Rocky Mount, N.C.—The American Civil War intrigues Dr. Jonathan Dean Sarris, assistant professor of history at Wesleyan. His quest for understanding issues surrounding the war has resulted in his first book, A Separate Civil War: Communities in Conflict in the Mountain South.

Published in 2006 by the University of Virginia Press, the 238-page work is part of the 12-volume series A Nation Divided: New Studies in Civil War History, edited by distinguished Civil War history professor James I. Robertson, Jr.

Noted Civil War historian Kenneth W. Noe wrote of Sarris’s work that “scholars of Appalachia’s Civil War have looked forward to Jonathan Dean Sarris’s book on Civil War-era north Georgia. It fulfills its promise, making a substantial contribution to both Appalachian studies and the broader field of the Civil War.”

A Separate Civil War examines the war’s unique impact on two communities in the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia—Fannin and Lumpkin counties.

“At first, studying two obscure counties may seem a puzzling choice,” Sarris writes in his Introduction. “The Civil War never touched this region directly…. But what happened in these communities between 1861 and 1865 helps us answer broader questions about the interaction of localism and nationalism, the nature of Southern regional identity, and the American way of war.”

Sarris’s interest in history began with childhood visits to historic sites near his Bethesda, Maryland, home—Mt. Vernon, Monticello, the Gettysburg and Antietam battlefield parks. Eventually he earned a degree in history at Washington College and his Ph.D. at the University of Georgia.

Sarris’s book addresses questions about the conflict and Appalachian society: What motivated soldiers to fight? Why did the Confederacy collapse? What was the role of the Appalachian people in the war? Scholars agree that Sarris’s findings add welcome complexities to Civil War studies and contribute to a more complete understanding of the war.

“Over 130 years after the conflict, historians still debate…the motivations of Civil War soldiers,” Sarris writes. Some argue that soldiers were motivated to fight mainly by ideological factors and that the war represented a philosophical struggle. “When dissecting the war at the community level,” Sarris says, “I see far more complex motivating forces at play.” Sarris sees those forces as local goals “having to do with the safety and security of their mountain communities.”

Some scholars think that loyalty to the Confederacy was a weak motivator and that Union victory naturally followed from a lack of loyalty to a vague concept. Others blame battlefield losses.

“One method of exploring these issues of loyalty and motivation is to analyze individual Southern communities and map out the dynamics of loyalty within them,” Sarris writes. “By focusing on Fannin and Lumpkin counties, this book reveals the way in which local, regional, and national issues combined to influence the allegiances of people in the region. Thus, loyalty to the Confederacy depended in most cases upon local conceptions of allegiance, manhood, duty, kinship, and economics…. Loyalties depended upon a number of factors—ideological, economic, familial, and situational—and this study attempts to weigh the effect of each of these components.”

Also Sarris’s book “helps to reconfigure the history of the mountain South and to close significant gaps in our understanding of Appalachian society,” he writes. “I hope this research will…introduce readers to a part of the nineteenth-century South too long obscured by myth and indifference.”

Sarris came to Wesleyan full-time in 2003 after serving as an adjunct professor at NCWC in 2001 and teaching at Appalachian State University. At Wesleyan he teaches courses in North Carolina history, the Civil War, the Vietnam War, and American history since 1945.

A Separate Civil War is available through the University of Virginia Press, www.upress.virginia.edu, phone (434) 924-3468, Amazon.com, and bookstores: paperback - ISBN 0-8139-2555-X; cloth - ISBN 0-8139-2549-5.