An Auto Tour and a Good Overview of the Battle
Reviewed by Jay Jorgensen
A Field Guide to Gettysburg was originally published in 2013. It garnered the Bachelder-Coddington Award as the best book on Gettysburg published that year. The University of North Carolina Press has published a Second Edition to the book this year. This updated edition makes the book even more valuable than its earlier version.
The authors are Caron Reardon and Tom Vossler, and they are eminently qualified to write this guide. Reardon is a distinguished professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, and she has written several books on the Civil War. Vossler is a retired colonel in the U.S. Army and serves as a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg.
The stated purpose of the book is to allow readers to better appreciate this pivotal engagement “from the perspectives of both the senior leaders and the privates in the ranks.” The authors succeed in doing so by applying a unique analysis to the battle. A Field Guide to Gettysburg is separated into 36 stops on the battlefield, divided among the three days of battle action. A thirty-seventh stop explores the Soldiers’ National Cemetery.
Each stop starts with a concise orientation of the area. This information is helpful for novices as well as seasoned Gettysburg aficionados alike in setting the stage for what is to come. The authors provide a detailed analysis for each of the stops by answering six questions at each site: what happened; who fought here; who commanded here; who fell here; who lived here; and what did they say about it later? These questions enable readers to obtain a clear understanding of the action that occurred at the stop, as well as insight into who the participants were and what they had to say about it.
The two extra stops in this edition add important information for visitors to the battlefield. Stop 4 describes the fight on the Harmon farm. The site is located west of Willoughby Run and housed the Gettysburg Country Club golf course until a few years ago. Off the beaten path, this area saw fighting on the first day of the battle. It is also where Confederate Brigadier General James Archer was captured, the first of Robert E. Lee’s generals to be captured in the war. Stop 30 is the other addition to this edition. It is located at Powers Hill, another site that is rarely visited. The National Park has removed many trees from the hill, allowing better access and visibility, while returning the land to its appearance during the time of the battle. The authors have included this as a new stop to allow visitors a better understanding of how this terrain served as a Federal artillery position. The addition of both stops is an excellent reason for people to pick up this book, even if they already have the first edition.
The book does not have a bibliography, which is perhaps its only minor drawback. However, the footnotes to each stop supply readers with additional sources of research material for further study. The authors have also provided photographs for each stop that aid in establishing the reader’s orientation at the particular site. This is a helpful feature that authors of other guidebooks would be wise in following.
There are a number of guidebooks for the Battle of Gettysburg. Among the better of them are The Complete Gettysburg Guide by J. David Petruzzi and Steven Stanley, Gettysburg: A Battlefield Guide by Mark Grimsley and Brooks D. Simpson, and Guide to the Battle of Gettysburg by Jay Luvaas and Harold Nelson. Reardon and Vossler’s A Field Guide to Gettysburg deserves a place alongside those works. It is written as an auto tour, with driving directions provided from stop to stop. Yet the book is equally valuable as an important resource for readers to obtain an overview of the battle in general, and specific areas of interest in particular.
Jay Jorgensen is a judge in New Jersey. He has written several books on Gettysburg. He is the editor and co-author of the recently released Top Ten at Gettysburg
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There are those damn green flags again!
Reviewed by Gould B. Hagler, Jr.
The essays on the Civil War cover Irish contributions to both North and South. The most interesting are the minibiographies of prominent Irish American military and civilian leaders. Of particular note is the entry on the Bishop of Charleston, Patrick Lynch. David Heisser gives an informative account of the bishop’s career, with an emphasis on his mission to Europe on behalf of the Confederate government and his pamphlet defending slavery. Mauriel Joslyn provides an excellent narrative on Patrick Cleburne. A chapter by Ann Caraway Ivins tells of Texas Irishman Dick Dowling and gives a solid account of the battle of Sabine Pass.
Four entries examine the Irish immigrant communities in major Northern cities, communities that produced tens of thousands of recruits for the Union army. A recurring theme in these essays is the way military service provided a path for immigrants to prove their American bona fides and helped (to an imperfect degree) overcome nativist anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice. Another theme is the role which Irish opposition to English rule affected their attitude toward the war.
These are well written and carefully documented; however, in places they seem at once both too much and too little. They read like abridgements of longer articles, proceeding from one topic to the next without providing sufficient details on the one left behind. Moreover, they are sometimes repetitious, as the story of the Irish in New York is not dissimilar from the story of the Irish in Boston, Philadelphia or Chicago.
There is also a chapter on Irish women, and considerable discussion of Irish attitudes towards blacks and the institution of slavery.
One of the essays on the Mexican conflict contains an account of the San Patricios, Catholic Irishmen who deserted the U.S. Army and joined their co-religionists on the other side. These men fought with great determination to the very end, knowing their fate should they surrender. Desertion is a major offense; going to the other side during a war magnifies the crime. Those who were captured suffered brutal treatment and were executed by the army they deserted. However, villains to one side can be heroes to the other. To this day the San Patricios are honored in Mexico.
Fighting Irish covers one of the numberless aspects of the Civil War worthy of study, the contributions a major immigrant population made to strengthen the armies of both the United States and the Confederacy. A.P. Hill noted the bravery of the Irish who charged repeatedly at Fredericksburg: “There are those damn green flags again!” The Federals facing the division commanded by Ireland’s Patrick Cleburne surely felt the same way.
Gould Hagler is the author Confederate of Georgia’s Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation (Mercer University Press, 2014). His new book on Alabama’s Confederate monuments is to be published by Indiana University Press.
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Valuable Compilation of Confederate Documents
Reviewed by Lawrence K. Peterson
Author Wallace Hettle has combined 66 individual documents or groups of documents pertaining directly to the Civil War, specifically from the Confederate viewpoint. Many aspects of the war are treated by the various papers. These include Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne’s proposal for Confederate emancipation of slaves (even listing its signers), the Bread Riot in Richmond (four combined documents), and President Jefferson Davis’ address to the city of Columbia, S.C., during the winter of 1863-1864. Hettle includes many accounts by former slaves, often documenting their relationships with their masters, attempts both successful and not at escaping from slavery, and descriptions of life as a slave.
Hettle divides the book into “chapters” for each year of the war. He begins the year 1861 with Mississippi’s “A Declaration of the Immediate causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of Mississippi from the Federal Union” and the Ordinance of Secession, Jan. 26, 1861. Also included is a statement from Edmund Ruffin’s diary concerning his firing the first shot at Fort Sumter on April 12th. He continues with documents spread across each of the four remaining years of the Civil War.
This places in the reader’s hand a quick and valuable source of information concerning the Confederacy. Hettle carefully cites the source of each document, providing an author or researcher with its origin.
While there are other such books available, Hettle has found many lesser known documents focusing on the human side of the war, and they make in many cases fascinating reading. For the casual reader or serious researcher, this is a provocative and very useful book. Hettle has done us all an excellent service.
Lawrence K. Peterson is the author of Confederate Combat Commander: The Remarkable Life of Brigadier General Alfred Jefferson Vaughan Jr. (University of Tennessee Press, 2013). He is president of the Rocky Mountain Civil War Round Table. His next book, Decisions at Chattanooga: The Nineteen Decisions that Defined the Battle, is scheduled to be published in 2018 by the University of Tennessee Press as part of the Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series.
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Essential to Those Interested in Civil War Small Arms Use
Reviewed by Joseph G. Bilby
By way of full disclosure, I was a member of the Company of Military Historians Review Board that initially classified Gary Yee’s book Sharpshooters 1750-1900 as a “standard reference” for the subject in American military history. I have neither seen nor heard anything since to dissuade me from that decision. This is indeed a must-have book for any student of American military history – as well as any serious student of the Civil War. Gary Yee, a long-time museum curator, firearms student, writer and Civil War Round Table officer, has acquired considerable expertise on the subject.
Yee’s work covers the evolution, training and deployment of “sharpshooters” for a century and a half, which, by necessity, covers the Civil War, the largest American conflict during that period. A significant segment of the book— more than half of it—is dedicated to the role of sharpshooters during that war. Yee’s research on the origins of the term sharpshooters, and the tactical employment of skilled riflemen in combat in previous conflicts, sets the stage for explaining their role in the Civil War.
Yee provides an understanding of the role of British and French work in small arms development, training and employment in the decades before the war. Sharpshooter training was unfortunately not implemented for most Civil War soldiers. The popular idea was that some rural squirrel hunter who could drop a rodent from a tree limb twenty-five yards away with a small caliber patched round ball rifle is a natural born sharpshooter. Designated sharpshooters in both Union and Confederate armies took seriously the European research, which had been reproduced in American manuals, and when possible included it in their training. Familiarity with those facts is essential to any tactical assessment of the conflict. Likewise, the significant postwar National Guard and regular army interest in long-range small arms accuracy is directly related to the army’s dissatisfaction with the lack of common soldier training and with poor marksmanship during the Civil War.
Yee reports in detail on the role of sharpshooters in minor skirmishes as well as major battles in both the eastern and western theaters of the war. His book is supplemented by some interesting illustrations and features, exhaustive footnotes and an extensive bibliography. Sharpshooters 1750-1900 not only covers well-known and publicized units like Colonel Berdan’s regiments, but other groups of designated sharpshooters down to company and individual levels. A trained gunsmith and black powder shooter, Yee also provides technical deals on sharpshooter rifles and ammunition.
At the risk of redundancy, I would like to close by re-stating that this book is essential to those interested in small arms use in the Civil War.
Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social, Political 1865-1872. By C. Mildred Thompson. Edited and with Introduction by William C. Bragg. Notes, bibliography, index, 536 pp., 2017, Mercer University Press, www.mupress.org. $30 paperback.
Reviewed by Stephen Davis
Georgia’s experience in Reconstruction after the war was like that of the other ten ex-Confederate states—except when it was not. The first professional historian to explain this was C. Mildred Thompson, in her Reconstruction in Georgia: Economic, Social, Political 1865-1872. This remarkable work, published in 1915, was the author’s doctoral dissertation, which she wrote at Columbia University under the distinguished scholar William A. Dunning. Long a staple of Reconstruction literature, Thompson’s history has just been reprinted by Mercer University Press.
The real gifts in this edition come from William C. Bragg, professor emeritus at Georgia College. Dr. Bragg’s Introduction places Thompson’s work in historiographical context. Most importantly he has compiled a meticulous index, which the edition of 1915 sorely lacked.
Bragg’s essay, “C. Mildred Thompson: A Liberal among the Dunningites,” offers her biography, and from it we learn that Mildred Thompson was an uncommon woman. “An Atlanta public school girl,” as Dr. Bragg writes, she went to college (Vassar, no less), excelled in history and earned admission to Columbia for a master’s degree in 1906, before the university had become fully co-educational. There she caught the eye of Professor Dunning, one of the nation’s leading historians of Civil War Reconstruction. After earning her master’s, she stayed on at Columbia to earn her doctorate in American history.
Mind you, this was in 1907 and Miss Thompson, a twenty-five year-old single woman from Atlanta, had moved to New York City to get her Ph.D. Up to 1915, when she won it, nine out of ten doctoral degrees in history granted by American universities had gone to men.
Dunning was one of the most influential scholars in American history. His own account of Reconstruction dates from 1907, but during his years at Columbia he guided his students to produce others. Included among there are Walter Lynwood Fleming’s history of Reconstruction in Alabama (1905), and Charles W. Ramsdell’s of Texas (1910). Thompson’s dissertation, finished in 1915, covers Georgia. Columbia University Press published it that same year.
Reconstruction in Georgia reminds us that the institution of slavery was more than an economic model in the antebellum South. It was a social order which established relations between whites and African-American for over two hundred years. Little wonder, then, that when emancipation suddenly freed millions of Southern slaves, the first years of Reconstruction were marked by vast uncertainty between the races. In Georgia, whites and a half-million blacks tried to figure out how society and the economy would continue to function.
President Andrew Johnson’s Reconstruction policies helped. In Georgia a Unionist, James Johnson, was appointed governor. In Oct. 1865 a constitutional convention repealed the state’s secession ordinance and abolished slavery. The next month voters (whites who had taken the loyalty oath) elected a governor, state legislators and U.S. congressmen. When the General Assembly approved the Thirteenth Amendment, Johnson pronounced Georgia as readmitted to the Union. All of these events are summarized in “A Political Chronology,” another of Bragg’s helpful contributions.
Meanwhile, the state legislature enacted laws codifying freedpeople’s rights (and lack of them, like the right to vote). The Freedmen’s Bureau helped oversee a “system” whereby blacks returned to the fields under contract labor.
Then came Congressional Reconstruction, the policy by which Republicans, led by “Radicals,” made rights for the newly freed slaves key to restoring the ex-Rebel states. With moderates’ help, in April 1866 they passed a Civil Rights Act to protect freedmen and stake out a route to the citizenship. Fearing the Supreme Court would invalidate it, Republicans passed and sent to the states a Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship rights to black Americans. Ratification by Southern states became another requirement for readmission to the Union. Georgia joined every former Confederate state except Tennessee in rejecting it.
An angry Congress enacted military rule for the South in March 1867; Gen. John Pope took command in Georgia. When voters were registered, 95,000 whites and 93,000 blacks were recorded. State elections followed, in which a Republican beat Gen. John B. Gordon (Democrat) for governor, and Republicans won numerous seats in the legislature. Carpetbaggers (Northern-born politicians) and scalawags (pro-Republican native whites) swarmed the corridors of government. She does not exaggerate, but fairly describes the corruption and inefficiency of the new regime (example is the waste arising from the state’s leasing of the Western & Atlantic Railroad).
Thompson recounts all of these developments, frequently citing and quoting sources now obscure. She tells of the sensational murder of Radical George Ashburn, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the state, and the expulsion of black legislators after conservatives won control of the legislature. When the General Assembly rejected the Fifteenth Amendment (guaranteeing black men the vote), Congress rescinded Georgia’s readmission, and granted it only when the state ratified the amendment in 1870. Thus was Georgia “reconstructed.”
I asked Dr. Bragg for a reflection on Thompson’s achievement. In an email he thoughtfully reminded me that she crowned her academic career by becoming president of Vassar. “She excelled outside her native region in a profession formerly forbidden to women,” he observed, adding that all the while “she kept her soft Southern accent.”
Mildred Thompson was a product of her times. When she wrote that Congressional Reconstruction “attempted to subvert the social order of the Southern states by making the former masters impotent and putting the instrument of power into the hands of former slaves, and keeping it there by military force,” she was only saying what most white Southerners would have said about the period after the war. While she was skeptical of ex-slaves’ ability to implement the full bounds of their new freedom, she avoided the racial intolerance which marked many white Southerners at the time— hence Bragg’s epithet, “a liberal among the Dunningites.”
When she added that Congressional Reconstruction had created “a social problem that the South and the nation have not yet in half a century been able to solve,” she sounds even more a product of her times. In the 100 years since she wrote, the nation has indeed done much to address its problem of race relations. To the extent that it has not yet been perfectly able to do so—and just about all Americans today will agree that we haven’t— Mildred Thompson’s views of Reconstruction in Georgia deserve another look indeed. In this light, Bill Bragg’s and Mercer’s reprinting of her important book deserve our gratitude and appreciation.
The Political Partnership that Saved the Union
Reviewed by Steven R. Koppelman
The relationship between a President and Congress is always a key factor in the success of any given administration, indeed in the country’s success. That’s true not only today but most certainly during the tumultuous days of the Lincoln presidency. In yet another in the excellent Concise Lincoln Library series published by Southern Illinois University Press, with Lincoln and Congress, William C. Harris has given us a rich view not only of the relationship between the two, but, to a lesser degree, a lesson on the Constitution and a treatise on the political parties of the day.
The purpose of the SIU “Concise” Series is to give the reader an opportunity to quickly achieve basic knowledge of a Lincoln-related topic. Harris’ specific stated goal in writing the book was to “give the reader a better understanding of the difficulties that Lincoln and Congress faced in saving the Union, abolishing slavery, and providing for a
Capstone for what will become the monumental study of Antietam
The Maryland Campaign of September 1862: Vol. III: Shepherdstown Ford and the End of the Campaign. By Ezra A. Carman. Edited and annotated by Thomas G. Clemens. Maps, footnotes, appendices, bibliography, index, 325 pp., 2017. Savas Beatie. www.savasbeatie.com. $32.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by John Michael Priest
Preceded by Volume I: South brighter future for America.” On both of these objectives, mission accomplished!
Lincoln believed in legislative supremacy, stating, “As a rule, I think it better that congress should originate, as well as perfect its measures, without external bias.” Harris ably details the political partnership between the president and legislative branch, from the beginning of Lincoln’s calling for the Thirty-Seventh Congress to convene early, on July 4, 1861 (though not immediately at the outbreak of the Civil War), and right through to the Wade-Davis Bill and Lincoln’s thoughts on Reconstruction.
Regarding the convening, Harris points out that contrary to what has often been assumed (Lincoln wanted time to act freely without congressional intervention), the president actually wanted to allow time for three key activities: elections to Congress that still needed to take place in several states, his writing of a formal report on his actions to-date, and physical arrival of Congressmen in Washington.
A key component of the book treats the activities of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, created to “guide the Lincoln administration on war policy, investigate military failures, and seek the removal of incompetent and failed military commanders.” Harris taps into and makes great use of many primary and secondary sources, including the excellent The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice (1969) by the late Hans Trefousse.
The Radical Republicans believed that William Seward had too much influence on Lincoln (and did not influence him in the way they wanted). Harris details the story of Salmon Chase’s involvement with the Radicals to have Seward removed from the Cabinet, and Lincoln’s masterful handling of the situation—he received
Mountain (2010) and Volume II: Antietam (2014), Shepherdstown Ford and the End of the Campaign is the capstone for what will become the monumental study of the bloodiest single day in American history, and the campaign which expanded the focus of the Civil War from a struggle to preserve the Union to a crusade to abolish slavery. Volume III, reflecting Ezra Carman’s lifelong passion to preserve for perpetuity the history of the campaign, is both Seward’s and Chase’s resignations. Harris argues convincingly that historians, in paying too much attention to Lincoln’s political nimbleness, have not given enough attention or credit to the legitimate worries of these Republicans and “their attempts to arrive at a reasonable accommodation with the President regarding their concerns.”
It was nice to see some of the lesser ‘mined’ members of Congress getting a good deal of attention throughout the book: Lyman Trumbull, William Pitt Fessenden, and Jacob Collamer (amongst others), and not just the expected Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Benjamin Wade, all of whom certainly do loom large, though. This provides a broader picture for the reader by bringing in some lesser known arguments and opinions.
One quibble, albeit a minor one perhaps, is that in a book (though necessarily concise) titled Lincoln and Congress, not once is Lincoln’s one term in Congress mentioned or referred to (he served from Dec. 1847 to March 1849). Perhaps his personal experience as a congressman influenced how he chose to deal with Congress as President? Was it any factor at all? Harris does not venture into this—that’s too bad.
As Lincoln famously wrote in his Dec. 1862 Message to Congress, “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” Harris has helped ensure that they not only are remembered, but that their motivations and rationales are understood a little better as well—perhaps that’s more important.
Steven R. Koppelman is President of The Lincoln Group of New York, a member of the Board of Advisors to The Lincoln Forum, and on the Board of Trustees to The New Jersey Historical Society.
not a stand-alone volume and is a companion to Carman’s two preceding books. Therefore, I decided to review this volume within the context of the entire trilogy.
Merchant turned warrior, Ezra Ayres Carman (1834-1909), in one capacity or another, served his country for over 40 years. He began the war as the Lt. Col. of the 7th N.J. until May 5, 1862 at Williamsburg, Va., when a bullet in the right wrist ricocheted up his right forearm and broke it. While recovering at home in New Jersey, the governor appointed him colonel of the newly recruited 13th N.J., which he commanded throughout the end of the war. Leaving the service as a brevet brig. gen., he went on to become chief clerk of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, historian for the Antietam National Battlefield Board and Superintendant of the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park. Quite justifiably, his work on preserving the legacy of Antietam and the Maryland Campaign became his postwar obsession.
While he had obviously seen action before Sept. 17, 1862, Antietam is where “his” regiment received its first fire. The memories of that day followed him the rest of his life. When reading his account of the regiment, I could sense a personal sadness at the loss of his men along the Hagerstown Pike (Vol. 2, 230- 233) and later in the West Woods (Vol. 2, 308-310). The battle cost his “green” regiment 101 officers and men. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the officer standing atop the New Jersey monument at Antietam is Capt. Hugh C. Irish, Co. K, 13th N.J., who was shot dead on the west side of the pike.
This three-volume set on the Antietam Campaign is his legacy – an outstanding tribute to the men of both armies. Volume I covers the campaign from its commencement through the three battles on South Mountain on Sept. 14, 1862. It begins with a detailed analysis of the rise of General George B. McClellan to command of the Army of the Potomac, which I found particularly fascinating. Volume II is the most in-depth tactical level study of the Battle of Antietam I have yet read. Volume III concludes the series with a description of the battle of Shepherdstown, with Carman’s assessment of Abraham Lincoln’s, Henry Halleck’s and George McClellan’s handling of the campaign.
At the same time, Volume III is the final chapter, but not the final word on these pivotal events U.S. history. It is the fathomless well from which future, more specialized studies will possibly spring.
The three appendices in Volume 3 alone are worth the price of the book. The first two appendices are errata sheets for the corresponding volumes and the third is an annotated biographical dictionary of every individual Carman mentioned in his work –
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a testament to Carman’s massive amount of research.
Just as importantly, The Maryland Campaign is a tribute to the determination and scholastic tenacity of Thomas G. Clemens, Ph.D. His footnotes and annotations are invaluable. He meticulously documented as many of Carman’s sources as he could find. If Dr. Clemens were a forensic detective, I would not want him on my trail. I have never seen, to date, such a thoroughly documented historical work. Fellow researchers can use his commentaries and citations as springboards for further exploration of one of the most intricate battles in U.S. history. Not to embarrass him, but as historian Ted Alexander called him, Clemens is “Mr. Antietam.”
The Maryland Campaign is the most thoroughly researched and edited trilogy I have had the privilege to review. Carman, as a veteran of the battle, wrote the most detailed analytical and tactical description of any battle I have yet read. Thomas G. Clemens, through his superb footnoting and editing has “raised the bar” by which other scholarly historical works will probably be judged. Both gentlemen have done a great service to the veterans whose memories they have worked to preserve.
John Michael “Mike” Priest, a certified battlefield guide at Antietam, has edited or authored several battle books on the Civil War, ranging from Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle (White Mane, 1989) to “Stand to It and Give Them Hell”: Gettysburg As The Soldiers Experienced It From Cemetery Ridge To Little Round Top, July 2, 1863 (Savas Beatie, 2014). He is currently working on another work on Gettysburg.
Well-researched Book on Union Escaped Prisoners
The Yankee Plague: Escaped Union Prisoners and the Collapse of the Confederacy. By Lorien Foote. Maps, notes, bibliography, index, 256 pp., 2016. University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.org. $34.95 cloth.
Reviewed by Stephen Briggs
“Never judge a book by its cover.” In this case, the title certainly applies to Lorien Foote’s The Yankee Plague. Though not a particularly enticing title, Foote provides a refreshing narrative, emphasizing escaped Union prisoners as a contributing factor to Confederate collapse. The “plague” signifies not only the masses of Union prisoners who escaped during the final days of the Confederacy, but the influential support of those willing to help the fugitives along the way. These included newly liberated slaves, slaves on the brink of freedom, pro-Union citizens, as well as women and children swept into the maelstrom.
Foote does not merely regurgitate the downfall of the political and military establishment within the Confederacy. She directs her narrative from the numerous
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prisoners’ perspectives and other personal accounts, an obvious reflection of her exhaustive research. In addition, she brings to life the internal and external struggle of a decaying Confederate government throughout 1864-1865, based on a failing prison system.
Past interpretations have a tendency to fall short, portraying Union fugitives as a ravenous, faceless mass. Foote’s fluid account does more than discuss prison conditions and the inmates’ escape. She introduces the reader to the complexities of escaped Union prisoners’ accounts, the routes they took and their interactions with others.
By 1864 and 1865 the Confederate government was increasingly unable to defend large areas of its territory due to shortages of manpower, food, and weaknesses within itself. Foote argues that by this time the vicious cycle of depriving one territorial area to bolster another was worsened by having to secure and feed Federal prisoners. Department commanders such as Maj. Gen. Samuel Jones (commanding S.C., Ga., and Fla.) made unrealistic requests for men and supplies that the government could not hope to meet.
Foote shines in her relating of the prisoners’ perspective. As Confederates moved prisoners from Columbia to Florence, South Carolina, her narrative reads like a novel of utter suspense. If you are looking for description of Gen. William T. Sherman’s March to Savannah and through the Carolinas (taking place roughly the same time in 1864-65), this may not be the book for you. Yet many of the war’s military events had a significant bearing on the prisoners’ fate, especially the fall of Atlanta in September of 1864 and the loss of the vital sea port of Wilmington in 1865.
Yankee Plague still manages to flow chronologically, noting
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some of the important actions taking place on the front lines that fit into the narrative, an example being the Battle of Honey Hill on Nov. 30, 1864.
Foote argues that the breakdown in Confederates’ command structure, and their inability to supply and hold Union prisoners were more detrimental to the Confederacy in 1864-65 than failing tactics and strategy. She demonstrates the severed allegiances within the Confederacy, especially those Southerners once devoted to their cause who were later willing to help Union escapees.
Women become a focal point of Foote’s story. Many women who once protected Confederate guerrillas and waged war in an unconventional manner, became disillusioned by the Confederate government and were willing to help Union escapees. Foote describes the reasons why women once loyal and abiding citizens to the cause were now fed up. Organizations such as the Guard for Home Defense in N.C. terrorized women who harbored deserters and draft dodgers. She argues that these types of organizations were more detrimental to the Confederate cause, and that by 1864-65 many women simply longed for an early end of the war and for their husbands to come home.
Foote also delves into the encounters between Union escaped prisoners and newly emancipated slaves. Escaped prisoners Willard Glazier and Moses Lemon found that their travels were far from conventional. For example, “Northern Soldiers expected southern blacks to speak in the typecast vernacular absolutely distinct from white speech that novelists and minstrel shows used to portray black speech.” She also explains how Union escapees weighed their immediate survival versus the emancipation of slaves they encountered. “Escaped prisoners of war, although they nearly unanimously supported emancipation as a war goal, were primarily interested in their own survival, and would not risk their own lives to free slaves they encountered.”
Much praise is to be accorded to Lorien Foote’s The Yankee Plague: a thoroughly researched book focusing on Union escaped prisoners, offering a wealth of information as she follows her characters to the end.
Stephen Briggs holds degrees in history from Kennesaw State University and the University of West Georgia. A Park Ranger at Pickett’s Mill State Historic Site near Dallas Ga., he is Vice President of the Civil War Roundtable of Cobb County.
African American Slave Experience in South Carolina
Yes, Lord, I Know the Road: A Documentary History of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526-2008. Edited by J. Brent Morris. Photos, notes, index, 248 pp., 2017. University of South Carolina Press, www.uscpress.com. $24.99 paperback. Reviewed by Patrick McCawley
From the first attempt by the Spanish to settle Port Royal in the 16th century, African Americans have had a substantial presence in S.C. For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, African Americans were a majority of the population and their forced labor was a major factor in the colony and state’s economic power. However, their status as slaves and later as second-class citizens led to a position of irrelevance in most early accounts of the state’s history. The fifty years since desegregation, however, have seen a wealth of academic work devoted to the role and significance of African Americans in our history.
The volume produced by Dr. J. Brent Morris, Assistant Professor of History at USC-Beaufort, continues this effort. Morris provides a very nice synthesis of the history of African Americans in South Carolina in his lengthy introduction, but admits that “details were sacrificed for the sake of concision.” The bulk of his book, of course, is his compilation of documents and accounts whose purpose is to inform the larger story. He provides a broad range of documentation from an account of a slave uprising in 1526 during a Spanish colonization effort to Barak Obama’s victory speech after his primary victory over Hillary Clinton in 2008. Dr. Morris has the typical broad chapters that one may expect in a book like this: introduction and establishment of slavery, emancipation, reconstruction, Jim Crow period, civil rights and post-civil rights.
The success of a documentary history lies in its selections. Allowing the documents to speak for themselves, or to rely on “the words of the participants, of eye-witnesses” (as Morris quotes from Herbert Aptheker’s introduction to A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States) can be fraught with problems. It can, in the worst scenarios, leave the lay reader to assess the relevance of the selected pieces without proper context. Even Aptheker’s groundbreaking and massive work was criticized because of a selection process that derived from the editor’s political leanings. The historical editor must provide some context and interpretation of what his selections represent.
Dr. Morris’ introduction suggests that African American history is one of communal selfreliance. His selections, however, seem to center on oppression and liberation. And while I would agree this is a prevalent theme in African American history, I don’t believe Dr. Morris made much attempt to illustrate the more subtle aspects of the struggle and accommodation that existed for S.C. African Americans. He seeks to show the diversity of the African American experience, but provides no documentation of the activities of the antebellum free black population. There seems to be a heavy preponderance of the legal documentation of the slave society and second class citizenship, but little that records the life of the slave, the free person of color or the sharecropper and how they coped with everyday existence. And lastly, for a work that purports to include many unpublished documents, I find that many appear to have come from published (albeit out of print) works. What I find missing is source matter from legislative petitions, court cases, coroner reports, or other records found in archival institutions that could have more poignantly illustrated the story. That being said, Dr. Morris has created a good primer on the S.C. African American experience.
Patrick McCawley is the Supervisor of the Archival Processing Unit of the South Carolina Dept. of Archives and History, and has over thirty years’ experience with documentary sources on South Carolina history. He coordinates an annual Symposium on South Carolina Civil War History and among his publications is The Many Faces of Slavery (Columbia, 1999).
