North Carolina’s War in “Pres ent Tense” Compelling
The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina. By Philip Gerard. Selected sources, bibliographical references, illustrations, photographs, index, 327 pp., 2019. University of North Carolina Press. www.uncpress.org $28 cloth.
Reviewed by Joan Wenner, J.D.
This book is billed as “the story of the Civil War in North Carolina, through the eyes of those who lived it”—meaning, through their letters and diaries, along with communications of commanders on both sides. And that it is. War is personal on many levels, and it is not an easy task to write as if events were happening at the present moment, as accomplished by this North Carolina author.
The Last Battleground is composed in 43 clear and concise vignettes as the long journey from secession to surrender. For those of us who have visited battlefields in Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and elsewhere, where Tar Heel regiments fought, it can’t help but leave an indelible impression.
This overview of Civil War North Carolina is told by inhabitants, soldiers, military commanders, blockaders and blockade runners, politicians, deserters and the deserted, bummers and the bummed out, planters and farmers, and “contraband” (General Butler’s word), fort defenders and attackers, news reporters and editors, medical and religious people, tradesmen and railroaders. It also involves the Old North State’s band of Unionists that the author calls “Jefferson Davis’s worst nightmare come true”—the enemy from within.
There is sufficient depth to make for an ideal read, particularly for North Carolinians in these 327 captivating pages.
New Perspectives on the Civil War. Edited by Gary Gallagher and Elizabeth Varon. Illustrations, notes, index, bibliography, 260 pp., 2019. Fordham University Press, www.fordhampress.com. $35 paperback.
Reviewed by Wayne L. Wolf
Gary W. Gallagher’s excellent book The Union War clearly defined the importance and meaning of Union to Civil War participants. He now unites with Elizabeth Varon to present eight essays by noted historians that explain how the fight for the Union and the destruction of the domestic aristocracy of the South, along with the institution of slavery, took on a myriad of opinions among individuals. While seeking to preserve the Union, they exhibited widely diverse political, economic, religious and cultural differences.
Two of these essays stand out for their treatment of individuals beset by internal conflicts over the meaning of Union, the support for democracy, and the means used to achieve victory. In the first, “Edward Bates and the Disunionist Dangers of Radical Rhetoric,” Jesse George- Nichol cogently details how Bates, the conservative icon of Lincoln’s cabinet, tried to moderate Lincoln’s use of inflammatory phrases which he felt only fueled the fears of Southern secessionists and made compromise more difficult. He was continuously trying to keep Lincoln out of the radical abolitionist camp and pushing toward a compromise that was the hallmark of antebellum political strategy. He desired to preserve the Union the Founding Fathers designed and avert a fratricidal war. While he was ultimately unsuccessful, his quest illustrated the division in the Republican Party and the nation as a whole on what a united Union should look like. Should Bates have been the Republican nominee in 1860 would Civil War been averted and another compromise fashioned to preserve the Union?
Michael T. Caires’ essay on Salmon P. Chase sheds new light on Chase’s vision for the creation of a national banking system to bind the states together into a stronger, more interdependent Union. National banking became a step toward not only centralizing political and economic control in Washington, but also fostering a sense of nationalism that would be stronger than prewar states’ rights allowed. Thus the drive to preserve the Union set the rhythm and pulse of political,
It is strange to start a review by recalling a running skit done by the late great Steve Allen, but it dawned on me about a third into this book how appropriately it fits. Steve would grab a copy of the newspaper and read the letters to the editor with the passion and anger in which they were written. He would pound the desk and get the audience involved.
Once I recalled this running skit, I then started reading the first third again. It seemed to me a whole new experience. I was now visualizing the veterans as they told or wrote these stories. The words jumped out at me with their pain, confusion and feeling of disrespect for their time in uniform.
The key in this book is that Mr. economic and cultural thought in the United States until the present.
The remaining essays illustrate a wide continuum of perspectives that vividly point out that not all Americans shared in the Lincoln administration’s view on how or why the Civil War was necessary. Political parties were divided on the reasons, methods and values the country should stand for. These differences are manifest today in the states’ rights vs. federalism concept of the Constitution’s meaning, the definition of citizenship, and the judicial battles over civil rights. Each essay contributes to a better understanding of the wide differences of opinion during the Civil War and in the decades that followed.
Each essay included is thought-provoking, well written, and comprehensively annotated. New perspectives from the common soldier, the press, religious leaders, social reformers and politicians add to the understanding of the role each played in saving the Union and forging a lasting reconciliation. Thus it is easy to recommend this volume to the intellectual historian seeking a fresh look at patriotism and sentiment during the Civil War.
Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College in Illinois and past president of the Lincoln-Davis Civil War Roundtable. He has written numerous books and articles on the Civil War and is currently seeking diaries and letters of common soldiers for a better understanding of the ordeal they faced during the conflict.
Owen includes men who fought for the North or South in numerous regiments. What ties these men together is that they all settled in Texas after the war. Owen also allows the reader to decide on the validity of the stories on their own, with only a few exceptions. One example is the story told by Howard Diven; the author found no record of his service.
Readers will find amazing recollections of the pain of prisoner of war camps, the loss of comrades, and Confederates’ need to figure out why their actions failed at Gettysburg.
One can read in their own words the confusion they felt about why they lost the battle. Many “lost cause” items are
A Great Sacrifice: Northern Black Soldiers, Their Families, and the Experience of Civil War. By James G. Mendez. Notes, index, appendix, 304 pp., 2019. Fordham University Press, www.fordhampress.com. $35 softbound.
As the topic of the American Civil War opens up to a wider variety of scholarship, more books like James Mendez’s A Great Sacrifice are becoming available. This book is part of the Fordham University Press series “The North’s Civil War.” This collection encompasses the antebellum development and postbellum effects of the war as it affected the homefront and the armies of the North. A Great Sacrifice examines how black soldiers and their families viewed participation in the Civil War. As his sources, Mendez has used letters written primarily by or for northern black women and addressed to both Union military and political officials, including President Lincoln. These women were the mothers, daughters, wives, sisters, and family friends of black men serving in the Union army.
This collective voice of those left behind gives readers a look at the issues faced by black families. Most families were small, including a mother, father, and two children. The male parent
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was the primary breadwinner, and the loss of his earning power often sent his family into crisis. The options available to white families—money saved, other wage earners, available family members to help provide care and support—were rarely available to black families. Dependence on charities, often begun within the black community itself, and state agencies which served all Union soldier families were often the only buffers between a decent existence and starvation. Black families attempted to have access to the rightful wages of their men, but this was difficult. The frustration and humiliation felt in the letters are evident in the pleading and apologizing of the letter-writers.
Service as a Union soldier was hard on everyone, but black families left behind faced an almost impossible situation. Their soldiers had little or no pay to send home, battlefield conditions were more lethal for black soldiers due to Confederate policies, camp conditions were particularly onerous as white officers routinely assigned the worst camp chores to black soldiers, and there was no chance of any significant promotion opportunity. Most of the letters sent to the army and the government from those left behind asked the same question: “where is my soldier?”
There was a variety of answers. The constant movement of armies made finding any specific soldier challenging, even though USCT units were often the subjects of newspaper articles. Another common issue was illness and hospitalization. When a soldier was injured and sent to the army hospital, he often became lost in the red tape of the medical system. His fellow soldiers might not know what had happened to their comrade, the soldier might be listed under an incorrect name—a common occurrence when the man had formerly been enslaved and did not care to be found by his owner, or the soldier’s unit might leave the area permanently without information concerning those left behind. The Union army had difficulty finding “missing” men. Incorrect information often delayed bonuses due, money owed, or pensions for a widow or child, regardless of the soldier’s race.
Another issue affecting black families more than white ones was the enlistment periods of many men. Since black soldiers did not enlist until 1863, their tour of duty often did not end when the war itself ended. Many black soldiers were kept in the army to serve as occupation troops in the South. Others were sent west to deal with the implementation of policies concerning Native Americans. Many ended up in Texas doing a little bit of both. It was remarkably difficult for black families to see white soldiers returning home in significant numbers while their men still served. By the end of 1865, however, all twenty-six northern black regiments were mustered out of service and could return home.
This period of sacrifice by black families deserves inclusion when the story of the Union war effort is told. The soldiers’ story is only one part of the narrative. The efforts of those left behind, often to fend for themselves and their families, is very much a part of the history of the Civil War. Author James G. Mendez, Associate Dean of Student Affairs and Associate Professor in the Department of Medical Education at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, has allowed his readers an enlightening ear to the voices of black families left at home during the Civil War. They are an essential part of the northern homefront and deserve this attention. A Great Sacrifice goes a long way toward this effort.
Meg Groeling received her Master’s Degree in Military History, with a Civil War emphasis, in 2016 from American Public University. Savas Beatie published her first book, The Aftermath of Battle: The Burial of the Civil War Dead, in the fall of 2015. She has been working on the manuscript for First Fallen: The Life of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, since 2011. She is a regular contributor to the blog Emerging Civil War.
Forgotten Voices Now Heard
Reviewed by Patrick McCawley
The 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union Army in the Civil War played an important role in the war effort and a more crucial role in the struggle for freedom and citizenship for black Americans. The first of those many soldiers were the men of the First South Carolina Volunteers. Organized in the spring and summer of 1862 from the freed slaves concentrating around the recently established Union stronghold of Port Royal Sound, S.C., their story serves to illustrate the early political struggle to arm African Americans and the larger fight to prove their worth as fighting men. Despite published firsthand accounts of the regiment, its lack of combat service in major campaigns has limited the unit’s exposure to the general Civil War public—a problem this book seeks to correct.
John Saucer recounts in detail the first year of the regiment; its early recruitment, its organization and training around Beaufort and its initial combat during raids along the Georgia and Florida coast. An early component of Saucer’s story is the struggle of abolitionist General David Hunter to get official recognition of the unit amidst Lincoln’s resistance to black participation in the war in order to keep the loyalty of border slave states. Saucer credibly provides the context for the creation of the unit in his early chapters.
The story of the First South Carolina is vividly told through Saucer’s use of first-hand accounts. From Army Life in a Black Regiment, the memoir of the unit commander, Thomas W. Higginson, to the unpublished letters of the unit surgeon, Seth Rogers, and the numerous firsthand accounts of soldiers and civilians stationed in the Port Royal area, Saucer has done an outstanding job of assembling a variety of sources to tell this story. He ably includes accounts from the Official Records and Confederate soldiers who fought against the unit—no small feat given the minor raids described. The reader does get a full account of the unit through training and its early combat campaigns.
What is missing is a real sense of the enlisted men who made up the unit, except as presented through the eyes of the white officers and civilians who interacted with the unit around Beaufort. Susie King Taylor’s (the unit’s laundress) Reminiscences of My Life in Camp is listed only five times as a specific source. A lack of letters and postwar writings from freed slaves would be expected, but he does cite two pension applications connected to the unit. Is it possible there might be more to be uncovered?
The significance of the regiment cannot be denied, but its limited combat role raises the question of why the complete history of this regiment could not be told in one volume. One of the roles of a historian is to make choices. Saucer includes plenty of details and lots of quotes from his sources, but a more thoughtful use of the material would have improved the narrative. While he could be commended for his effort to discuss the strategic and tactical problems of the Battle of the Hundred Pine, the eleven pages devoted to what amounted to a couple of quick volleys in the dark seems overdone even to one who enjoys the mundane. Most readers would also trade the chapter-by-chapter alphabetical list of sources and the thirty pages of explanatory end notes for specific source citations (especially with the quoted material), some nice maps and a good index. This book would have benefited from a good and judicious editor, but I still applaud the author for bringing the regiment back to the attention of the Civil War community.
Patrick McCawley, Supervisor of Record Services for the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, oversees the agency’s archival collection and records management functions. He has more recently coordinated the department’s present exhibit on Reconstruction in South Carolina and is currently working on a new exhibit focused on South Carolina’s Revolution of 1719.
Resistance, Resources & Race
Alabamians in Blue: Freedmen, Unionists, and the Civil War in the Cotton State. By Christopher M. Rein. Appendix, notes, bibliography, index, 298 pp., 2019. Louisiana State University Press, www.lsupress.org. $47.50 cloth.
Reviewed by Katelyn Brown
The ongoing discussion over Southern Unionists is wellknown, due to books such as The Free Victoria Bynum’s State of Jones. Yet many of these works tell only a small piece of the story, leaving space for scholars like Christopher Rein to expand beyond single communities of dissenters to encompass entire Confederate states. In Alabamians in Blue, Rein adopts a unique perspective to tell the story of the many Alabamians, both black and white, who demonstrated their undying support for the Union by joining the Federal army.
Rein’s argument is complex and multi-faceted, asserting first that the contributions of anti-Confederate Alabamians within the Federal army were important but largely overlooked. Second, he demonstrates that those men who joined the Union army did so largely in response to practical concerns (rather than ideological ones), motivated by the competition over resources that has shaped all of Alabama’s history. And third, Rein shows that Alabama Unionists’ efforts present a unique example of racial cooperation. In support of these assertions, the book begins with a description of Alabama’s settlement, using an environmental history framework to demonstrate the ways in which the state’s antebellum history was shaped by an ongoing battle over resources. It then moves into the Civil War, beginning with the presence of Unionist sentiment in the state and how those dissenters resisted Confederate policy. The second half of the book focuses on the military engagements and campaigns in which Alabamians in blue uniforms participated, and the “tangible service” that these men provided to the Union in defeating well-known Confederate commanders, particularly Nathan Bedford Forrest and John Bell Hood. The book concludes with an analysis of Unionists’ lives following the war’s end throughout Reconstruction.
With so many goals and points of focus, it is easy for the reader to lose the thread within the book; however, it becomes easier to follow once placed alongside Margaret Storey’s Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction, which explores the guerrilla warfare that Unionist Alabamians experienced on the homefront. Rein’s book appears to be an answer to Storey’s title, building off her argument for Alabama’s significance and uniqueness while addressing gaps he perceived in her work. Rein’s work seeks in part to address the “false dichotomy” between the conventional and unconventional methods of warfare that he believes scholars like Storey have created, asserting the importance of military campaigns as well as guerrilla warfare. Storey’s work also offers a map that is useful for readers of Alabamians in Blue, as Rein references counties, cities, and regions both within Alabama and in the surrounding states that can be hard to follow if the reader does not know the geography of the area.
With his unique use of environmental history, Rein’s use of resources as a lens for understanding slavery is particularly effective, as he presents labor as a resource worth fighting over. This lens is also a crucial part of the second prong of his argument, as it illustrates the many ways in which the Union Army provided relief for Unionists who had been cut off from resources by Confederate authorities. The most effective application of this lens is the conclusion, however, which extends the timeline of the book to modern Alabama. By showing how the political landscape of Alabama has changed in response to the continued fight over resources (now defined as votes and labor) since the Civil War, he provides a compelling image of the issues facing both the Yellowhammer State and the United States as a whole.
Katelyn Brown is the Digital Project Specialist for the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore. She has published articles in Ohio Valley History and Military Images and is currently working on her first book.
Marketing the Blue & Gray: Newspaper Advertising and the American Civil War. By Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr. Notes, bibliography, index, 239 pp., 2019. Louisiana State University Press, www.lsupress.org. $47 cloth.
Reviewed by Stephen Davis
“Newspapers were the primary means of advertising during the mid-nineteenth century,” Lawrence Kreiser reminds us in the opening pages of his new and welcome work, Marketing the Blue & Gray. The author further contends that “Civil War historians, in turn, have long cited newspapers but have ignored the advertisements.” I’ll go further: that’s because scholarly writing about Civil War newspapers, both Northern and Southern, has really only hit its stride in, say, the last twenty years. Examples of recent, notable works are Ford Risley, Civil War Journalism (2012); Patricia G. McNeely, Debra Reddin van Tuyll and Henry H. Schulte, eds., Knights of the Quill: Confederate Correspondents and their Civil War Reporting (2010) and Debra Reddin van Tuyll, The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War (2012).
Professor Kreiser, who teaches at Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, makes the point that businesses advertising in their local newspapers seized upon the public’s (again, whether Northern or Southern) war fervor and used propagandistic war themes in their ads to better market their products. The author looked at 550 newspapers to form his conclusions. War-related ad headlines were employed to sell goods, such as the notice blaring “Sundries and Southern Rights.” Kreiser discerns what may be called nationwide advertising; “publishing companies and patent medicine makers were the most prolific in advertising across the Union and Confederacy.” The author also examines how advertising themes related—or did not relate—to the war’s shifting fortunes. I was struck by Kreiser’s conclusion that “in Confederate newspapers, the phrasing of slave announcements remained slick and self-assured, even while the slaveholders’ republic crumbled.”
…struck the more so because that’s what Bill Hendrick and I are seeing in the wartime pages of the Atlanta Intelligencer. For our book, tentatively titled The War Comes Home: The Atlanta Daily Intelligencer and the Civil War, we are reading every copy of the newspaper we can find (Atlanta History Center microfilm, thank you). On May 15, 1863, Crawford, Frazer & Co., “Auctioneers and Dealers in Negroes” located at 8 Whitehall Street downtown, took out an advertisement that prominently declared, “Our NEGRO YARD AND LOCK-UP, at No. 8, are SAFE AND COMFORTABLE.” The point was that Crawford and Frazer took good care of “our stock” with capabilities to “feed and lodge [them] well.” As we write in our manuscript, the merchants made clear that they took good care of their merchandise: “sleeping apartments and cook house” were “closely looked after,” so that “our stock is thereby kept in health.”
Not only were slave traders advertising vigorously in the spring of 1863, but their “stock” continued to fetch high prices. In mid-April 1863—note, this was four months after Lincoln had issued his Emancipation Proclamation, arguably the deathknell of the South’s peculiar institution—the Intelligencer reported that Crawford and Frazer had auctioned “a likely waiter” for $3,500 and “a likely maid servant” for $3,000. The high prices that white people were willing to pay, as we point out, attested as much to their confidence in the future of Southern slavery as to their need for labor.
Southern traders’ advertising of slaves and Southern purchasers’ buying of them (in the midst of a war ostensibly aimed at destroying slavery) illustrates one of Lawrence Kreiser’s conclusions. Civil War newspaper advertising tells us a whole lot more about contemporary attitudes and emotions than we have previously thought about.
Steve Davis is Book Review Editor for Civil War News. His and Bill’s book on the Atlanta Daily Intelligencer is under contract with the University of Tennessee Press.
Reviewed by Joan Chaconas
Having worked at the Surratt House Museum, I have read many books about the Lincoln assassination. The standard story heard in school is that Booth, a staunch Southerner, felt Lincoln must be done away with and only he was up to doing it. On the morning of April 14, Booth finds out Lincoln will be going to Ford’s Theater, and he decides this is his perfect opportunity. He gets his band of cohorts together for a meeting and assigns them their jobs. Booth shoots Lincoln and then the various questions develop. Did Booth act alone? Did he have help from the Confederates? Were the Confederates the ones leading the murder plot and using Booth as the marksman? Was the Catholic Church behind it? There are many avenues to travel in these directions, but travel no more: Judge Sandy Prindle feels he has found the answers in his new book, Booth’s Confederate Connections.
In the recently discovered “lost confession” of conspirator George Atzerodt, he makes mention of the fact that Booth had to hurry to accomplish his plan or the New York group would beat him to it. They had a plan to blow up the White House. Fortunately, this was discovered and stopped. But by using some of Atzerodt’s comments in this discovered “lost confession” and following the various trips of John Surratt, Jr. and his alluring traveling companion Sarah Slater, Prindle believes strongly that John and his mother were keys to John Wilkes Booth’s murder plans through the messages given to John by Judah Benjamin. He argues that even though the messages were secret, Surratt must have known what was in them. Thus, he knew murder was the aim, and he took measures to remove himself from the area of Ford’s Theatre when it would happen, and made sure people saw him at those other locations. As for John’s lengthy escape, he talked too much for his own good. One person he talked to was Henri Beaumont de Sainte Marie. Surratt told Marie that the assassins had “acted under the orders” of persons under Davis and strongly pointed to Judah Benjamin. All this information had been passed on to the government in 1866. Our author thinks this 1866 statement of Marie is pertinent and is evidence that points directly to the Confederacy and to those responsible.
The South was losing the war at this point. Richmond had been evacuated and Davis was on the run. Did Jefferson Davis condone murder or was Benjamin the real mastermind? Did he tell Davis of his plan? When it appeared that Richmond was going to be evacuated, kidnapping Lincoln was no longer viable. Now enters the New York group and their plan to blow up the White House. There is strong evidence that Judah Benjamin withdrew fifteen hundred dollars from Confederate funds for this project and gave it to demolition expert Thomas Harney. This plan obviously failed. On this same day, John Surratt was paid for his courier service. John Jr. made many trips and carried many messages for Benjamin; he was very welcome at his office.
It was the last ditch for the Confederacy. The Dahlgren Raid had pushed them over the edge. No more “mister nice guy.”
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Whether true or not, Confederate higher-ups believed the raid aimed for their deaths, with Benjamin first on the death-list. Benjamin kept a low profile while working on the murder plan that Booth carried out.
After the war Judah Benjamin left the country and never came back. After a very arduous trip to England he eventually led a very good life, earning more than eighty thousand dollars a year.
When John came back from his last trip for Benjamin, he arrived in Washington and had a brief stopover at his mother’s house. A few words were spoken and he left. Was Booth a late visitor at the Surratt house and did Mrs. Surratt give him a message? Our author believes it was Mrs. Surratt who gave the message to Booth—not to capture Lincoln, and but to kill him—and it was given by way of Judah Benjamin’s messages to her son John.
Case closed. Or is it? Judge Prindle has presented a strong line of evidence that leads to the top Confederate leadership. By following the various stops of John and Sarah Slater, using the various clues in the newly discovered Atzerodt statement, and connecting them to Booth’s movements, he has given us a logical trail. They lead to Judah Benjamin and his plans. It seems that the Confederacy was behind Booth’s assassination all along.
The Judge’s book belongs in your library. Get it!
Joan is historian at the Surratt House museum and has been consultant for several television productions on the Lincoln assassination story. She was the one who found the missing Atzerodt statement in the mid-seventies.
Lions Of The Dan The Untold Story Of Armistead’s Brigade. By J. K. Brandau. Photos, endnotes, bibliography, index, 282 pp., 2020. Morgan James Publishing, www.MorganJamesPublishing.com. $18.95 softbound.
Reviewed by Joe Bordonaro
This informative book tells the story of General Lewis Armistead’s brigade from its formation by units enlisted from the Pittsylvania County area of southeastern Virginia in 1861, to its surrender with General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in April 1865.
A number of books have looked at General Armistead’s brigade but have focused on its involvement in the Pickett-Pettigrew- Trimble charge on July 3 at Gettysburg. General Armistead himself, of course, famously fell at the climax of this charge. This book is unique in that it looks at the entire history of the brigade and hence relates, as the subtitle of the book indicates, the untold story of Armistead’s brigade.
The author has obviously done a tremendous amount of research, as a glance at the extensive bibliography will show. He also has gone beyond published works and has researched unpublished manuscripts. This research provided the author with a wealth of information on Armistead’s brigade and its component regiments.
To a large extent, the history of Armistead’s brigade is intertwined with the history of Pittsylvania County, as seventy percent of all infantry from this county served in the brigade. The author explains how the county was guided in its growth by members of Virginia’s “First Families of Virginia,” while the bulk of the white population (55% of the county; the rest was black) consisted of farmers descended from settlers. Many of the settlers were descendents of colonial dissidents, outcasts and non-English immigrants. Despite this disparate background, the inhabitants of Pittsylvania County (watered by the Dan River) proved through the course of the war that they were “Lions of the Dan.”
The campaigns and battles of Armistead’s brigade are covered in much detail in this book. Its one serious shortcoming is the complete absence of maps detailing this fighting, or depicting Pittsylvania County itself. The author does include enough detail to make it possible to follow the course of the brigade’s combat. But the brigade spent a considerable amount of time on detached duty from the Army of Northern Virginia, and these areas are not as familiar to most readers as those where the Army’s main battles occurred, so the absence of maps is particularly unfortunate when the history of this detached service is recited.
When the brigade did serve with the army, it suffered considerably more than it did during its various detached services, as in the disastrous charges at Malvern Hill in 1862 and Gettysburg in 1863. The famous charge that the brigade made at Gettysburg is covered in much detail, as is the heroic death of its leader, Lewis Armistead. Ironically, Armistead was not looked upon favorably by the army’s command prior to the battle of Gettysburg for a variety of reasons. His death, however, has forever enshrined him as the epitome of a heroic combat leader. The brigade continued on under other leaders and the author relates this “untold story.” The story has been “untold” because most interest in the brigade has heretofore terminated upon reading of its charge at Gettysburg. Its hardest fighting actually occurred after that battle and is of considerable interest to a student of the war.
Every combat in which the brigade, or its component regiments, fought is covered in some detail. Included in this detail are references to various members of the brigade and how they fared in these battles. This personalization of the account makes it possible for the reader to make a connection to these soldiers and so brings them to life in a way that standard regimental histories often do not.
This history is recommended to those readers interested in the soldiers who fought for, and were from, Virginia. Much can be learned from the book about Pittsylvania County, pre-war Virginia, economic and race relations in the county, Virginia’s secession from the Union, and, of course, the fighting that the “Lions of the Dan” were involved in during their long and bloody struggle.
Joe Bordonaro is a veteran of the USAF (1973–77), taught for 25 years in elementary and middle schools, and has been reenacting the Civil War for the past 20 years. He has been writing articles for Civil War News for the past several years, focusing on the reenacting and living history communities.
Reviewed by Frank J. Williams
Reviewed by Joseph Truglio
Noah Brooks was born in Castine, Maine in 1830. He was educated locally and upon finishing high school promptly left to find his fame and fortune. From an early age he exhibited a wanderlust. He tried his hand at many occupations and endeavors. For example, he was a painter, artist, writer, reporter, editor, novelist, prospector, political spy, Challenges is the tale of the last six weeks of President Abraham Lincoln’s life. Those six weeks were an extraordinary time not only for the president, but also for the nation that reverberates to this day.
During those six weeks, Lincoln gave his celebrated Second Inaugural Address. He worked with his generals and supervised the battles that led to the end of the Civil War. He learned of General Ulysses S. Grant’s acceptance of General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia. And he was felled by assassin John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre.
Interestingly and carefully, the author describes Lincoln’s daily routine as he guided our nation during the end of the war. These small but important events shed light on how President Lincoln commanded the loyalty of so many during this time. His inauguration is described in detail from Mrs. Lincoln’s ball gown to the inaugural ball attendees. During this time, Lincoln greeted visitors to his ball. He asked the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass what he thought about
confidant to a President and naval officer, amongst other occupations. He travelled from coast to coast, never staying long in any one place.
He met Lincoln for the first time in 1856 in Dixon, Illinois. It was a brief encounter but made an impression on Lincoln. After getting elected president, they met again with Brooks now a reporter for a local newspaper. They seemed to get on famously. Lincoln liked Brooks’ easygoing style and the fact that he never asked for favors. (This was a rarity in that era of lobbyists.) Gradually, Brooks began to write political articles in favor of Lincoln under the name “Castine”—the nom de plume was a popular device of the era. He began to spend much time with Lincoln and started attending political rallies, reporting back to the president about the events. Lincoln found this valuable information. Brooks’ relaxed demeanor made him welcome in all circles and this placed him in an advantageous position. In fact, Lincoln asked him to replace John Hay at the beginning of his second term as his personal secretary. Unfortunately, the assassination ended that opportunity and Brooks was never to hold that office. Soon after this tragedy he his Inaugural Address. He spoke often with Generals Grant and Sherman regarding the battles taking place in Virginia and the battles’ potential for ending the war. He visited a field hospital outside of City Point, Virginia. He read the press reviews and accounts of his Inaugural Address. All the while, he worked diligently to calm his wife, who at that time appeared to be suffering mental health issues that he feared would lead to a nervous collapse. There is a great account of how Washington City and the country celebrated when the end of the war was announced.
This book finds strength in its vivid descriptions of Lincoln’s last six weeks. It describes what many may consider the most important period this country has ever seen. The author’s description of the assassination of Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre is masterful, describing the incident from the viewpoint of audience members before transporting the reader to Lincoln’s box and that fateful shot.
left Washington City for greener pastures.
He wrote a few histories for young readers and achieved a modicum of success. Unfortunately he never achieved the financial success he had always strived for. He eventually went to Pasadena for his health, which slowly deteriorated. Brooks died in 1903.
I found this book a difficult read. For whatever reason it had no flow to the story. Every page is filled with information, yet most it is piecemeal. I was looking for depth and I received snippets. I never really understood just what the author was trying to tell me. I was most disappointed in Temple’s explanation of Brooks’ relationship with Lincoln. This subject takes up about a third of the book, and it too is just one-sentence snippets, reading like modern-day sound bites.
I realize that this is a biography of Noah Brooks and that Lincoln was only a small part of his life. I expected more. For those of you interested in Noah Brooks, it will be a worthy read. For Lincoln students, not so much.
Reviewed by Lawrence K. Peterson
This work appeared to be just what I was looking for: a review of the Civil War in the Trans- Mississippi West. Turns out it wasn’t. Robert Laven indicates in his Preface that he has had an interest in Missouri’s role in the Civil War for many years. He has studied that role and has written an easy-to-read description of it. While he briefly mentions a few actions in the Trans-Mississippi, this is all about Missouri’s specific role, and, as such, is mistitled.
Laven takes the reader through the Civil War in Missouri in a fairly easy style, giving enough detail to make sense of the various actions conducted by both sides during that conflict. There is some inconsistency in spelling. The book abounds with photos. In describing many of the actions, I would have greatly appreciated more maps to help me follow many of the events described. Though familiar with some of them, maps would nonetheless have greatly enhanced this book. Laven soundly documents his narrative, and provides an index as well.
The author briefly mentions the battle of Pea Ridge or Elkhorn Tavern and covers the battle of Mine Creek in Kansas. He essentially does not describe any of the other actions which took place within the Trans-Mississippi other than those in conjunction with Missouri, such as Fort Scott and the sack of Lawrence, Kansas.
My suggestion is that this work be retitled into a history of Missouri in the Civil War. The occasional references to other actions within the Trans-Mississippi help to place Missouri within the context of this area. As it stands, the reader looking for a definitive description of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi will not find it here. Laven has obviously conducted extensive research on the war in the state of Missouri. For those interested in how the Civil War was conducted by both sides within and around Missouri, and that state’s fate in the Civil War, will find that this book provides a good description and reference of those events.
Lawrence K. (Larry) Peterson is President of the Rocky Mountain Civil War Round Table. He has had published three books on the critical decisions of the battle of Chattanooga, and the Kentucky and Atlanta Campaigns in the University of Tennessee Press’ Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series. He is working on the critical decisions of the battle of Perryville.