Booknotes: Germantown during the Civil War Era

New Arrival:

• Germantown during the Civil War Era: A Reversal of Fortune by George C. Browder (U Tenn Press, 2024).

Though a Memphis suburb today, Germantown was a rural Shelby County, Tennessee town in 1860, a station along the Memphis & Charleston Railroad fifteen miles east of the city. At that time, Germantown and the surrounding area had a population of around 2,200 (the majority of whom were slaves), with the town itself having just a few hundred inhabitants. Readers of various works covering the Civil War in West Tennessee will repeatedly encounter places on the map such as Germantown, Grand Junction, and Collierville, their military importance being their location along key railroad corridors. Most often, however, deeper insights into those communities and how they were affected by the war are relatively fleeting. That will certainly be no longer the case for Germantown after reading George Browder's Germantown during the Civil War Era: A Reversal of Fortune. It is a comprehensive military, social, and economic history of the community before, during, and after the Civil War.

With the narrative portion alone approaching 500 pages, this is a big study that's divided into three time periods: "Antebellum Germantown," "The War Years," and "The Aftermath." From the description: "Before the Civil War, Germantown had become a thriving cultural, commercial, and political center. Its elite and middle-class White families had full access to the cultural and social life of Memphis, as well as local private academies and collegiate institutions that hosted enriching events. Its appealing inns, taverns, and mineral springs allowed for festive social mixing of all classes. As an emerging industrial and commercial center of a rich cotton-growing district in the 1850s, Germantown’s decline after the war would have been unimaginable before the war. Thus, this monograph paints a picture of a vibrant community whose brilliancy was extinguished and almost entirely forgotten."

The Civil War section of the book consists of five chapters, one for each year of the war. In them Browder recounts wartime events that impacted the area, the Union occupation of "greater Germantown," and details the experiences of incessant guerrilla warfare.

The aftermath section discusses postwar Reconstruction, economic and societal recovery, and "rebirth." More from the description: "Meticulously documented and richly illustrated with maps and data, this book reveals the impacts of surviving a theater of guerrilla war, of emancipation, of social and political Reconstruction, and a disastrous Yellow Fever epidemic on all of Germantown’s people—psychologically, socially, and culturally. The damage struck far deeper than economic destruction and loss of life. A peaceful and harmonious society crumbled."

The appendix section offers further discussion of census and service record data as applied to Germantown's population as a whole, its Civil War soldiers, wealth, and property figures. Just from a cursory glance through it, the depth of this West Tennessee county and community study looks impressive.