Reviewed by Christopher L. Kolakowski
As long as military history has been written, there has been a focus on leadership and generalship. The personalities and interplay of various leaders and their subordinates, so critical often to the success or failure of campaigns, is a fruitful topic of study— no matter the era.
The Civil War offers no shortage of leadership and generalship case studies in both theaters. Major characters like Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, Thomas J. Jackson, William T. Sherman, and many others continue to fascinate, educate, and inspire today. Much ground remains to be plowed in considering Civil War generals and generalship.
Richard Sommers is wellknown for his extensive work on U.S. military history, both professionally at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his published work on the Richmond-Petersburg campaigns of 1864-65. An in-demand speaker, Sommers has spoken many places and offered thoughts on Civil War leadership and combat. He has compiled several recent presentations into the current volume of essays. Topics include the generalship of U.S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in 1864 and 1865; Union civilian corps commanders; Union corps commanders at Antietam, Gettysburg and the Overland Campaign; and a final chapter on descendants of famous Revolutionary War figures in the Civil War. (A second volume will discuss tactics, logistics and other matters.)
The reviewer has heard one or two of the above presentations, and enjoyed reliving them in the text. The other presentations/essays were read with considerable interest, and did not disappoint. Sommers’ deep grasp of the subjects shows through in every section. His perspectives are worth consideration by any student of the war, especially of the Eastern Theater.
That said, the book does have some limitations. Several essays, especially those on the corps commanders, are repetitive as the same characters are mentioned. Long and detailed footnotes, while informative, can be distracting. Sommers also gets into technical details that may lose less well-informed readers.
All things considered, Richard Sommers has made an important contribution to understanding the Civil War and leadership. This book is recommended as a reference for any student of Union leadership or the war’s Eastern Theater.
Christopher L. Kolakowski works as a historian in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the author of four books on the American Civil War and World War II, and is a contributor to the Emerging Civil War blog.
Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons: Familiar Responses to an Extraordinary Crisis during the American Civil War By Angela M. Zombek. Notes, bibliography, index, 287 pp., 2018. Kent State University Press, www.KentStateUniversityPress.com. $45 cloth.
Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons places the years 1861–1865 into the broader context of prison in the mid-nineteenth century. I knew little about such things, so this book was very enlightening for me, and author Zombek provides more than enough details to set a reader up for an informed reading experience. In short, prisons in America were places where people convicted of committing a crime were sent to serve their sentences. They were warehouses—certainly not the sort of penitentiaries we know today. Punishment was the purpose, hand-in-hand with rehabilitation. Prisons differed from jails, which were temporary holding areas for the recently arrested or those who had not yet gone to trial.
Prisons housed the poor, illiterate, “rough customer” who got caught breaking the law. Gentlemen were not imprisoned, as a general rule—nor were average citizens who might occasionally drink too much, take something not theirs, or be a bit too aggressive in disciplinary measures used at home. Women were sent to prison as well, usually for theft or prostitution. “Nasty, bad criminals go there, not good folks.” It was into this mindset that the war imposed military prisons, and few knew just what to think about it all.
Before the war there were no facilities designated as military prisons—both Washington and Richmond had to utilize other facilities such as warehouses and abandoned building complexes. Places in areas such as Chicago, Salisbury, and Andersonville needed to either refurbish old buildings or build new ones, some based on such spurious designs as a large enclosure which fenced in prisoners and provided makeshift shelter. There were arguments concerning just who had to pay for military prisons: states did not care to bear the burden of incarcerating and caring for men not their own, and before the war the military had not even considered hospitals, much less prisons. Lastly, there was the ongoing issue of a professional army versus a volunteer army. Federals rounded up after First Bull Run, for example, were sent to prison in Richmond. They were appalled that they were now considered convicts, a role they had not enlisted to play. Suddenly, Union soldiers went from proud volunteers to criminals in prison. Confederate prisoners fared even worse, as many captives from the South at the beginning of the war were often from well-to-do families. They had no idea how to care for themselves in prison, and quickly spoiled their rations and their environment due to ignorance of simple skills like cooking and cleaning.
It did not get better as the war ground on. When prisoner exchanges were cancelled, more and more men were confined, with little planning made for their care. When this information is put into context, as it is in Zombek’s book, the results may be viewed in a new light. The antebellum expectations of prisons- -such as not imposing a financial burden on the citizenry by being self-supporting via workshops and contract labor—suddenly became untenable. Confederate prisoners were certainly not going to help the Union war effort by sewing uniforms or wrapping cartridges. Nor were Union prisoners going to receive the care in a Confederate prison that a
Civil War Catalog Featuring a large assortment of Civil War and Indian War autographs, accoutrements, memorabilia, medals,
insignia, buttons, GAR, documents, photos, & books. Southern man might receive. Guarding prisoners became an onerous and unpopular job when transferred from the realm of public employment to a military duty. Author Zombeck details many of these issues, which occurred on both sides.
Penitentiaries, Punishment, and Military Prisons is a fascinating comparison of institutions, and one that has not been given much attention. The book is heartbreaking in many ways, but the way that it affected me most was the psychological one, in which a soldier was placed in the same position as a criminal. Even a jailbreak could be looked at from many points of view. If it is the duty of a captured soldier to attempt escape, which it was on both sides, then imagine the conflict of a man in prison. He knows he should try to get out, but he also knows that he is putting his life in his hands in the attempt. If he is recaptured, punishment is great as well. Imagine being a young man who was law-abiding until the war, signed up to fight for morally feasible reasons, and for some cause—illness, wound, staying with a fallen friend—suddenly he is a prisoner and is being treated as if he was a criminal.
Angela M. Zombek, an assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, has done extensive research on her topic and has written articles and book chapters about Civil War prisons. With this work she gives readers a serious, empathetic and nuanced look at a topic that affected hundreds of thousands of men. Reverberations of these events continue today in the modern struggle for humane treatment of prisoners.
Meg Groeling of Hollister, Cal., received her Master’s degree in military history, with a Civil War emphasis, in 2016 from American Public University. Her next book, First Fallen: The Life of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, will be published by Southern Illinois University Press.
A View from Across the Pond
Reviewed by Katelyn Brown
When most Americans imagine the Civil War, they picture a strictly American conflict that was fought and thought about only by Americans; however, no historical event happens in a bubble, and the Civil War was no exception. A number of scholars have argued the importance of the Civil War to Britain, a discussion which Hugh Dubrulle joins with this book.
Dubrulle, a history professor at Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, begins with a description of the state of the field, laying out the various scholarly views of Britain’s perspectives on the Civil War. As Dubrulle argues, scholars’ analysis of British opinion has focused on “who believed what,” whereas the field also requires a discussion of “how Britons believed.” With the purpose of the book clearly stated, Dubrulle then moves into a thorough analysis of how the people of Britain thought about Americans before and during the war. Throughout, the author argues that the British viewpoint of Americans was shaped by postcolonial arrogance and the stereotypes that antebellum travel literature had instilled in the British public. Americans were somehow both a familiar extension of the British world while also being an unknown Other.
After beginning with an examination of British perceptions of antebellum Americans, Dubrulle spends most of the book in the analysis of four particular subjects: British perspectives on American racial relations, politics, military, and nationalism. Interestingly, Dubrulle challenges the popular narrative that British attitudes towards the war were shaped by slavery or commerce; instead, he argues that “British opinion was not pro-northern or pro-southern as much as it was pro-British.” As the title suggests, the British public was more ambivalent than anything else.
Dubrulle’s assertion of British ambivalence is a relatively new idea, with most scholars arguing for strong British opinion one way or the other. As the author writes, only a handful of scholars have previously framed British opinion in a nuanced way, including R.J.M. Blackett in Divided Hearts (2001) and D.P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers (1974). Dubrulle adds a new dimension to this argument, however, by arguing that Reconstruction changed British minds regarding the feasibility of its popular government. Surprised by the Federal military victory and the resilience of American nationalism, Britain was forced to reevaluate its ambivalence and therefore to open up a new chapter in Anglo-American relations.
This argument is strengthened by Dubrulle’s opening chapters, in which he describes the perspectives that Britons brought into the start of the Civil War. By opening with such analysis of antebellum perceptions, he provides a crucial foundation from which to convincingly prove the shift in British views of Americans as a result of the war.
Another strength comes from the author’s thorough research and use of a wide variety of primary sources, including newspapers, official correspondence and government archives. By adopting an entirely new lens of analysis on this source base, Dubrulle is able to successfully meet his own challenge of showing how the British perceived Civil Warera Americans, demonstrating that British attitudes towards the war were shaped by an ambivalence formed even before the war began.
While the breadth of his sources is impressive, this thoroughness results in a highly academic work that is quite dense. As a result, it is not a book for the casual reader; however, it does provide a valuable perspective on the international dimensions of the Civil War and the relationship between Britain and the United States.
Katelyn Brown is the Program Coordinator for the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies and Education Assistant for the American Battlefield Trust. She has published articles in Military Images and Ohio Valley History.
“Our Little Monitor”: The Greatest Invention of the Civil War. By Anna Gibson Holloway and Jonathan W. White. Maps, tables, illustrations, photos, notes, appendix, index, 283 pp., 2018. Kent State University Press, www.KentStateUniversityPress.com. $34.95. Hardcover.
What a pleasure to review this comprehensive and fact-filled book. It is co-penned by Jonathan W. White, the former curator of the USS Monitor Center at the Mariners’ Museum & Park, a respected professor and author at Christopher Newport University.
This is partly due to my witnessing the retrieved turret’s arrival in 2002 at Newport News and updating developments at the Museum numerous times since
then for CWN. And how amazing that this “greatest invention” shares center stage with another innovative and technologically advanced craft—the winning 2013 Team Oracle America’s Cup foiling catamaran in a newly launched exhibition.
This is a book of heft that includes many interesting images and illustrations with technical and engineering information. For example, did you know there was a Monitor float in a Grand Army of the Republic parade and later commemorations, and sheet music composed for marches, common for notables at the time? Other photographic images from the period have been often reprinted, while recovered artifacts and discoveries from the modern day would likely be of special interest to Civil War naval buffs, and especially perhaps the undersea images by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary (currently in hopes of its boundaries being expanded.)
The work is divided into two distinct parts. Part 1, containing 177 richly illustrated pages, presents a narrative history of the ironclad Monitor from its beginning designs through construction and her battle at Hampton Roads with the CSS Virginia in March of 1862, the sunken ship’s discovery, to the conservation of those parts and artifacts retrieved (including remains of crew members, their identification and burial).
Part 2, 68 pages, in documentary fashion serves up intriguing and often fascinating first-hand accounts and communications— the real words and unique perspectives of those who experienced the Monitor. They are gleaned from many “untapped materials” and divided into individual chapters. The battle of Hampton Roads in Chapter 10 is particularly interesting, as are Chapter 11 on President Lincoln’s Mailbag March 10-17, 1862, the Engineer’s View in Chapter 12, and the chapters that follow concerning the ship’s repair and personal observations of two surgeons of her final moments.
A terrific book that does in fact pull it all together, as the authors claim, “Our Little Monitor” is for whatever level the reader desires to know about the ship and those connected with her. It is indeed a very definitive account of virtually every aspect of the USS Monitor.
1. Who sent the following mes
3. This Union officer, a son of
4. The preceding officer moved
5. In May 1862 this Northern
6. The arrival of this U.S. ma
Union Generals in the
Western Theater
sage to the Confederate commander at Fort Donelson: “I propose to move immediately upon your works”?
wrote President Lincoln, “I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the 7. This Virginia-born career City of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition”? 8. This intellectually brilliant Irish immigrants, started out serving in Missouri, then distinguished himself as an infantry brigade commander at Perryville and Stones River. He ended the war as commander of all cavalry in the Army of the Potomac. Who? from west to east. Just the opposite occurred with this Federal major general. His mediocre leadership of Hooker’s cavalry in spring 1863 led to his being relieved; he was later reassigned to Sherman’s army in 9. After his lines were broGeorgia. In his raid toward Macon in July 1864, he was pursued and overwhelmed by Confederate cavalry, and forced to surrender himself and much of his command. Who? 10. Recommended by Halleck general was sent to New Orleans after Federal capture of the city. Southerners excoriated him, calling him “Spoons” for alleged thievery of silverware and “Beast” for his famous “Woman Order.” Who?
jor general’s army during Answers found on page 45. the battle of Shiloh is widely seen as saving Grant from defeat in April 1862. But he allowed Bragg and Kirby Smith to maneuver him out
Send your book(s) for review to: CWN Book Review Editor, Stephen Davis 3670 Falling Leaf Lane, Cumming, GA 30041-2087
of middle Tennessee later in the summer. After the battle of Perryville, Ky., on October 8, 1862, Bragg retreated, but this officer failed to pursue. Within two weeks he was canned. Who?
U.S. Army officer earned the famed nickname “Rock of Chickamauga.” Who?
Union general commanded Federal forces from St. Louis early in the war. After Shiloh he assumed command of Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, Buell’s Army of the Ohio and Pope’s Army of the Mississippi, some 110,000 men. But his advance to Corinth, Miss., was so cautious and lethargic that in July 1862 Lincoln kicked him upstairs to become general-in-chief in Washington. Who was this officer, nicknamed “Old Brains”?
ken during the battle of Chickamauga, this commander of the Union Army of the Cumberland was later accused by James A. Garfield of having fled the field. Who? and Grant, this Ohio-born officer was promoted to brigadier in August 1862 and to major general two months later. He led the XVII Corps at Vicksburg and the Army of the Tennessee in Sherman’s Georgia Campaign until his death near Atlanta. Who?
Reviewed by Thomas J. Ryan
Unfortunately for his legacy, George Armstrong Custer is best known for his death in 1876 at the battle of Little Bighorn against the Lakota and Arapaho Tribes in Montana Territory. The general public knows much less about Custer’s exploits and accomplishments during the Civil War of 1861–1865.
Edward G. Longacre, who has focused much of his research and writing career on Civil War cavalry commanders and operations, undertook to clarify and expand upon the historical record of George Custer’s service in the Union army—primarily as a cavalry officer. This is the first of a planned two-part series. Longacre laid the groundwork for his current study with prior publications, including The Cavalry at Gettysburg (1986), General John Buford: A Military Biography (1995), Lincoln’s Cavalrymen (2000) and Lee’s Cavalrymen (2002).
In this current work, Longacre proposes “to identify and correct the myths, misconceptions, and misinterpretations about Custer the man.” He also intends to “add depth to the Custer narrative” by including substantial detail about his life and career.
The author introduces the Ohio native George Armstrong Custer as an impulsive youth, born in 1839, whose hero was General Winfield Scott of Mexican War fame. Custer’s penchant for engaging in pranks and telling jokes was in evidence during his years as a cadet at West Point. His behavior and lack of dedication to the curriculum came within a whisker of ending his status as a cadet, and he graduated last in his class in 1861.
Longacre points out that, depending on their geographic origin, hostility developed between West Point students prior to the Civil War. Yet Custer managed to maintain friendships with cadets from both the North and South. Once he donned the uniform as a Union officer, he retained amenity toward Southern friends and acquaintances—some of whom he met on the battlefield. Politically, he was more in tune with the South regarding lifestyle issues, including slavery, yet maintained an allegiance to the Union of states.
The narrative describes battles in which Custer played a role either in a staff or line function. A paradox is evident concerning the mutual admiration between Custer, a daring young officer, and Maj. Gen. George McClellan, a slow-to-act army commander. Custer failed to find fault with McClellan even in light of the latter’s reluctance to act aggressively during the battle of Antietam and its aftermath.
The author pays considerable attention to Custer’s relationship with young women, and his tenacious, and, at times, overbearing, pursuit of the hand of Libby Bacon—his future wife. While Custer’s social escapades are indicative of his personality, Longacre also details Custer’s facility for maneuvering through the political morass to achieve promotion, as well as important assignments with the assistance of high-ranking military officers.
Indicative of his success in overcoming typical bureaucratic constraints, Custer received promotion from captain to brigadier general in the volunteer service just two years after graduating from West Point. His patron was Maj. Gen. Alfred Pleasonton, Army of the Potomac cavalry corps commander, who saw in this young officer, as well as the fiery and reckless Hugh Judson Kilpatrick, the caliber of leader he wanted commanding his cavalry divisions and brigades.
Longacre focuses in detail on Custer’s courageous performance against Stuart’s more numerous cavalry east of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. Although not as famous as the charge named for Maj. Gen. George Pickett on that same date, Custer’s charge- -while shouting to his Michigan horse soldiers, “Come on, you Wolverines!”—stymied Stuart’s attempt to break through Union defenses behind the main lines. It was an important contribution to the Union victory at Gettysburg.
To insure that Custer’s character and motivation in life are understood, Longacre quotes readily from Custer’s wartime letters. Prior to the retreat of Lee’s army from Gettysburg, the author speculates whether Custer “must have wondered if the general commanding [Maj. Gen. George G. Meade] would be just as happy to see his antagonist escape.” Custer’s loss of patience with Meade’s cautious tendencies is seen in a letter he wrote not long after the Gettysburg campaign, when both armies were back in the same location as when it began.
In a compact, easy-to-read, well-documented narrative, Longacre fills in some blanks in George Custer’s story, and corrects a number of misconceptions. Maps and other illustrations help to keep track of events. The author evaluates Custer’s performance as a West Point cadet, and as an officer in the Union army during the first two years of the war. His projected second volume “will cover the remainder of Custer’s Civil War service and his controversial stint in Texas during the early months of Reconstruction.”
Given the sparsity of historical writings devoted to George Armstrong Custer’s service during the Civil War, Custer devotees as well as a more general audience will no doubt want to add Custer: The Making of a Young General to their collection.
Thomas J. Ryan is the author of the award-winning Spies, Scouts, and Secrets in the Gettysburg Campaign: How the Critical Role of Intelligence Impacted the Outcome of Lee’s Invasion of the North, June-July 1863. His latest book, written with Richard R. Schaus, is titled Lee is Trapped, and Must be Taken: Eleven Fateful Days after Gettysburg, July 4-14, 1863 and is scheduled for publication by Savas Beatie later this Spring.
