Civil War historians have estimated that over 70,000 books have been published pertaining to the “the late unpleasantness” since the rebellion commenced 155 years ago. That output equates to at least 1.25 books per day since the war began, making the Civil War one of the most written-about topics in American history, second only to religion.
Given that staggering volume, the casual reader might easily conclude that every possible topic relating to the conflict has been written about endlessly. Yet with Service with the Signal Corps, editor J. Gregory Acken shows that is not the case, for this work represents the first-ever, book-length published memoir from a soldier who served in the Union army’s elite Signal Corps.
The Corps was the brainchild of Albert J. Myer, an antebellum army surgeon. Myer had a deep interest in sign language. When he entered the army in 1854 he used those principles to create a flag-based system to transmit information.
Though his ideas were initially rebuffed by the War Department in the mid-1850s, he was given approval to create his corps shortly after the Civil War started. An added impetus was the realization that a former subordinate had used Myer’s system at the battle of First Manassas to help the South achieve victory.
The Signal Corps’s fundamental wartime missions were to observe and communicate intelligence regarding enemy movements and positions, as well as to relay information among its own various army commands. Its members had to possess above-average intelligence.
Despite early doubts regarding the corps’s value, by the end of the war the Union high command held the signalmen’s work in high regard.
An important part of the book is the editor’s detailed commentary with illustrations as to the logic behind the signals and their creation.
This memoir was written by Capt. Louis R. Fortescue, who was a 23-year-old first lieutenant with the 29th Pennsylvania Infantry when he accepted an offer to join the nascent Signal Corps in mid-1861.
His wartime journey took him from the Upper Potomac to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in spring 1862 and then into eastern Virginia. Fortescue saw signal duty at the battles of Cedar Mountain, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, all of which are described in detail.
This published version of his manuscript ends 10 days after the July 1863 battle at Gettysburg — following Fortescue’s capture by Confederates. He spent the war’s remaining 20 months in five separate Rebel prisons before being exchanged on March 1, 1865.
Though Fortescue’s manuscript also covers his time as a prisoner of war, those months are not included in this volume.
Fortescue’s comments on the war years’ key issues are peppered throughout the text. They reveal him to be a reasonably well-educated, staunch pro-Lincoln Republican who favored a hard war against the Confederacy. Consequently, he had little use for Democratic Gen. George McClellan, whom Fortescue referred to as “the idol of Rebel sympathizers in the North.”
Though anti-slavery, Fortescue used common racist slurs to describe blacks. His real vitriol, however, was reserved for Southerners and their region’s purported hospitality, which he claimed was “a myth and deception” repeated so often that “its reiteration creates a nausea.”
Fortescue penned his memoir about 30 years after the war. Once finished, he had it typed and bound in five volumes. The typescript memoir was donated to Philadelphia’s Civil War Museum and Library in 1923, eight years after Fortescue’s death in 1915.
The author based his memoir on his wartime diary and notes, rendering it of greater value to scholars than one written solely from memory. Six helpful maps and 20 photographs and sketches supplement this important new memoir.
Civil War veterans’ recollections abound. However, its heretofore unseen and fresh perspective on the great conflict makes this book a significant addition to any Civil War bookshelf.
Demonization Of Yankees Popular In South
You can’t have war without hatred of the enemy, as George C. Rable reminds us in Damn Yankees! Drawing on sociological and psychological aphorisms — e.g., “emotional distance between our side and theirs is essential” — Rable surveys the breadth of Confederate literature to show how Southerners expressed their hatred of, well, damn Yankees.
“The words deployed against the other side help cement or establish national identity,” Rable begins. He draws on newspapers, speeches, letters and diaries for Confederates’ denunciations of the enemy.
The longer the war dragged on, the more poisonous and pervasive the anti-Yankee invective became. Soldiers and citizens, politicians, preachers and editors all spoke the same language, using surprisingly similar themes and terms.
The author casts a wide net, quoting 200 soldiers, 140 civilians, a score of political leaders and two dozen ministers and essayists. I am impressed by his exhaustive use of 64 Confederate newspapers, especially the Richmond Dispatch. He also quotes from the Southern News and Illustrated Southern Literary Messenger.
“Taken altogether,” Rable concludes, “these disparate sources reveal much about how Yankees were defined, defamed, and decried.”
This process of describing “a distinctive Yankee character,” of course, began well before the war. Actual armed conflict only highlighted the enemy’s “cowardice, vulgarity, or general depravity.”
Civil War Artifacts
Nick Periut Proprietor
They were a “mercenary, lowclass” bunch. They killed and raped, robbed and burned, according to contemporary writers.
“How poorly does the thieving, burning, murdering Yankee compare with Southerner,”
“This race of sharpers…have less fight in them than any white race now on the globe,” declared the Charleston Mercury in August 1861 (inaccurately, as Southerners would learn).
Three years of war only intensified these feelings. “When I come in sight of their blue yankee uniforms,” wrote Lt. Col. Barrington King in July 1864, “I only feel an intense desire to kill.”
Even Confederates refused to acknowledge anything positive about the Yankees. “These worthless fellows whom we have so often whipped, whose cowardly backs we have so often seen,” wrote North Carolina captain Henry Chambers, had only conquered brave Southrons “by sheer force of numbers.”
In 1832 Joseph Smith, Jr., the Mormons’ first prophet, foretold of a great war beginning in South Carolina. Three decades later, when Smith’s prophecy failed with the end of the American Civil War, the Mormons’ perspective on the conflict required palliative revision. In The Civil War Years in Utah, the first full account of the events that occurred in Utah Territory during the Civil War, John Gary Maxwell contradicts the patriotic mythology of Mormon leaders’ version of this dark chapter in Utah history.
The ostensible goal of the controversial Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid on Richmond was to free some 13,000 Union prisoners of war held in the Confederate capital. But, orders found on Colonel Ulric Dahlgren dead body point instead to a plot to capture or kill Confederate president Jefferson Davis and set Richmond ablaze. What really happened, and how and why, are debated to this day. Kill Jeff Davis offers a fresh look at the failed raid and mines newly discovered documents and little-known sources to provide definitive answers.
Battlefield archaeologist Daniel M. Sivilich provides readers with the tools and techniques to unlock the stories of small shot in this book, the first definitive guide to identifying musket balls, from the oldest formed to those fired in the early nineteenth century.
Rable’s research is demonstrated by his voluminous endnotes, which he offers in lieu of a bibliography. I count over 350 notes in nearly 50 pages, about a quarter of the book.
Some may say that Rable’s work, a product of the Walter Lynwood Fleming lectures he delivered at LSU, is primarily cumulative since he assembles so many written references to the hated enemy. I don’t think so.
A hundred fifty years afterward, we in the Civil War remembrance community continue to discuss why Americans went to war against one another.
Recalling how wartime Southerners demonized “the perfidious, malignant, & vile Yankee race” — Edmund Ruffin’s words before he blew his brains out after Lee’s surrender — serve us well as we continue to scratch our heads. Stephen Davis’ What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Wrecking of Atlanta was published in 2012. He’s working on a study of John Bell Hood for Savas Beatie.