Civil War

“Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front” by Timothy Smith

October 10, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

In high school and college, when we read about or study the American Civil War, we learn primarily about the political and military figures and the battles and campaigns. When I attended LSU, the school’s history department had a national reputation, with professors like T. Harry Williams, who was not only a highly regarded Civil War historian but also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Huey Long. Williams published several books on Abraham Lincoln, P.G.T. Beauregard, Civil War generals, and related topics.

In recent years, more attention has been paid to the war and how it affected civilians. When Union armies invaded the Southern states, they civilians they encountered were largely women, children, and older men beyond military age. And it is this group, and their lives in towns, cities, and farms, that Timothy Smith considers in Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front.

Smith divides his story in two pieces. First is how the state of Mississippi dealt with the military conflict from secession through the end of the war. The second is how the civilian population experienced the war. He pays particular attention to the belief among historians that the South was defeated not only by Northern industrial might but also by the people losing the will to fight. He finds some of that may be true, but that the “losing the will to fight” sentiment may have played a smaller role than previously thought.

Mississippi’s surely had more than sufficient reason to lose heart. From early in the war, the state was devastated economically, militarily, and socially. Agriculture was disrupted, cities burned, and railroads destroyed. What little there was industrial infrastructure also suffered severely. Deserters and criminals freed from jails roamed the countryside. Cotton, which had been the state’s primary crop, became almost useless with the federal blockade of ports. Inflation soared. Foodstuffs became scarce. The state had to sequester food for the military. Many people fled the state during the war for less affected places like Texas. (My own Mississippi ancestors did precisely that, returning only after the war was over.)

Particularly interesting is Smith’s discussion of the anti-secession sentiment in the state, which was surprisingly strong. Not everyone wanted to leave the Union; not everyone owned slaves. But everyone would largely suffer equally.

Smith provides an overview of what people experienced. Military battles aside, it was a dark time for many people in the South, free and slave, and the effects would be felt for decades. Some say the effects are still being felt.

Smith’s numerous books on the Civil War include accounts of the battles of Vicksburg, Corinth, Champion Hill, Shiloh, Forts Henry and Donelson, and Chickamauga; the Mississippi secession convention; U.S. Grant’s invasion of Tennessee; and the Grierson Raid in Mississippi. A professor of history at the University of Tennessee at Martin, he’s won numerous awards for his books, including the Fletcher Pratt Award, the McLemore Prize, the Richard Harwell Award, the Tennessee History Book Award, the Emerging Civil War Book Award, and the Douglas Southall Freeman Award. He lives with his family in Tennessee.

Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front is a sobering story. Mississippi and the other Southern states may have brought the war upon themselves, but its people endured and survived, Smith explains how that happened.

Top photograph: The original Oxford, Miss., courthouse, with a Union army encampment on its grounds.

“The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles” by Michael Ballard

October 3, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

If there is a state we most associate with the American Civil War, it is Virginia. Numerous battles occurred there; the federal and confederate armies faced each other for four years, most often in a stalemate; and the two enemy capitals ensured that Virginia was a major theater of the war. And it was in Virginia that Robert E. Lee ultimately surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant.

Some have argued that the United States really won the war farther west – the fall of New Orleans and Vicksburg, the battles around Nashville and Chattanooga, the capture of Atlanta in 1864, and Sherman’s March to the Sea.

And then there was Mississippi, the second state (after South Carolina) to secede from the Union. The Civil War in Mississippi was more – far more – than Vicksburg. Historian Michael Ballard (1946-2016) tells the story in The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles (2011). The book is volume 5 of the Heritage of Mississippi published by the University Press of Mississippi for the Mississippi Historical Society and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Vicksburg (1863) may have been the most important battle in the state; its surrender solidified control of the Mississippi River by the United States and severed the Confederacy in half. But the northern part of the experienced numerous battles. The town of Holly Springs changed hands 57 times. The town of Oxford was burned. The state capital of Jackson fell twice to the federals; Grant took the city and then attacked Vicksburg from the east. Before he marched to the sea in Georgia, Sherman marched from Jackson to Meridian in similar fashion, destroying anything that might be of value to the Confederates. Major Benjamin Grierson led a three-week-long raid with 1,700 cavalry troops from the Tennessee line south, eventually arriving in federally held Baton Rouge in Louisiana.

The destruction through the years of war was large-scale – plantations, factories, warehouses full of supplies, railroad deports and track, and whole towns in some cases. In his well-written and highly readable account, Ballard succinctly tells the story of all of what happened.

During his lifetime, Ballard published numerous books about the Civil War, including A Long Shadow: Jefferson Davis and the Final Days of the Confederacy (1986); Landscapes of Battle: The Civil War (1988); Pemberton: The General Who Lost Vicksburg (1999); A Mississippi Rebel in the Army of Northern Virginia: The Memoirs of Private David Holt (1995); Grant at Vicksburg: The General and the Siege (2003); U.S. Grant: The Making of a General 1861-1863 (2005); and several others. He received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Mississippi State University, where he also worked as archivist and director of the Congressional and Political Collection.

The Civil War in Mississippi is a fine history and a sobering one. By the end of Civil War, the state’s economy was in ruins, its towns and cities had experienced widespread destruction, thousands of its men had died on battlefields across the state and the South, and its social order was turned upside down. Recovery would be a long time coming.

Top photograph: Artist’s rendering of the Battle of Corinth, Miss.; Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

“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.

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