In our last column, we related how Douglas Southall Freeman’s “Confederate Book Shelf,” published in 1939, led Ralph G. Newman of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop to propose a Union counterpart. Newman talked about the project with Sherman biographer and fellow Chicagoan Lloyd Lewis, who was interested. But Lewis’ death in 1949 shelved… er, postponed it.
So Newman on his own compiled what he hoped would be “an acceptable list of books relating to the Northern participation in the war of the sixties.” It was published in the very first three issues (March, June and September 1955) of Civil War History, the quarterly academic journal being produced then by the State University of Iowa.
Newman’s listing is much longer than Freeman’s. Indeed, the compiler quickly acknowledged that he had included almost as many titles in just one category (“Personal Narratives, Diaries and Letters,” fifty) as had Dr. Freeman in his entire compilation (fifty-eight).
The complete “Union Book Shelf” includes more than 175 volumes. Newman broke most of them into a few categories (e.g., “Reference Works,” “Notable Biographies”), but almost a third, published in September 1955, were lumped together: everything from war causes to naval topics to women’s roles to newspaper reporters. The eclecticism itself is stimulating.
Like Freeman, Newman offered no evaluative comment on his entries, allowing them to stand on their own. Exception is his comment on books about Ulysses S. Grant. “No Union list of personal narratives could possibly begin without the story of the victorious general,” Newman wrote. Indeed, he claimed that Grant’s two-volume Personal Memoirs (1885) “belong in anylist of 100 great American books.”
Newman considered his book shelf as preliminary, a work-inprogress. “The reader is reminded,” he wrote in June 1955, “that these listings are by no means final or definitive.” He encouraged comments and recommendations from Civil War History readers. In subsequent issues of the journal, however, one does not see a mailbag of responses leading to an updating or lengthening of “The Union Book Shelf.” Sort of as an addendum, though, Newman in December 1955 published a listing of his favorites in the category of “Civil War Fiction” (yes, Gone With the Wind is among his six “best,” as is The Red Badge of Courage). Once more, he asked Civil War History readers to send him their lists of six best novels of the war. But again, he got no responses worthy of publishing, at least as I see in the first several years of the journal. Its issue of June 1957 carried Newman’s “Basic Lincolniana,” best books on the president, but after that, the Chicago bibliophile ceased his columns altogether.
So Newman’s “Union Book Shelf” stands as it was published in mid- 1955. A mere perusal will confirm how, more than a half-century later, the books he thought important before the Civil War Centennial in many cases still are. Example is Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac: Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952) and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953). Some entries remind us of how the Union won the Civil War in the first place, e.g., George E. Turner’s Victory Rode the Rails (1953).
At the same time, Newman’s listing from the 1950s attests to just how far the military history of the war has progressed. Earl Schenck Miers’ The Web of Victory: Grant at Vicksburg (1955) is the only title treating one of the most decisive campaigns of the Civil War. Nowadays, with the accomplished work of Michael Ballard, Terrence Winschel and others, no purposeful student would even think of going to Miers’ entertaining but dated volume.
A generation later, we might note, Michael Mullins and Rowena Reed compiled The Union Bookshelf: A Selected Civil War Bibliography (Wendell, N.C.: Broadfoot’s Bookmark, 1982). It lists nearly 250 books, including such expected classics as Sherman’s and Sheridan’s memoirs, but also magna opera like John J. Pullen’s The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War (1957), which the compilers rate as “the best unit history of the Civil War.”
Such glowing commendations, of course, risk being engulfed by the tides of time. For me, the fact that bibliophiles can still speak of Confederate and Union Book Shelves as separate entities reminds one of the old saw that the victors write the history.* Either way, the literature of winning and losing in our American Civil War will continue to fascinate us for a long time to come.
*I like the variant offered by the Irish folk proverb: “Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs.”
Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor. His new book, A Long and Bloody Task:
This is a masterpiece of ten years of research in order to better understand why these men seceded from the Union. With a Cause of attaining Virginia’s independence, the 60th Virginia Regiment was a consolidation of southern patriots which utilized the title of this book as their motto.
The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, has just been published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series. The companion volume, carrying the Atlanta Campaign to the city’s surrender on September 2, 1864, will be published early next year.
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Reviewed by Stephen Davis
Slaughter at the Chapel: The Battle of Ezra Church, 1864. By Gary Ecelbarger. Maps, illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 288 pp., 2016, University of Oklahoma Press, www.oupress.com, $26.95 cloth.
It’s not very often that two authors turn out books on the same subject within a year or so of one another. William J. Cooper’s Jefferson Davis, American appeared in 2000; Felicity Allen’s Jefferson Davis: Unconquerable Heart preceded in 1999. Noah Andre Trudeau’s Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage was published in 2002; Stephen W. Sears’ Gettysburg arrived the following year.
Sometimes the writers are aware of each other’s work-in-progress, sometimes not. I can’t recall knowing that Richard McMurry was writing a summary of the Atlanta Campaign when I was writing mine. His Atlanta 1864 came out in 2000, my Atlanta Will Fall in 2001. I, therefore, did not cite Richard’s book in my notes. But in my bibliographic essay, which I wrote just before we went to press, I acknowledged it, adding that Atlanta 1864 “offers benefits that my own slight book will not afford.” It helped that Richard and I share many of the same views and interpretations about the Atlanta Campaign.
You can see the quandary. Another writer has just beaten you to the punch, publishing his book before yours. What do you do?
Earl J. Hess’ The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta (Chapel Hill, 2015) was published last year. Gary Ecelbarger, Slaughter at the Chapel: The Battle of Ezra Church, 1864 has just come out (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016).
My task as reviewer of Ecelbarger’s new book is to keep Professor Hess’ in mind. They’re both very good works, setting forth the basic story of Ezra Church in sound, authoritative narrative, well buttressed by documented research. They both explain the battle fought July 28, 1864, west of Atlanta in greater detail than any previous work. They make some of the same points, such as how the Confederate attacks achieved greater success at some places than the previous literature has noted. They also offer clarifying maps to dissect the fighting, although those in Ecelbarger’s study, drawn by professional cartographer Hal Jesperson, are better.
In mid-July 1864, Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman’s three armies, 100,000 officers and men, had pushed to within five miles of Atlanta, the Confederacy’s secondmost important city. The alarmed Southern government relieved Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, commander of the Army of Tennessee, and replaced him with Gen. John B. Hood. The Confederate forces, some 60,000, were secure in strong fortifications surrounding the city. Sherman would not attack them there, but instead set out to cut the railroads bringing supplies into Atlanta.
After wrecking the rail line leading east to Augusta, Sherman aimed for the last one, the Macon & Western running south. On July 27, Maj. Gen. Oliver O. Howard’s Army of the Tennessee started marching toward it, west of the city.
Hood determined to block the Yankee advance by sending two of his three infantry corps on the attack. But it would not be a frontal one. On the morning of July 28, Lt. Gen. Stephen D. Lee (just arrived from Mississippi) was ordered to march his troops out west of Atlanta on the Lick Skillet Road and take a defensive position at a key crossroads near Ezra Church, toward which the enemy was heading. Lee was to hold the enemy in check on the 28th while Lt. Gen. A. Peter Stewart guided his corps behind and beyond Lee, then on the next day launched a flank attack against the Federal right (westmost) flank.
Lee was assigned the task of moving out to secure the junction on the morning of July 28. He was to merely hold Sherman at bay, not attack him that day. Stewart, meanwhile, would move two of his divisions (Walthall’s and Maj. Gen. William W. Loring’s) out along the Lick Skillet Road and set up to attack the Union flank and rear on the morning of July 29 (Hess, pp. 40-41).
Hood revealed to Lee that on July 28, he would order him to march his new corps out onto Lick Skillet Road…. While Lee’s corps…confronted the vanguard of Sherman’s attempt…General Stewart would march out….on July 29,…pass behind Lee’s two divisions, and gain Sherman’s right flank. Once this was attained, Stewart would…attack him in flank (Ecelbarger, pp. 51-52).
Hood’s plan fell apart on July 28 when Howard’s troops reached Ezra Church first, dug in on high ground, and prepared to be attacked. “At 11:30 A.M. the entire defensive line of the Army of the Tennessee [was] formed,” Ecelbarger affirms. When Lee brought his troops up, he ordered his infantry forward as they arrived, all without notifying Hood at his headquarters, then three miles away. The resulting piecemeal, uncoordinated Confederate frontal attacks, into which Stewart’s men were unfortunately sucked that afternoon, were predictably repulsed with heavy loss to the Southerners. The six-hour battle of Ezra Church ended as a relatively easy defensive Union victory. Casualties were predictably lopsided: about 3,000 killed, wounded and missing for the Confederates; some 600 for the Federals.
But here is where the disagreement begins.
“Historians have uniformly criticized Lee for starting the battle in the first place and for conducting it in piecemeal fashion,” concludes Hess. And historians (including McMurry and myself) have indeed so criticized Lee, with Hess joining in. “Lee wrecked Hood’s plan to set up a flank attack on Howard,” Hess affirms, criticizing his “unwise decision to launch major attacks on Howard” (172-73, 202).
In his new history, however, Ecelbarger diverges from this consensus on Hood’s battle plan and Lee’s execution of it. “Hood himself revealed almost nothing about his plan in his after-action report and in his memoirs,” the author concedes. His only documentation is a line in General Lee’s after-action report: “On the 28th, about 11 a.m., I received orders to move out on the Lick Skillet road and check the enemy, who was then moving to our left” (OR, Vol. 38, Part 3, p. 762). Hood adds nothing more in his report, stating only that Lee “was ordered to hold the enemy in check on a line nearly parallel with the Lick Skillet road, running through to Ezra Church” (OR, Vol. 38, Part 3, p. 632).
This is not much to go on, but from it Ecelbarger does the very worst thing he could: he speculates —imagines is not too strong a word —concerning Hood’s plan.
The ambiguous directive “check the enemy” needed a specific endpoint named to accomplish that check….Hood did provide a specific endpoint to define what “check the enemy” meant; he most likely reviewed those instructions by showing Lee a map of the region three miles from where they stood and defined the exact place where he wanted him to deploy (Ecelbarger, p. 56).
Gary Ecelbarger is an accomplished historian, so why he would presume to know that Hood specified where he wanted Lee to lead his infantry is anybody’s guess. Guesswork is also the basis of the author’s statement that Hood “most likely” showed Lee “a map of the region.” Students of the Atlanta Campaign know that, unlike Sherman’s officers who had slews of maps at their disposal, the Confederate forces had precious few; no wartime Southern map of the area west of Atlanta has ever come to light.
Then in an equally soaring flight, the author presumes to know just where that “specific endpoint” was: “the high ground aligned ‘nearly parallel with the Lick Skillet road’ but nearly half a mile above it” (p. 56). Again, there is no documentation to support this—neither map nor proof that C.S. troops had earlier reconned the area—but the point is important for Ecelbarger. Stressing that Hood wanted Lee to seize the heights north of the road—which by late morning of the 28th were occupied by Union infantry—allows the author to explain Lee’s decision to attack them there. “If Lee vacillated or took even an additional half hour or so to reconnoiter the area,” he argues, “those heights would more likely be lost to the Confederates—so would Lee’s mission and Hood’s plan” (p. 72). So Lee ordered his infantry forward in their frontal assault, and repulse.
Ecelbarger knows exactly what he is doing here. He fudges when he claims that Hood’s report “clearly stated…the specific point that Hood wanted Lee to occupy,” but, as we have seen, it clearly does not. Then, when he adds that this revelation “somehow has been overlooked for 150 years since Hood mentioned it” (p. 241 n. 5), he invites us all to infer that there’s good reason for this: Hood did, in fact, no such thing.
The author, unfortunately, compounds his new misinterpretations by boasting of them in his Introduction. “This study,” he writes, “offers conclusively a single reason for this battle’s one-sided failure by arguing for a completely different scapegoat for that loss” (p. 6). By this, he means that he exonerates S. D. Lee, the story’s customary fall guy—who, by Ecelbarger’s reasoning, was only following orders—and blames J. B. Hood, the commanding general, as “the primary culprit.” “Hood committed an unrecoverable error,” the author asserts, by waiting too long on the morning of July 28 to order Lee’s troops out to Ezra Church. This blunder, he charges, “was arguably his biggest mistake of the campaign” (pp. 201-202).
Ecelbarger has a penchant for hyperbole; recall his observation in his previous book that July 22, 1864, the date of the battle of Atlanta, was “The Day Dixie Died.” Calling Hood’s two-hour delay in ordering Lee out his “biggest mistake of the campaign” is, as he himself admits, at least arguable.
Which brings us back to last year’s study of Ezra Church. Because of Ecelbarger’s strained interpretations, next time I reach for a book on the battle of July 28, it’ll probably be Earl Hess’.
