Scandals of the Civil War Book

Kenslea's work is mostly a detailed account of every piece of evidence he found and lacks much argument. Certainly the sources, hundreds of personal letters by the Sedgwick family that give intimate details of courtship, relations between men and women, and marriage, have much intriguing details, but Kenslea is lacking deeper analysis of them beyond noting the variety of experiences men and women had when it came to courtship in the early republic. In short, the book lacks an answer to the broader "so what" question and is more an additional example to what others have already documented.