Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Brooks Simpson

“The Civil War: The Third Year Told by the People Who Lived It”

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The year 1863 was likely the critical one in the Civil War, largely because of two battles. Both were fought about the same time, in July. Gettysburg happened over three days, while Vicksburg had been considerably longer and far more complex, with Grierson’s Raid, the Battles of Jackson and Port Gobson, and the long siege that saw town citizens hiding in caves from the shelling and subsisting on whatever food sources might be available.

But the year saw far more than only two battles. The Emancipation Proclamation went into full effect; former slaves were forming into Union regiments; the Union instituted a conscription act, which resulted in days of draft riots in New York City; Knoxville was occupied by Union forces; the Confederates experienced a great victory at Chancellorsville; and more.

It is one thing to read the accounts of battles, new military weapons, the privations brought by blockades. It is quite another to read the personal accounts of the people who lived this era. That’s what this Library of America series on the Civil War does (four volumes in all), and the third volume, The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, is just as good as its two predecessors. 

Edited by Arizona State University professor Brooks Simpson, the work makes the war personal in a way that history books usually can’t. You read the letters of Robert Gould Shaw, who commanded the 54th Massachusetts Regiment (the first all-Black regiment) and who died with so many of his men in the assault on Battery Wagner outside Charleston. You read the accounts left by Kate Stone, a young Louisiana woman as slaves and Union troops overran her family’s plantation. You read about inflation and food riots in Southern cities. You read the letters home written by soldiers who didn’t know whether or not they would survive the coming battle. 

And you read the correspondence between commanding generals and their presidents, and the letters that William Sherman and Ulysses Grant wrote home. One of the most moving letters was written by Grant to Sherman, explaining that Lincoln had put him in charge of the Union armies and what Grant owed to his commanding generals like Sherman. You learn that anti-war northern Democrats long agitated against Lincoln and the war, to the point where a former Ohio congressman was arrested for treason, tried, convicted, and then expelled to the South. 

Brooks Simpson

This was never just a story about battles.

Simpson (born 1957) is a history professor at Arizona State. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Virginia and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He’s written or co-written numerous books about the Civil War and related areas, including accounts of emancipation, Ulysses Grant, Lincoln, the collapse of the Confederacy, the eastern theater, Reconstruction, and an illustrated history of the war.

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It makes the war personal and immediate. You experience the full scope of people’s responses and experiences – the fear, anger, horror, grief, and, sometimes, even hope.

Top photograph: Some of the caves that Vicksburg residents lived in during the siege by Union forces.

“The Civil War: The First Year by Those Who Lived It”

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The refusal of Fort Sumter to surrender and the subsequent shelling by South Carolinian authorities might have been the immediate cause of the American Civil War, but it had been a long time coming. In retrospect, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the Mexican War of the mid 1840s, which opened up vast new tracts of land for settlement; the Compromise of 1850; the Kansas-Nebraska Act; the Dred Scott decision in 1857; and John Brown’s Raid in 1859 all edged, pushed, or shoved the nation towards an internal military war. The spark that lit the fuse was the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, followed by the secession of several Southern states. 

Documentation abounds. Few things occupied American minds in the 19th century like slavery. And Americans expressed their thoughts and deeds in diaries, letters, journals, newspapers, speeches, laws, and court decisions. Under the auspices of The Library of America, that documentation has been curated and published in four volumes collectively called The Civil War, edited by Brooks Simpson, Stephen Sears, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean. Each volume is devoted to a specific year; volume 1 is The Civil War: The First Year by Those Who Lived It. 

The curated collection begins with an editorial in the Charleston (SC) Mercury on Nov. 3, 1860, asking what shall the South Carolina legislature do. It ends with a letter by Edwin Stanton, who became Lincoln’s Secretary of War, on Jan. 24, 1862, bluntly stating “This (federal) army has got to fight.”

In between are the thoughts, beliefs, hopes, and fears by Americans on both sides of the conflict, from Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, officers and soldiers in the field writing to each other and loved ones, to civilians back home, writing in letters and diaries. You read the responses to the Battle of Bull Run (Manassas), which was almost a Confederate defeat until it turned into a rout of the Union army, with soldiers fleeing back to Washington and fear gripping the federal capitol. You also read how, from the start, the Union army was grappling with the “contraband question,” which was what to do about slaves who had escaped to the Union armies. It was a question that dogged the federals all through the war. And you read the stirring writing of Frederick Douglass, during from the beginning that it be made a war over slavery: Lincoln initially focused on the idea of preserving the Union.

You see the strategic and tactical thoughts on people’s minds, and you see them dealing with the ordinary and mundane things of life. The reader has the benefit of hindsight; we know how this will end. But the people at the time did not, and both sides were determined to prevail. 

Brooks Simpson is an author and Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. Stephen sears has published a biography of George McClellan and several individual battle histories. Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred Frey Professor of History at Louisiana State University and the author of two Civil War histories.

The Civil War: The First Year by Those Who Lived It provides a considerable number of source documents for the first year of the war. It allows you to consider what people were thinking, believing, and experiencing. It’s an eye-opening and, at times, poignant read. 

Top illustration: An artist’s drawing of the shelling of Fort Sumter.