history

A Year of Reading (and Writing) the Civil War

January 3, 2024 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

My story connected to the Civil War has passed the 70,000-word mark, and the ending is in sight. I’m not sure when it was that I realized I was writing about something I had only the most surface understanding of, but I did. The only solution was to start reading and researching.

Many blogs and web sites have been helpful, but two especially so. Emerging Civil War, edited by Chris Mackowksi, is written by historians, National Park guides, and other who know their stuff. Most have published books. Civil War Books & Authors, penned by Andrew Wagonhoffer, posts notices of new books and full-length book reviews focused solely on the Civil War, its causes, and its aftermath. Both sites have been at this work for years, ECW for more than a decade and CWBA since 2005.

What was also a treat was discovering and visiting the Missouri Civil War Museum, located adjacent to the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery here in St. Louis.

My reading and research this year has been less about military strategy, tactics, and battles, and more about what both civilians and soldiers experienced. For several decades after the war, officer and soldier memoirs were popular, and several publishers have made them available in digital format. The same is true for civilians, although there seem to be more memoirs by women and mothers on the Southern side than the Northern, likely reflecting the direct experience these women had.

I did pay attention to certain battles. For my story, the battles of Shiloh, Gettysburg, The Wilderness, Franklin, and Petersburg / Appomattox were the key ones, as was the whole surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. The surrender, in fact, was the scene where the manuscript originally started, even if its now in another place.

What’s also changed is that I’m reading other fictional accounts of the war – novels, stories, and poetry. Many people turned to fiction and poetry to make sense of what happened in the years between 1861 and 1865. As a friend once said, “Fiction can be truer that history.”

What follows is a list of the books I read in 2023. Given where my own fiction manuscript is, I expect to be reading far fewer in 2024. Then again, maybe not; the Civil War is a difficult subject to walk away from.

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorda.

Irish-American Civil War Songs by Catherine Bateson.

Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era by Frances Clark and Rebecca Jo Plant.

An Atlas and a Map of the Civil War

Contemners and Serpents: The James Wilson Family Civil War Correspondence, edited by Theodore Fuller and Thomas Knight.

Four Years with Morgan and Forrest by Col. Thomas Berry.

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

If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania, Vol. 1, by Scott Mingus & Eric Wittenberg.

Reading John Greenleaf Whittier, the “Abolitionist Poet”, edited by Brenda Wineapple.

A Season of Slaughter: The Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, May 8-21,1864 – Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White.

Bear in the Wilderness by Donald Waldemer.

“No One Want to Be the Last to Die”: The Battle of Appomattox, April 8-9, 1865 by Chris Calkins.

The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg and Tullahoma, edited by Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch.

Man of Fire: William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War by Derek Maxfield.

My Dearest Julia: The Wartime Letters of Ulysses S. Grant to His Wife.

The Wartime Journal of a Georgia Girl by Eliza Frances Andrews.

Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer by G. Mosely Sorrell.

The Civil War: The First Year by Those Who Lived It – Library of America.

President Lincoln Assassinated! The Firsthand Story of the Murder, Manhunt, Trial, and Mourning by Harold Holzer.

Bloody Promenade: Recollections on a Civil War Battle by Stephen Cushman.

Belle Boyd: Cleopatra of the Secession.

If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania, Vol. 2 by Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenberg.

The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It – Library of America.

Service with the Sixth Wisconsin Volunteers by Rufus Dawes.

The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It – Library of America.

The True Story of Andersonville Prison by James Madison Page.

The Civil War: The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It – Library of America.

From Western Virginia with Jackson to Spotsylvania with Lee by Peter Luebke.

The Story of Camp Douglas by David Keller.

Lee’s Miserables: Life in the Army of Northern Virginia from the Wilderness to Appomattox by J. Tracy Power.

Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War by Stephen Cushman.

Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott.

Shiloh, A Novel by Shelby Foote.

John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary.

John Brown’s Body by Stephen Vincent Benet.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane.

The Battle of Franklin by A.S. Peterson.

The Stolen Train by Robert Ashley.

I also wrote four blog posts that discussed a little of my own great-grandmother’s experience in Union-occupied New Orleans and some of the struggles I had with the research.

A Little of the Story of Wilhelmina Ostermann

When Research for Your Historical Novel Changes Your Understanding

My Enchantment with (and Addiction to?) the Civil War.

Research Can Teach You a Hard If Useful Lesson.

Top photograph, courtesy Wikimedia Commons: The Wilderness site, sometime after the battle. The dense scrub wasn’t conducive to fighting, but the dry weather made it conducive to being ignited by sparks from artillery fire.

“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.

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

June 28, 2023 By Glynn Young 1 Comment

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 19^th 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.

“Reconstruction in Mississippi” by James Wilford Garner

December 5, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a Comment

James Wilford Garner (1871-1938) was born and raised in Pike County, Mississippi, the same county where my paternal great-grandparents were born and raised (during the Reconstruction period, the state legislature split the county into two, with the southern half retaining the name and the north half being renamed Lincoln County). Garner graduated from the Mississippi Agricultural & Mechanical College in 1892 and went on to study at the University of Chicago and Columbia University.

Garner would become a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Illinois, and he also did extensive teaching work in India. He co-authored a history of the United States with Henry Cabot Lodge, and he published a number of other works on government and political science.

The work he is best known for is his Ph.D. thesis, published in 1901 under the title of Reconstruction in Mississippi. It firmly established him as what was then called the Dunning School, named for Columbia professor William Archibald Dunning. The school of thought generally favored a conservative, more pro-Southern understanding of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period.

The thinking of the Dunning School was influential in universities through World War II, although it was not without its critics, notably historian and civil rights activist W.E. B. DuBois. However, DuBois did consider that, of all the writings associated with the Dunning School, Garner’s Reconstruction in Mississippi was the fairest.

Reading it today, 120 years after it was published, is to see it as a product of its time. Yet Garner did marshal a huge amount of data to support his thesis that Reconstruction, managed by Radical Republicans and backed by the U.S. Army, was largely a disaster for the state of Mississippi.

The work begins with a summary of secession and the Civil War and the transition from war to reconstruction. It covers presidential reconstruction under Andrew Johnson, followed by congressional reconstruction. The period of congressional reconstruction was particularly marked by rampant theft and corruption in the state government, involving Northerners called carpetbaggers and Southerners know as scalawags who seemed determined to raid the state of as many resources as possible. Garner notes that many of the Union soldiers who had fought in Mississippi returned after the war to live there. (He also notes than roughly one fifth of private property in the state changed ownership during the period.)

It was a difficult time for many in the state. Not only was Mississippi economically devastated by the war, rail lines had to be rebuilt, the postal service reestablished, social order restored, and a civil government created that could function. Garner also devotes entire chapters to the creation and functioning of the Freedman’s Bureau, the disturbances associated with the Ku Klux Klan, and the creation (or re-creation) of the public school system, which was also plagued by corruption.

Reconstruction in Mississippi has a definite pro-Southern tilt to its depiction of Reconstruction, but I understand why DuBois considered it relatively fair. Garner is evenhanded in his criticisms, and he does discuss the period broadly and rather inclusively. He doesn’t paint the period of slavery as some happy, pleasant time for all concerned. But it’s his extensive use of data, tables, and charts that is most impressive.

Top illustration: A Drawing of a Freedman’s School in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1866.

“North Against South” by Lowell Johnson

November 30, 2022 By Glynn Young Leave a 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.

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