Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermonsby R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson’s Chief of Staff. Transcribed and edited by Jonathan W. Peters. Photographs, appendices, glossary, endnotes and bibliography. 344 pp. Sola Fide Publishers, Destin, Florida. www.solafidepublications.org. 2021. Softcover. $24.99 Reviewed by Richard J. Blumberg
Robert Lewis Dabney was a “jack of all trades.” He was a missionary, headmaster/teacher, professor of ecclesiastical history, and perhaps the best theologian of his time. He also served as a Confederate Army chaplain and General “Stonewall” Jackson’s Chief of Staff. During these career pursuits, he also coped with the death of three sons from 1855– 1862.These life experiences gave him a wealth of practical, administrative and spiritual tools that were invaluable to the Confederacy.
Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermons is a fascinating and provocative collection of Dabney’s teachings. Mr. Peters serves as a laborer of the Reformation Bible Church and Hartford Christian School in Darlington, Md. He did an excellent job transcribing and editing some sermons Dabney preached to the Confederate Army. Editing someone else’s work is one of the most difficult aspects of writing. However, Mr. Peters effectively captures the essence of Dabney’s preaching style.
The selected sermons not only impacted Civil War soldiers, but impact today’s readers as well. Each of Dabney’s lessons began with a brief justification of why the lesson is important. This is followed by a description of any lessons/morals learned and how they applied to specific situations. Mr. Peters links various sermons into a cohesive story depicting the every-day life of Civil War soldiers. He effectively captures the emotions of 1) fear and uncertainty; 2) hope; 3) grace, and 4) love. These are the focal points of most of Dabney’s teachings. Mr. Peters clearly shows that R.L. Dabney still shines as brightly today, as he did more than onehundred fifty years ago.
This book is well worth the $24.99 price tag. Excellent research, a detailed bibliography, and numerous photographic images bring Dabney’s sermons to life. This work is especially suited for those interested in the spiritual influences of the Civil War. However, all readers will benefit from the excellent life lessons that are covered in this book.
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.
Visit our New
Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox. By Caroline E. Janney. Photos, maps, notes, index, 344 pp., 2021. University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.org. Hardcover. $30.
Reviewed by Jonathan A. Noyalas
Pulitzer-winning historian Never Call Bruce Catton’s Retreat, volume three of his Centennial History of the Civil War, portrayed Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox as a clean, decisive break with four years of tragic conflict. What occurred at Appomattox, in Catton’s estimation, permitted Lee’s veterans, once paroled, to return home to civilian life without fear of any reprisals. “Lee’s solders were to lay down their arms, accept paroles, and then go to their homes… the men who had been paroled broke ranks, and the Army of Northern Virginia went away from its last parade ground,” Catton wrote in 1965. In recent years historians have begun to challenge this somewhat simplified perspective of Appomattox’s aftermath which has permeated the literature for generations. Arguably, however, no single volume so successfully dismantles the notion that the transition to peace after Lee’s capitulation occurred swiftly and without issue than this latest volume from one of the most respected and prolific historians writing today, Caroline Janney.
Janney, the John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War and director of the Nau Center for Civil War History at the University of Virginia, has produced a prodigiously researched and eloquently crafted volume. Janney’s study, destined to be a classic, will prompt historians to reconsider the complexities of life for not only Lee’s veterans after Appomattox, but the civilians and the United States soldiers with whom they interacted in the days, weeks, and months following the Army of Northern Virginia’s capitulation.
While Janney impeccably details the circumstances surrounding Lee’s surrender, the range of emotions Confederate veterans experienced, the complexities of what it meant to be paroled, and how United States authorities pursued paroling Lee’s veterans, one of the book’s central elements is an analysis of the various challenges Confederates encountered on their way home, chief among them finding food. As they had during the conflict, Confederate veterans relied on civilians for sustenance. Janney’s careful analysis reveals that while some civilians offered what they could and in some instances transformed wartime aid societies into paroled soldiers’ relief societies, others refused.
Some rebuffed Confederate veterans out of economic necessity. For example, Janney relates the encounter of David Champion, a paroled Confederate from Georgia who offered to purchase corn and bacon from “an older man” in the Carolinas with Confederate currency. When the elderly man refused Champion’s offer of compensation with money not worth the paper upon which it was printed, the Georgian and his men pillaged the Carolinian’s corn crib and smokehouse. Encounters such as these, as Janney correctly notes, not only reveal the lengths to which Lee’s veterans went to survive, but bares much about the limits of Confederate loyalty.
Throughout this outstanding study Janney highlights encounters between paroled Confederates and Unionists, both on their homeward journey and in their hometowns. Unionists, Janney illustrates, not only refused aid to defeated Confederates, but when Lee’s veterans arrived in communities with strong Unionist sympathies, local vigilance committees took measures to expel Confederate veterans. For instance, Janney examines the saga of Bob Heck, a paroled Confederate from Boonsboro, Maryland, who was forced out of his house by that town’s vigilance committee fifteen minutes after he arrived there. Janney rightly asserts that Unionists did this in an effort to protect their communities and enact vengeance on individuals they deemed traitors.
Janney’s superb volume also offers an in-depth examination of how paroled Confederates raised anxieties among formerly enslaved people and how Southern veterans attempted to exert control over freed-people, oftentimes in brutal ways. Among the incidents Janney analyzes is the story of a group of Alabama Confederates who, once they returned to their home state, cut off the ears of a number of people once enslaved “in an attempt to terrorize them into submission in returning to the fields.”
Additionally, woven throughout this study are examinations of how various moments after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, most notably the language of Lee’s General Orders No. 9 and interactions between enslaved and former enslavers, helped cultivate various aspects of the Lost Cause.
There is little to criticize about this important book. Janney’s study is critical to comprehending the nuances and complexities of life after Appomattox. This book reframes how we should think about the immediate days, weeks, and months after Appomattox and illustrates that April 9, 1865, while it might have marked a cessation of hostilities between two armies on the battlefield, proved the commencement of a new, uncertain, and tumultuous period.
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 ValleyDuring 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.
February 2022
Reviewed by David Marshall
President Abraham Lincoln ordered the first mass executions and commutations of Native Americans in American history during the 1862 Dakota uprising. Michael Green asserts that Lincoln was capable of growth and change but was dependent on political pressure from others during the Civil War. This main idea runs through the narrative. Readers will find literature comparing Lincoln’s dealing with on Native Americans by authors such as Phillip Paludan, Eric Foner, David Nichols, and Neil Painter throughout this small work.
Green shows that few historians have addressed Native American experiences during the 1862 Sioux Uprising or the 1832 Black Hawk War that Lincoln served in, but they largely deal with Lincoln’s view that Native Americans did not have a civilization like other Americans and were an obstacle to Manifest Destiny and economic growth of the United States. This monograph brings together Lincoln’s attitudes and actions as president and asserts that his outlook was based on his background and European perceptions. The president generally referred policy and actions to his Interior Department and the writer focuses on this department and its involvement with Native Americans.
White settlers seeking cheap land and economic opportunities pushed many different tribes off their lands and onto reservations
as the spread of Southern slavery and westward expansion occurred prior to the Civil War. Green asserts that Lincoln did not necessarily support all situations faced by Indigenous people but failed to make any significant changes due to the conflict between the states, emancipation, and immigrants and Northeastern and Midwestern farmers movement onto the Great Plains. Additionally, he claims that politicians and businesspeople profited from conflict with Native Americans and often violated signed treaties. Few cared if Indians were treated equitably or fairly. An interesting what if deals with what Lincoln might have done if he survived, providing students with food for thought.
One problem that Lincoln faced was that often individuals representing the president failed to seek and receive his guidance prior to making important decisions. Many government agents acted on their own in what they thought was in the best interest of the U.S. government. An example of this was the Sand Creek Massacre which Lincoln never sanctioned but his appointees were crucial in directing this military action. Green points out that Lincoln failed to comment on massacres, did not show the same regard for Indians that he exhibited toward African Americans, did not push important Indian reforms through Congress, and was condescending toward a group of visiting chiefs.
Green reveals what happened to Indigenous policy following Lincoln’s death and where his strategies led. His policies were more successful in the West than in the South. However, Indians did face prejudice and unfairness following Reconstruction. He argues that free labor was not a solution for class equity and economic opportunity for Native Americans, as it was for white settlers and African Americans. He further explains that Abraham Lincoln lived in a time that was generally unconcerned with Indians. Unlike other historians, Green does not blame the President but does not praise his policies either. Additionally, he asserts that the president’s concerns for Native Americans were sincere; however he was mainly concerned with preserving the Union by winning the Civil War and creating economic opportunities for the nation, businesses, and Americans.
This title contains six chapters. Chapter 1 evaluates Lincoln’s family background, early years including his experience during the 1832 Black Hawk War. Chapter 2 examines his presidential years. Chapter 3 evaluates the people who worked for Lincoln, the reformers, and Lincoln’s presidential encounters with Native Americans. The final three chapters deal with issues involving indigenous people during Lincoln’s time in office.
This an interesting story in which the writer persuasively argues that the sixteenth president’s policies were better than many of his predecessors and successors, but not what some contemporaries wanted for Indians in the nineteenth century. This is a good manuscript, impeccably edited/written and full of rich material. This is a solid addition to the literature on Lincoln and Native Americans.
David Marshall is a high school American history teacher in the Miami-Dade School district for the past thirty-five years. A life-long 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.
Matchless Organization: The Confederate Army Medical Department by Guy R. Hasegawa. Endnotes, Appendices, Bibliography, Index, Illustrations. 262 pp. 2021. Southern Illinois University Press. siupress.com. Softcover. $26.50.
Reviewed by John Michael Priest
Imagine creating a government of independent states run by a central government, whose laws the states could ignore if they violated their state sovereignty. Imagine, if you will, trying to organize an efficient centralized military medical system that could fall prey to the whims of a divided Congress, a micromanaging president, territorial state governments, and, at times, capricious generals in the field. Welcome to the Twilight Zone known as the Confederate Army Medical Department. Jefferson Davis allegedly said the Confederacy died from a theory. States Rights and John C. Calhoun’s Nullification Theory undermined everything the Confederacy attempted to accomplish, the Army Medical Department being no exception.
Mr. Hasagawa has woven a complicated tapestry of an essential organization’s constant struggle to centralize the medical system that desperately wanted to save thousands of lives while constantly battling for the authority to do so. The author’s exhaustive research spans the entire organization from the Surgeon General’s office, to the acquisition of medicines from
home and abroad, to defining soldiers’ disabilities. In itself, the organization required a veritable army of support personnel, straining the already limited manpower supply required by the field armies.
It has taken me longer than usual to read this complicated work and to absorb even a small portion of what the author had to say. I shall have to read it again to truly appreciate the immense detail. This is most certainly an excellent foundation for more in-depth research into the Confederate medical service. A researcher could use any chapter as a springboard for further study.
While I will not remember everything, I gleaned some very useful insights from Matchless Organization. It reaffirmed my belief that a “house divided against itself cannot stand.” Throughout its brief and sanguinary history, the Southern Confederacy never achieved a balance between states rights and its own central government, between federalism and anti-federalism. The Confederate Army Medical Department found itself assailed on all sides. President Jefferson Davis, who while trying to run a pseudo-centralized government, interfered with its efficient operation by vetoing legislation that would have given the Medical Department more operational independence. The Medical Department got involved in price fixing and confiscation of private property to acquire medicines. The field generals argued with the department’s definition of “disability” in their efforts to get more men back into ranks. States resisted setting up general hospitals that would treat all soldiers using any available doctors rather than dividing patients and physicians and hospitals by states. Matchless Organization is, as of now, the definitive study of the Confederate Army Medical Organization, but also provides an explanation of how the Confederacy destroyed itself.
Mike Priest is author of Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle (1989) and Before Antietam: The Battle of South Mountain (1992).
Civil War Witnesses And Their Books: New Perspectives On Iconic Works. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Stephen Cushman. Notes, Contributors, Index, and Appendices, 312 pp., 2021. Louisiana State University Press. lsupress.org. Hardcover. $45.00.
The eight essays in Civil War Writings focus on five male and three female participants who lived through it as combatants and civilians from both the South and the North. Included are Union and Confederate women’s views on the war, as well recollections of an enlisted man and the rise and fall of a Northern politicians fight against slavery and the Confederacy. This is the second title edited by Gary Gallagher and Stephen Cushman that concerns a wide-ranging variety of wellknown Civil War books.
Together, as the scholars show, these writings have sustained their influence over generations and include histories, memoirs, journals, novels, and one literary falsehood posing as an autobiographical narrative. Six of the works, such as the James Longstreet, George McClellan, Walter Taylor, and Elizabeth Custer memoirs, Union artillerist John Billing’s account of soldier life, and Henry Wilson’s three historical volumes are familiar to educators, but the other two accounts about Phoebe Pember, and Maria Daley’s memoir offer new material to even the most
well-read Civil War enthusiast. They evaluate replies in personal communications or printed appraisals; scrutinize how writers published to different audiences, and out of diverse reasons, generating a multifaceted record that suggests possible new assessments. In all cases, a deeper look at these writings reveals why they continue to resonate with armchair buffs more than 150 years after the end of the conflict
Elizabeth Varon starts the initial eight monographs detailing in “From Manassas to Appomattox: James Longstreet’s Memoir and the Limits of Confederate Reconciliation” analyzing the differences between his wartime record, postwar career and difficulties with Lost Cause champions. Ultimately, she provides an understanding that the general resumed his friendship with Ulysses S. Grant but never reconciled with his Southern adversaries. William Blair writes in “A Modern Sensibility in Order Garb: Henry Wilson’s Rise and Fall of the Slave Power and the Beginnings of Civil War History,” that the Abolitionist senator accused slaveholders of weakening the United States from the colonial period through
Reconstruction. In “The Brisk and Brilliant Matron of Chimborazo Hospital: Phoebe Yates Pember’s nurse narrative, Sarah Gardner details Confederate medical care and contentions of numerous features of noncombatant life and societal difficulties in wartime Richmond.
The second group of two narratives begins with Stephen Cushman on a general’s personal story. He concentrates on the importance of McClellan’s religious beliefs, his persistent alternative outcomes of battles and campaigns, his bond with his men, and asserts that “Little Mac’ should not be undervalued. In “Maria Lydig Daley: The Diary of a Union Lady 1861–1865,” J. Mathew Gallman allows readers to realize that few women changed somewhat during the war however her antipathy toward President Lincoln, the New York draft riots, and abolitionism is very telling of wealthy New Yorkers.
In the third collection of three compositions, the initial essay by M. Keith Harris focuses on the experiences of citizen-soldiers, race, slavery, and reconciliation in “John D. Billings’s Hardtack and Coffee: A Union Fighting Man’s Civil War.” In “One Widow’s War’s: The Civil War. Reconstruction, and the West in Elizabeth Bacon Custer’s Memories,” Cecily Zander reminds readers that she went against standard explanations of her husband, General George Custer’s reputation. Her three books concentrated on reconciliation, African American rights, differing public attitudes toward Civil War and Indian Wars veterans. Zander asserts that the author deserves more positive consideration from scholars and armchair buffs. Finally, Gary Gallagher in “Proximity and Numbers: Walter H. Taylor Shapes Confederate History and Memory,” persuasively argues that Robert E. Lee’s assistant adjutant general greatly contributed to the Lost Cause adulation of Lee as a general and a man as well as the Confederate cause being doomed from the start. This book’s editor does a good job of pointing out that Lost Cause thinking changed over time and Taylor’s books continue to be cited by historians interested in Lee and his campaigns.
The eight contributors’ original essays are subtly argued and richly documented; they provide biographical details, understanding, and written examinations of the reasons that these individuals wrote their historical accounts. Their work is readable, and a wide-ranging set of monographs written by wellknown individuals, who have spent their lifetimes researching the Civil War.
Overall, the papers in Civil War Writing underscore how participants employed various literary forms to record, describe, and explain aspects and episodes of a conflict that assumed proportions none of them imagined possible at the outset.
Strategies of North and South: A Comparative Analysis of the Union and Confederate Campaigns. by Gerald L. Earley. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland 2021). Notes, bibliography, index. Softcover. 304 pp. $39.95 Reviewed by Christopher L. Kolakowski
One of the more persistent debates about the Civil War concerns the overall strategy of each side. Authors have suggested different options that may have ended the war sooner, changed its outcome, or had some other major overall effect. Others argue the relative importance of Eastern versus Western operations, with some attention of late turning to the Civil War’s impact on the far Western frontier.
Gerald Earley wades into these matters with this book. He has set an ambitious and twofold agenda. His first mission is to examine prewar myths about Southern martial superiority and relative cultures of North and South. Second, he evaluates the conduct of the war through the lens of battle command, strategy, national goals, and constraints.
Readers are greeted with a sprawling narrative over nine
Publishers/Authors Send your book(s) for review to:
Charleston, SC 29412
chapters, with the vast majority of the text covering the war years. Seven chapters are organized by year, from 1860 to 1865 with two for 1861. His narrative discusses the land war involving major armies; theaters like the Atlantic Coast, Gulf Coast, or naval war, receive little attention. Even within discussion of the war, the East gets most of the coverage, although Earley is to be commended for including major operations west of the Mississippi River. The book’s analysis of the war is military-centric; political and economic factors often take a backseat.
The book has significant limitations. First, while there are interesting battlefield illustrations included, there is not a single map. In a broad survey of the war and its major battles, this is a serious omission. Second, the index is not as comprehensive as it could be. Earley’s narrative approach to the war often buries analysis among description. The concluding section is weighted toward the land war in the East, whereas a fuller scope would have enhanced his discussion and conclusions.
Earley has compiled an interesting work and offered analysis that is thoughtprovoking. However, the book’s limitations impact its usefulness. The bibliography will be very helpful for anyone looking for sources on the subject. However, those wanting a more comprehensive approach to the war’s strategy and conduct should look elsewhere.
Christopher L. Kolakowski works as a historian in Madison, Wisconsin. He is the author of four books on the American Civil War and World War II, and is a contributor to the Emerging Civil War blog. The views contained herein are his own.