Fighting for General Lee: Confederate Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade. By Sheridan R. Barringer. Illustrated, photos, maps, notes, bibliography, index, 304 pp., 2016, Savas Beatie, www.savasbeatie.com, $32.95.
Rufus Barringer had a distinguished career as a Confederate regimental and brigade commander. It is a record, however, relatively unknown to many, if not most, Civil War buffs.
It is not that his achievements had been forgotten, but rather obscured. A North Carolinian, Barringer served in the cavalry of the Army of Northern Virginia, a command dominated by Virginians. As far as history is concerned, he also had the misfortune of missing the cavalry engagement at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863.
An antebellum lawyer in his native state, Barringer was elected captain of Co. F, 1st North Carolina Cavalry. He proved to be a very capable officer, eventually rising to the colonelcy of the regiment.
He suffered a severe wound to his face at Brandy Station on June 9, 1863. He was promoted to brigadier general during the Overland Campaign and assigned to command of the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade.
During the Appomattox Campaign, Union scouts dressed in Confederate uniforms captured Barringer and his aides. He spent four months in prison at Fort Delaware, and returned to civilian life in August 1865.
Barringer was among the minority of former Confederate officers who joined the Republican Party. He advocated for voting rights for freedmen. He died in 1895.
Author Sheridan R. Barringer is a collateral descendant of the general. This book is a straightforward and favorable biography of the Confederate cavalryman.
The author has based his narrative on in-depth research in manuscript collections, contemporary newspapers and published memoirs and reminiscences. It is likely to remain for a long time as the standard work on Rufus Barringer.
Reviewer Jeffry D. Wert is a retired Pennsylvania high school teacher. He is the author of eight books on the Civil War, including his recent Cavalryman of the Lost Cause: A Biography of J.E.B. Stuart.
Fort Bascom: Soldiers, Comancheros, and Indians in the Canadian River Valley. By James Bailey Blackshear. Illustrated, photos, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 272 pp., 2016, Oklahoma, www.oupress.com, $29.95.
Many history books claim that during the Civil War the Western Plains were abandoned by the U.S. Army as troops fought in the East. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Indian wars continued on the Western frontier by regular U.S. and state regiments. While some frontier forts were abandoned, others were built. Among the latter was Fort Bascom on the Canadian River near Tucumcari, N.M.
In 1863 the 7th U.S. Infantry and the 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry built that fort. It was on the land bridge between the Canadian River and the Pecos
A Virginia officer in an Alabama regiment, commander the Army of Northern Virginia’s elite sharpshooters, Eugene Blackford’s correspondence spans nearly the entire war and allows a modern reader to see this turbulent era through the eyes of someone who lived it. His accounts of the sharpshooters; battles like Chancellorsville and Gettysburg; camp life; army leaders; and national and regimental politics are detailed and exceptional. Volume 1 of 3. Special 20% prepublication discount • 6x9 cloth, 235 pages, 10 Maps,
30 illustrations, footnotes, index, bib. – CFS Press, Asheville, NC River. It protected portions of New Mexico and Texas from raids by the Comanche and their allies.
Fort Bascom was an adobe post that was always in need of repairs and constantly short of drinkable water, fresh vegetables and feed for its animals. The fort’s story is partially told through the lives of the officers and men who served there.
The Comancheros acted as middlemen between the white settlers and the Indians. They were merchants who journeyed onto the Plains to trade goods for plunder the Indians had seized from other settlers.
This plunder generally consisted of livestock, but also included people and goods. In exchange, the Comancheros supplied weapons and other goods the Indians could not manufacture. Many contend that this trade was the foundation of New Mexico’s economic life during the first half of the 1800s.
This book is far from a dry history of Fort Bascom. James Blackshear places the fort in its social, political, historical, geographic and geological context.
Readers learn that the fort was located at the end of a slender and expensive supply line. It was garrisoned by soldiers who spent their time building or patrolling. During the patrols there were few encounters with hostile Indians.
Not understood by the War Department was that, although there were few engagements with hostiles, the daily patrolling by the soldiers broke up the normal pattern of Indian raiding and trading with the Comancheros. Fort Bascom thus kept peace in its area by serving as a deterrent force.
“A witness of a sort
that historians rarely encounter.” SHARPSHOOTER The Selected Letters and Papers of Maj. Eugene Blackford, C.S.A. Edited by Fred L. Ray
One aspect of the fort’s history that Blackshear fails to develop is purported Confederate efforts to mobilize the Comanche and their allies to launch attacks on settlements in New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas following the Sand Creek Massacre and Kit Carson’s Canadian River Expedition.
The Comanche and their allies viewed these two events as a coordinated effort by the U.S. Army to kill every Indian on the Western Plains.
In 1874, as a cost-cutting move, the army abandoned Fort Bascom over the locals’ objections. The War Department contended there was no longer a need for Fort Bascom and its troops could contain Indians elsewhere.
Unfortunately for Texas and New Mexico settlers, once Fort Bascom was closed the Comanche and other Plains Indians were again free to strike against isolated targets on the frontier.
Fort Bascom had been home to the 7th, 15th and 37th Infantry, 57th and 135th USCT, 1st New Mexico Cavalry, and 3rd and 8th Cavalry.
The 1st New Mexico Volunteer Cavalry was one of the last Civil War volunteer regiments to be mustered out. It was constantly in the field from May 1862 to September 1866.
This book is well worth reading since it sheds light on an important but forgotten theater of military operations of the Civil War period.
Reviewer Charles H. Bogart has a B.A. in history from Thomas More College and an MA in urban planning from Ohio State University. He is the historian for Frankfort, Kentucky’s Fort Boone Civil War Battle Site.
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If you marched north through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and across West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, you would eventually reach the Potomac River. Located on its northern shore is Washington County, Md., famous as the Battle of Antietam location.
The county is interesting not only because of the major battles fought there but also for its population, which was a blend of Northern and Southern sympathizers. You could say that the county was a microcosm of the nation as a whole.
In a photo album such as this, there is a temptation to focus on the largest, most famous battles. However, author Stephen R. Bockmiller chose to concentrate on the smaller, more intimate events and the people and families that intersected with them.
What emerges is a personal, more nuanced portrait of Washington County’s role in the war.
Bockmiller has mostly collected period portraits from local families. Some of them have never been published. Extended captions give the story behind each picture. This core of portrait photographs is supplemented with a host of drawings, paintings, documents and maps that amplify the basic stories.
If you browsed through the album, you would spot a photo of James Breathed, a debonair-looking man with a receding hairline and a full mustache and goatee. A physician
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from the town of Hancock, Breathed joined J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry in 1861. He rose to become a prominent commander of a horse artillery battalion. After the war, he returned to Hancock and resumed his medical practice.
Next, you might see a stern, darkhaired man with a full beard. This is Union Lt. Thomas Torrence of the 18th Pennsylvania Cavalry. While riding through Hagerstown in July 1864 his unit was surprised by Rebel troops involved in Jubal Early’s raid on Washington, D.C.
The detail surrendered, but Torrence tried to fight. Wounded twice, he fled and hid in a nearby house. Some Hagerstown residents were obviously pro-North; otherwise, they would not have taken the risk of hiding him.
After the war, Torrence, who became a traveling salesman, periodically paid courtesy calls to visit the family that had saved him during the war.
Among the more striking documents presented is an 1864 hand-written loyalty oath from a county resident. Bockmiller explains that in areas regularly transited or occupied by Union troops, residents were expected to sign an oath of loyalty to the United States.
Those who declined were monitored and sometimes forced into Southern exile. This is a somewhat dark side of Civil War history that is often overlooked.
No, you won’t find any of the popular wartime Antietam battlefield images here. Instead, you are treated to lesser-known images illustrating the battle’s impact on locals in later years.
An example is a 1920s photograph taken of the Burnside Bridge. Ford Motor Company was promoting its vehicles as a way for American families to sightsee. An advertising photo shows a Ford crossing the bridge.
This book, which would be of special interest to locals, is easy to skim. My one complaint is that the brief stories with the photos are so interesting that I frequently found myself longing to read more.
Reviewer Walt Albro is a magazine editor and writer based in Rockville, Md. His history articles have appeared in such publications as MHQ (Military History Quarterly), Military History and The Civil War Times.
Like so many Civil War biographers, Joseph Byrd started this to honor an ancestor — his great-great maternal uncle William E. Simmons. Simmons’s biography serves as the background for a very nice regimental history of the 16th Georgia and the 3rd Battalion Georgia Sharpshooters.
The catastrophe of the Civil War caught men and women, both North and South, in many ways unprepared and in a state of confusion. While military planners and the media dreamed of swift victories, the war instead dragged on for four bitter years.
Perhaps the least prepared for the war were the medical services of both sides. Union and Confederate governments were slow to respond to the crisis of hideous and voluminous casualties.
In her slim volume on the subject of South Carolina’s Confederate hospitals, Rebecca Barbour Calcutt
This book chronicles in detail all of the engagements in which the two units participated in the Eastern Theater of the war.
I particularly appreciated how the author uses a wide variety of primary sources – letters, diaries, after-action reports, newspaper accounts – to flesh out the front-line soldiers’ lives.
One instance occurred during the fighting around Chattanooga, Tenn., in September 1863. A Union officer, while on a mission to retrieve wounded between the lines, asked then Capt. Simmons what unit his men had encountered the evening before.
Simmons asked why he wanted to know that information. The officer replied, “We knew it want not any of [Braxton] Bragg’s regular troops from the accuracy and rapidity of their fire.”
During the ill-fated Nov. 28, 1863, assault on the icy walls of Fort Sanders at Knoxville, many Confederates died in the ditch at the base of the wall because they could not gain a foothold on the walls to scale the parapet.
But Capt. James L. Lemon managed to reach the parapet by cutting handholds and footholds in the sides of the wall with his sword. As he neared the top, he plunged the blade into the earthwork above his head and pulled himself up. About 12 of his men, using bayonets and Bowie knives, followed suit and scaled the wall.
demonstrates how the wide gaps in care for the wounded were handled by ordinary men and women carrying out extraordinary service.
Calcutt opens with a chapter on the well-known shoddy care received by the wounded. Amputations, sepsis and disease were the far greater threat to soldiers than bullets or bayonets.
Care varied from place to place. Most “hospitals” were run by volunteers in churches and even private homes. Competence and outcomes varied greatly.
Calcutt provides vignettes of each South Carolina Civil War hospital, focusing on those in Charleston. She includes separate chapters on those just outside Charleston and others throughout the rest of the state.
The heroes of the story are the least known — people like Louisa McCord of Columbia, S.C. This dynamic woman from the upper-class of Columbia was the daughter of former U.S. Speaker of the House
Richard A. LaPosta Civil War Books
Lt. Col. Solomon Z. Ruff (18th Georgia) joined in the assault by using the staff of the regimental colors to pull himself up. Only Captain Lemon and a few of his stalwarts got into the works, and they were captured.
After being captured in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, Major Simmons was imprisoned at the notorious Fort Delaware. Amid horrid conditions, he devised a way for him and his fellow officers to receive female visitors who were “relatives.”
Simmons had his comrades vouch that his first lady visitor was his cousin. After that, every woman to drop by announced that she came to see “Cousin William.” He sounds a bit like Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind.
Much more than a typical regimental history, Confederate Sharpshooter goes well beyond the standard recitation of battle after battle. It brings the men to life with all of their foibles.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is a pleasant addition to my personal library.
Reviewer John Michael Priest retired from teaching in 2011 after serving 30.5 years. He is a guide at Antietam. He has published four Civil War books and is an avid 54mm wargamer — French and Indian War through the U. S. Civil War.
Langdon Cheves. She worked tirelessly collecting donations, rolling bandages and turning her plantation into a food and supply depot.
She sat bedside with the sick and dying — giving comfort and companionship, reading to the men and writing their letters.
McCord is just one of many unheralded South Carolinians worthy of our respect. As Calcutt repeatedly shows, it was people making do with whatever they had at the local level to help their cause.
This book helps readers understand how Civil War medical care was given and how people and communities showed their humanity during that grueling struggle.
Reviewer David A. Galli is a private practice physician in St. Louis, Mo., and Instructor of Medicine at St. Louis University Medical School. He has a degree in history from St. Louis University and a long-time interest in the Civil War.