The River Was Dyed With Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest and Fort Pillow. By Brian Steel Wills. Illustrated, appendix, notes, bibliography, 288 pp. University of Oklahoma Press, 2014, hardcover. $29.95.
Reviewed by Wayne L. Wolf
Brian Steel Wills does a superb job of charting the background of Nathan Bedford Forrest and how the culture that shaped him manifested itself later in the courage, caution, and the untiring energy characterizing his military career. Additionally, Forrest exhibited the ability to produce dramatic moments in critical situations while simultaneously employing tactics to turn adverse conditions to his benefit. These traits had served him well before the Civil War in building a fortune and would guide him throughout his Confederate service.
To fully understand the controversy surrounding Fort Pillow, one must grasp the retribution, retaliation, and reprisal culture characteristic of West Tennessee as early as the fall of 1862. The men under Forrest’s command had experienced widespread local brutality by Union forces directed against Confederate sympathizers and their families, been exposed to Union atrocities including murder, and seen their property confiscated leaving families destitute. Animosity was inherent in the minds of individual soldiers. Likewise, the presence of Negro soldiers stoked the passions of men raised in a stratified society that relegated slaves to the bottom rung.
The combination of individual anger, antipathy, and societal strictures led to an explosive situation once the walls of Fort Pillow were breached. The deaths of soldiers, particularly black soldiers, as well as Unionist civilians housed in the fort, resulted from “unloosening of the dogs of war.” General Forrest did not lead the assault on the fort and only entered after its surrender. The majority of the killing that was later so vilified as a massacre took place below the bluffs as escaping soldiers fled to the river. Contemporaneous accounts confirm that Forrest was not present when the “massacre” occurred and stopped any excesses upon his arrival. Yet, being in overall command, he was forever labeled with the sobriquet “That Devil Forrest.”
Brian Steel Wills presents a well-balanced, unbiased, and thoroughly researched account of both the assault on Fort Pillow and its aftermath. He explores how the Union press and politicians used the slogan “Remember Fort Pillow” to defeat Democrats and scapegoat Forrest for their political purposes. Yet, he leaves the interpretation of conflicting facts to the reader who is willing to examine the evidence in light of contemporary biases and leave the ultimate conclusions for further research. This book is well written, concise, and superbly edited. It should be on every student of the Civil War’s bookshelf.
Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College and the author of numerous Civil War books including Heroes and Rogues of the Civil War and The Last Confederate Scout.
Lincoln’s Multiple Personal Tragedies to the Terrible Carnage of the Civil War
Reviewed by David Marshall
Professor Dirck has written a narrative on death and mourning by Abraham Lincoln. The United States president knew death throughout his life, but nothing prepared him for how the country lost so many soldiers during the Civil War, destroyed so much property, and produced such a significant debt to the nation paid for by an extraordinary amount of taxation. While the fighting caused so many widows, he was able to lead the country toward a “new birth of freedom,” with a future liberation from human bondage. His hope for a better future was littered with graves. This excellent writer makes the argument that death can be looked at with emancipation and preserving the Union as one of the central realities of Lincoln’s life. He failed to mention how he dealt with death throughout his lifetime but points to it in some of his wartime speeches and letters. Much conjecture and researched deduction is found throughout this outstanding narrative of how Lincoln handled the death of his parents, children, alleged love of his life, and the loss of so many in this important time in our history.
Unlike many individuals from this time, the author asserts that Lincoln was far more rational than superstitious; rarely spoke of ghosts or other displays of the spirit world. He provides many fascinating examples of how this man confronted the problems of death and dying with the same realism that directed other important characteristics of his fifty-six years on this planet.
The Black Heavens insightfully tackles how Lincoln gradually turned to the almighty and faith during four years of war and conflict. It is fascinating to see that the President learned to accept the casualties of conflict in order to pay for Union fight and freedom for millions. While he mourned close friends early in the contest such as Elmer Ellsworth and Edward Baker, he chose to deal with death in a private way. Dirck makes excellent observations in detailing that for the president to lose himself in the war’s casualties, would have risked his rationality, his judgment, and ability to govern. The author allows us to gain an understanding of this great man’s character and ability to withstand the rigors of his presidency.
Dr. Dirck writes about Lincoln dealing with a good death, the ideas of death, ghosts, battlefields and death, duty, control, and the death of his sons Eddie and Willie as well as his close friends; Elmer Ellsworth and Edward Baker. He shows interesting examples in his study of death creating an honest passing with a sense of resolution and a reason that systematically provided people with hope for a better future. The most compelling chapters are the three dealing with the deaths of Eddie and Willie Lincoln and Elmer Ellsworth and how Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary, dealt with their deaths, their lives, his four years in office, and the Civil War. This academic has brought to light that the president’s legal background and political nature trained him that death was also an entity that could be sensibly examined, defined, and handled in a more disconnected way.
In the end, the strength of Dirck’s tome is analyzing and finding how Abraham Lincoln searched for a deeper meaning concerning death and its purpose for himself during his life. The President’s Second Inaugural Address clearly states his beliefs as he told people on March 4, 1865, “as G-d gives us the right, …let us finish the work we are in.” He knew that the afterlife was black but did not necessarily understand why.
Brian Dirck has written a fascinating volume on Abraham Lincoln and death that presents a very different perspective on the Sixteenth President. The author has succeeded in the first booklength treatment of Lincoln’s connection with death that scholars and enthusiasts will learn from and enjoy. The Anderson University professor offers a fresh, innovative, and quite readable account of Abraham Lincoln. The author’s use of thirteen images is very effective and helpful to the reader. Thus, this title is highly recommended.
David Marshall is a high school American history teacher in the Miami-Dade School district for the past thirty-three years. A lifelong Civil War enthusiast, David is president of the Miami Civil War Round Table Book Club. In addition to numerous reviews in Civil War News and other publications, he has given presentations to Civil War Round Tables on Joshua Chamberlain, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, the Battle of Gettysburg, and the Common Soldier.
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Too Much For Human Endurance: The George Spangler Farm Hospitals and the Battle of Gettysburg. By Ronald D. Kirkwood. Illustrated, appendices, bibliography, index, Savas Beatie, www.savasbeatie.com, 2019, 396 pp., hardcover, $34.95.
George and Elizabeth Spangler and their four children operated a successful, growing, and profitable farm in Gettysburg, Penn. By community standards, they were doing well and giving back to their community. Then the XI Corps, Army of the Potomac, seized their home, barn, and summer kitchen for a field hospital, leaving them crowded in one bedroom for the next six weeks as nearly 2,000 wounded and dying Union and Confederate soldiers were treated on their property and the adjacent Granite Schoolhouse.
Both armies used their property as a staging area for the battle, trampling crops, tearing down fencing, devouring food stores, and fouling the land with human and animal waste. Spangler’s Farm was chosen because it was sufficiently large (166 acres), sat at the crossroads of intersecting Baltimore Pike, Emittsburg Road, and Taneytown Road, and was central to protecting the Union’s front line extending from Cemetery Ridge to Culp’s Hill. It also provided sufficient space and shelter for thousands of expected wounded.
Ron Kirkwood has masterfully woven together the troop movements during the Battle of Gettysburg with the subsequent horrors of treatment at the Spangler Hospitals. His personal accounts through soldier letters, diaries, and medical files illuminate what the Spangler family lived through, a nightmare of blood, amputated limbs, agony, death, and nauseating smells. Individual chapter vignettes highlight personal stories that make the reader realize Gettysburg is a story of thousands of individual stories.
As examples, the death of George Nixon III, great grandfather of a future president, or the sacrifices of Civil War nurse Rebecca Lane Pennypacker Price are highlighted. The heroic death of Confederate General Lewis A. Armistead and the struggles of Private Reuben F. Ruch of the 153rd Pennsylvania show that death and dying did not discriminate by rank. These stories are multiplied by those of countless individual soldiers, doctors, nurses, and volunteers who contributed to alleviating the trauma of the hospital stay
These stories also illuminate the medical care available in 1863, the contributions of local residents, unscrupulous profiteers in embalming tents, tomb raiders for souvenirs, and the torture of family members seeking their loved ones. Medical providers, like Dr. Bleeker Hovey and his wife Marilla, who worked side by side to alleviate suffering left a lasting impression on their physical as well as mental health. War was truly hell in these hospitals and no one associated with them ever forgot their experiences.
The author’s research is extensive and contains six appendices that include biographies of surgeons who worked at the Spangler Hospitals, a detailed list of over 1,400 wounded and deceased soldiers, and an organizational chart of the Army of the Potomac. These inclusions make this a volume that should be on every Civil War bookshelf. Much of this information would only be available after the months of research Ron Kirkwood obviously did with a passion for accuracy and historic preservation.
Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College and past president of the Lincoln-Davis Civil War Roundtable. He has written numerous books and articles on the Civil War and enjoys researching the life of the common soldier.
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Wilbur George Kurtz: A Most Remarkable Life, A Pictorial Biography. By E. Joseph Seguin. Photos, index, notes and timeline, no bibliography, acknowledgments, foreword, introduction. 202 pp., 2019. Stone Mountain, GA: K & S Books.
Reviewed by Salvatore Cilella
You might say he was the founding father of Atlanta History. Wilbur Kurtz’ disciples included the renowned local historian, Franklin Garrett; Civil War collectors and scholars, Beverly Dubose Sr. and his son, Beverly Dubose Jr., (and later, Beverly III); Colonel James G. Bogle, and Margaret Mitchell. This group was not only essential to establishing the Atlanta Historical Society, but the Atlanta Civil War Roundtable, which continues to flourish today with nearly 700 meetings since its inception just prior to the Centennial in the 1960s.
Ironically, it would be Kurtz, a native of Illinois and a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, and Garrett, another Midwesterner, from Wisconsin by way of Chicago, who would be responsible for preserving much of Atlanta’s history. (Full disclosure: as a native Chicagoan, I bring no pre-conditioned views to this review). Southerners DuBose and Bogle balanced the team.
He is almost singlehandedly responsible for the nearly 350 historical markers in and around Atlanta. According to the book’s foreword, he wrote most text for them as he helped supervise the exact placement of each one. He got heavily involved with production of the movie Gone with the Wind. Author Seguin tells the story of Kurtz’ insatiable desire for historical accuracy in the movie. While on set in Hollywood, he wrote home to ask his son Henry to send him detailed measurements of an antebellum lamppost still extant in front of the United Daughters of the Confederacy on Juniper and Sixth Street in Atlanta. Henry was evidently as avid as the old man. Climbing to the top of the lamppost, he drew unwanted attention from the local constabulary and was held until he was able to explain his behavior to the satisfaction of the authorities.
Kurtz was also involved with the Atlanta Cyclorama in the early 1930’s under FDR’s Works Projects Administration (WPA). The program was designed to stimulate the economy putting all types of labor back to work. It helped various groups of artists and artisans to work during the depression. Several important artists benefited from the program including the likes of Jackson Pollack, Willem de Kooning, John Steuart Curry, Berenice Abbott, and Jacob Lawrence. Kurtz landed the job of creating the diorama which remains with the restored painting at the Atlanta History Center. He kept a meticulous record of his work on the large painting including early attempts to conserve it. His Notebook 23, Cyclorama was presented by Wilbur Kurtz III, to the History Center in 2018 and is an important contribution to documenting the painting and to our understanding of its intriguing history.
The early 1940s found Kurtz in Hollywood working on Song of the South, and in the early 1950’s on the Great Locomotive Chase in which his father-in-law, Captain William A. Fuller, had participated. Kurtz was “the acknowledged expert on the subject.” He and Bogle collaborated on the film parlaying the latter’s reputation as “a recognized railroad historian…and the foremost authority about the Andrews Raid of 1862. Bogle had lectured and written extensively on the topic, including “The General and the Texas” co-authored with Stan Cohen, and supervised the restoration of the locomotive Texas at Grant Park.”1 Along with Garrett and Dubose, their connections continued through the Atlanta Civil War Round Table.
others may find it a hindrance to the flow of the story. In the end this is an extensive picture book with extremely detailed captions rather than a traditional biography. Kurtz’ life is a fascinating look at the first half of the 20th century in the Midwest and the revitalized City of Atlanta.
Source: 1. Bogle Obituary, August 17, 2010,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Salvatore Cilella was the President and CEO of the Atlanta History Center, 2006-2012. He is the author of Upton’s Regulars, A History of the 121st New York Volunteers in the Civil War, (University of Kansas Press, 2009), editor of The Correspondence of General Emory Upton, 2 Vols., (University of Tennessee Press, 2017), and editor of Till Death Do Us Part; The Correspondence of Emory and Emily Upton, (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020).
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Reviewed by Jonathan A. Noyalas
In 1958 Wesleyan University published a series of lectures delivered by Bruce Catton that spring on campus. Catton, in the introduction to that volume, America Goes to War, meditated on the Civil War’s place in American history. After lambasting those who romanticized it too much, Catton concluded “the Civil War is not a closed chapter in our dusty past.” That statement rings as true today as it did sixty-two years ago. As a republic we still grapple with the Civil War’s legacies. More than 150 years after fighting on the battlefields ceased, the Civil War still stirs deep emotions, sparks bitter rancor, and triggers controversy. The question remains as to why that is the case. This volume lends significant insight into why individuals believe what they do about the Civil War and why our nation’s most tumultuous moment remains unresolved.
Cody Marrs, an English professor at the University of Georgia, through prodigious research and careful analysis of film, art, novels, and poetry, has produced a carefully-crafted, impeccably
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written, and thought-provoking volume. It simultaneously informs and calls for an honest reckoning with the past.
Organized into four main chapters, the book’s first, examines the notion that the Civil War was merely a “family squabble,” a contest of brother against brother. Beginning with the publication of Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps in 1865, Marrs traces how various individuals such as Constance Mayer, whose painting Recognition: North and South, which depicted a Confederate soldier mourning over the body of a slain Union soldier, his brother, in the aftermath of battle, mythologized the conflict as a temporary falling out among family members. Marrs convincingly argues that this myth, either as a result of Whitman’s writings, the musings of Robert Penn Warren during the Civil War centennial, or screen writers such as Tony Kushner, endures because it is much more comfortable to imagine the war as “a domestic quarrel… that ultimately brought everyone back together.”
In the next chapter the author’s attention turns to how various individuals including Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Emily Dickinson, and Ken Burns cast the Civil War as a “dark and cruel war” where the shared sufferings of soldiers on the battlefield, meaning white combatants, essentially erases national allegiance. The “dark and cruel war,” just like the “family squabble,” skirts around slavery’s centrality to the conflict and the African American experience.
While the first two perspectives Marrs examines side-step slavery, the book’s third chapter provides a solid exploration of how the Civil War’s most persistent, and arguably most destructive mythology, the Lost Cause, infests society with the idea that not only did slavery have nothing to do with the war, but that enslavers proved genial and kind. While the author does revisit some familiar ground here, explored by other scholars of the Lost Cause in examining the influence of individuals such as Edward Pollard, D.W. Griffith, and Margaret Mitchell, Marrs’s examination of the ways in which alternative history such as Harry Turtledove’s The Guns of the South continues to foment the Lost Cause is an important contribution to the study of Civil War memory.
Marrs’s final chapter offers insight into how African Americans such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Edmonia Lewis, and Meta Vaus Warrick Fuller, attempted to challenge the perspectives examined in the volume’s first three chapters. While each chapter is strong, this final one is arguably the most powerful. It not only posits the manners in which various African Americans attempted to place slavery’s destruction at the center of Civil War remembrance, but compellingly shows how African Americans viewed figures, many in white society, both North and South, since the Civil War’s end. Through careful analysis of speeches and writings of individuals such as W.E.B. DuBois, Marrs suggests that criticisms levied against Robert E. Lee and other Confederate figures in recent years, particularly in the wake of the 2015 tragic murders in Charleston, S.C., are not necessarily a case of revisionist history, but merely resurrecting the ideas promulgated by African Americans since the Civil War’s end.
Engagingly written and solidly argued, Marrs’s volume should have wide appeal to those interested in the complexities of Civil War memory and individuals seeking an understanding of how the past influences the present.
Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute in Winchester, Virginia, a professor in Civil War Era Studies at Shenandoah University, and founding editor of Journal of the Shenandoah Valley During the Civil War Era. He is the author or editor of thirteen books including Civil War Legacy in the Shenandoah: Remembrance, Reunion, and Reconciliation.
Remembering the Civil War: The Conflict as Told by Those Who Lived It. Edted by Michael Barton and Charles Kupfer. Introduction, pictures, photos, 470 pp., 2020, Lyons Press, Lanham, MD, www.rowman.com, $34.95.
Reviewed by Joseph A. Derie
This text is published as an introductory volume of Civil War memoirs “for general readers.” All the entries are in the public domain and many are available online at places such as Project Gutenberg (under the heading “US Civil War (Bookshelf”).
The volume is broken into sections for each year of the war, with readings on battles in chronological order, interspersed with sections such as “Prologue to War,” ”Everyday Life in Camp and Field,” “Everyday Life in the Hospital,” “The Variety of Warriors,” “The Variety of Civil War Experience,” and “Reflecting on the War.”
Each reading is introduced by the editors with comments on the background of the author and their place and purpose in the War. At the end is bibliographic information about the item. The memoirs range from commanding generals (Lee, Grant, Longstreet) to common soldiers (Sam Watkins, William Fletcher) to well-known personalities (Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, Ambrose Bierce, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglas) and a host of others. The authors attempt to present a well-rounded view North and South, general and common soldier, soldier and civilian, and generally do so.
I would have liked to see more readings from the Trans- Mississippi and from the navies. The editors’ biggest failing is the year 1865. There are only four readings (all other years have over twice that) covering the Appomattox Campaign, Lee’s surrender, and Lincoln’s assassination. There should have been some readings from the Army of Tennessee or its Union counterparts, something about Jo Shelby and the Confederate Iron Brigade crossing the Rio Grande and going to Mexico, or Juneteenth in Texas. If nothing else, they should have included Nathan Bedford Forrest’s farewell to his troops (“I have never on the field of battle sent you where I was unwilling to go myself, nor would I now advise you to a course which I felt myself unwilling to pursue. You have been good soldiers. You can be good citizens. Obey the laws, preserve your honor, and the government to which you have surrendered can afford to be and will be magnanimous.) Granted Forrest is controversial in some quarters, but his words are perfect for a volume such as this.
Remembering the Civil War is not for the well-read Civil War enthusiast or specialist. It is intended for those with very little background in the Civil War who want to learn more. It would make a great gift to someone just starting out or someone who has expressed an interest and, for whatever reason, hasn’t pursued it. It is recommended with that understanding.
CAPT Joe Derie is a longtime Civil War buff with a special interest in Civil War naval history and the Civil War in the West. He is a retired USCG officer and a licensed officer of the Merchant Marine, currently self-employed as a marine surveyor and marine accident investigator in Portland, OR.
Custer at Gettysburg: A New Look at George Armstrong Custer versus Jeb Stuart in the Battle’s Climatic Cavalry Charges. By Philip Thomas Tucker. Notes, and Index, 480 pp., 2019. Stackpole Books, An Imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. www.rowman.com, hardback. $32.95 Reviewed by David Marshall
Philip Tucker’s new book, Custer at Gettysburg, focuses on the cavalry showdown on East Cavalry Field between Union General George Custer and Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart. Philip Tucker concentrates on the tactical performances of both men during this climatic day of the battle. This is one of the first surveys of George Custer that concentrates on his contribution on a single day during the Civil War and does not emphasize his life before July 3, 1863, or his post war fighting in the Western United States.
The author makes an argument that the fighting that took place away from Pickett’s Charge was much more important than the accepted climatic moment of the three day’s at Gettysburg that
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helped denigrate Custer’s importance to the battle. Tucker paints a portrait of the need for emphasizing the clash at East Cavalry Field rather than appearing as an insignificant moment during the final day of fighting. This historian succeeds in bringing to light the unexpected portrayal of a cavalry commander as a forceful, prepared, clever, and careful battlefield leader of both cavalry and horse artillery. In the end, Philip Thomas Tucker writes an interpretation of the battle of Gettysburg that illuminates a new history of Custer’s success and leadership in out-thinking and out-dueling Stuart and his horsemen.
Unfortunately, this title is marred by a forty-three-page introduction and a great deal of repetition throughout the narrative including numerous times in the same paragraph and page. Assistance in editing would have greatly helped the flow of this four hundred and eighty-page volume. Much is made of other soldiers who are viewed as if there is a competition to elevate this “boy general.” Tucker emphasizes throughout this tome that anything Custer does or achieves is much better than most everyone else who fought and helped the Army of the Potomac gain an important victory at Gettysburg. Additionally, it would have been helpful to have more maps as well as a bibliography. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the volume is that the author makes related statements several times throughout this tapestry that “a number of nonprofessional Civil War authors— rather than PhD’s—and nonacademic publishers have made a cottage industry on behalf of their false propositions and based on outdated books.” On a positive note, he quotes many well-known and leading scholars who support many of his assertions throughout this magnum opus. Despite these limitations, the book provides some important information, including a previously unpublished account of the battle written on July 4, 1863, and published by a correspondent under the heading “From the Michigan Cavalry.”
This study covers two important individuals who helped determine which side won the battle of Gettysburg. Overall, this book gives an interesting and thought-provoking look into George Armstrong Custer and J.E.B Stuart’s strengths and weaknesses in the combat’s critical cavalry charges. This history is significant and the writer has written a probing reconsideration of the performance of these two important figures. This is a lucid, readable summary of the critical East Cavalry Field fighting that brings two key personalities to life. Tucker’s engaging prose ably examines the topic and makes the story accessible to anyone seeking to understand these individuals and their contributions to this important moment during the Civil War.
There have been many titles published dealing with one of the most important Civil War battles, but Tucker has succeeded in researching and analyzing the vital fighting at East Cavalry Field in a full book-length treatment that scholars and enthusiasts will discuss and argue over. The author provides fresh insight that helps us understand Custer and Stuart’s motivation, strategies, tensions, controversies, and triumphs that characterized their careers and lives prior to Gettysburg and during the battle. He does not shy away from placing fault with anyone, especially how it relates to Custer. The general and his Michigan Wolverines’ success on July 3, 1863, was Custer’s finest hour.
Using a series of biographical sketches of inmates, Mab Segrest traces the history of the Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum from its founding in 1842 to its court-ordered demise in 2010. The book’s central thesis is that modern psychiatric practice was forged in the cauldron of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the era of Jim Crow. The Georgia State Asylum became the laboratory for reconstructing psychiatric history within the United States, particularly as an integral part of Southern history.
Patient narratives, hospital records, newspapers, and oral histories were combed to place each historical period in perspective to explain the changing context of psychiatric care for both white and black patients. Varying psychiatric theories from heredity predisposition to germ theory, bodily humors, behavioral causation, and post-traumatic stress are placed in the historical time period when they dominated admissions to the asylum.
The author, however, goes beyond a mere cataloging of data related to the number and diagnosis of each patient to an overriding view that indicts Southern society as a preserver of racism manifested even in the Georgia Asylum. Antebellum racism was held to not only shape American psychiatry but to inculcate in it the seeds of white supremacy that would, and still does, characterize America.
Many contentions put forward by the author to support her omnipresent racism are flawed. Her contention that more Southerners died in the Civil War than Union troops because more battles were fought in the South neglects numerical, industrial, and technological superiority of the North. Frequent use of phraseology such as, “We can imagine, he seemed a bat[sic bit] narcissistic, or, of course, we cannot know for sure,” allow the author to conclude that white supremacy ideology was the root cause of not only psychiatric admissions but later disproportionate prison sentences and labor gang membership. Opinion becomes diagnosis; conjecture becomes the answer to statistical fact finding, and reconstruction of events, e.g. contending the 1897 fire at the asylum was the outcome of a century of segregation, are used to color psychiatric practices with racism and white privilege.
The imperative of reasserting white control after the Civil War subverted scientific advances and is labeled as the overriding socio-political theory of America. If the author would have removed her own stated biases and let readers interpret the data for themselves, they may reach similar conclusions or may realize that it was the global understanding of mental illness at the time that was reflected in the administration of asylums in America.
The data and personal stories in this text are well documented, enlightening, and historically relevant as one piece in the puzzle of the evolution of psychiatry in America. Except for a series of typographical errors, the research is solid and comprehensive. For historians interested in the role of psychiatry in society, this book is recommended but should be read with an understanding of the inherent biases.
Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College and the author of numerous books and articles on the Civil War. He is past president of the Lincoln-Davis Civil War Roundtable.
Christopher H. Tebault, Surgeon to the Confederacy. By Alan I. West. Bibliography, illustrations, photographs, tables, index. 207 pp., 2020, MacFarland and Company, Inc., www.mcfarlandpub.com $39.95.
Christopher H. Tebault, a New Orleans native, was commissioned an Assistant Surgeon in the Confederate Army Medical Corps in early 1862, shortly after graduating from medical school in New Orleans. He was originally assigned to the 21st Louisiana Infantry and served in the Corinth Campaign. Later he was assigned to the 10th South Carolina Infantry as an Acting Surgeon, taking part in Bragg’s invasion of Kentucky, the Battle of Stone’s River, and the Tullahoma Campaign.
Probably because of his excellent medical qualifications, he was then assigned to the Confederate Hospital at Quintard, Ga., in July 1863. He served continuously at Confederate Army Hospitals in Georgia until being paroled from the Confederate Army Hospital in Macon in May 1865.
Following the war, he returned to New Orleans where he began a long career as a medical practitioner, medical educator, public health doctor, Southern patriot, “Lost Cause” proponent, and concerned citizen. He was the Surgeon General of the United Confederate Veterans from 1896 until his death in 1914.
The genesis for this book came when the author, a collector of medical antiquities, purchased a walnut medical chest with many original medicine bottles from a Connecticut antiques dealer in 1998. The beautiful wooden chest had a Stars and Bars on it and a small plaque engraved:
The dealer knew nothing about the chest other than that he had purchased it from a Connecticut estate. As the author stated, this began a 22-year quest to find out more about Dr. Tebault. There is nothing in Dr. Tebault’s records about the loss of his chest; author speculates that he lost it in one of his campaigns with the Army of Tennessee. This is possible of course, but it could just as well have been looted at the end of the war when he was paroled.
Dr. Tebault left no memoirs but did leave some writings (several of them are in an appendix to the book). The book is thus mostly a history of what was going on at the time, followed by a few paragraphs on what Dr. Tebault was doing based on records and other documents. He was obviously an accomplished doctor, did much for public health in New Orleans, and was well thought of by his contemporaries, both doctors and lay persons, but due to lack of material we don’t find out much about the person.
Christopher H. Tebault, Surgeon to the Confederacy, has been ably researched by the author and, with a few minors errors (the 21st Louisiana Infantry did not have 7,000 at Island Number 10 and Dr. Tebault was never on the staff of every Confederate commander in chief), there is much of interest here. It is highly recommended to those with special interests in the Confederate Army Medical Corps and its services in the Army of Tennessee’s area, reconstruction in New Orleans, the September 1874 Battle of Liberty Place in the Crescent City, public health issues, medical education in New Orleans following the war, and the United Confederate Veterans.
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Reviewed by W. Clifford Roberts Jr.
In 1929, British military historian and theorist B.H. Liddell Hart published Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American. This groundbreaking work would be his only exploration of the American Civil War. Hart, who would ultimately be knighted for his 26 books on military history, had seen firsthand the futility of frontal assaults in the First World War, and he saw in General Sherman one of the earliest proponents of indirect warfare. Sherman was the master of directing large armies to feint in one direction and flank the Confederates in the opposite direction. Hart went on to argue an even larger point that, by having the foresight to aggressively destroy the Southern means of economic production, Sherman destroyed the resolve of the Southern people, and ultimately the Southern nation itself.
Now, nearly a century later, another respected British military historian, Brian Holden Reid, has written The Scourge of War: The Life of William Tecumseh Sherman, an important new biography of Sherman published by the prestigious Oxford University Press. Brian Reid is Professor of American History and Military Institutions at King’s College London; he is considered by most scholars to be the leading British expert on the American Civil War. He is closely associated with the British armed forces, having spent ten years as resident historian at the Department of War Studies to the Staff College, Camberley. Reid was awarded the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize by the Society for Military History in 2019 for his contributions to the field.
Much like Liddell Hart, Brian Reid has strong opinions and insights about General Sherman and nineteenth century warfare in general. Certainly, William T. Sherman shares the stage with Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant as the three principal architects of Northern victory in the Civil War. General Sherman served from First Bull Run to the end of the war and the author recognizes Sherman’s maturation as a military leader and strategist. Professor Reid points out that as early as 1861, Sherman was telling all who would listen that the “Real War” would be fought for control of the Mississippi basin. Reid believes that, as Military Commander of the Memphis District in the summer of 1862, Sherman reached the conclusion that the South could not be reconciled, and that to win the war, the North must conduct “a harsher, more punitive style of military campaigning.” Writing his brother, Senator John Sherman, in the spring of 1863, the general declared, “We are forced to invade – we must keep the War South till they are not only ruined, exhausted, but humbled in pride and spirit.” This would be Sherman’s guiding philosophy as his responsibilities in the Union command structure rose with each promotion. The Southern people, in his mind, had brought this “Scourge of War” down upon themselves.
Reid’s new biography follows Sherman from his 1820 birth in Ohio, until his 1891 death in New York City. “Cump’s” formative years were driven by the early death of his father, Charles Sherman, and his subsequent adoption by Thomas and Maria Ewing. A powerful U.S. Senator from Ohio, Ewing secured Sherman’s appointment to West Point in 1836. Popular with his fellow cadets for his flashes of wit and loquacious personality, Sherman also dressed carelessly and saluted slovenly. Unlike Lee and Grant, a disappointed Lt. Sherman missed the fighting in the Mexican War. In 1850, he married the Ewing’s daughter Ellen at Blair House in front of President Zachary Taylor and the president’s entire cabinet. While Sherman’s banking career would be checkered after his 1853 resignation from the army, Reid believes that the articulate Sherman was “the best-read ex-officer in civil life,” with a sophisticated taste for theater as well as British history and literature.
Brian Reid notes Sherman’s personal bravery at Shiloh, but also acknowledges that on a tactical level—the actual fighting of battles—the general did not excel. His frontal assaults at First Bull Run, Chickasaw Bayou, Tunnel Hill, and Kennesaw Mountain were all repulsed. Reid believes that the unexpected death of his son, Willy, contributed to a despondent Sherman not doing the painstaking reconnaissance at Chattanooga for which he was renowned. Reid also faults Sherman for missing an opportunity on the second day of the Battle of Jonesboro to destroy and capture William Hardee’s Corps.
Where Professor Reid sees exceptional brilliance in Sherman is at both the operational and strategic level. The general’s superb logistical understanding and preparation allowed him, in the 90-day Atlanta Campaign, to “consistently outthink and outmaneuver Joseph Johnston.”
After capturing Atlanta and ensuring the re-election of President Lincoln, Sherman boldly set out for Savannah in his famous March to the Sea. Both Liddell Hart and Brian Reid praise Sherman for paring his army back to his 62,000 fittest soldiers, creating a mobile fighting force that lived primarily off the country. Reid also puts a spotlight on Sherman’s expert use of pontoon trains to ensure that his columns were never held up by large rivers in Georgia or the Carolinas.
From a strategic perspective, Reid notes that Sherman understood, more than any other military leader, the psychological destruction he was inflicting on the South’s international prestige and internal self-respect. Foreign governments could never recognize a Southern nation while a Northern army was moving rapidly and unchecked through its hinterland. This point leads naturally to Reid’s most controversial assertion that Sherman’s wanton plunder and burning of civil and private property was vastly overstated. It was on the same level as occurred in the Napoleonic wars, argues the author, and nothing compared to later wars, such as the Eastern Front in World War II. Reid points out that there was hardly any violence directed at Southern civilians, nor did starvation set in after the departure of Federal troops. Sherman’s orders “to spare nothing” was directed primarily at the property of prominent slaveholders who, in the mind of the general, had led the Southern people to a false rebellion. Reid writes that it was the later tenets of the Lost Cause that have given Sherman “a wholly false diabolic presence in this self-indulgent and self-serving folklore of victimhood.”
Professor Reid also sees in William T. Sherman a “dazzling literary stylist,” whose published writings and reports are cogent and eminently quotable. Reid uses this correspondence to explore the general’s evolving and complicated relationships with Ulysses Grant, Henry Halleck, John McClernand, Joseph Hooker, Henry Stanton, and, above all, his wife Ellen. It was her Ewing connections and letter writing prowess that was instrumental in Sherman’s reinstatement to command after his temporary breakdown in November 1861.
Brian Reid’s biography of General Sherman is deeply researched, written at an academic level, and filled with historical insight and commentary. Its pages will be enjoyed by readers who already have a firm grasp on how the Civil War was won and lost. Sherman’s strikingly individualistic personality shines throughout this crisply written biography and Reid’s refined opinions are welcome, whether the reader ultimately accepts or rejects them. The author appropriately closes his new book with a quote from Rutherford B. Hayes, who described William T. Sherman, quite simply, as “the most interesting and original character in the world.”
Finally, as good as Reid’s contribution is to an understanding of the mercurial Sherman, this is not to say that American biographers have nothing important to say about General William Tecumseh Sherman. In the last twenty years, Sherman has drawn full-length biographies from Lee Kenneth
100 Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign presents a riveting collection of George Barnard’s camera work. Most of the photographs are from Barnard’s time in Atlanta, mid-September to mid-November 1864, during the Federal occupation of the city. With this volume, Stephen Davis advances the scholarly literature of
(2001), John Eisenhower (2014), Robert O’Connell (2014), and James McDonough (2016). The last word, from this side of the pond, is, in my opinion, James Lee McDonough’s 816-page William Tecumseh Sherman: In the Service of My Country: A Life. The author of nine books on the western theater, McDonough, a professor emeritus of history at Auburn University, put his lifetime of scholarship behind a nuanced analysis of Sherman as a military general and as a noted American icon. Readers of Civil War history are without question blessed to have so much recent scholarship published on one of America’s most gifted military leaders.
Cliff Roberts is the President of the General Barton and Stovall History & Heritage Association and co-author of Atlanta’s Fighting 42nd; Joseph Johnston’s “Old Guard”, published by Mercer University Press in 2020.