Some notable titles in Civil War writing are listed below. Match the book with the author.
1. The 20th Maine: A Volunteer
2. R. E. Lee: A Biography 3. Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951) 4. Return to Bull Run (1993) 5. George B. McClellan: The 6. Decision in the West: The
7. Their Tattered Flags: The
8. Hard Tack and Coffee: The
10. The Killer Angels: A Novel
continued into the nineteenth century, as you can see from the cover of Joseph E. Johnston’s Narrative of Military Operations (1874).
Then there’s the peculiarly titled Memoirs of Robert E. Lee. They’re not General Lee’s memoirs, but Armistead Long’s reminiscences about Lee. Decades ago, when in graduate school, I remember leading an undergrad class. Taking roll, I came upon the name of one Army Long. I asked the gentleman if he was descended from Brigadier General Armistead Lindsay Long, late of the Army of Northern Virginia. (He was.)
I used to work with physicians. As I look at Daniel W. Barefoot’s biography of Robert F. Hoke (1996), I remember learning at a Georgia Orthopaedic Society meeting that the famed Atlanta pediatric orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. Michael Hoke, was the son of the Confederate general!
Fellow bibliophiles will agree that Chapel Hill and LSU stand preeminently among publishers of Civil War books. Not to be forgotten is that a half-century ago,
Regiment in the Civil War (1957) (1934–1935)
Young Napoleon (1988) Atlanta Campaign of 1864 (1992) Epic of the Confederacy (1970) Unwritten Story of Army Life (1887) Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend (1997) (1974) A. Stephen W. Sears B. Douglas Southall Freeman C. Michael Shaara D. John J. Pullen E. Frank E. Vandiver F. Albert Castel G. Bruce Catton H. John J. Hennessy I. James I. Robertson, Jr.
Answers found on page 46.
Indiana University Press turned out its Civil War Centennial Series, with standout reprints such as Jubal Early’s War Memoirs (purchased in 1986 for $22) and Longstreet’s From Manassas to Appomattox ($7.50).
I’ve had authors inscribe my books over the years, and seeing their signatures brings back fond memories. I had James Ramage sign his Rebel Raider in 2000 when we both were speakers at Pamplin Park’s symposium on Cavalry Raids and Guerrillas. Other presenters were Ed Bearss (Brice’s Crossroads), Jeff Wert (Mosby) and Brian Wills (Forrest). My paper was titled, “Civil War Cavalry Raids: Just What Did They Achieve?” (More on that later.)
What’s even better, my Confederate biographical library continues a-buildin’. Recently I bought from Owens & Ramsey, the Richmond booksellers, Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins’ edition of The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857–1878. (Thanks, Marc!)
So there’s your peek into my library—testimonium amoris mei librorum!
Singly and in small groups, soldiers on the battlefield would realize that they faced a choice: surrender or die. So they dropped their weapons and raised their hands. Garrisons in fortified places and units in the field, forces ranging in size from the very small up to thousands of men, could find themselves in a no-win situation. Their commanders raised the white flag and negotiated terms as best they could.
Sometimes the men would be paroled on the field. Sometimes surrender meant a short time in prison before exchange. Other times prisoners suffered for long periods as they awaited release, and for tens of thousands release came only with death.
Some capitulations were considered by all to be honorable, bringing no shame on the officers who made the decisions or their men. In other cases giving up was condemned as disgraceful and cowardly. Men surrendered by their officers might object vehemently—as at Harpers Ferry in September 1862 – and suffer ridicule for decisions made not by them but for them. In other cases, especially in the Trans-Mississippi in the war’s last spring, it was the common Confederate soldiers who forced their officers to yield. They knew the jig was up even if the brass refused to face facts.
Raising the White Flag covers in detail events that are usually mere codas to the narrative, a couple of paragraphs before the next chapter takes up the next battle. Except for a few surrenders—Appomattox, of course, and some others that are sometimes treated as stories in their own right—we read that the surrenders occurred, we get a prisoner count, and we move on. Silkenat’s work fills a gap.
When is a surrender honorable and manly? When is giving up a craven and despicable act? What are the mores and protocols that governed during this war? How did they change as the war progressed? What effect did practices in America’s previous wars have on the war between North and South? How did practices in the Civil War affect rules in subsequent conflicts? How did the termination of the Dix-Hill exchange cartel influence soldiers’ willingness to capitulate? These questions and more are addressed by Silkenat’s carefully researched and thoroughly documented work.
Readers may question some of Silkenat’s analysis and interpretations. To pick one small example, this reviewer does not accept that the “widespread condemnation” of Bowe Bergdahl was due to his “capture,” but rather to his desertion. The author also makes contradictory statements about the fate of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. On one page we read of “his surrender.” On the next page he is beaten unconscious but does not voluntarily give up. Then on the same page he “believed that surrender entitled him and his men to certain protections and rights.” So Brown surrendered. Then he didn’t. Then he did.
The best parts of the book are the excellent descriptions of numerous surrenders that we have all heard of but few (I suspect) know
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very much about. These are solid narratives that help tell the story of the war. My favorites are the episodes in the Trans-Mississippi after Lee, Johnston and Taylor surrendered all the Confederate forces east of the river. Get the book and learn more about conditions in the west and the goings on with E. Kirby Smith, Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jo Shelby and a character named Meriwether Jeff Thompson. My marginal notes on pages describing his actions read “kookie” and “Baghdad Bob.”
Silkenat, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh who has previously written two books and several articles on the Civil War, poses in his concluding chapter a counterfactual. He asks us to consider “what the Civil War would have looked like if the option to surrender had been taken off the table.” It is easy to imagine a hard war made all the harder, a cruel time made utterly barbarous, a long war made longer and peace and reconciliation made impossible.
• Lecturer • Author • Course Instructor
Civil War Writing: New Perspectives on Iconic Texts. Ed. by Gary W. Gallagher and Stephen Cushman. Photos, notes, index, 296 pp., 2019. Louisiana State University Press, www.lsupress.org. $48 cloth.
Reviewed by Brian S. Wills
The first of an intended series, this volume includes nine essays on “iconic” texts of the American Civil War under Louisiana State University Press’ series Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. Editors Gary W. Gallagher and Stephen Cushman turn to fellow academics, largely from college or university departments of history, to rediscover works related to the great conflict of the mid-Nineteenth Century. The editors explain that no communication composed by the human hand, presumably including this one, is devoid of messaging, although the degree to which such viewpoints have become subject to evolving audiences and readerships is a critical part of their evolution into “iconic” status.
The current volume is a logical addition to the earlier writings of both scholars, particularly Cushman’s Belligerent Muse: Five Northern Writers and How They Shaped Our Understanding of the Civil War (North Carolina, 2014), which also included a foreword by Gallagher. That volume took the reader through samples of the well-known work of Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and William T. Sherman. As such, it should not surprise readers of this work to see similar evaluations of Civil War-era authors and their writings by Cushman, Gallagher and the other contributors.
Selection of the texts/topics and those tasked with examining them always indicates a great deal. Readers of Gallagher’s edited volumes will find many familiar collaborators from his previous works and associations. The arrangement of the essays based upon “an editorial sense of rhythm and equilibrium” makes sense, allowing for less restriction to conform to a “chronological arrangement” that would be artificial in this instance, particularly when many of the writings appeared over a span of time and in different forms.
What emerges here is the sense that each author is a product of his or her time and conventions. Selfinterest in various forms served as catalysts for the original texts, ranging from attempts at raising awareness (Joseph T. Wilson’s The Black Phalanx) and shaping historical interpretations (Jubal A. Early and John B. Gordon) to generating income and notoriety (“Loreta Velasquez”). The “commercial pragmatism” demonstrated by the same publishing house of the two works by Joseph E. Johnston and Sherman also reminds us that all of these publications fit into a larger contextual or competitive framework in the hopes of reaching wide-ranging audiences and potential consumers. Even so, readers will learn about the contexts in which diarists Charlotte Forten and Mary Chesnut composed their thoughts and experiences, including their interactions with high-profile figures, although they will ascertain considerably less about the ways in which the Louisa May Alcott novel Little Women informed anyone concerning the Northern “home front.”
The William C. Davis and Gallagher essays are among the most engaging of the compilation. Whether or not one wishes to dispute the characterization of Edward Porter Alexander as “the best Confederate memoirist,” or the proposition that “Loreta Velasquez” was an earlier version of the modern self-made “celebrity,” those individuals certainly produced fascinating, and in Alexander’s case, articulate windows into their worlds. While each of the other essays is enlightening in its own fashion, undoubtedly, it will prove difficult to determine the degree to which this volume or any of its successors can appeal to general readers, outside of those familiar with the individual text or texts under examination. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, Civil War Writing demonstrates that such assessments and re-evaluations will continue to add to our understanding of the conflict that inspired them.
Brian S. Wills of Kennesaw State University is the author of award-winning studies of Union general George Thomas and Inglorious Passages: Noncombat Deaths in the Civil War (Kansas).
This Ship’s Story Is as Murky as the Water It Sank In
Going Home: The Secret Life and Sudden Death of the U.S. Army Transport Steamer General Lyon. By Peter Holman. Illustrations, maps, tables, appendices, chapter notes, 256 pp., 2018. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. $15.99 softcover.
Reviewed by Richard J. Blumberg
Many varieties of steamboats served as floating hospitals, as well as transports for military cargo and troops throughout the Civil War. The U.S. Army Transport General Lyon, a side-wheeled steamer, was one of them. The U.S. Navy also rebuilt a captured Confederate side-wheeled steamer named the USS General Lyon. Let the confusion begin!
Peter Holman is a retired British-born postal worker who also worked in the United States marketing, selling and shipping various medical diagnostic equipment and radioactive materials. Holman’s work focuses on the
Treason on Trial: The United Sates vs. Jefferson Davis. By Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez. Notes, illustrations, index, bibliography, 356 pp., 2019. Louisiana State University Press, www.lsupress.org. $55 cloth.
Reviewed by Wayne L. Wolf Army Transport Steamer General Lyon, built in 1864, not the captured Confederate vessel of the same name. The General Lyon likely carried invalid soldiers, former prisoners of war, women and children on its final voyage from Wilmington, N.C., to Fort Monroe, Va. Since remains of the vessel have yet to be recovered, and no drawings or original plans for the ship still exist, its demise is hard to determine. Some think an explosion occurred as a result of a bomb. Others presume that a kerosene oil can turned over near a main boiler during a bad storm. Reports simply claim it inexplicably caught fire and sank off the coast of Cape Hatteras.
Holman’s extensive research over three years enables him to vividly tell stories of the individuals lost, and the families impacted, when the General Lyon sank. He uses Combined Military Service Records (CMSRs), located at the National Archives, along with various passenger lists to resurrect the names of some six hundred lives lost on March 31, 1865. The narrative, while interesting, becomes confusing with apparent flashbacks to different years in the war in order to introduce new characters. This, coupled with the Navy’s reconfigured vessel of the same name (which served in several Civil War battles), makes it difficult to follow various parts of the story.
This work underscores problems historians and researchers still face today: determining what is newsworthy, and dealing with facts that contradict each other. In March 1865, the Civil War was all but over. The sinking of
Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez does a remarkably thorough job of tracing the nuances, ambiguities, Constitutional arguments, and political theatre that contributed to the eventual dismissal of treason charges against Jefferson Davis. It was this convergence of events, personalities and skills of the prosecution and defense teams, many little known before Davis’ indictment, that resulted in four years of delay before bringing Davis to trial.
The reader will be introduced to these characters one by one.
Lucius Chandler, the U.S. Attorney for Virginia, doubted his own legal skills, and cognizant of the trial’s effect on his own political ambitions, bears a major responsibility for the endless delays. But his actions do not exonerate Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, who did not want to offend the General Lyon was the worst maritime disaster up to that time. However, reviewing our history from April 1-April 27, 1865, we encounter General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox; the assassination of President Lincoln and the explosion of the Sultana. These events caused much of the expected hype about the General Lyon’s loss to never materialize. News reporters of the mid-1800s focused on what was the most sensational and attention-getting at that moment, and then moved on to new topics. This is very similar to how our reporters conduct their work today. As one might also expect, misspellings of names and changed recollections of family members resulted in confusion regarding whether certain individuals lost on this vessel were even on it in the first place. Similarities and differences when compared to the Sultana disaster of April 27th also muddy the water.
Holman’s book creates a good foundation for further research, but by his own admission, much work still needs to be done. The factual content and controversies covered in this work are compelling and make it well worth the price.
Richard is a retired Army veteran with more than 26 years of service. Seventeen of those were spent in assignments dealing with Corps and Theater Army level multi-functional logistics. Transportation, Ordnance and Quartermaster functions had the most emphasis. He is entering his eighteenth year as a book reviewer and his current research focuses on the contributions of music during the war.
Southern states whose votes he might need as he quietly sought the 1868 Democratic presidential nomination. Likewise, James Speed, President Johnson’s first Attorney General, was reluctant to prosecute such a nationally divisive case. His successor, Henry Stanbery, personally did not believe Davis committed treason. Finally, Andrew Johnson, while believing Davis should be tried, allowed his legal team full control of the trial process, thus sanctioning the numerous delays. Further complicating the prosecution were the vindictive attitudes of presiding District Court Judge John C. Underwood, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, and William M. Everts, chief prosecutor and later Attorney General. The delays and outward vindictiveness gave time for Davis’ defense team, led by Charles O’Conor, Robert