Reviews

“Man of Fire” by Derek Maxfield

May 31, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

“Well we have had a big battle where they Shot real bullets and I am safe. Except a buckshot wound in the hand and a bruised shoulder from a spent ball…” – Letter from William T. Sherman to his wife Ellen Ewing Sherman, April 11, 1862, after the Battle of Shiloh.

Growing up, I had a grandmother who referred to the Civil War as “The War of Northern Aggression” which had been won for the North by “that drunkard General Useless Grant.” Her father-in-law had been a young soldier in the war; relatives on both sides had fought and died. A century later, the Civil War was still being fought, at least when she was present, wrapped up in loss, memory, and an unshakeable belief in the “Lost Cause.”

But no Union officer received my grandmother’s opprobrium like William Tecumseh Sherman, whom I understood to be a personification of Lucifer.

And that so-called Lucifer is the subject of Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War, the highly readable, fact-filled, and wonderfully illustrated biography by Derek Maxfield. This is not a comprehensive, “be-all-and-end-all” study of the man; instead, it focuses on his Civil War years and military service.

The man who emerges from these pages is complex, ambitious, doubt-ridden, often depressed, and an incredibly competent and capable leader. He was lauded in the North and despised in the South and for largely the same reason: the March through Georgia in late 1864. The earlier fall of Atlanta made Sherman a Union hero (and assured Abraham Lincoln’s reelection), setting the stage for the march to the sea. Maxfield notes that many credit Sherman with inventing the idea of “total war.” It wasn’t only about defeating armies in the field but also about destroying the supply base and demoralizing the civilians. And the march did exactly that. It also became one of the major pillars of the “Lost Cause” mythology.

Man of Fire describes how Sherman, after repeated business failures in civilian life, found a natural home back in the military. But it wasn’t an easy ride. Early on, it appeared his career was over; the man likely had something like a nervous breakdown. But his service at Shiloh helped restore the luster. It also helped that Grant supported him through good times and bad.

Sherman also had to deal with Washington politics, and specifically Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War. He may have been a military hero, lauded in the press (and Sherman knew exactly how fickle the press could be), but the general had to deal with Stanton’s interfering and eventual humiliation over the peace terms offered to Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston. Maxfield succinctly summarizes all of this.

Maxfield is an associate professor of history at Genesee Community College in Batavia, New York, and has received several awards for teaching. He previously published Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp – Elmira, N.Y. Maxfield has also written and directed several plays, including Now We Stand by Each Other Always and Grant on the Eve of Victory. He is a lecturer on several Civil War, Victorian America, and American Revolution topics, and he’s been a regular contributor to the Emerging Civil War blog since 2015. He lives with his family in New York.

Man of Fire doesn’t tell you everything you might want to know about Sherman, but that’s not its intent. It summarizies the Civil War years, highlighting the mjnor events of the general’s military career and personal life (including the death in Memphis of his beloved son from typhoid. It gives you the general and the man, his victories and accomplishments as well as his failures. At the end, you understand William Tecumseh Sherman better than you did when you started to read it.

But I can still see my grandmother shaking her finger at me.

Top illustration: What the black-and-white photographs of the era don’t pay justice to is Sherman’s red hair.

“The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg & Tullahoma,” edited by Chris Mackowski & Dan Welch

May 24, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

There are few more momentous years in American history than 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation. The Battle of Gettysburg, ending Robert E Lee’s invasion of the North. The Fall of Vicksburg, which effectively cut the Confederacy in half. More than 30,000 books have been written on the Battle of Gettysburg alone.

And there are few more actively maintained and managed Civil War web sites than Emerging Civil War. With 28 contributors and seven editors (all of whom also contribute), the site is updated daily and often several times a day.

Chris Mackowski serves as editor-in-chief, and Dan Welch is one of the site’s contributors. Together, they have edited some 40 articles about the Civil War summer of 1863, focusing ontwo major campaigns – Vicksburg in Mississippi and Tullahoma in Tennessee. Usually works about that momentous summer address the Battle of Gettysburg; The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg & Tullahoma are about the other two campaigns whose outcomes had as much to do with the defeat of the Confederacy as did Gettysburg. In fact, one might argue that Vicksburg had at least as great an impact on the war as Gettysburg did, and perhaps more.

The articles cover a broad array of topics. Included are an overview of the stakes of Vicksburg; the turning point for Ulysses S. Grant; photographing Vicksburg; Grierson’s Raid through central Mississippi; how Admiral David Porter ran gunboats past the batteries at Vicksburg; the role of William Tecumseh Sherman; the related Vicksburg battles of Champion Hill and Jackson; how civilians fared during the siege of the Mississippi town; an overview of the Battle of Tullahoma and the related actions at Liberty Gap and Shelbyville; and more.

And the book isn’t only about battles and military strategies. We read about Old Abe, the Eighth Wisconsin’s war eagle; the shooting of a Maine deserter; Abraham, the slave “blown” to freedom; a letter-writing campaign to the veterans of Vicksburg; the life of an officer as revealed by his letters; and other human-interest stories.

The result is a collective story of armies, strategy, generals, and civilians who fought and experienced two of the most significant campaigns of the American Civil War.

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has received B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania.

Welch is an educator in a public school district in Ohio and serves as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and associate editor of Gettysburg Magazine. He’s written two books in the Emerging Civil War Series and co-edited several volumes.

Mackowski and Welch have done an excellent job in gathering and curating a wealth of material, putting in its context, and helping us make sense of that tumultuous and important summer. The Summer of ’63 is a story told well.

Top illustration: Admiral David Porter’s gunboats run the Vicksburg blockade, lithograph by Currier & Ives, 1863.

“Bear in the Wilderness” by Donald Waldemer

April 19, 2023 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

One of the many features of the Missouri Civil War Museum is the gift shop, which has artifacts, souvenirs, refreshments, t-shirts and jackets, and books. Lots of books. Lots of new and used books all about the Civil War. (I wrote about the museum here.)

I found more than a few things of interest, but I didn’t overdo it. I walked away with an old copy of Stephen Vincent Benet’s epic book-length poem John Brown’s Body, the novel Shiloh by Shelby Foote, and a few others. One, as it turned out, had a strong St. Louis connection.

Donald Waldemer (1925-2021) was about totally St Louis as you can get. He was born here. He received two degrees from Washington University in St. Louis. He worked for Union Electric (now Ameren, the main electric utility) for 34 years. He and his wife raised a family in Brentwood, a close-in St. Louis suburb, and he’s buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Kirkwood, the suburb where I live.

Waldermer was also an avid student of the Civil War. He published Triumph at the James: The Checkmate of Gen. Robert E. Lee in 1998 and Bear in the Wilderness: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5,6,7 1864 in 2001. It was the book on the Battle of the Wilderness that I found at the Missouri Civil War Museum.

It’s not a battle we heard much about in school, yet, in its own way, it was just as important as Gettysburg or Vicksburg. It was the last battle for which Robert E. Lee went on the offensive. It was the first battle matching lee and Ulysses S. Grant as commanders. And it was the battle in which Grant determined how he was going to defeat the Confederacy – by wearing Lee’s army down, no matter what the cost to the Union side. And the cost here was terrible.

Seven years before Waldemer published his Wilderness book, Gordon Rhea had published The Battle of the Wilderness, which is still considered the definitive account of the battle. Waldemer took a different tack. He used the official letters, orders, and reports and knitted them together with brief contextual information, allowing the official reports to tell the story of the battle.

What results is something lopsided – it’s a story told almost entirely from the Union side. And it was for a very simple reason – there was little to no similar records on the Confederate side. Lee and his generals wrote very little down. It’ also something of a lopsided account because it is a top-down view. If you want to see what Abraham Lincoln, Grant, and Grant’s generals were thinking and planning, this is a solid account. You won’t get much of the perspective of the soldiers doing the actual fighting.

That doesn’t make Bear in the Wilderness unimportant. Waldemer had a gift for context, taking a wide array of texts of all kinds and assembling them in an order that makes sense and helps in understanding how the battle unfolded. If you want to know Grant’s thoughts, fears, strategies, and tactics, and how Lincoln responded with his own, this is an account that’s easy to follow.

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier by Louis Leon.

Hell Itself: The Battle of the Wilderness May 5-7, 1864 by Chris Mackowski.

Top photograph: A photograph of the Wilderness, showing the kind of terrain where much of the three-day battle was fought. Photo courtesy of Encyclopedia Virginia.

“A Season of Slaughter” by Chris Mackowski & Kristopher White

April 12, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

From May 5 to May 7, 1864, the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, battled with the Army of the Potomac, commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. In what was known as the Battle of the Wilderness. The terrain was horrific for a battle – hundreds of acres of dense scrub, trees, and thick woods. Dry conditions, not to mention shelling by artillery, were conducive for fires. It was also notable for being the first engagement between the two commanding generals.

With only a day passing, the two armies moved from the Wilderness area to the region around Spotsylvania Court House and soon found themselves engaged again. Except this time, it was more of a push-me / pull-you series of engagements, with the Confederate lines generally holding (with one major exception) and with continuous punching of those lines by Union forces. Instead of three days, the action went on for two weeks, from May 8 to May 21.

Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White detail the action day by day in A Season of Slaughter: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864. And they do more. Each chapter (general covering each day) includes directions on how to visit the various battle and engagement sites and explaining what visitors today would see that the actual participants would not have (or vice versa). The book serves as both an essential day-by-day history of the battle and a field guidebook (with photographs). Also included are numerous photographs of many of the officers, generals, and soldiers involved in the battle.

The book is not written for expert or academic readers but for the general reader who might be interested in the battle, the Civil War, and American history. And for those interested in touring the battlefields. For that general reader, it is an excellent and helpful resource.

A professor at St. Bonaventure University, Mackowski has B.A., M.A., M.F.A., and Ph.D. degrees in communication, English, and creative writing. The author of some nine books, he’s written extensively on the Civil War for a number of publications. He also worked for the National Park Service and gave tours of the Civil War battlefields at Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania. He serves as editor at Emerging Civil War.

White is the deputy director of education at the American Battlefield Trust. He received a B.A. degree in history from the California University of Pennsylvania and an M.A. degree in military history from Norwich University. For five years, he served as a ranger-historian at the Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. He is also a co-founder and chief historian for Emerging Civil War, and has published, co-authored, and edited nearly 24 books.

A Season of Slaughter stresses the importance of the month of May. The two commanding generals were not only testing their armies but also each other, each gaining the measure of what he was dealing with. It was also the month when the strategy of the overall Union army changed, a change driven by Grant: the goal became not the capture of Richmond, the Confederate capital, but the destruction of Lee’s army. If Grant had to do that by wearing down the Confederates, Grant would do that, even at the cost of horrific loss of Union soldiers.

Top illustration: Battle of Spotsylvania by Thure de Thulstrop.

“If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania: Vol. 1” by Scott Mingus & Eric Wittenberg

April 5, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

When you get the compressed view of history in school – too much to cover and not enough time – you tend to think events like battles just happened. Two armies showed up and fought. But as Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenberg demonstrate in If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania: The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac March to Gettysburg, battles like Gettysburg have lead-ups, clashes and conflicts, and after-events.

In other words, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia didn’t just show up in Gettysburg and fight George Meade’s Army of the Potomac. In the month leading up to the battle, Lee’s army moved in three substantive routes toward Pennsylvania. The approval to take the war into the North was given by the Confederate government in late May, and Lee wasted no time. By June 1, his army began to move.

Along the way, the Northern generals tried to figure out what Lee was up to. They knew a large part of his army was moving north, but was the objective West Virginia, Pennsylvania’s state capital of Harrisburg, a turn back toward Baltimore and Washington, D.C., or perhaps even Philadelphia? Lee’s ultimate target was unknown.

Volume 1 of this work covers the period from June 1 to June 21, 1863, from leaving Fredericksburg, Virginia and arriving near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, some 25 miles from Gettysburg. and the authors are meticulous about explaining what was happening from the perspective of soldiers, officers, generals, and civilians. Drawing upon books, memoirs, letters, official histories, Mingus and Wittenberg document Lee’s daily progress north in detail.

Small battles, skirmishes, and limited engagements marked Lee’s progress north. A few of the engagements were intense. Generally, the Union troops got the worst of it, including the Confederates’ recapture of Winchester, Virginia, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, which had chafed under Union occupation.

The authors do a masterful job of reconstructing three weeks of movements by both armies. Gettysburg didn’t just happen one day; that battle has a history, and Mingus and Wittenburg have fully documented it.

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.

Vol. 2 in this series covers June 22-30, 1863, and will be published June 30 of this year.

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

March 29, 2023 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

Emerging Civil War (ECW) is one of my favorite blogs to follow for stories, news, and articles about the Civil War. It has quite a roster of editors and writers, all of whom have backgrounds (and often jobs) in history, national parks, and publishing. They publish a weekly newsletter, sponsor an annual conference, and have a series of books published with the publishing firm Savas Beatie.

What I particularly enjoy is how their posts and publications are in understandable (i.e., non-academic) English. They’re writing to be read and understood by people like me, the general public. (In case you’re interested, they also produce and manage a sister site on the American Revolution, Emerging Revolutionary War Era.)

Last year, ECW published several works to celebrate their tenth anniversary. One of those is Grant vs. Lee: Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War. Edited by ECW Editor-in-Chief Chris Mackowski and contributor Dan Welch, it’s a collection of 46 articles by 22 authors posted on the site from the preceding 10 years.

The Civil War period covered is less than a year – Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee did face each other in battle until the Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7, 1864). And even then, their armies fought over terrain unconducive to battle – dense scrub and forest that had as much to do with the engagement’s outcome as anything the armies or the generals did. In one essay, Mackowski argues that it was this battler, rather than Gettysburg, that should be considered the turning point in the war. What Lee learned was that Grant would through wave after wave of men and weaponry at him, and only counting the fearsome cost afterward. (“Was Grant a butcher?” he asks in another essay.)

Other battles and engagements are covered, including Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, North Anna, Petersburg, the fall of Richmond, and Appomattox. And the collection not only addresses battles but also the regiments and individuals involved, including author and poet Herman Melville’s perspective on the Fall of Richmond.

In short, Grant vs. Lee is a solid introduction to the last year of the Civil War.

The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi by Chris Mackowski.

ECW Podcast: Grant vs. Lee.

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