to reconcile on terms that excluded Black veterans and formerly enslaved people after the war.

Ultimately, the fascinating themes, good writing, and evocative quotations Thompson provides will make Friendly Enemies a very useful book. Thompson adds specificity to important questions of white soldier identity formation and to the experience of war.