Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

Vicksburg

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

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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.

Chris Makowski

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.

Dan Welch

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. 

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith

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From April 17 to May 2 of 1863, a group of some 1,700 Union cavalry traveled from LaGrange Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In less than three weeks, they cut a swath through central Mississippi surprising Confederate forces, Mississippi’s governor, and a number of cities and small towns along the way. Their goal: disrupt Confederate supply lines and draw attention from General Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi River right below Vicksburg.

The cavalry, under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson of Jacksonville, Illinois (and a music teacher in civilian life), were wildly successful. Grierson’s Raid, as it became known, was celebrated in the North and even grudgingly admired in the South. It had pulled off what few thought possible.

One might think that such an event would have been the subject of numerous books. For whatever reasons, possibly including a bias toward the eastern battle front in the Civil War, few book-length accounts are to be found. Dee Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published Grierson’s Raid in 1954. It was not well received by critics, and its reputation has not improved with time. Brown often made fast and loose with his account, inventing conversations and scenes out of whole cloth. Even a non-historian like myself can read it today and see where Brown fudged, or invented, his facts.

In 1956, a writer named Harold Sinclair published a novel about the raid, The Horse Soldiers, embellishing history even more. The novel because the basis for the 1959 movie of the same name, starring John Wayne and William Holden. The movie moved the story even farther away from the historical record.

In 2018, Timothy Smith, a professor at the University of Tennessee – Martin, published The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi. Proving that history books do not have to be dry and dull, Smith wrote a historically accurate account that tells the story in an engaging and fascinating way. Having read both the account by Brown and this account by Smith, the historian’s book is far superior and loses nothing in the telling.

The Real Horse Soldiers
Timothy Smith

Sixty-four-years after Dee Brown’s book, Smith had more sources to draw upon, but he used many of the same sources used by the popular writer. His account provides far more context than Brown’s, especially about Grierson’s background, the politics that was ongoing among the Union army leaders, and the importance of the raid to Grant’s ultimately successful attack on Vicksburg.

Reading about Grierson’s Raid is also personally intriguing. I had ancestors who died at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee in 1862, and other relatives who were living in the Brookhaven, Mississippi, area at the time of the raid. They experienced first-hand what I know only as history, and it expands my understand of my family’s life during the Civil War.

Smith has published numerous books about the Civil War, including several on the Battle of Shiloh, the war in Tennessee and Mississippi, and the siege of Vicksburg. He’s appeared on the History Channel and C-Span and spoken widely about the Civil War. A former park ranger for the National Park Service at Shiloh Battlefield, he is currently a professor of history and philosophy at the University of Tennessee – Martin. 

The Real Horse Soldiers is a fine book. Smith not only tells a thrilling story; he also tells a historically accurate story.

Related:

Grierson’s Raid and “The Horse Soldiers.”