Book on Battle of Monocacy is Well Researched and Illustrated
Determined to Stand and Fight: The Battle of Monocacy, July 9, 1864, by Ryan T. Quint. Illustrations, maps, photos, index, online footnotes, appendices, 113 pp., 2017. Savas Beatie, www.savasbeatie.com. $14.95 paperback.
Not too many years ago, Monocacy was a relatively obscure and underappreciated battle. If you searched for a book about Confederate General Jubal Early’s 1864 invasion of Maryland—of which Monocacy was a key engagement—you discovered that there was only one volume in print.
Today, public interest in the battle has risen, and books have been flying off the presses. During the last half-dozen years or so, there have probably been the same number of new books published either about Early’s invasion or the Battle of Monocacy itself.
Determined to Stand and Fight, part of the Emerging Civil War series, is the latest volume in this category.
Monocacy, which took place on July 9, 1864, is commonly known as “the Battle that Saved
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together. A true “you are there” experience. Washington,” since the surprisingly stubborn Union defense there delayed Early’s assault on Washington, D.C., by one day— thereby enabling Northern troops to reinforce the city and prevent it from being captured.
At the time, Washington’s ring of fortifications was lightly manned. Most of the garrisons had been sent south to assist Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s siege of Petersburg, Va.
Early’s goal was to relieve the pressure on Petersburg by forcing the Federals to transfer troops back to Washington. Another aim was to embarrass Lincoln a few months prior to the critical 1864 presidential election.
At the start of the invasion earlier in June, Early had marched north through the Shenandoah Valley with about 12,000 troops and crossed into Maryland. Although warned about a possible Confederate thrust at Washington, Grant at first didn’t take the threat seriously and delayed sending reinforcements.
The Northern commander in Baltimore, Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace, was quicker to recognize the danger. He was limited by the fact that he had only 3,200 troops at his disposal, and most of them were inexperienced 100day enlistees. Wallace dashed off a telegraph begging Grant to send troops immediately, and rushed off to establish a defensive line east of Frederick on the bank of the north-south-flowing Monocacy River.
Wallace’s men were deployed so as to block the fords and bridges needed to cross the river.
At this point, Grant began sending reinforcements both to Baltimore and Washington. First to arrive in Baltimore was the 4,000-man veteran division of Brig. Gen. James B. Ricketts. Once unloaded from ships, the men were put on trains and rushed to Frederick. They arrived there in the nick of time: Early’s vanguard arrived in the city from the west the following day.
Given the odds—the defenders were outnumbered by more than two-to-one—the battle’s outcome was never in doubt. Early’s men found an undefended ford about a mile south of Wallace’s position. They crossed the river and struck Wallace’s left flank. The fighting flowed back and forth until the flank caved in and Wallace was forced to withdraw. Although Early won a tactical victory, the valiant defense by the Union helped turn Early’s attack on Washington into a strategic Southern defeat.
This book not only covers the whole Early invasion from the entry into Maryland to the climactic battle at Fort Stevens, but also overviews a number of colorful secondary issues, including: the ransom of Frederick; medical care during the battle; the attempted cavalry raid to free 12,000 Rebel prisons at the Point Lookout, Md., prison camp; the cavalry raid that successfully cut the direct rail link between Philadelphia and Baltimore; the McCausland cavalry raid that resulted in the burning of Chambersburg, Penn., a month after Monocacy; and Wallace’s post-war literary career as the author of the best-selling novel, Ben Hur.
Included in the appendices is a comprehensive self-guided tour of the Monocacy National Battlefield.
While this book does not have any major new revelations or reinterpretations, it is well researched, exhaustively illustrated and provides a number of supplemental details to widely known facts and stories. The volume is concise, but is still densely packed with facts. It’s an ideal introduction to someone new to the battle, and also a valuable companion guide for someone who wants a self-guided park tour.
Shelby’s Competence Shows in Trans-Mississippi Raids
General J. O. Shelby at Clarendon, Arkansas: The Capture and Destruction of the U.S.S. Queen City.By Don Roth. Maps, photos, footnotes, appendix, bibliography, 60 pp., 2017. Camp Pope Publishing, www.camppope.com. $10.00 paperback.
Reviewed by Joan Wenner, J.D.
This brief but interesting gem is by retired armed forces veteran and first-time author Don Roth. Roth succeeds in telling the gripping tale of a Confederate cavalry commander and raider extraordinaire in Kirby Smith’s and Sterling Price’s command, Brig. Gen. Joseph O. Shelby. Shelby led his troops in a surprise 3:30 a.m. attack, June 24, 1864, on a Federal lightly armored former ferryboat, Queen City, in the White River, Arkansas. After capturing it and offloading materiel of value, Shelby ordered the igniting of the ship’s magazine. The well-known USS Tyler attempted to recover the Queen City, but to no avail.
Roth’s research shows a solid grasp of the timeline as we are introduced to the principals. He sets the stage for Shelby as a coharasser-in-chief in disrupting Union Navy inland river movements (along with “Admiral” Nathan B. Forrest, so named for his
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capture of a gunboat in the Tennessee River and turning it on nearby vessels). Shelby demonstrated strategic and tactical skills, though having no formal military training, that early brought him the attention of Southern and Union leaders alike.
Readers will glimpse Shelby’s masterful and silent preparations in the dead of a sweltering June night. This account comes from an artillery sergeant, his guns positioned fifty yards from the ship: “All our guns were loaded and ready to fire, but we were ordered to keep quiet and wait... There we waited for two hours. Think of it! Two hours there with that great monster liable to wake up and annihilate us in a minute! And to give you an idea of how quiet we were, the gun I was with was 20 feet from the front door of a dwelling, and none in the house or boat knew we were within a hundred miles of the place.” During the twenty-minute action, the ship took 54 artillery hits from the Southerners’ unrelenting shore battery, as well as rifle fire from Shelby’s dismounted sharpshooters. After capturing the vessel, the Southerners set her ablaze, thus sending a clear visual message to the enemy.
Roth’s narrative includes a good account of those onboard the surrendered craft and those who captured her, as well as a description of looted stores and materiel. This is a good account of just one instance of Jo Shelby’s contributions to the Confederate war effort.
Civil War Dreams and the Thin Line Between Night and Day
Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams during the Civil War. By Jonathan W. White. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 296 pp., 2017. University of North Carolina Press, uncpress.org. $34.95 cloth. Reviewed by Daniel Pollock, M.D.
In his latest book, historian Jonathan W. White plunges into the arena where psychology wrestles with history, and he emerges after a 290-page matchup with mixed results. Seeking new insights into the emotional states and deepest desires of ordinary Americans during the Civil War, White gathered an impressive trove of over 400 dream reports, largely recorded by soldiers and non-combatants in private correspondence and diaries. He reviewed each report and searched for patterns of shared wartime experiences, which he identifies, describes, and categorizes in Midnight in America: Darkness, Sleep, and Dreams During the Civil War. However, the insights that his ardent efforts provide are less a revelation than a recapitulation of numerous studies, published since the 1980s, that use social history methods and first-person accounts of soldiers’ and civilians’ daytime preoccupations to draw conclusions about their prevalent thoughts and emotions during the Civil War.
White, whose previous books include a study of the Union army and Abraham Lincoln’s reelection campaign, sought Civil War dream material by searching “as diligently, as thoroughly, and as creatively” as he knew how to do. While he acknowledges that the dream reports he found are not necessarily representative of all the dreams of all the Americans who lived through the Civil War, he concludes that the reports nonetheless provide a singularly important way to probe what mid-nineteenth century Americans saw, felt, and heard during the war years. Americans of this period, he observes, recognized a connection between their waking concerns and their nightly unconscious visions.
This nexus between the brain awake and the brain asleep underpins White’s historical analysis. The connection also is a major focus of modern-day dream research. As described in the most recent edition of the leading textbook of sleep medicine, Meir H. Kryger’s Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine (2016), there is a growing consensus among researchers that dream experiences are related closely to presleep waking states and serve a function of off-line consolidation of recent memories. Mounting evidence suggests that brain networks involved in prior waking experience are reactivated during later sleep, enabling the brain to file daytime inputs into memory. Still, there is no consensus among researchers on what distinguishes dreaming from other cognitive processes.
For historical purposes, this thin yet elusive line between the mental activities of night and day lends credence to the use of dream material to gain insight into the innermost thoughts and emotions that preoccupied people in the past. However, precisely because of the continuity between the brain’s day and night shifts, there is a strong likelihood that dream reports will serve to complement first-person accounts of thoughts and emotions while awake. For the same reason, there is a relatively low likelihood that these reports will provide new and compelling historical evidence that is unavailable from other primary sources.
White’s book exemplifies this inherent limitation on what can be gleaned from dream reports for historical purposes. His foray across the dreamscape of the Union and Confederate armies and along the home front largely buttresses rather than breaks away from previous Civil War scholarship that surveyed the daytime thoughts and emotions of combatants and non-combatants. A prime example is his assessment of soldiers’ dreams. More than anything else, White reports, their dreams were about home, and they often revealed longings for spouses or sweethearts, deep-seated concerns for the well-being of families, or fears of abandonment and adultery.
These same themes were sounded by Reid Mitchell in his monograph on Civil War Soldiers (1988), James M. McPherson in his study For Cause and Comrade: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), and other Civil War historians who have turned their attention to the daytime concerns of ordinary Americans during the war. “Homesickness was a dominant theme in the letters of many soldiers,” according to McPherson. Not surprisingly, troops on both sides longed for letters from loved ones and were sorely disappointed if they did not arrive. Another problem, according to Mitchell, arose when a soldier thought that people at home were unfair to his family or were grasping in financial matters. Understandably, these ties to home were a major preoccupation for soldiers. Other insights that White develops from his source material are similarly familiar because of previous historical scholarship, or are remarkably unsurprising in light of what is known about human emotions. Women and children often dreamed of their menfolk coming home. Slaves dreamed of freedom. Fugitives had menacing dreams of recapture. Civil War prisoners dreamed of food. These findings fall short of demonstrating that dream experiences are fertile ground for new historical discoveries. Still, White has produced a valuable compendium of Civil War dream reports, and many of his conclusions complement what has been learned from other sources. His analysis would have benefited from closer engagement with historical studies of emotions, such as Susan Matt’s Homesickness: An American History (2011), but he has unearthed dream reports that warrant attention in efforts to understand how the Civil War felt to the people most directly affected by it.
journal, Southern Spaces.
North Carolina Cavalry in the Army of Northern Virginia
Stuart’s Tarheels: James B. Gordon and His North Carolina Cavalry in the Civil War -- Second Edition. By Chris J. Hartley. Photos, maps, roster, notes, bibliography, index, 435 pp., 2016. McFarland, www.mcfarlandpub.com. $29.95 paperback. Reviewed by Robert L. Durham
This volume is a second edition; the first won the Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal from the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In this new edition of Stuart’s Tarheels, Hartley includes information from new primary sources. In addition, he has added an annotated roster of the 1st North Carolina Cavalry.
General James B. Gordon was not trained for warfare but he learned well, eventually becoming commander of the North Carolina Brigade in General J.E.B. Stuart’s Cavalry Corps. He had many mentors, among whom were Generals Stuart and Wade Hampton. Through them he discovered cavalry tactics: picketing, scouting, screening from the enemy, etc. He also absorbed fighting tactics: the charge, dismounted tactics, rear guard
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action, night and street fighting. Stuart considered Gordon one of his best officers; in fact, at Yellow Tavern, one of his last words on the battlefield were: “Would that Gordon were here.”
Gordon was a true son of the South, being a large plantation owner in Wilkes County, North Carolina. He never lost faith in the Confederacy; even after the Battle of Gettysburg, he was instructing his family to invest in slaves, as he thought that slaves and land would not decrease in value. It was not until he began to see the decline of the cavalry, mainly due to the lack of good horseflesh, that he started to wonder if the war would end victoriously. Even then, he did his duty wholeheartedly.
A lifelong bachelor, he finally met the girl of his dreams in Virginia. Theirs was a typical—if there is such a thing as typical— wartime romance. They became secretly engaged and he wrote movingly to her.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in the Army of Northern Virginia, in the actions of Civil War cavalry or, particularly, in North Carolina troops. Hartley does an exceptional job of explaining the details of cavalry tactics and the complex movements of mounted troops in battle.
Robert L. Durham has been a devoted Civil War buff for many years. He has written several articles for publication in various magazines and Civil War internet blogs. His article on the Battle of Raymond, Mississippi appeared in the July 2017 edition of CWN.
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Made In The USA
No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar: Sherman’s Carolinas Campaign from Fayetteville to Averasboro. By Mark A. Smith and Wade Sokolosky. Maps, photos, notes, appendices, index, 370 pp., 2016, Savas Beatie, www.savasbeatie.com. $29.95 hardcover.
Reviewed by Daniel T. Davis
The advent of 1865 saw the Confederate States of America on the brink of collapse. Hoping to deal a final blow after completing his march across Georgia, Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman set out with his army from Savannah through the Carolinas. Similar to his “March to the Sea,” Sherman planned to disrupt the logistical infrastructure of the Confederates by living off the land. A critical element of Sherman’s movement was celerity. His two wings would not be able to remain stationary for an extended period, lest he risk exhausting his available food source from the surrounding countryside. He planned to resupply at Goldsboro, North Carolina.
Setting out in early February, it was not long before Sherman’s expedition caught the attention of Confederate General-in-Chief Robert E. Lee. Lee requested that Gen. Joseph Johnston, who had been relieved from command during the Atlanta Campaign the previous summer, be reinstated to command. Reluctantly, President Jefferson Davis acceded to Lee’s wishes and Johnston was given the assignment to slow Sherman’s advance. For this purpose, Johnston assembled a hodgepodge force that consisted of his old Army of Tennessee, troops from the defenses of Charleston, and the Department of North Publishers:
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In the second week of March, Sherman’s force entered Fayetteville, North Carolina. After a few days’ rest, he began the final stage of the journey to Goldsboro. On March 16, Lt. Gen. William J. Hardee’s Confederate force engaged elements from Maj. Gen. Henry Slocum’s Army of Georgia outside the hamlet of Averasboro. Employing a defense-indepth, Hardee was able to slow the Federals for a full day. Hardee’s action bought valuable time for Johnston to unite his scattered forces and devise a plan to strike a wing of Sherman’s force. Three days later, Johnston attacked Slocum outside the village of Bentonville in an attempt to delay the Union advance.
Mark A. Smith and Wade Sokolosky, two of the leading scholars on the Carolinas Campaign, have written an engaging and highly readable narrative. They blend a number of primary sources into engaging prose. Especially valuable is their detailed, micro-tactical analysis of the Battle of Averasboro, arguably one of the war’s forgotten engagements. The chapters on the battle, along with the entire book are supplemented by excellent maps by cartographer Hal Jespersen. Colonel Darrell L. Combs, USMC (Retired), also contributed a number of wonderful sketches. Smith and Sokolosky complement the text with several appendices of particular interest. Included is an excellent and easy to follow driving tour of the major sites in and around Fayetteville as well as the Averasboro battlefield; an order of battle for Averasboro; Sherman’s logistical plan for the campaign; the field hospitals at Averasboro; a letter from Janie Smith, a civilian whose family owned a plantation on the Averasboro battlefield; and the story of a gunner’s quadrant owned by the Confederate commander of the Fayetteville Arsenal.
This book is a must read and is highly recommended for any student of the Civil War and especially those interested in the Carolinas Campaign.
Daniel T. Davis is the co-author of six books in the Emerging Civil War Series published by Savas Beatie, LLC. He is the Managing Editor of the Emerging Civil War blog and resides in Fredericksburg, Va.
The Legion’s Fighting Bulldog: The Civil War Correspondence of William Gaston Delony, Lieutenant Colonel of Cobb’s Georgia Legion Cavalry, and Rosa Delony, 1853-1863. Edited by Vincent Joseph Dooley and Samuel Norman Thomas Jr. Bibliography, index, illustrations, timeline, biographical roster, 432 pages, 2017. Mercer University Press, www.mupress.org. $35 hardback.
Reviewed by J.H. (Hank) Segars
Sometimes we are overwhelmed by the constant avalanche of new Civil War titles, especially when so many cover the same ground over and over again. What seems to be missing are published histories about individual units, Union and Confederate. Consequently, those seeking detailed information about a particular unit are obliged to piece together information from various available sources, whatever is to be found in the OR, biographies of unit commanders, diaries, newspaper accounts, and period letters.
I have been interested in finding information about Cobb’s Legion of Cavalry, the unit of service for two of my ancestors. So, it was exciting to discover the new publication by Mercer Press entitled The Legion’s Fighting Bulldog, a compilation of Civil War correspondence between Colonel William Gaston Delony, and wife, Rosa. The native of Athens, Georgia, served as commander of Cobb’s Legion of Cavalry, a regiment of Georgians that fought in over 130 battles and engagements under the leadership of Generals Wade Hampton and J.E.B. Stuart in the Army of Northern Virginia.
With so many published compilations of Civil War letters, I was also interested in seeing if Vince Dooley, UGA’s championship coach, and Sam Thomas, curator of the T.R.R. Cobb house in Athens, could add to the story of Cobb’s Legion... and they did in superb fashion.
I should mention that Coach Dooley is not a novice to historical research. After earning an undergraduate degree from Auburn University in 1953, he returned to graduate with a master’s in history in 1963. In later years, his strong interest in American history served as inspiration to visit CW battlefields and to author History and Reminiscences of the University of Georgia, illustrated by artist Steve Penley (who also painted the cover for his newest book).
The Delony letters were found in the special collections library at the University of Georgia. Dooley and coeditor Thomas met at the Hillside Grill in Athens for a period of over five years to work on the project. While the correspondence between Delony and his wife consists of love letters, they are also very revealing. “These are not the writings of the typical soldier of either side,” writes Emory Thomas. “Instead, they are the correspondence of well-educated and independent individuals who also happened to be well placed in society.”
In reading the beginning chapters, we learn how the coming storm of warfare is affecting Athens and North Georgia. There is much discussion about home life and the children, the arduous rigors of service and the burdens caused by war. There are times when readers may feel like they are invading the privacy of the couple. In the beginning, the tender-hearted Colonel Delony seems to have Ashley Wilkes-like characteristics, especially when he states that “I never was so homesick, restless, and down hearted in my life.” But, don’t be fooled, he is a bulldog on the battlefield.
With the skillful inclusion of bold narratives by the editors, the story picks up steam chapter after chapter. Reports from Trooper Wiley C. Howard, Thomas R.R. Cobb, General Wade Hampton and other important military leaders keep things flowing. And the letters of Colonel Delony build in excitement with his vivid descriptions of military strategy,
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behind-the-scenes drama and first-person portrayals of the intense fighting.
The intriguing title of The Legion’s Fighting Bulldog comes from a statement made by General Wade Hampton when he said, “Colonel Delony has the courage of a bulldog!” And Major Delony was not only a courageous bulldog but, in the end, also a lion “fighting like a mad boar with a whole pack of curs about him.”
Postscript. While there is no formal history of Cobb’s Legion of Cavalry, The Legion’s Fighting Bulldog adds valuable information to the unit’s ongoing study. For those seeking a full roster of enlisted men, please consult Harriet Bey Mesic Cobb’s Legion Cavalry (2011). Also, what may have been forgotten are General Hampton’s comments after the war when he said, “Cobb’s Legion Cavalry was the best regiment of either army, North or South. Some regiments had one squadron that was better than the others, but the Cobb Legion never failed me no matter which squadron was in front.”
J. H. (Hank) Segars is associate editor for Smith Communications The Lake and columnist for Oconee News in Madison, Georgia. He is author and editor of such Civil War books as The Bell Irvin Wiley Reader, In Search of Your Confederate Ancestors, and Black Southerners in Confederate Armies.
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Reviewed by Christopher L. Kolakowski
The campaign and Battle of Stones River (also known as Murfreesboro) over the last week of December 1862 and the first days of January 1863 are underappreciated but vital operations of the Civil War. The hard-fought engagement between William S. Rosecrans’ Union Army of the Cumberland and Braxton Bragg’s Confederate Army of Tennessee occurred at a critical time, and the battle’s result had a profound impact on both the Union and the Confederacy. Most studies of Stones River, including the one written by this reviewer in 2011, focus mostly on the infantry and artillery, leaving cavalry operations somewhat in the shadows.
Dennis Belcher puts the spotlight on the cavalry commands of both armies in this volume. His scope is vast, describing and analyzing the operations of both Union and Confederate cavalry forces during the campaign and the weeks before, beginning with the retreat from Kentucky during October 1862. Belcher provides significant analysis and frequently breaks narrative flow to provide unit histories, leader biographies, and to chart reorganizations.
Belcher has done extensive research, and it shows in the amount of information he provides on the cavalry commands of both sides. For example, biographical details about Col. John Kennett, Rosecrans’ tactical cavalry commander at Stones River, are extremely hard to find; Belcher unearthed an obscure history of the 4th Ohio Cavalry from 1912 that filled them in. As a reference alone about the cavalry leaders and their units, details like this make the book invaluable.
That said, the book does have some limitations. First, using the term “cavalries” in the titles and elsewhere is awkward. Annoying typographical errors sometimes appear, and Belcher’s analysis is sometimes repetitive. But these limitations ultimately do not cancel out the book’s overall usefulness.
Belcher’s The Cavalries at Stones River is not recommended as an introduction to the campaign or battle. Nonetheless, it is an important contribution to scholarship on the Civil War in Middle Tennessee, and is a musthave for students of Stones River and the operations leading up to the battle.
Christopher Kolakowski works as a historian in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the author of four books on World War II and the American Civil War, including The Stones River and Tullahoma Campaign: This Army Does Not Retreat (History Press, 2011). He is also a contributor to the Emerging Civil War blog.
Civil War Round Tables are Organizing for Growth
For several years many Civil War Round Tables have been losing members or, even worse, are no longer in existence. This is sad because we are losing our ability to keep the story of our Civil War history alive and passed down to future generations. This is also surprising because Brunswick CWRT has been very successful in our 7 short years of existence. Given our success, Mike Powell our President and I decided we should share best practices with other Round Tables. We decided to hold a Forum and invite leaders of all 13 North Carolina Civil War Round Tables.
We held the first NCCWRT Forum in Raleigh in August 2016 with approximately 25 leaders present. The first meeting was principally to get to know the other North Carolina RT leaders and discuss problems they were facing. I was shocked that no Round Table leader knew how many North Carolina Round Tables existed or where they were located. They were islands of CW members with little contact with other Round Tables and little change in their actions to deal with declining membership and revenues. All of them wanted to know about why BCWRT was growing. For the first time they were talking to each other and over-whelmingly wanted to have another meeting in 2017.
The 2017 Forum was again held in Raleigh on Aug. 5 with approximately 20 leaders attending. This year we focused on sharing best practices and discussing ways to increase membership and revenue. We had 6 Round Table leaders speaking about 1) creating and sharing a list of quality speakers they have had to help others attract good, reasonably priced speakers locally or regionally, 2) low-cost media actions used to attract new members, 3) organizing joint field trips to reduce costs and, 4) creative fund raising ideas.
The meeting was a great success. Everyone was energized, asking good questions and sharing interesting ideas. Some
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Round Tables are already planning joint field trips with other RT’s, and working on circuit speaker trips to multiple RT’s to reduce travel costs.
Interestingly, Round Tables in Augusta, Lawrenceville, and Savannah, Ga., Huntsville, Ala., and Bluffton, S.C., learned about our Forum and asked to attend our 2018 meeting in Raleigh. They have all been invited and we have sent them copies of this year’s meeting presentations, RT rosters and organization metrics.
We all are looking forward to next year’s meeting and hope to see improvements in membership and revenues. Sharing best practices and working together should generate positive results.
The American Heritage Short History
Bruce Catton begins his American Heritage Short History of the Civil War with a look at America in 1860. Most people lived on farms or in little towns back then. The country was young and growing; the people were optimistic. “They lived better than their fathers had lived,” Catton writes, “and they knew that their children would do still better.”
Such sunny optimism feels a long way off today, which is the reason I picked up Catton’s short history of the war, published in 1960. I wanted to read about the American Civil War before George Wallace raised the Confederate flag over the capitol in Montgomery, before Barbara Fields likened Robert E. Lee to a Nazi, and before Mayor Landrieu took down the Confederate monuments in New Orleans.
In other words, I wanted to read about the Civil War without all the taints and trappings which we moderns have hung upon history.
And, boy, was it fun, and rewarding to boot. It’s almost as if—and I don’t want to be too cynical here—you have to go back a half-century to read history written clearly or sensibly, especially about the causes of the war. “The differences between the two societies,” Catton explains, regarding the North and the South at the time, “were most infernally complicated by the existence in the South of the institution of chattel slavery.” “Without slavery,” he lucidly points out, “the problems between the sections could probably have been worked out by the ordinary give-and-take of politics; with slavery, they became insoluble.” “It was not the only cause of the Civil War,” Catton says, “but it was unquestionably the one cause without which the war would not have taken place.”
That just about says it all, doesn’t it?
Those of us long-of-tooth grew up with the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War (1960). It was richly illustrated, and as a seventh-grader at the time I pored over all of its pictures (and David Greenspan’s cool battle maps). Not till later did I read Catton’s accompanying text, which was published as the freestanding paperback I’m writing about now.
Re-reading it brought me back to some memorable Cattonesque chestnuts. “An independent nation could not countenance the existence of a foreign fort in the middle of one of its most important harbors,” is his comment
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concerning Sumter, and the Confederates’ casus belli. When the two armies clashed at Bull Run, the Rebels pressed hard enough to cause Union Gen. McDowell to order retreat. The Federals’ withdrawal was orderly until “the father and mother of all traffic jams” at Cub Run bridge turned it into a rout.
In the hands of a masterful writer, commonplaces about the war are not stale but surprisingly refreshing. Turning to Tennessee, Catton recounts Grant’s victories at Donelson and Shiloh, after which he observes, “the Confederate path in the West went downhill all the way.” Back east, Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley exploits immobilized 50,000 Yankee troops and left the Lincoln administration “utterly bamboozled.” All the while, Catton’s narrative is swift, if general. The Seven Days’ Battles are barely named, but little more is needed to support his observation that Lee and Jackson possessed “the driving, restless spirit of war.”
In a chapter on the navies, he contends that Union naval power—“on the ocean, in the coastal sounds, and up and down the inland rivers”—became the North’s “overwhelming advantage” that began to doom the Confederacy. Building on the small, antiquated U.S. fleet, the Federals constructed blockade runners, river gunboats, and ironclads while the South struggled to improvise a navy. Combined operations against Hatteras and other ports worked with a tightening blockade to deprive the Confederacy of materiel. Farragut’s capture of New Orleans “illustrated the immense value of unchallenged sea power.” Yet the inventive Rebels built “a fighting ship the likes of which no one had ever seen:” the ironclad gunboat Virginia. “It should be pointed out,” Catton writes with his beguiling breeziness, “that since warships had never worn armor, no one had ever bothered to create an armor-piercing shell.” So when the Virginia dueled the North’s Monitor at Hampton Roads, the two ironclads slugged it out to a draw. This historic battle ended the era of wooden sailing warships, as the author notes: “by 1865 naval warfare would resemble the twentieth century much more than it resembled anything Lord Nelson or John Paul Jones had known.”
You can tell what an enjoyable read Catton’s Short History is, even to this day. I’m stopping here, just before his chapter on “Confederate High-Water Mark” (Antietam and the fall of ’62). Resumption
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of this little delight awaits another fine day at the beach.
Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor.
His book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, was published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series.
The companion volume, All The Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign From Peachtree Creek To The City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864, was published this Spring.