J. Howard Wert’s Gettysburg: A Collection of Relics from the Civil War Battle. By Bruce E. Mowday and G. Craig Caba. Map, photos, appendices, bibliography, index, 144 pp., 2017. Schiffer Publishing, www.schifferbooks.com. $34.99 hardcover.
Reviewed by Joseph J. Bordonaro
A shell whistled through the trees, clipping off branches as it came. Exploding, it nearly hit J. Howard Wert, who was guiding General Strong Vincent’s men up Little Round Top. He picked it up, still warm, and thus it became one of the first items of what turned into a fantastic collection of battlefield relics.
Wert came by his proclivity towards collecting relics honestly. He grew up in a patriotic family (members fought in all of the American wars from the French and Indian through the War of 1812) who valued their relics of the past and kept them in the family home. Among these treasures from the past were his maternal grandfather’s American Revolution sword; his father’s friend Thaddeus Stevens’ patriotic eagle walking stick, and a special gift from his father Jacob’s friend and Revolutionary War comrade, Benjamin Rush. Dr. Rush gave Jacob President Washington’s official documents box.
Another source of family relics were those associated with their anti-slavery efforts. J. Howard’s family was very active in the Gettysburg area’s Underground Railroad. When he was just nine years old, he helped his father assist in the escape of a slave. He guided the carriage containing his father and the escapee through a hideaway on Wolf’s Hill, pursued by slave hunters. Among these relics are a walking stick given to Adam Wert for his assistance in helping slaves escape and a first edition, custom leatherbound Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Attached to the book is a brass paper clip that held Mrs. Stowe’s notes while she was writing this classic.
J. Howard Wert took this existing family collection to a whole new level when the Civil War broke out. A local militia man after graduating from Gettysburg College, Wert ended up scouting under the command of Major Granville Haller, of the 7th U.S. Infantry. Haller had been ordered to recruit Gettysburg area citizens to fight the Confederates. His activities during the battle and the relics he collected are covered in great detail in the book. Suffice it to say that he played an important part in the battle and an even more important part in preserving the history of the battle.
An article about the collection by Robert Swift appeared in Gettysburg Magazine (#38, Jan. 2008). The article was well written, but only contained two pages of text and two pages of black-and-white photos, so it cannot compare with this book. It would be worth getting a copy of the magazine, however, if you want a very concise summary of J. Howard Wert’s collection as an adjunct to the study of the many color photographs in this book and did not want to read its much longer text.
J. Howard Wert’s Gettysburg contains a partial list of books by Wert, which is a nice bonus. His A Complete Hand-book of the Monuments and Indications and Guide to the Positions on the Gettysburg Battlefield is an extremely useful guide to interpreting the meaning of these monuments. It is readily available as a book in print and in a free online Google Books version.
Mowday and Caba’s book also contains two samples of Wert’s poetry. Although wildly out of style, extremely patriotic and sentimental in nature, this reviewer found them to be excellent. Especially poignant is “Under the Oaks of Rock Creek. Culp’s Hill: 1853–1863–1883.” The poem takes the reader through time from the peaceful picnic spot that Culp’s Hill was before the Civil War, through the carnage of the fighting there during the battle of Gettysburg, to the sadness of a survivor’s walk in the woods there.
There are only two areas of weakness in this book, which perhaps can be improved in later editions. One is the paucity of maps. There is only one in the book. It would be helpful to have more, including a map showing Wert’s movements on the battlefield during the battle and the location of places mentioned in the text, such as the Wert family farm. The other shortcoming consists of incomplete or missing identification in the captions of items photographed. Twenty-one groups of photographed items contain at least one relic that is not identified. The most glaring omission is the failure to identify the lectern that President Abraham Lincoln used when he gave his Gettysburg Address. It took a bit of research online to find a photo of it to confirm that it is part of the Wert Collection. It is currently on loan to the Union League of Philadelphia and is probably the most valuable item in the entire collection, so the failure to identify it in the book is startling.
On the positive side, the text is very well written and the photos are very often placed in conjunction with mention of the items in the text. The photographs themselves are of very high clarity, and are all in color. The book is printed on high-quality, glossy paper and is well bound. All in all, I strongly recommend this book to anyone with any interest in the battle of Gettysburg. It will reward the casual reader as well as the student of the battle.
Gettysburg, as well as from earlier periods in U.S. history, and bequeathed it to his son, Howard Houck Wert. He followed the instructions in his father’s will and kept the collection intact. It was kept together by the family over the years until 1957, when it was sold to family friends John and Vanita Cobaugh, who promised to keep the collection together. They in turn sold it, intact, to G. Craig Caba, a past president of the Harrisburg Civil War Roundtable and also of the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association. He is currently the CEO and curator of the J. Howard Wert Gettysburg Collection and has tried very hard to keep the collection intact, going so far as to sue a Gettysburg shop when stolen items (fortunately not important relics) from the collection turned up there. He has now teamed with noted author, Bruce E. Mowday, an award-winning journalist and author, to create this excellent book. And so J. Howard Wert’s patriotic legacy to his country lives on.
Joe Bordonaro has been covering events for Civil War News since 2016. A long time Civil War reenactor and living historian, he is currently in training for this year’s 155th Anniversary Commemoration of the Union Army’s Sixth Corps March to Gettysburg, which will involve a march in Civil War uniform, including brogans, from Edward’s Ferry, Maryland, to Little Round Top in Gettysburg National Battlefield.
Worthy Opponents: William T. Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston—Antagonists in War, Friends in Peace. By Edward G. Longacre. Maps, photos, notes, index, 392 pp., 2017. University of Oklahoma Press, www.oupress.com. $24.95 paper.
Reviewed by John D. Fowler
William Tecumseh Sherman is generally considered by Civil War historians as one of the best generals of the American Civil War, while his most famous opponent, Joseph E. Johnston, is often considered among the worst. The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 cemented the reputations, good and bad, of both men and created a bond they continued after the war. Through his postwar letters and memoirs, Sherman explained his success while Johnston’s letters and memoirs explained his defeat. Interestingly, both men needed the other to substantiate their accounts and their generalships. Historian Edward G. Longacre’s Worthy Opponents examines this interesting story.
Longacre is a prolific scholar, having written 24 books and some 100 journal and magazine articles on the Civil War. His The Cavalry at Gettysburg: A Tactical Study of Mounted Operations during the Civil War’s Pivotal Campaign, 9 June–14 July 1863 (1993) won the prestigious Fletcher Pratt Award as the best book of Civil War nonfiction; his Pickett: Leader of the Charge—A Biography of General George E. Pickett (1995) was a finalist for the Douglas Southall Freeman Award; and his Gentleman and Soldier: The Extraordinary Life of General Wade Hampton won that award in 2004. He also served as a historical advisor to the 1993 motion picture Gettysburg.
Worthy Opponents is organized into 18 chapters that present parallel biographies of both Sherman and Johnston. The final chapter is an epilogue that discusses the men in the post-Civil War period until the death of Sherman. Longacre writes well, and he weaves an interesting story. He does not, however, offer anything new on Sherman’s and Johnston’s military histories or their battlefield encounters during the Vicksburg, Atlanta, or Carolinas Campaigns. Indeed, the sections covering the battles are mere summaries of the events without much depth or detail. While the narrative does examine their generalship to a degree, the reader is left wanting more. Moreover, the most disappointing aspect of the book is the short epilogue that chronicles the generals’ postwar relationship. The title appears to promise more than the ten pages given.
In sum, Longacre has written a basic biography of both generals that would come in handy for someone who only needs a brief overview with limited detail of these men and their Civil War careers. Despite its brevity, this volume is more effective than the ultra-slim, 94-page attempt at a co-biography of the generals entitled Civil War Enemies, Post- War Friends: William Tecumseh Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston (Charles River Editors, 2013).
Those wanting a more detailed account of the lives of both men must consult other biographies. Currently, perhaps the best biographies of William T. Sherman are James Lee McDonough’s William Tecumseh Sherman: In Service to My Country—A Life (2016), Robert L. O’Connell’s Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman (2014), and John F. Marszalek’s Sherman: A Soldier’s Passion for Order (1993).
Additionally, while not a biography as such, Burke Davis’s Sherman’s March: The First Full-Length Narrative of General William T. Sherman’s Devastating March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1980) offers great insight into the man and his generalship. Likewise, perhaps the best modern biographies of Johnston include Gilbert Govan and James Livingwood’s Joseph E. Johnston: A Different Valor (1994) and Craig L. Symonds’ Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography (1992). Historians have not delved into Johnston’s life as much as Sherman’s, and there is a need for a new monograph on that general.
John D. Fowler, Ph.D, holds the B. J. and Dicksie Bandy Chair of American History at Dalton State College. He is co-editor, with David B. Parker, of Breaking the Heartland: The Civil War in Georgia (2011).
The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. By Richard White. Maps, photos, notes, index, 941 pp., 2017. Oxford University Press, www.oup.com/us. $35 hardbound.
Reviewed by William Harris Bragg
After almost thirty years, the Oxford History of the United States has at last provided the sequel to James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. McPherson’s 1988 book ended with a somewhat suspect anecdote, attributed elsewhere to Rock Island Prison:
“In 1865 a black soldier who recognized his former master among a group of Confederate prisoners he was guarding called out a greeting: ‘Hello, massa; bottom rail on top dis time!’ Would this new arrangement of rails last? That is a question for subsequent volumes in this series to ponder.”
Given the omission of the white Southern majority, this was a tendentious question, to be sure. Nonetheless, anyone McPherson had made curious about the “Sequel of Appomattox” received almost immediate gratification. Emerging a few months later, the Reconstruction volume of Harper’s competing multi-volume series, The New American Nation, practically collided with McPherson’s Civil War opus, then on its way to becoming the still-reigning bestseller of the Oxford series.
That book, Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, was meant to update the matching volume in Harper’s original American Nation series, William A. Dunning’s long-lived Reconstruction, Political & Economic, 1865–1877 (1907; 1962 [paperback]). Inspired by Marxist colossus W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction (1935), Foner set about with some success not only to replace Dunning, but also to destroy him as a respectable historical source. Foner argued that Dunning’s view of Reconstruction was irredeemably racist, but he must also have been displeased by Dunning’s spirited attacks on radicalism and revolution.
Although Foner’s Reconstruction became revered and widely assigned in the universities, the Oxford study of Reconstruction met more than its share of delays. Sadly, now that the missing volume has finally appeared, it seems unworthy of such a long wait, given its cursory glance at Reconstruction, its patchwork treatment of the turbulent twenty years that followed, and its emphatic devotion to leftist pieties.
Foner’s Reconstruction lives again in the scant eighty pages which form the new book’s major focus on the immediate postwar period; it does yeoman’s service, along with mostly 21st-century secondary sources, especially Gregory P. Downs’ After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (2015). Judging by the footnotes for the Reconstruction section of the book, it would collapse if Foner and Downs were subtracted.
Furthermore, dependence on more doctrinaire recent works often robs the book of necessary context and detail and makes some passages resemble polemic more than history. This is particularly true where white Southerners are concerned. The book presents quite a pitiless view of the impoverished ex-Confederate states through 1896, a land where whites seemingly fell victim neither to sharecropping nor lynching
The book’s author, Richard White, elsewhere proclaims himself to be a historian of the American West above all. His chosen subject certainly receives his undivided attention, but White’s disciplinary concentration suggests that much broader expertise was needed to synthesize a historical period of such scope and complexity.
Nonetheless, in the academy White’s book has garnered those obligatory hosannas reserved for an orthodox entry in a prestigious, prize-winning series. Only time will tell if approval will also come from that general readership ostensibly targeted since the series’ earliest days under original editor C. Vann Woodward, mentor of current series editor, David M. Kennedy.
Unequaled as Southern historian, Woodward regrettably also promoted both presentism in history and conspicuous political engagement for historians. Nonetheless, his initial recipe for the Oxford History volumes called for a balanced mixture of the New History and the Old, the latter characterized by a self-consciously objective narrative, with concentration on historical figures from the “top down,” and emphasis on political, military and diplomatic history.
But White, like most contemporary academic historians, strongly favors the New History: left-of-center ideologically, concentrating on “the people” from the “bottom up,” and emphasizing social, racial, and gender themes. Arguably, such history is directed less at a general readership than at White’s fellow university historians and their students, since (although unmentioned among the Oxford series’ goals) the potential for lucrative textbook sales has always been given considerable weight.
In terms of actual weight, White’s book will find few challengers. From the first, the Oxford volumes were meant to be lengthy and hefty—“ample” was Woodward’s word. But these tomes, several nearing one thousand pages, have also been described, with some hyperbole, as “hernia-inducing.”
White’s style, fortunately, is much less ponderous than his book. He writes compellingly and clearly, while also providing generous flashes of wit. Additionally, his minimalist coverage of Reconstruction aside, his book’s last seven-hundred-orso pages constitute a reasonable outline of the principal events of 1877–96, although fully fleshed with identity liberalism.
Gordon Wood, author of the elegant Empire of Liberty (most balanced of the Oxford volumes to date) has advised the present generation of historians to “be less eager to judge the past by the values of the present and less keen to use history to solve our present problems.” Unfortunately, White’s book embodies the practices Wood decries: it relentlessly maintains the politically correct, presentist interpretation of the activist historian. Consequently, it seeks social justice over truth, assigns agency with a lavish hand, demonizes disfavored historical actors and valorizes favorites. Consequently, readers are left less with a convincing factual record of a pivotal period than with a tool deliberately fashioned to affect the present and the future. “If you like this sort of thing,” as Miss Jean Brodie famously said, “this is the sort of thing you will like.”
Retired from college teaching, William Harris Bragg has published widely on the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most recently, he has edited, introduced and indexed the recent republication of C. Mildred Thompson’s classic Reconstruction in Georgia.
“Confederate history has survived its eras of apology, of brag and bombast, of pietistic biography, of de-bunking, of reappraisal and revisionism,” Richard Barksdale Harwell wrote forty years ago. The truth he told then is even truer now, as “Confederate history,” along with almost every genre of historical writing, continues to be reinterpreted to suit the predilections of the present.
That’s why I recently enjoyed looking again at Harwell’s In Tall Cotton: The 200 Most Important Confederate Books for the Reader, Researcher and Collector (1978). Confederate history is, unfortunately, being erased, covered up, hushed, closeted, even re-written in our current culture. In his time Dr. Harwell was able to write about it unabashedly, even affectionately. Perusing his listing is like traveling back through history.
Harwell (1915–1988) was perhaps the most renowned scholar of Confederate bibliography, second only to Douglas Southall Freeman. The latter’s “Confederate Book Shelf” I discussed in this space back in November 2016. Dr. Freeman compiled a list of almost three score important books on Confederate history, published as an appendix in his The South to Posterity (1939). Inspired by that listing and wishing to bring it up to date, not to mention expand it, Harwell prepared his list of the 200 most important Confederate books, as he saw them.
Expand it he definitely did. While Freeman’s compilations largely featured works of history in such categories as basic reference works, biographies and memoirs, Harwell did not categorize his entries at all, listing every manner of book, such as specialized works on Confederate railroads, newspapers and warships. August Dietz’s The Postal Service of the Confederacy
• Lecturer • Author • Course Instructor
(1929) is included; so is Harwell’s own Confederate Music (1950). Moreover, he included novels published from wartime to Gone With the Wind. Best of all, he mashed them all together, naming them alphabetically by author. Number 1 is E P. Alexander’s Military Memoirs (1907). Number 200 is Stark Young’s novel of a Mississippi plantation, So Red the Rose (1934).
“This list is a guide to an imaginary collection designed to help an imagined reader find his own version of the Confederacy,” Harwell wrote in his Introduction, emphasizing the breadth of experiences one may derive from literature. Part of the fun of In Tall Cotton is to turn to a page—any page—and discover what he saw fit to include. Page 46 has John Singleton Mosby’s Reminiscences (1887), a history of White’s battalion of Virginia Cavalry (1871) and Robert Manson Myers’ epic The Children of Pride (1971).
For each book chosen, Harwell offers commentary that is at once expository and personal. And erudite: for James Boyd’s novel Marching On (1927), he quoted an opinion offered in the New York Herald Tribune Books of May 9, 1927.
Harwell spent his last working years as director of the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library. It’s not surprising that In Tall Cotton showcases his knowledge of rare Confederate titles. Example: Francis P. Porcher’s Resources of the Southern Fields and Forests, Medical, Economical, and Agricultural, published at Richmond in 1863, was an attempt to catalog Southern trees, plants and shrubs for their useful medicinal extracts. Harwell terms Porcher’s “probably the most important work produced in the Confederacy.”
I was fortunate to have known Dr. Harwell (he received an honorary doctorate from New England College in 1966) when he was still in Athens. I’ll never forget the time he interrupted my research at Hargrett to ask if he could take me—a poor graduate student!—to lunch. (Who could ever forget that?)
Rick, as I came to call him, appreciated the value of fiction as a way of embracing the Confederate experience. Among his 200 titles, I count a dozen novels, including those by Joel Chandler Harris and William Faulkner (that’s cool).
But Dr. Harwell was much more interested in personal narratives. Emma LeConte’s When the World Ended (1957) he deems “a truly exciting view of Columbia,
South Carolina, in 1865 through the eyes of the teenage daughter of …one of the most capable Southern scientists.” What strikes me is that Rick found Miss LeConte’s book exciting—that’s the kind of book-lover’s world he lived in.
I don’t think it’s too much to say that Richard Barksdale Harwell—he was related to the famed general from Mississippi, and always used his middle name—spent his life pondering the question of what it meant to be an enlightened Southerner with a passion to study the Confederacy. I was therefore not surprised that he wrote so positively of Robert Penn Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War: Meditations on the Centennial (1961). Harwell quoted Warren’s meditation that “only at the moment Lee handed Grant his sword was the Confederacy born.” In other words, Southerners lost their war for independence, but in fighting and losing it, they gave us a set of experiences which I suspect will continue to fascinate Americans for a long time to come.
In Tall Cotton was originally printed by Jenkins Publishing Company of Austin, Texas, in a limited edition of 1,500 copies. In 2006 it was reprinted by Broadfoot Publishing Company of
Please send your book(s) for review to: CWN Book Review Editor, Stephen Davis 3670 Falling Leaf Lane, Cumming, GA 30041-2087
Wilmington, N.C. Unfortunately, Harwell’s opus is currently out of print; I bought my copy last year from Marc Ramsey when Owens & Ramsey had a table at a big Civil War meeting. In 2006 Tom Broadfoot also published In Taller Cotton: 200 More Important Confederate Books for the Reader, Researcher, and Collector, a work he intended both to emulate and update Harwell’s listing of 1978. To select this newer 200 he enlisted the services of Gary W. Gallagher, Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr. and Robert K. Krick. Watch for a future column on Taller Cotton.
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The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5–July 18, 1864 Davis’ narrative history of the Atlanta Campaign is divided into two paperbacks from Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War Series. Volume One, A Long and Bloody Task, carries Sherman’s forces from Dalton in northwest Georgia to the Chattahoochee River. There the Confederate government was forced to relieve its army commander, Joseph E.
Johnston, and replace him with Gen.
All the Fighting They Want
With the Yankee army five miles outside of Atlanta, Hood promised not to give up with city without a fight— which is all President Jefferson Davis asked. Davis’ companion volume, All the Fighting They Want, describes Hood’s efforts to defend Atlanta. Its fall in early September 1864 was a mortal blow to Confederate hopes for independence and a big boost to Lincoln’s hopes for presidential reelection.
1. “As soon as they saw his high
2. A leader of Confederate
3. This Union major general
4. The name his soldiers liked to
forehead and large, popping eyes, they christened him ‘Old Brains.’” Who was this major general who became the Union army’s chief of staff?
forces in the Trans- Mississippi, this major general, nicknamed “Old Pap,” led a raid into Missouri in the fall of 1864 that led to his defeat at Westport. Who? was a devout Christian who liked to hand out religious tracts to his troops. “But among the Germans of the Eleventh Corps, many of whom were freethinkers, the activities of ‘Old Prayer Book’ were not so welcome.” Name him.
call him was not, according to
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5. Soldiers of his Army of the
6. “Contrary to popular belief,”
7. “Old Fuss and Feathers” James I. Robertson, the one he earned at First Manassas, but “Old Jack.” Answer?
Cumberland referred to him as “Old Slow-Trot,” from his days as West Point instructor of cadets, ordering their horseback pace. Of whom are we thinking?
writes biographer Donald Pfanz, “there is no evidence of Ewell being widely known by this or any other nickname during the Civil War.” What was the nickname for Confederate Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell?
was a nickname, biographer Timothy D. Johnson writes, “that he had acquired as a result of his pedantic nature and love of showy uniforms.” This aged officer—who was older than the U.S. Constitution—was
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8. His Confederate nickname of
9. One of the lesser-known
10. “Old Jube” and “Old Jubilee”
Answers found on page 46.
Steve Davis is the Civil War News Book Review Editor.
general-in-chief of Union forces at the start of the war. Who?
“Old Blizzards” was earned on March 13, 1863, when Union gunboats approached Fort Pemberton, Miss. “Shouting and cursing purple oaths, his spittle flying,” his biographer writes, he shouted, “Give them blizzards, boys! Give them blizzards!” “Old Blizzards” stuck, through his subsequent service in the Army of Tennessee. Who?
nicknames of this Union major general is “Old Pills,” as John Marszalek writes, because his troops in Kentucky in the fall of 1861 “found him such a ‘bitter pill to swallow.’” Who?
were the nicknames for this lieutenant general in Lee’s army. To whom are we referring?
Recollections of a Civil War Medical Cadet. Edited by Richard M. Reid. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index, 148 pp., 2017. Kent State University Press, kentstateuniversitypress. com. $29.95 cloth.
Reviewed by Jonathan W. White
In 2010, Richard M. Reid published Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment: The Civil War Diary of Burt Green Wilder, 55th Massachusetts, a wonderful book that reproduces the diary of an assistant surgeon who served in a black regiment from May 1863 until September 1865. Now Reid offers Wilder’s earlier wartime experiences as a medical cadet at the Judiciary Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., through a memoir that Wilder compiled, but never published, more than a half century after the war.
Burt Green Wilder was an undergraduate studying anatomy at Harvard in 1862 when he decided to leave Massachusetts for the nation’s capital. Stationed at the Judiciary Square Hospital in Washington, D.C., Wilder served as a medical cadet—a position authorized by Congress to “act as dressers in the general hospitals and as ambulance attendants in the field.” Wilder’s “recollections” describe the hospital setting, the arrival and care of wounded soldiers, surgeries, autopsies, his criticism of doctors, and other events he witnessed.
Wilder’s writings give uncommon glimpses into the medical profession during the Civil War era. For instance, when one amputee was rapidly losing weight, a surgeon recommended that “Port wine would be better for him than Sherry, the only kind provided at the dispensary.” Like many Union soldiers, he toured the nation’s capital, even taking in a play at Ford’s Theatre. Along the way, he encountered famous people. Abraham Lincoln once came to the hospital and spoke kindly to every convalescing soldier there. “The President also shook hands with the hospital staff,” recalled Wilder, “and of course we cadets were gratified; but for many years I have felt that presidents and governors should be exempt from official handshaking.” After describing a second meeting with Lincoln— this time at a White House reception—Wilder wrote, “I have often recalled the weary face and much abused hand of the President, and have recently declared my conviction that the time and strength of high officials should be saved for something better than pandering to the snobbishness of the crowd.”
By the summer of 1863 Wilder decided to cast his lot with the 55th Massachusetts, a newly formed black regiment. “I have heard that the rebels make dire threats against the officers of colored troops,” he wrote, “but some must go so why not I?” His story continues in Practicing Medicine in a Black Regiment.
Wilder’s “recollections” are a hybrid document. When drafting them in the early twentieth century he copied or summarized portions of his original wartime letters to his fiancée, while also incorporating material from a friend’s 1862 diary, postwar correspondence with doctors and patients, original hospital records, and postwar reminiscences written by others who had worked at the hospital. Wilder pulled these sources together, using italics, parentheses, and other notations to indicate the sources of his “recollections.” The editor reproduces the book in the form that Wilder had originally written it (which is good as it helps readers know the sources of the material); however, the format takes some getting used to.
One wishes at times that Wilder had offered greater detail when describing some of the people he met or the scenes he witnessed. Nevertheless, readers interested in the medical history of the war will find much to commend this short volume.
The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains: Confederate Nationalism, Sectionalism, and White Supremacy in Bartow County, Georgia. By Keith S. Hebert. Maps, tables, endnotes, bibliography, index, 282 pp., 2017. University of Tennessee Press, www.utpress.org. $50 hardcover.
Reviewed by Stephen Davis
Bartow County is located in hilly northwest Georgia. Its county seat is thirty-five miles northwest of Atlanta and almost sixty miles south of Chattanooga. The area was settled by whites after the Cherokees were expelled; the state legislature created the county in 1832. Agriculture was the antebellum economic mainstay, yielding wheat, cotton and tobacco. Slaveholding plantations developed in the Etowah River valley; yeoman farmers without slaves tilled the Piedmont uplands. Ore deposits gave rise to iron works such as Mark Cooper’s plant on the Etowah. Completion in 1850 of the Western & Atlantic Railroad, combined with the cotton boom of the ‘50s, brought increased population and prosperity. Not everyone enjoyed the latter, though; tenant farmers comprised a third of households in 1860.
This is the backdrop provided by Keith S. Hebert in his The Long Civil War in the North Georgia Mountains. The author, who teaches at Auburn University, came upon his subject naturally. He grew up in Bartow, and went to school there before attending the University of West Georgia (he took his Master’s and Ph.D. at Virginia Tech). Hebert thus brings local knowledge and the historian’s skills to this study.
When war came, white men rallied to the Confederate cause. Poor farmers flocked to the colors alongside the well-off valley planters. All were motivated, as Hebert writes, by “kin networks and a desire to defend their homes from Federal invaders.” Beneath this, the author astutely concludes, lay a “shared understanding” of what many Confederates were fighting for: “white supremacy, black inferiority, and optimism that the future protection of slavery might provide an avenue for upper mobility for all white men.” Over 2,000 men from the county joined the Confederate army, including ¾ of those aged 18 to 35.
They enlisted in such companies as the Bartow Yankee Killers, and went off to the front, many of them to Virginia with Col. Francis S. Bartow’s 8th Georgia. After Bartow was killed at Manassas, local lawmakers called for the state legislature to change the county name. Originally it had been Cass County, named for Lewis Cass, President Jackson’s Secretary of War (who had helped with the Indian removal). By vote of the General Assembly it became Bartow County; the county seat, Cassville, was also renamed Manassas.
War came to Georgia in 1864, when Sherman launched his Atlanta campaign. As Johnston’s army retreated through north Georgia, soldiers from Bartow felt tempted to fall out and slip away. “Many went home,” Hebert writes; “30 percent of all Bartow County soldiers serving in the Army of Tennessee deserted during the Atlanta Campaign, most in May of 1864.”
When the Yankees neared, many civilians fled, but a number stayed behind to guard their property. The area’s Unionist minority, of course, was thrilled at the sight of Federal troops, as were slaves. Even when the front moved south as Sherman approached Atlanta, Federals remained in Bartow, guarding the W. & A. Railroad. Civilians coming into contact with the occupiers experienced a baffling range of behavior, both gentlemanly kindness and ruffian cruelty. Fear of looters was constant.
Hostilities returned in early October when Hood marched through the area en route (eventually) to north Alabama. Union forces followed, and their presence provoked increased guerrilla attacks, especially along the railroad. Sherman ordered reprisals, including the burning
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of civilians’ homes; the town of Cassville/Manassas was burned on November 5. When Sherman left Atlanta for the sea, the Federals gave up the railroad. In the vacuum of authority, bands of irregulars and Confederate deserters preyed on civilians, particularly Unionists still in the area. A semblance of order returned when C.S. authorities created a Department of North Georgia, commanded by Brig. Gen. William T. Wofford. Three weeks after Appomattox, Wofford surrendered his troops to Union Brig. Gen. Henry M. Judah at a house in Kingston. It’s still standing, as I saw on a recent visit.
Professor Hebert’s research is impressive, from county census records to the papers at Chapel Hill of the Barnsley family (prominent Bartow landowners), to Lucy Cunyus’ county history, to a mountain of scholarly secondary literature. His work, though, is not without error. General Henry Judah appears as “Benjamin.” I was puzzled not to see Jenkin Lloyd Jones’ History of the 6th Wisconsin Battery listed in the bibliography, even though the author refers to it (albeit as “Jenkins”). The Wisconsin artillerymen occupied a fort overlooking the Etowah River for several months. (The earthwork is still there, if you choose to climb up the brambled slope.) Lacking from the index is any listing for Cass or Bartow County; I had to scour for the county’s population in 1860.
As a work of local Confederate history, Hebert’s study ranks to me as unmatched. Kudos to this scholarship from a historian who grew up there and, as we often like to say, walked the ground.
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 Spring 2017.
Let me say right up front—this is a work of fiction. However, this fiction is taken from primary sources and is influenced by some of the newest thinking in secondary sources, such as Michael C.C. Adams’ Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War and Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death
By Thomas P. Lowry M.D.
and the American Civil War. Author George Bryjak, a teacher of sociology and criminology at the University of San Diego for twenty-four years, has done a sensitive, scholarly job of weaving together the words of those touched by the war into a manuscript that reads like a one-act play—one I would love to see. Bryjak is, in fact, a playwright as well as a history buff.
The premise of Voices is this: twenty-six fictional persons are given a “voice” created from primary sources pertinent to their character. The result is a relatively short (averaging two-tothree pages) piece told in his/her own words. There are thirteen women and thirteen men; half are from the North and half from the South; eight are African-American and two are children. Each piece is preceded by a “short, factual introduction about a particular event or situation,” according to author Bryjak. Then the fictional narrators “provide insight into these events by giving them a face, a voice, and a cohesive story.” I have used Bryjak’s words because they perfectly describe the process by which this book is constructed.
Letters, diaries, interviews, and a touch of creativity bring these fictional characters to life. For instance, in the chapter “Take Me Jesus,” a seventy-one year-old black female living on a Georgia plantation in December 1864 expresses the feelings of many when she says, “I stayin’ right here.” Even Sherman’s promise of freedom doesn’t tempt this older slave. She is fully aware that racism and discrimination will continue, North as well as South. All she asks for is a “good rest and a life o’ not bein’ afraid all the time.” Through her words, the reader is transported into the mind of an elderly enslaved woman who has lived on a plantation all her life. Freedom is something she cannot imagine and frankly, she is not certain she can live as a free person. She sings:
Another character is a fifty-two year-old white male preacher who presents a sermon based on the Biblical interpretation used in the South to justify the enslavement of almost four million people. Yet another is an elite Richmond matron during the bread riots of 1863, and still another is a relatively young Union soldier
INDIAN WARS
The Union hanged Major Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville. They should have hanged Confederate Brigadier General John Henry Winder and, if the South had won, they would have been justified in hanging Union Colonel William Hoffman.
A detailed study of prison nutrition (and Malnutrition), and who was responsible, forms the introduction to the dramatic stories of 292 Virginia rebels who escaped prison by joining the US Volunteers and going West to
confined to a hospital after the war. He suffers delusional ideas from the stress of nearly being buried alive, intense survivor’s guilt, and sees no future ahead of him worth living.
George Bryjak has carefully chosen his characters to represent all ages, both sexes, and many life positions. In his introductions it is impossible to find any political bias one way or another. Each person is an example of many, and is an amalgam of primary sources. This approach has helped him bring each individual “person” to life. They are neither named nor pictured but anyone who has read the collections of diaries, letters and slave interviews will immediately find him/ herself on familiar ground.
Rather than toss this book into some heap labeled “Civil War Fiction,” this little gem ought to be read and then reread. After all, fiction is a very common genre with which to introduce any topic, and many will attest that reading a fiction book or viewing a movie was the “gateway drug” into a lifelong passion of some variety. I am hopeful that someone creates a one-act play from its pages. The passages ring so true, and it would be one more way to get others interested in the
Civil War. Also, if the reader can suspend disbelief long enough to take each character at his or her word, this book is a safe way to examine the ideas of those who might have thought differently from the preconceived ideas of others. In today’s politically charged atmosphere, that opportunity is rare.
Meg Groeling, bloodnight@aol.com, is a contributor to the blog Emerging Civil War, author of The Aftermath of Battle: The Burial of the Civil War Dead, and is currently working on First Fallen: The Life & Times of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth. She resides in Hollister, Cal.