The Union Blockade In The American Civil War: A Reassessment. By Michael Brem Bonner and Peter McCord. Bibliography, index, notes, University of Tennessee Press, https://utpress.org, 2021, 217 pp., hardcover. $45.
It has long been accepted historiography that the Union naval blockade of Confederate ports became more effective as the war progressed, crippled the Southern economy, and was a major factor in the Union’s ultimate victory. This book challenges those assumptions with voluminous data from the Official Records, the British admiralty, and anecdotal sources. While the blockade affected Southern morale psychologically, the catand-mouse game of evading the Union blockade actually became more effective as the war entered the 1863–1864 period. The blockade was porous enough to hold the Union capture rate of blockaders to approximately 1 in 6. Combined with internal fiscal mismanagement, contraband only marginally affected the inflation rate in the South. Only when Union forces captured port cities did blockade running come to a halt in those ports.
The Lincoln administration did a commendable job of holding British concerns with the blockade at bay. They walked a delicate diplomatic tightrope to convince European powers that the blockade was effective and that they were thus in compliance with the Declaration of Paris. Simultaneously they accepted the dirty little secret that both sides kept trade channels open for their mutual benefit.
Blockade running was one of the most lucrative enterprises of the Civil War, filling the pockets of not only the blockade runners but commanders, like Matthew Maury and Colin McCrae, crews, shipbuilders, and transfer agents. Thus, while King Cotton Diplomacy failed, the Union blockade did manage to achieve limited success in three distinct areas: the psychological impact on the Southern populace and on those thinking of entering
“The best little book on Barnard”
The American Civil War was the first war in which both sides widely used entrenchments, repeating rifles, ironclad warships, and telegraphed communications. It was also the first American War to be extensively photographed. Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan are famous for having made iconic photographs in the Civil War’s eastern theater. George N. Barnard deserves to be ranked in this top tier for his photographic work in the war’s western theater. A civilian photographer hired by Gen. William T. Sherman’s chief engineer to take pictures of fortifications around Atlanta, Barnard took several hundred of them in and around the city in the fall of 1864. His most famous is the site of Union Maj. Gen. James B. McPherson’s death in the battle of Atlanta, July 22, 1864. Thus far, no comprehensive, definitive listing has been made of the photographer’s work. For this book we have chosen a hundred images we deem “significant.”
the lucrative smuggling trade; hampering the arrival of needed supplies that the South could not produce internally thus adding to inflation; and, creating a sense in the South of a daily reminder of the South’s inferior resources.
The authors do an extremely credible job of amassing the data necessary to question previously held historical interpretations, including psycho-historiographic interpretations of blockade running, placing the costweight scholars on the defensive when actual dollar amounts are in question, and shedding doubt on all of the tenets of the contributing-effective historian’s arguments. While many naval historians will never be satisfied with the effect that current data implies, this book at least brings new light to the conclusions of historians with a much-needed impartial viewpoint. For scholars of Civil War maritime history, this volume is a must read. It is packed with raw data, easily readable, and balanced in its conclusions.
Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College and past president of the Lincoln-Davis Civil War Roundtable. He is the author of numerous books and articles including The Last Civil War Scout, Heroes and Rogues of the Civil War, and Two Years Before the Paddlewheel.
online at
Reviewed by Brian Matthew Jordan
Between 1861 and 1865, the Buckeye State supplied more than a third of a million soldiers to the Federal war effort. Thirteen Ohio units, ten volunteer infantry regiments, two light artillery batteries, and an unattached cavalry company, saw action on September 17, 1862, the war’s bloodiest day. Veteran authors Kevin R. Pawlak and Dan Welch ably chronicle the participation of these men, and their efforts to memorialize their Antietam sacrifices decades later, with this slender, accessible, and wellillustrated volume. This title is the most recent addition to The History Press’s growing catalog of books that approach the Civil War from local angles.
Mining Ohio newspapers, regimental histories, and the files of the Antietam National Battlefield Library, the authors recovered the voices of ordinary enlisted men who engaged in combat atop the spine of South Mountain, the fingers of the West Woods, along the Sunken Road, and on the Federal left. Pawlak and Welch wring human color from the sources, spicing their narrative with evocative quotes and telling anecdotes. At many points throughout the text, they permit the men themselves to recount the experience in arms and under fire.
The first chapter recalls the fierce fighting on South Mountain, just three days before Antietam. Packed into the Kanawha Division, six Ohio infantry regiments forced Fox’s Gap in tense, often hand-to-hand fighting across a low stonewall that rambled through the thickets. Commanding the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, future president Rutherford B. Hayes was seriously wounded as his troops flanked the tiny Tarheel brigade commanded by Samuel Garland. Hayes recovered from his injuries in nearby Middletown, Maryland.
The second chapter narrates the battle as waged by the trio of Buckeye regiments in Colonel Hector Tyndale’s XII Corps brigade. After an initial exchange of musketry the morning of September 17, the Fifth, Seventh, and Sixty-Sixth Ohio regiments drove to the high ground around the Dunker Church. From that knob, they pitched into the West Woods and bagged many enemy prisoners.
The Eighth Ohio was the lone Buckeye regiment in the Army of the Potomac’s II Corps at Antietam. Summoned to support a Federal battery in the twilight artillery duel that roared to life on September 16, the regiment suffered few casualties. Yet it managed to find the thick of the killing the next morning, when it advanced on the Sunken Road, a natural farm lane eroded into the earth near the Confederate center. Thomas Gawley, an Irish sergeant and clever wordsmith who left a justly famous account of his regiment, noted that men fell from the ranks “by the hundreds.”
Though physically exhausted from the previous Sunday’s fight at Fox’s Gap, not to mention emotionally depleted by their macabre assignment to South Mountain’s burial detail, the IX Corps troops in Colonel Hugh Ewing’s brigade soldiered on south of Sharpsburg. Flanked by the Confederates, they suffered losses exceeding ten percent of their effective strength. In the space of an hour, the Thirtieth Ohio lost two color bearers.
Admirably, the authors extend their narrative beyond the battle. A brief chapter considers how Ohioans experienced the immediate aftermath of combat. They chronicle the search for
January 2022
wounded, the impulse to collect souvenirs, and the first, desperate attempts to coax chaotic scenes into orderly prose. Pawlak and Welch likewise survey the work of the Ohio Antietam Battlefield Commission, which dedicated monuments on the field at the turn of the century. An appendix considers the storied service of commissary sergeant, and later U.S. president, William McKinley. Finally, the authors supply their readers with a handy reference list of Ohio burials in the Antietam National Cemetery.
Though not great in number, “Ohio’s soldiers,” Pawlak and Welch conclude, “played a key role in preserving the Union with their actions at South Mountain and Antietam.” This book celebrates that service while also revealing the war’s horrors. The story of Ohio at Antietam was
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one of pride and pain, heroism, and heartbreak.
Ohio at Antietam is a narrative history rather than an argumentdriven monograph. As such, the authors do not attempt to fit their work into larger interpretive frameworks; nor do they spend much time building larger contexts. Readers with a working knowledge of the battle of Antietam, however, will welcome this compact, well-written survey of one state’s sacrifices on the war’s bloodiest day.
Brian Matthew Jordan is Associate Professor of Civil War History and Chair of the Department of History at Sam Houston State University. A Pulitzer Prize finalist, he is the author of A Thousand May Fall: Life, Death, and Survival in the Union Army (2021).
The Bonds of War: A Story of Immigrants and Esprit De Corps in Company C, 96th Illinois Infantry. By Diana L. Dretske. Photos, notes, index, 256 pp., 2021. Southern Illinois University Press, www.siupress.com. $26.50 Reviewed by Jonathan A. Noyalas
At the conclusion of Virginia’s commemoration of the Civil War Sesquicentennial, Dr. James I. Robertson, Jr. composed a volume as part of the Commonwealth’s Sesquicentennial Commission series. In the preface to Civil War Echoes, Robertson wrote something that he always stressed during my time as his graduate student at Virginia Tech, “history is the story of human beings.” The investigation of individual stories, Robertson wrote, “should be the primary, most exciting avenue in the quest for knowledge” among students of history. Those who share his perspective that history at its core is about individuals will find Diana Dretske’s study engaging, thought-provoking, and powerful.
Dretske, a curator and historian at the Bess Bower Dunn Museum of Lake County, Ill., has employed micro-history to its finest to tell the stories of five soldiers who served in Company C, 96th Illinois Infantry. Initially inspired by a photograph in the museum’s collections of these five men, only one of whom initially, Edward Murray, was identified, Dretske’s investigation into the remaining four not only revealed their names, Loughlin Madden, James Murrie, William Lewin, and John Taylor, but resurrected “their connection as neighbors and immigrants.”
Murray, Madden, Murrie, Lewin, and Taylor immigrated to the United States between 1841-1854 and ultimately settled in Lake County, the state’s most northeastern county. Murray immigrated from Ireland, Madden and Lewin from England, Murrie and Taylor from Scotland. Although these five men did not enlist at the war’s outset, they responded to President Abraham Lincoln’s summer of 1862 call for 300,000 volunteers.
The five men served in the 96th Illinois Infantry and the author does an impeccable job of highlighting the regiment’s experiences during the conflict, including performing various labor tasks during the first year of their enlistment and the 96th’s combat experiences in Tennessee and Georgia. This is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a regimental history. Dretske’s superb study is an intimate history experienced by five immigrants who fought for their adopted home.
Throughout this study Dretske masterfully uses the lives of these five soldiers to explore what motivated immigrants to fight and explore what they thought about slavery. Additionally, Dretske utilizes the experiences of each soldier to illuminate how soldiers confronted and coped with war’s tragic consequences. While keenly aware of “the risk [of] heading off to war” the author contends that the battlefield’s destructive reality did not hit home for these men until John Taylor, wounded at Chickamauga, died on November 24, 1863.
By examining the lives of these five soldiers, three of whom survived the war; Taylor died in 1863 and Madden died at Andersonville in 1864, Dretske highlights the reality that, although the shooting ceased in the spring of 1865, veterans coped with the war’s physical and emotional legacies until death. For instance, Dretske’s examination of the postwar life of Lewin, who died in 1914, reveals that he suffered for the rest of his life from frequent “dull heavy pains in his head” as
a result of wounds he received at Chickamauga.
Dretske’s history offers much more than a microcosm of how the conflict impacted these five men, but also analyzes how the war affected loved ones and neighbors left behind. In addition to discussing the roles civilians at home played in lending support to the Soldiers Aid Society or similar organizations, this outstanding study reveals how those on the home front, such as Nancy Murray, John Taylor’s fiancée, too became a battle casualty.
While marvelous studies, including those penned by such talented historians as Brian Matthew Jordan, James McPherson, and Peter Carmichael, offer insight into the myriad ways the conflict impacted soldiers, it is a rare thing to have a volume that traces, in such magnificent detail, the lives of the rank and file from the years prior to the conflict, their military service, and postwar existence. This outstanding volume, carefully researched and cogently argued, is essential to anyone interested in the Civil War’s longterm impact on the rank and file and their families.
Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute in Winchester, Va., 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 fourteen books. Noyalas’ latest book, Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, was published by the University Press of Florida.
This is an interesting book. Much has been written about why the South lost the war, in book and article form, but the six essays in Southern Strategies claim to be the first to analyze Confederate defeat through “the lenses of classical strategic and leadership theory.”
Each contributor brings a level of gravitas to his subject matter not always present in essay collections. Editor Christian B. Keller is a professor of history and the director of the Military History Program at the U.S. Army War College. His other five contributors are retired or active-duty Army officers with a wealth of high-level military and teaching experience.
Three essays focus on specific
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campaigns, Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign, the 1862 Maryland Campaign, and 1863 Gettysburg Campaign. Two examine various flaws in Confederate financial and diplomatic policy, while the final essay studies how the Davis War Department mishandled the Trans-Mississippi Theater. The contributors adopted a unified process that identifies and analyzes political and strategiclevel mistakes that seriously diminished the prospects of a Southern victory, and by doing so forced army commanders to overcompensate in what they tried to do on the battlefield.
These lost advantages, they argue, could and should have been accomplished using diplomatic, economic, and informational (intelligence) strengths at the national level. Military power tossed into the mix coins the acronym DIME (no pun intended), an interesting and potentially useful technique to evaluate how a nation state like the Confederacy or the United States, then or now, managed its influence and power at the strategic level. The essays begin with the assumption that the South, at least in theory, possessed sufficient diplomatic, informational, military, and economic power to win its independence. I have my doubts as to the truth of that assumption, but clearly this is something unknowable.
Keller kicks off the collection with “Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Strategic Contingencies in the 1862 Valley Campaign,” which borrows from and builds upon his 2019 book The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy. Keller examines two main issues affecting DIME: The timing of the Lee-Jackson partnership and Stonewall’s untimely death, and the strategic implications of transferring Jackson from the Valley to Richmond to confront McClellan in what would be known as the Seven Days’ Battles. The exploration of the latter implications offers an especially interesting set of “what if” circumstances.
Career Army field artillery officer Eric Johnson, in his “Confederate Economic and Fiscal Policies: Root Causes of Defeat,” argues that actions taken in the economic sphere hamstrung the Confederacy’s ability to win against the United States which, to the surprise of no one, was superior in every aspect of DIME. This road seems well traveled, and Johnson admits to borrowing the insights of others in this regard. The distinction in his essay, he argues, is that few previous writers have linked the strategic weakness of the Confederacy to its failure to integrate its economic and military options.
Next up is “Lee’s Blind Horse: Confederate Intelligence Operations in the 1862 Maryland Campaign,” by Kevin E. McCall, a retired Army officer and former professor at the U.S. Army War College. As suggested by the title, McCall examines a host of issues including a discussion about Lee’s Special Orders 191 I have yet to see raised elsewhere. I did not find it convincing, but I did find it intriguing. Alex Rossino is arguably the leading expert today on the lost orders, the subject of his recent A Tale Untwisted, but McCall tosses enough spice into the mix to give readers their money’s worth.
Retired U.S. Army infantry officer Erik Anderson, who taught at West Point and is currently an instructor at the War College, penned “For Want of Friends: The Failure of Confederate Diplomacy.” The issues here have been covered elsewhere, the failure of the “King Cotton” strategy, inept and occasionally imbecilic emissaries, and Union diplomatic pushback, among others. Anderson’s nail in the Confederate coffin lid is a deeper dive into the often-overlooked national interests of France and England, which did not coincide with the Confederacy’s. This international failure, of course, threw sand in the South’s already rusty gears comprising DIME.
The penultimate contribution, “Going North in 1863: Balancing Boldness and Risk in the Pursuit of Strategic Imperatives,” by Chris Compton, may be the most interesting to general readers of Civil War history. The career field artillery officer and recent graduate of the U.S. Army War College utilizes a strategy analysis tool taught at his alma mater, too complex to fully make sense in a brief review, to evaluate Lee’s decision to move north. Unlike many writers Compton concludes the plan was conceptually sound, but its execution at the operational and tactical levels was deeply flawed.
The final entry takes us out west to the Civil War’s red-headed stepchild theater. “The Forgotten Trans-Mississippi Theater and Confederate Strategy,” by Michael J. Forsyth will also be of interest to military enthusiasts. The retired field artillery office and current assistant professor at the U.S Army Command and General Staff College in Leavenworth, Kansas, has little good to say about how
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the Confederacy managed the sprawling region. After examining everything from theater neglect, poor leadership, and the implementation of weak overall strategies, Forsyth concludes the Davis administration never fully grasped the region’s potential, and that Davis’ failure to implement DIME heavily influenced other aspects of the national war.
There is nothing to quibble with here.
The editor makes it clear at the outset that this book builds on earlier studies like David Donald’s Why the North Won the Civil War (1960) and Gabor Borritt’s Why the Confederacy Lost (1992). In fact, it nests comfortably with those important works and adds additional facets of analysis.
Keller’s Southern Strategies is original, crisply written, and uniquely, and in many cases, persuasively, argued. One can disagree with the arguments and conclusions within these pages, but so what? That is the point of scholarly essays. They should make you think and reevaluate what you think you already know.
Theodore P. Savas (Managing Director) graduated from The University of Iowa College of Law in 1986 (With Distinction). He practiced law in Silicon Valley for many years and taught business and history classes at the college level for about 20 years.
In 1990, he co-founded (with David Woodbury) the historical press Savas Woodbury Publishers (later Savas Publishing). The company was sold to an East coast publisher in 2001. Ted and the late Russel H. Beatie together founded Savas Beatie in January 2004.
Savas is the author or editor of fourteen books as well as scores of articles in a variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers.
Reviewed by Charles H. Bogart
Colonel Joseph Thorburn was born in Ireland in 1825. Shortly after his birth, his family immigrated to the United States. After a number of moves, the family eventually settled in Ohio. Here, Thorburn became a school teacher and later a doctor. In 1853, he relocated his family to Wheeling, Virginia, now West Virginia. In May 1861, one month after the attack on Fort Sumter, Thorburn joined the 1st Virginia Infantry USA, a threemonth regiment, as it’s surgeon. The regiment saw action at the June 3, 1861, Battle of Philippi, a Union victory. During this battle, Thorburn entered into the thick of battle bearing arms and took command of soldiers around him. During the fighting, Colonel Benjamin F. Kelley, the regiment’s commander, was wounded.
In August 1861, with its three-month enlistment up, the 1st Virginia Infantry USA was mustered out of service. The 1st Virginia Volunteer Infantry USA was then reorganized as a threeyear regiment and its ranks filled with former members of the threemonth regiment. Colonel Kelley at this time was still hospitalized, thus the men of the new regiment elected Joseph Thorburn as their colonel. In 1863, upon the admittance of West Virginia into the United States as a newly formed state, the 1st Virginia Volunteer Infantry USA became
the 1st West Virginia Volunteer Infantry USA. The 1st West Virginia Volunteer Infantry USA took part in various engagements and battles along the West Virginia-Virginia border and in the Shenandoah Valley during 1862 and 1863. The regiment suffered numerous casualties during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign, which saw the regiment forced to retreat into its home state. In the spring of 1864, following a reorganization of Union forces, Colonel Thorburn took command of the 2nd Brigade, First Division in General Franz Sigel’s Army of West Virginia. A month after the May 15, 1864, defeat of General Sigel at the Battle of New Market, Colonel Thorburn was given command of the Army of West Virginia’s First Infantry Division. At this same time, General Sigel was relieved of command of the Army of West Virginia by General George Crook. Confusingly, during General Philip Sheridan’s Army of the Shenandoah 1864 Valley Campaign, General Crook’s Army of West Virginia is often referred to as VIII Corps.
On October 19, 1864, Colonel Thorburn’s First Division were among the troops caught up in the Battle of Cedar Creek. During this fighting, while leading his men, Colonel Thorburn was mortally wounded during confused fighting in Middletown, Va., and died on the battlefield. Colonel Thorburn’s remains were taken back to Wheeling, West Virginia, where he was laid to rest in the Mt. Wood Cemetery. James E. Taylor, within his sketchbook, has a drawing of the killing of Colonel Thoburn.
Major General George Crook, commanding officer Army of West Virginia, wrote after the battle, “I am pained to report the death of Col. Joseph Thoburn, commanding First Division, and Capt. Philip G. Bier, assistant adjutant-general on my staff. Both fell mortally wounded while rallying the men. Brave, efficient, and ever conspicuous for their gallantry on the field of battle, in them the country sustained a loss not easily repaired.”
The book under review contains diary entries, letters, and reports written by Colonel Thoburn during 1864. The first diary entry is for May 4, 1864, and the last entry was written on August 7, 1864. The letters consist of three the colonel sent home to his wife in August 1864, while the reports consist of two, one submitted in September and one in October 1864. These diary entries, letters, and reports all provide a keen insight into Colonel Thoburn’s relationship with his family and his observations on the events happening around him. Overall, the letters, diary, and official reports provide an objective look at the U.S. Army in the Shenandoah Valley area during 1864.
The title of the book is based on a portion of a letter Colonel Thoburn wrote on October 4, 1864. “Genl. Crook and Sheridan have I understand portioned for my promotion, but I do not expect anything from it. — Genl. Cooke still retains me in command of a division while quite a number of Brigadiers are here commanding brigades.”
There are three appendixes. The first has reprints of letters containing information on the 1st Virginia Infantry USA during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign; the second appendix has Colonel Thoburn’s report on the Battle of Piedmont; and the third appendix has eye witness accounts of the death of Colonel Thoburn.
The book is an interesting read that provides insights into the thoughts of a forgotten Union division level officer who is concerned that the war is changing into a hard war and that certain individuals are not qualified for the tasks their position entails. He encounters African Americans in Confederate service, but these are slaves digging entrenchments. It is interesting to speculate if Colonel Thoburn would have received a promotion to Brigadier General or have been awarded a Brevet Brigadier General rank if he had survived to the end of the war. The book is nicely illustrated and contains numerous footnotes. More maps would have helped tell the story. However, if West Virginia Civil War history is of any interest, then by all means purchase this book, as you will gain some greater insight into this conflict.
Charles H. Bogart has a BA from Thomas More University and an MCP from Ohio State University. He is employed as a tour guide at the Fort Boone Civil War Battle Site in Frankfort, Ky., serves as President of the Frankfort Civil War Roundtable, and is a board member of the Kentucky Civil War Roundtable. He has written several books and articles on military and naval history.
Grant’s Left Hook: The Bermuda Hundred Campaign, May 5 - June 7, 1864. By Sean Michael Chick, Photographs, campaign maps and appendices. 171 pp. Savas Beatie (Emerging Civil War Series. www.savasbeatie.com. 2021. $14.95 Reviewed by Richard J. Blumberg
This is the thirty-ninth book in the Savas Beatie series. The goal of these works is to “offer compelling, easy to read overviews of some of the Civil War’s most important battles and stories.” This reviewer has reviewed several other works in the series and finds the omission of a bibliography and footnotes to be the major drawback. Readers must go online to get this information. In the case of Chick’s work, nothing is loaded to the site, even after the author’s request on May 2021.
In boxing, a left hook is a difficult punch to execute. However, when delivered correctly, it is very powerful. Mr. Chick’s most recent work is much the same. He scores several misses, some glancing blows, and a few direct hits.
One of the biggest misses is the editing. There are no citations alerting readers where footnotes might be. In the photo credits on page viii, it appears Scott Williams is abbreviated as “(sc)”, yet all other references in the book refer to him as “(sw)”, consistent with the other abbreviations used. Another shortcoming is the lack of analysis. Many tactical and logistical details are missing. This omission prevents readers from fully understanding the consequences of how Union commanders’ missteps impacted Grant’s 1864 three-pronged plan of attack. The lack of analysis is compounded, because each chapter reads like a list of events for a particular set of dates in the campaign.
On a brighter note, Mr. Chick’s treatment of the command relationship between Confederate generals Lee and Beauregard is interesting and well written. Unfortunately, there is no comparison between Union generals Grant and Butler. Including this information would help readers understand how command relations and leadership styles impacted campaign outcomes. Although the order of battle is helpful, most readers probably prefer to see the sources used, or receive a more indepth analysis of the campaign. Appendix B offers an interesting story regarding Jefferson Davis’ slave who had an encounter with General Butler after the war. However, this appendix doesn’t directly relate to the Bermuda Hundred campaign.
In spite of the misses and glancing blows, Mr. Chick’s experience as a New Orleans tour guide, helps make his driving tour an excellent resource and a highlight of this work. His research is sound and factually correct. His numerous photographs and maps help the reader understand the various battles of this campaign.
book Mr. Chick’s is an interesting work that offers a good overview of the campaign. The final chapter does a good job explaining the campaign’s purpose but leaves other chapters somewhat disconnected. Editing issues, little in-depth analysis, and limitations presumably imposed by the series editor prevent this from being the great work it could be.
Richard Blumberg has reviewed books for Civil War News for over twenty years. Three of his articles have been published in various issues of Civil War News.