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The Divided Family in Civil War America. By Amy Murrell Taylor. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi, 319 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2969-2.)
Many Americans continue to believe that the Civil War bitterly divided families, just as much as they insist that those same families quickly reunited, as the nation did, to survive and prosper. One of the most common clichés still associated with the war is that it pitted "brother against brother." Amy Murrell Taylor examines this popular assumption through a fascinating study of actual families, North and South, white and black, divided by war. Focusing on the "border states" of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia, and Missouri she tracks intimate relationships tested, strained, and sometimes severed by the conflict. Taylor more than simply presents dramatic family...