Reviews

“North Against South” by Lowell Johnson

November 30, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

The first thing you should know about Ludwell Johnson’s North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877 is that it’s controversial. First published in 1978 under the title Division and Reunion, 1848-1877, the book argues that Reconstruction was an extension of the military warfare carried out by the North during the Civil War, that Jefferson Davis was a more able leader than Abraham Lincoln, and that Robert E. Lee was a better military leader than Ulysses S. Grant.

That’s just for starters. Johnson (1927-2017) also says that the writing of Civil War history after World War II has been filtered through the lens of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s not that this vast multitude of history works are wrong and should be rejected, but more that readers and students need to understand the lens through which the Civil War has been seen and understood.

Johnson marshals facts and data to make his case. He tells the story of what led up to the war, how the war began and its major military battles, the critical role played by the North’s economic and manufacturing advantages, and what he describes as the three post-war “peace settlements” – President Andrew Johnson’s reconstruction plan, the reconstruction plan of the Radical Republicans, and finally the abandonment of Reconstruction.

What is perhaps most surprising in Johnson’s account is the sense of both sides being the aggressor. The North was not trying hard to avoid war while the South seemed hellbent to make one, nor were Northern armies waging a just and righteous crusade for human freedom. As the war faded in living memory, myths grew up on both sides. And the national trauma that we call the Civil War would continue to play a significant role in national politics.

Johnson was a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He focused his studies and teaching on the American Civil War. He was also the author of Red River Campaign: Politics and Cotton in the Civil War (1958).

I don’t have the background in Civil War history to say whether Johnson was right or wrong. I would hazard an educated guess that this book likely angered many Civil War historians when it was published in 1978 (and republished in 2002). For me, the real value of North Against South is understanding that one shouldn’t simply accept the received wisdom, whatever the source, and that the past continues to matter more than we’d like to think.

Top photograph: A scene from the Battle of Gettysburg by Thure de Thulstrup via Wikimedia Commons.

Bruce Catton’s Civil War

November 21, 2022 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

Bruce Catton (1899-1978) grew up in Petoskey, Michigan, listening to the stories of old Civil War veterans. As a boy, he was enraptured by these first-hand accounts, but his own experiences in World War I led him to believe that those Civil War veterans didn’t really understand modern warfare. His memoir of growing up, which included his interactions with Civil War veterans, was published in 1972 and entitled Waiting for the Morning Train: An American Boyhood.

At some point, he realized how wrong he was. He became a journalist and worked for such newspapers as the Boston American, Cleveland News, and Cleveland Plain Dealer. He never lost interest in the Civil War, and Catton continued studying and researching the period before, during, and after the war. He read extensively on the subject, and what he noticed was how historians talked about battles and generals, without paying much attention to the experiences of soldiers.

And it wasn’t for lack of sources. Hundreds if not thousands of memoirs had been published by Civil War veterans on both sides of the conflict. Regimental histories had been written. But these accounts weren’t the Civil War most Americans were familiar with.

Catton focused on the federal Army of the Potomac and wrote three books which focused heavily on the experiences of the soldiers. The first volume in what became a trilogy was Mr. Lincoln’s Army, published in 1951. The second volume was Glory Road (1952), and the third was A Stillness at Appomattox (1954). Sales weren’t exactly robust; the nation’s appetite for Civil War history seemed to have waned.

And then A Stillness at Appomattox won the Pulitzer Prize for history, followed by a National Book Award. The resulting publicity encouraged new readers and buyers. Here was a journalist (of all things) doing what historians had paid scant attention to – the experiences of the soldier. This wasn’t reading about Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, and Jefferson Davis; this was reading about the war fought by the boy next door, or your own son.

No one had written history like this before in America. Reading it gave people the impression they were firsthand witnesses, a result of its journalistic style. The series became popular and passed into publishing (and Civil War history) legend. Not only did it inspire Shelby Foote to write his multi-volume history of the Civil War, it also led to Ken Burns’ epic documentary for PBS. The series began airing in September of 1990 to 40 million television viewers. If you watched it (and I was one of those 40 million), you couldn’t forget David McCullough, the narrator, introducing the letters written by soldiers to their wives, sweethearts, and parents. Like Catton’s books, it made the Civil War profoundly personal.

The Library of America, a national publishing treasure if ever there was one, has recently combined Catton’s three volumes into one, simply entitled Catton: The Army of the Potomac Trilogy. It’s edited by Gary Gallagher, the John L. Nau III Professor of History of the American Civil War Emeritus at the University of Virginia. Gallagher includes an exceptionally fine introduction to Catton and his writing. The volume also includes maps of the battles fought by the Army of the Potomac, drawn by Rafael Palacios. Its hefty content (more than 1,100 pages of texts, plus another 100 of notes, bibliography, and index) is packaged in a relatively compact yet easily readable volume.

And it’s still a thrilling read, just like it was originally in the 1950s and through numerous editions, and just like the stories Catton heard when he was a boy in Petoskey, fascinated by the tales of Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, and so many more, all told by the now-grizzled old men who had fought them.

“Poets of the Civil War,” edited by J.D. McClatchy

November 15, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

If I asked you to give me the name of an American Civil War poet, you would likely say “Walt Whitman.” His poems, like “O Captain! My Captain!,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and “The Wound Dresser,” certainly catapult him to the top of the Civil War poets list.

But if I were asked to name another Civil War poet, I’d be rather stumped. Until, that is, I laid eyes on Poets of the Civil War, edited by J.D. McClatchy, published in 2005 as part of the Library of America’s American Poets Project. And I was in for a major surprise. Whitman doesn’t stand there by himself.

The list of Civil War poets includes some of the best-known writers and poets of the 19^th century. William Cullen Bryant. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. John Greenleaf Whittier. Herman Melville. James Russell Lowell. Bret Harte. Ambrose Bierce. Sidney Lanier.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“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.

“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.

“Hearts Torn Asunder” by Ernest Dollar Jr.

August 3, 2022 By Glynn Young 2 Comments

It’s April 1865, the last month of the Civil War. Richmond has fallen. The Confederate cabinet is fleeing. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia surrenders to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. Lee’s soldiers are paroled and dispersed, most heading south (and on foot) into North Carolina and toward home in the rest of the former Confederacy. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army is chasing that of Confederate Gen. Joseph Johnston, and the chase is ending near Raleigh and Greensboro. As Johnston meets with Sherman to discuss surrender terms, he learns that President Lincoln has been assassinated in Washington.

The final convulsion of the war and the Confederacy is happening in central and north central North Carolina. And it its path are the people who live there, in cities and towns, and on farms, people who see both armies strip the countryside bare of food and provisions. One army’s soldiers experience sorrow and despair, while those of the other feel jubilation. Soldiers of both, after four long years of war, are experiencing what today we recognize as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. It isn’t called that then; it isn’t even recognized.

But citizens and soldiers are experiencing its effects – and the effects of hunger. The hunger was at times so great that soldiers and civilians alike began attacking warehouses and trainloads of provisions meant for the Confederate army.

Horrors and atrocities happened on both sides. Rage, fed by deaths and maiming of friends and fellows and fueled by alcohol, could make otherwise kind men do terrible things. Civilians – men, women, and children, free and slave – bore the brunt of that rage. And it was rage coming from both Union and Confederate soldiers.

The story of that month and that place is told, and told well, by Ernest A. Dollar, Jr. in Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina. It’s a somber, sometimes shocking story that shows a side of war we rarely see in the movies or are taught about in school. But it happened, and it happens. And it doesn’t simply change people; it also changes cultures and societies. The effects of what happened in North Carolina in April 1865 were felt for generations.

Dollar graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with B.A. degree in history and a B.F.A. degree in design, and an M.A. degree in history from North Carolina State University. He’s worked at historic sites in both North Carolina and South Carolina. He’s currently the Executive Director of the City of Raleigh Museum, and he and his family currently live in Raleigh.

Hearts Torn Asunder makes for hard reading. But it’s a story that needs to be told.

Top image: Engraving of the meeting of Gen. Joseph Johnston and Gen. William T. Sherman at the Bennett Homeplace, April 1865.

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