Reviews

“The True Story of Andersonville Prison” by James Madison Page

September 6, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Andersonville is a name that conjures up a dark history. It was a prison camp for Union soldiers, placed in the Georgia countryside about 100 miles south of Atlanta. It was operated for slightly more than a ear, from 1864 to 1865. Some 45,000 Union soldiers were imprisoned there; 13,000 of them died. It’s now operated as a historical site by the U.S. National Park Service.

For comparison, the prison at Elmira, New York operated by the Union at roughly the same time, housed 12,000 Confederate prisoners, of which almost 3,000 died. The Union prison at Alton, Illinois housed Confederate soldiers, Union soldiers, and civilians; of the 11,000 prisoners, some 1,534 are known to have died. (Alton was noted for outbreaks of smallpox and measles.)

Andersonville remains the Civil War prison with the worst, and largely well-deserved reputation. It’s also known for one other event – its commandant, the Swiss born Major Henry Wirz, was executed after the war for the crimes he allegedly committed at the prison. The immediate post-war period was a time of outrage and demands for retribution, and what had happened at Andersonville was exhibit No. 1.

In the years after the war, a number of its soldier-inmates wrote memoirs of their wartime experiences and especially Andersonville. James Madison Page, a Pennsylvania-born man who had moved to Michigan and enlisted with a regiment there, and he’d been captured after a battle in 1863. He and his fellow prisoners were moved around, but eventually they found themselves sent to Andersonville. Every move raised the hope of a prisoner exchange, which happened only very late in the war.

In 1908, Page published his own memoir, setting in motion a controversy that still exists after more than a century. In The True Story of Andersonville Prison: A Defense of Major Henry Wirz, Page said that many of the witnesses at Wirz’s trial had lied; that, contrary to testimony, Wirz had never shot prisoners; that Wirz had intervened many times on the prisoners’ behalf and to their benefit; and that the prisoners received the same food ration as the soldiers guarding the prison.

Page went further. He saw the true villain as being Edward Stanton, the U.S. Secretary of War. It was Stanton, Page maintained, who refused to allow prisoner exchanges, resulting in overcrowded soldier prisons. Stanton defended his decision at the time by saying the Confederates would get well-fed soldiers while the Union would get emaciated and sick men. Page also pointed to the Union blockade of Southern ports, which did hurt the Confederacy in many ways, including the blocking of food and medicine, but that also applied to the Confederacy’s prisoners.

At least some of what Page reported turned out to be true, especially about the conduct of Henry Wirz. The major was away from the camp recuperating from an old battle wound (received at the Battle of Seven Pines in 1862) during the entire month of August, 1864, which was the period alleged to be when he personally had shot prisoners.

During Wirz’s trial in 1865, Page had been called as a witness but was not called to testify; he claimed it was because the military tribunal didn’t want to hear anything that contradicted what they had already pre-determined.

Reading The True Story of Andersonville Prison today is eye-opening. Page never denies the harsh conditions with regard to food and medical assistance. He reports the deaths of friends. But he draws a picture of Wirz that is markedly different from the “devil incarnate” depicted in Union newspapers. From Page’s perspective, it was a very bad situation made worse by Stanton’s refusal to exchange prisoners, guaranteeing overcrowded conditions.

Page’s account isn’t a whitewash of Andersonville; it was a horrible chapter in Civil War and American history, and Page doesn’t dispute that. But he does call attention to exaggerations, and he especially defends the conduct of the man who came to personify the prison and paid with his life for it.

Top photograph: A scene of Andersonville Prison.

“Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers” by Rufus Dawes

August 23, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Rufus Dawes (1838-1899) was a Union soldier and officer, a businessman, a congressman, n author, and the father of a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize and served as Vice President. He was descended from the man who warned of the coming of the British prior to Lexington and Concord.

He is also considered to have written one of the best, if not the best, memoirs of the Civil War, Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers.

Dawes distinguished himself as a member and officer of the famed Iron Brigade during the Battle of Gettysburg and other Civil War engagements. Comprised of regiments from Wisconsin, Indiana, and Michigan, its numbers and composition kept changing because of casualties. It was one of the most feared of all Union troops; it often stood its ground when other brigades were in full retreat.

He meticulously provided accounts of battles, engagements, and camp life to his family, his wife (they married during the war), and friends. Most of the letters were kept, and he had ready access to his own first-hand accounts when he finally wrote and published his memoir in 1890. He and the Iron Brigade were involved in some of the most famous battles of the war in the Eastern Theater. In addition to Gettysburg, Dawes wrote of Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville, among others. And he was there at the Battle of the Wilderness and nearby Spotsylvania Courthouse, writing meticulous accounts of what happened.

His descriptions of the battles put the reader right in the thick of the battle. He describes each as would a trained and highly observant military journalist or historian. He explains what went right and what went wrong. He is always crediting his troops for bravery and courage; this is not a man who focused attention on himself (as so many officers and generals tended to do).

Dawes also describes his work as presiding judge during court-martials. He doesn’t explain why he served in this capacity, but it was obviously because of his trained eye, his military reputation, and his strong sense of fairness. His judgments reflected facts and evidence, not emotions or personal feelings.

Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers is more than a memoir of the Civil War; it is a fascinating account of some of the most important battles of the Civil War, written by a man who was both a strong partisan but a fair and observant one.

Top photograph: a few members of the Iron Brigade.

“If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania, Vol. 2” by Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenburg

August 2, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Volume 1 of “If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania” covered June 3 – 21, 1863, when Robert E. Lee’s armies implemented the Confederate decision to invade the North. Volume 2, picks up with the period June 22-30, 1863, as Lee’s army and that of Major General George Meade moved into the positions that would eventually become the Battle of Gettysburg. Co-authors Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenburg continue the masterful job they did with the first volume, placing the reader right in the thick of events and happenings.

Because Lee’s army was now on official northern soil, there is considerably more information provided about the civilian response. Rumors had been circulating for days; many Pennsylvanians believed Lee was aimed for the state capital of Harrisburg. Many people fled, including free blacks, who knew the confederates would send them south to slavery. But many had no choice but to stay, hoping for the best. Surprisingly, some areas even welcomed the invading Confederates.

Units and advance troops encountered (or sometimes stumbled upon) each other, and the small battles and skirmishes of the previous three weeks were repeated. There was also considerable looting; the Confederates felt no hesitation in doing to Pennsylvanian farms what had been done to Southern farms. Lee had ordered that no destruction be undertaken; his order was generally followed, with at least one major exception. Confederate General Jubal Early came upon the ironworks owned by U.S. Senator Thaddeus Stevens, long an ardent abolitionist. Early deliberately disobeyed Lee and had the ironworks destroyed.

Like its predecessor, Volume 2 is packed with photographs of officers and soldiers as well as very helpful maps. The maps in particular allow the reader to track Lee’s progress north and Meade’s movement as well. While the two armies were moving toward confrontation, Union troops were making as effort to strike at Richmond, as so many Confederate troops were with Lee.

And Meade found himself in a surprising position. Gen. Joseph Hooker had been head of the army, but he was removed from command during the Union army’s movement north and replaced by Meade. Gettysburg would be Meade’s trial as commander, and he would do well.

While the two-volume work tops on the eve of the first day of Gettysburg, the authors include an epilogue which summarizes what transpired. And it was a crucial battle; a Southern victory might have led to the Confederacy’s recognition by Britain and France. The authors include what was happening in both countries as the two armies approached each other in America.

Mingus, an author and speaker, has written or co-authored some two dozen books on the American Civil War and Underground Railroad. He was previously a new product development director in the global paper industry, He lives in Pennsylvania. Wittenberg, a practicing attorney, is a Civil War historian, author, lecturer, tour guide, and battlefield preservationist. He’s written numerous books and articles on the Civil War and lives in Ohio.

Volume 2 of “If We Strike for Pennsylvania” is every bit as good as Volume 1. Both books make for riveting reading, even if we do know the outcome beforehand. The officers, soldiers, and civilians at the time did not know what would happened, and Mingus and Wittenburg neatly convey the hopes, the fears, and the terror that people experienced.

Belle Boyd: Cleopatra of the Secession

July 19, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Belle Boyd (1844-1900) was 16 when the Civil War began. A member of a prominent family in Martinsburg, Virginia (it became part of WestVirginia), she’d been in boarding school in Baltimore when the Southern states began to secede. She made he way back home, and when the war began, she promptly decided to do whatever she could to help the South win.

She became a spy.

Her hometown afforded more than ample opportunity; like doe so many other towns in contested areas, control of the town changed hands several times. She made no secret of her sympathies; she did make secret her listening in on Union plans and army movements. In one particularly amazing incident, she braved gun and cannon fire in rushing across a large field to bring news of Union army reserves to Gen. Stonewall Jackson.

Union authorities were not ignorant of Belle Boyd’s activities. No less a person than Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War, in President Lincoln’s cabinet, ordered her arrest. She was arrested six times and imprisoned twice. At one point, Pinkerton detectives were hired to track her down. She was finally able to make her way to safety in England before the war ended; to support herself, she became an actress.

She almost immediately began writing her memoirs, for which was a ready market in both North and South. She had locked a Northern reporter in his room during one Union army evacuation, and he was captured by the Confederates. He knew exactly who bore responsibility, and when he returned to the North, he wrote stories, many grossly exaggerated, that turned Belle Boyd into a notorious spy and femme fatale, at least as far as Northern readers were concerned. Belle shrugged off his lurid stories; what else should you expect from a Northern newspaper, she said. In the South, she was regarded as a great heroine, and Stonewall Jackson himself commended her patriotism and activities.

Her memoir, published in 1866, sold quite well. Entitled Belle Boyd in Camp and Prison: Cleopatra of the Secession, it detailed her activities from the beginning, her Southern patriotism, her captures and imprisonments, and her “in your face” attitude, including waving a small Confederate flag on the train bearing her to prison in Washington, D.C.

She writes with passion and intelligence. She may have been a teenager, but she was determined to do her part for the South. She gave little thought to her own safety, unless her treatment by Union authorities might reflect badly on them. She was typically jailed without any explanation or formal charges (although I’m sure she could have guessed), as habeas corpus had been suspended by executive order.

Boyd married three times; her second husband was a British citizen who had fought for the Union. She had a daughter from her first marriage and four children from her second. She died of a heart attack in Wisconsin and was buried there.

Her memoir, published in two volumes, is considered by many to be “highly fictionalized.” It is a rather breathless account, and it’s easy to see how she might have described some experiences and even invented others to put herself in a daring and positive light. But it is a highly entertaining account; Belle Boyd knew how to capture attention.

“Bloody Promenade” by Stephen Cushman

July 12, 2023 By Glynn Young 3 Comments

I found Stephen Cushman’s poetry first, and then I discovered he wrote about the Civil War as well.

Cushman is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He’s known for his seven collections of poetry and two books of literary criticism, Fictions of Form in American Poetry and William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure.

But when he was a child, he was given a book about the American Civil War. It was The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960), with a narrative by noted Civil War historian Bruce Catton. The book became the key that unlocked a lifelong interest in the war, to the point where he’s published three books about it – The Generals’ Civil War: What Their Memoirs Can Teach Us Today, Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War, and Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Cushman lives about 50 miles from the battle cited in that last work. It happened over two days, May 5 and May 6, in 1864, and it was one of the most horrific battles of a war known for its horrific battles. The Battle of the Wilderness was the first direct confrontation between Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee, and Grant proved he would be relentless even if he lost. Lee had not come upon an opponent like this before, an opponent determined to defeat Lee whatever it took in lives and material.

Cushman explains that he’s not providing a history of the battle or an analysis of its strategies and tactics. Bloody Promenade doesn’t fit a precise literary genre. It’s not so much a story of the battle as it is a reflection of what that battle meant in the war, in American history, and to himself. I live more like 750 miles from that battle, but it is the one that has come to be something of a metaphor for the war to me. I understand Cushman’s preoccupation with it.

The book is about ancestors and people who engage in re-enactments. It’s about what eyewitnesses reported and how newspapers and magazines covered it. It’s about the battle as described in memoirs of the famous and not-so-famous. It’s about the battle and the war in histories and poetry. And it’s about the terrain itself, that dense thicket of trees, shrubs, tall weeds and scrubland that, given the dry weather, was almost waiting for something to set off a conflagration. Which is what happened.

In addition to his own poetry and historical writing, Cushman serves as general editor of the fourth edition of Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. He’s served as co-editor of Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works and Civil War Writing 1866-1989: New Perspectives on Iconic Works. He’s also published numerous articles on both poetry and the Civil War. He received a B.A. degree from Cornell, an M.A. and D. Phil. Degrees from Yale, and a Ph.D. from Yale.

Bloody Promenade fully resonates. It’s not an account of a battle (several other books are available with as much or as little detail as you could want). It’s a book about the meaning of a battle – how it was understood at the time, after decades had passed, and now. It’s a reminder that the past is never really past.

A Season of Slaughter by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White.

Grant vs. Lee, edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch.

The Battle of the Wilderness by Gordon Rhea.

Top photograph: What the Wilderness “battlefield” looked like.

“President Lincoln Assassinated!!” by Harold Holzer

July 5, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

Less than week after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S Grant at Appomattox, President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford Theatre in Washington, D.C., and died at 7 a.m. the next morning. He and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln had been watching the play Our American Cousin, a lighthearted farce about an American rube visiting his aristocratic English relatives.

The Civil War was not yet over, but the end was near. As the news of the assassination spread, jubilation in the North quickly gave way to shock and anger. In the South, the news was greeted by some with enthusiasm, but by other, more prescient people, with trepidation. Lincoln’s death would not bode well for the South.

Harold Holzer, one of the leading authorities in the United States on Lincoln and the era, considered the first-hand accounts – diaries, letters, newspaper editorials, official announcements, testimonies, affidavits, speeches, and more. (It surprises us today that the reports took weeks to reach the broad mass of people North and South). He then collected some of the best and assembled President Lincoln Assassinated!! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning.

What a treasure this is. We can read the reactions and responses of people from all walks of life, North and South, to the news of the President’s murder. The first report by the Associated Press. Letters by Edwin Stanton, Secretary of War. Eyewitness accounts of what happened at the theater. Letters written to U.S. diplomats. Fanny Seward’s account of the attack on her father William Seward and her brother in their home. (The Secretary of State was recovering from a carriage accident; the neck brace he had to wear likely saved his life from the knife-wielding assailant.) Entries from John Wilkes Booth’s diary, written as the authorities closed in.

We follow events from shortly before the attack in Ford’s Theatre, through the death and funeral procession to Springfield, Illinois, and then to how Lincoln and the assassination began in live in American memory.

As the attack on Seward makes clear, the assassination was indeed a conspiracy. The idea was to kill leading figures in the federal government, throwing the government into chaos and gaining revenge for the South. Ulysses Grant and his wife Julia were supposed to have joined the Lincolns in the box at Ford’s theatre, but Grant knew full well that his wife and Mary Lincoln did not get along; Grant found an excuse to be absent. Booth was eventually found and shot; four others were convicted, including Mary Surratt, the first woman to be executed by the federal government.

Holzer has written, edited, or co-authored more than 40 books on Lincoln, the Civil War era, and related subjects. From 2010 to 2016, he served as chairman of the Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation, having previously co-chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2008. He is currently the chairman of The Lincoln Forum.

President Lincoln Assassinated!! is an excellent collection of first-hand accounts of Lincoln’s death and the aftermath. It provides the opportunity to go behind the historical summaries and see the emotion, the horror, and the shock expressed by Americans when they first heard the news, and what they saw and experienced first-hand.

Top illustration: A depiction of the shooting at Ford’s Theatre.

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