“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
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(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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New Titles from Stephen Davis
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.