Glynn Young

“Eyewitness to the Civil War” by Stephen Hyslop

September 26, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Sometimes I’m a sucker for coffee table books. And sometimes they turn out to be more than coffee table books.

In 2006, National Geographic published Eyewitness to the Civil War: The Complete History of the Civil War from Secession to Reconstruction. Written by Stephen Hyslop and edited by Neil Kagan, the book appears to be a classic book meant for the coffee table. And it could certainly find a home there. But it turns out to be a lot more.

The book is like a documentary in print. It provides a basic (and well-written) account of the war from beginning to end, highlighting the major battles, developments, home fronts, and international repercussions. It tells the stories of generals and soldiers, slaveowners and slaves, and farmers and townspeople who lived the war. It shows how an increasingly split nation finally erupted into the violence of civil war.

You discover what soldiers ate, like hardtack (biggest problem with this army staple: bugs). You learn about what passed for medical science. You read letters and journal entries. You see what soldiers’ apparel looked like. You see how newspapers North and South reported the war. You see paintings of battles, and study wonderful maps drawn at the time. You see the experiences former slaves had as soldiers. You experience the war in its glory and its horror. And you learn about what civilians thought and did, and how the war affected them, and how the war seemed to inhale immigrants, and especially the Irish.

Colorful and well-researched sidebars to the book’s main narrative include eyewitness accounts, mapping the war, and picture essays. The book’s major strength is how it draws upon relics, diaries, journals, letters, memoirs, photographs, and sketches. It’s carefully curated history, to be sure, but it’s history in the raw.

Hyslop’s published works include Eyewitness to World War II, The Old West, Atlas of World War II, The Secret History of World War II, Bound for Santa Fe, and Almanac of World History. Several of these titled were published by National Geographic. He worked as a staff writer and text editor at Time-Life Books, and he’s written for numerous magazines, including American History, Kansas History, California History, World War II, and the History Channel Magazine.

I’m not sure when I bought the book; it’s been sitting on my bookshelf for some years. But when I finally got around to reading it, I discovered the pleasure of a solid, well-thought-out, and well-constructed text that tells a straightforward and vitally important story.

“Ends of War” by Caroline Janney

September 19, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

I have an image in my head, likely based on what I remember from American history in college, that when Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant agreed to surrender terms at Appomattox in April 1865, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia went home. Two weeks later, William Johnston surrendered to William Sherman at Greensboro, North Carolina, and Johnstone’s Army of Tennessee went home. And that was end of the Civil War.

Well, not quite.

As Lee’s army fled west from Richmond and then Petersburg, what had been about 60,000 men was losing strength. Some were captured, some took off for points west, and some disappeared into the woods and valleys. By the time Lee and Grant met, Lee’s army was likely between 30,000 and 40,000, and more men were leaving every day.

Grant’s purpose, to which he stuck ferociously through the negotiations and through the coming months, was to bring peace. Lee’s men could go home. They would be issued rations and paroles. A parole was good to obtain rations from Union provosts and to obtain transportation on ships and trains to go home. There would also be no reprisals for having served in Lee’s army.

McLean House in Appomattox, where Lee surrendered to Grant

Many headed east first – to get to the ports where they could get passage to Mobile, New Orleans, and other ports. Others headed toward rail stations, though those were more problematic; many railroad tracks were not repaired from the war, and men would find themselves alternately riding and walking to the next station.

But for many in the Confederate army, the war was not over. Some tried to reach Johnston’s army, which was Lee’s army was trying to do in his flight from Richmond. Others decided to try to Texas and the army of General Edmund Kirby Smith. Still others would become guerillas and continue to war effort – something Grant feared almost more than anything. The region of Virginia and North Caroline experienced upheaval, chaos, and disruption that would continue for weeks (see my review of Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr.).

It looked like peace and an easy reunification might prevail, until the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on April 14 crystalized the desire for vengeance. It would be argued from the man in the street to the highest levels of government that Grant’s paroles of Lee’s men had limited application, and Lee, his officers, and many of his mean should be tried for treason. The wave demanding vengeance could only be stopped, and then incompletely, by Grant himself.

In Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox, Caroline Janney tells a riveting story of the final days and weeks of Lee’s army, its officers, and its men, how their paroles came almost seen to be worthless before cooler heads, notably Grant’s, prevailed. No peace could be or would be drafted and signed; peace treaties were between sovereign nations, and the United States view the Confederacy as a region of rebellion. A peace treaty would have also hammered out what punitive terms there might be for the defeated nation, its leaders, and its military. In the place of a peace treaty stood only the terms of Lee’s surrender to grant, which were extended by Sherman to Johnston.

But, as Janney makes clear, in those final, chaotic days of confusion, despair, and anger, the idea of what the South called “the Cause” became “the Lost Cause.” The South had not been defeated on the battlefield but by Northern industrial might, foreigners in the army, and the use of freed slaves as troops. Any evidence to the contrary was discounted and dismissed; the South believed its cause had been a righteous one.

Janney is the John Nau III Professor of the American Civil War and director of the John L. Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia. She has worked as a historian for the National Park Service and taught at Purdue University. has also published Burying the Dead But Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (2008) and Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013). She received a B.A. Degree in government and a Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Virginia.

She recently received the 2022 Gilder Lehman Lincoln Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Gettysburg College for Ends of War. The book was also a joint recipient of the Richard Barksdale Harwell Award of the Atlanta Civil War Roundtable for the best book on a Civil war subject published in the preceding ear.

The awards are no surprise. The book is an extraordinarily well-researched effort, as demonstrated by the extensive notes and bibliography. Written in non-academic language, it’s difficult to put Ends of War down. She succeeds in making her case, and she’s changed our understanding of the end of the Civil War and how it affected the country for a century afterward.

“War and Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1861-1875” by Charles Mills

September 12, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

During the Great Depression in the 1930s, the U.S. government’s Works Projects Administration undertook a number of efforts to help the unemployed retain their skills. While critics saw it as creating a huge army loyal to President Roosevelt, the WPA did employ some 8.5 million people in a wide variety of areas.

One of those efforts was the Writers’ Project, which, among other projects, produced travel guides to cities and states across the United States. Writers also collected oral histories of still-living Americans who had experienced extraordinary events, like the Civil War.

War and Reconstruction in Mississippi 1861-1875 was one such work. It focused on the town of Holly Springs in Marshall County, in the northern part of the state. Holly Springs was noteworthy for a number of reasons, not least of which was that it had changed hands 57 times during the Civil War. Before the war, it had been a prosperous town in a planter- and slave-based economy. During the Reconstruction period, it was occupied by a federal garrison and experienced Republican political control.

The WPA document assembled a history of the town and its founding, its experiences during the war as recounted by still living inhabitants, the role of Freedman’s Bureau during Reconstruction, and how the former Confederates eventually regained political control by stuffing the ballot box for the Democrats.

The document was edited and republished by Charles Mills in 2010. While some 60 to 70 years intervened between the events and how people remembered them, it still remains a valuable resource for what people on all sides experienced during the war and what followed.

Mills is also the author of Gold, Murder and Monsters in the Superstition Mountains, Legends of the Superstition Mountains, Death and Delusion in the Superstition Mountains, Treasure Legends of the Civil War, Love, Sex and Marriage in the Civil War, Civil War Civilian Life: Manassas, Virginia (Battle of Bull Run), and several other works on historical subjects. He is the producer and co-host of Virginia Time Travel, a TV program seen by two million viewers in northern Virginia, which is also where he lives (on land once owned by George Washington).

Top photograph: The New York Herald of Nov. 7, 1862, describing the expected move of Gen. Grant’s army southward toward Holly Springs.

Restoring the Family Bible – and More

September 7, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

More than 40 years ago, my father gave me the Young Family Bible. It had been given to him by his father, who’d received it from his father. The value of the book, as experts like to say, was “intrinsic,” In other words, it was zero, except for what a family member would believe.

The book as received from my father was wrapped in brown grocery-bag paper and tied with twine. It has sat on a closet shelf in my parents’ house for a long time, probably since they moved there in 1955. I have very vague memories of it from childhood.

When my father gave it to me, I did the time-honored thing: I put it on a closet shelf. Eventually, I removed the wrapping and twine and wrapped it in acid-free paper and a box. Its value to me and the rest of the family was what it contained – four pages, inserted between the Old and New Testaments, of family births, marriages, and deaths. The earliest date was that of my great-great grandfather’s birth in 1802; the last date was in 1890. All of the events were written in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s Samuel Franklin Young. He also wrote his signature on an inside cover.

The Bible was not in good shape. The leather binding had failed. The leather was gone from the corners of the cover, exposing the frayed and decaying “boards” underneath. The sewing of the sections had failed. Spine folds were damaged. The family pages were damaged. The title page had disappeared. And there was evidence (prior to my possession) (I hope) of damage from insects, mold, and possibly rodents.

The questions were: Could it be restored? Could we at least save the family record pages? And could I afford it?

My wife found a story in St. Louis Magazine about NS Conservation. It’s owned by Noah Smutz, and it focuses on book conservation and related services in St. Louis and the American Midwest. Noah is the real deal, and it was a real find to discover that he lived and worked right here in St. Louis, about 20 minutes from my house.

Noah became interested in book conservation when he was a student worker at the University of Kansas Libraries. He did internships with the Smithsonian Archives and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. He received a Masters degree in book conservation from West Dean College in the United Kingdom. And he’s worked with the St. Louis Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum in Kansas City, the Missouri Historical Society. Saint Louis University, and the Smithsonian Libraries.

If anyone could do something with the Young Family Bible, it was Noah.

Last March, I took the book to Noah for an assessment. He looked over it carefully. What was encouraging was that he didn’t reject it out of hand as impossible. As he went through the book, he found something that I’d never come across before – a lock of auburn hair. My best guess is that it probably belonged to my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young. She died more than 30 years before my grandfather did and, uncommon for the time, he never remarried.

He told me what he needed to do, and he told me what he wouldn’t do, which was to restore every single page of the Bible. The cost would have been prohibitive. But he spelled out what he would do and named his price, which I thought more than fair for the work he’d be doing. His initial assessment fee ($125) applied to the overall price he’d be charging.

He also said he wouldn’t have it finished until about October. The COVID pandemic seemed to have prompted a lot of people to become interested in restoring family books, Bibles, and similar heirlooms. I was more than happy with his schedule.

He also said the Bible, using the King James Version text, was likely printed in the late 1860s or early 1870s. Tens of thousands of Bibles like this were printed and typically sold by door-to-door salesmen.

Noah actually finished the work in late August. I knew we were getting close when I saw him post a few pictures on Instagram (nsconservation). What he did was amazing. It’s a bound book again. The family pages and the signature page have protected with Japanese paper. The leather cover was repaired and replaced where needed. The book was restitched; the signature page was placed where it originally belonged, at the back of the Bible (he matched the inkblots). He did a bit more work, and he constructed an acid-free storage box that fits it perfectly.

I’ve had time to think about this Bible and my great-grandfather. The approximate date of the book fits something else that happened in the family. His father died in 1870 (his mother had died some years before). Because of deaths in the Civil War (he lost two older brothers and a brother-in-law), he was the youngest and only surviving son. At 23 or 24 years old, he became head of the family, which included not only his young wife the firstborn child but also including two sisters-in-law, his sister, and their children. And he would have bought a family Bible with its record section because, like tens of thousands of other families in both North and South, the dead from the war needed to be remembered and memorialized, even if it was no more than writing their names in a family Bible.

What Noah restored was more than a book. It was also a piece of family history and American history. With the publication date, the family records and the lock of hair, the book has the Biblical story to tell as well as its own.

How Research Fills the Gaps in a Family Story

August 24, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

The idea has been in my head for years – a story about my great-grandfather. But I knew only a few facts about him, passed down by my father. Research has filled it in – a little bit.

Too young to enlist as a regular soldier, he’d been a messenger boy in the Civil War. He’d lost two brothers and a brother-in-law in the war, leaving him the youngest and surviving son. When the war ended in 1865, he had been “someplace east,” likely North Carolina rather than Appomattox. He had to walk home to southern Mississippi. When he arrived, he discovered his family was gone, having fled to Texas.

That was as much as I knew. When I finally decided to consider a story about him, I turned first to the family Bible, with its records of births, deaths, and marriages. The records, written over a period of 50 years, were in the same hand – my great-grandfather’s. They proved more revealing that I’d realized.

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.

When a Book Won’t Let Go

August 10, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Two weeks after finishing it, and I’m still thinking about Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. (See my review last week.)

When I read it, I expected to read about the final convulsive moments of the surrender of the Confederate armies and the immediate aftermath. And that’s the thumbnail description. But it’s about a lot more.

It’s the story of the civilians in north central North Carolina, roughly Raleigh to Greensboro, who found themselves in the path of two defeated armies and one victorious one.

It’s the story of the soldiers in those armies, who had to live with what we know today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. One thing you don’t read in the general histories of the Civil War period in the rather startling increase in soldier suicides and commitments to insane asylums in the years and decades after the war.

It’s the story of some of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian and military population. In generally, Confederate soldiers were focused on finding food, shoes, and clothes, and they didn’t care where they found them. Confederate soldiers and civilians alike were often desperate for food, and together they were raiding government warehouses and supplies.

The Union soldiers had food. What they were looking for was loot and revenge. There were too many reports of pillaging and looting, and more than a few of rape. Women and often children were brutalized. Houses were burned. It wasn’t only soldiers who developed PTSD. Some of the federal soldiers were disciplined and a few executed for their crimes (especially after the armies surrendered; that meant the civilians were no longer members of a foreign and hostile country).

My great-grandfather was somewhere in that convulsion. Even at war’s end, he was (chronologically) a boy. Too young to take up arms officially, he had enlisted and became a messenger boy for the Confederate army.

What I don’t know is what did he do to stay alive. Did he participate in the looting of government warehouses? Did he steal from civilians? Those questions will never be answered. What we do know is that he had to walk home to southern Mississippi – hundreds of miles across a landscape destroyed in many places and in complete social upheaval everywhere.

When he finally reached home, he learned his family had fled to Texas. So, his trek continued across Louisiana and into east Texas, where he found them. He also discovered that he was the sole surviving son, the youngest child in the family. When his father died four years later, my great-grandfather became the head of the family, which included a widowed sister, two widowed sisters-in-law, and a number of nieces and nephews. And his only family, too – he had married in 1867, and he and his wife had a little boy. He had to take care of that extended family through the rigors of Reconstruction.

My great-grandfather was made of some stern stuff, and that book, Hearts Torn Asunder, helped me understand just how stern it was.

Top photo: My great-grandfather, Samuel Franklin Young, and my great-grandmother, Octavia Montgomery Young.

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