Reviewed by Joseph Truglio
Aside from Gettysburg, Fredericksburg is my most visited battlefield. I have traipsed over virtually every site and spent uncounted hours at the ‘sunken road.’ I have read numerous books and accounts of what transpired there. However, as time passed, my interests shifted from ‘what happened’ to ‘why it happened.’ This book fulfilled my expectations.
The history presented is well annotated, with an ample bibliography for further study. A multitude of photos and illustrations are interspersed to assist in identifying participants, events, and sites. Also included is an order of battle.
Each chapter begins with a brief anecdotal account of the participants and actions discussed there. Then the author lists all the options available at a particular time, explaining each option in detail. Next comes the decisions made, and why they were chosen. Finally, we get a thorough explanation of the results of those decisions. It is here that the reader can reflect on whether he is in agreement or not.
I found this to be a wonderful process. For the most part I was in agreement with the author’s conclusions. The one thing I came away with is how political the Army of the Potomac leadership was. Politics and ego permeated all aspects of decisions and, in my opinion, led to some disastrous results. One can lay blame on all the participants, from the generals to Lincoln himself.
I don’t know how I missed this series. It is an excellent tool in understanding the ‘whys’ of Civil War battles. I plan on reading a few more of this series, perhaps all of them! I highly recommend you get one…, or a few…, or all of them, and test your own theories. These books are a must for any serious student’s library.
Joseph Truglio, of Manchester, N.J., is a retired Motion Picture Technician who has a lifelong interest in the Civil War. He is past President of the Phil Kearny CWRT in N.J.
Contesting Commemorations: The 1876 Centennial. Independence Day, And The Reconstruction-Era South. By Jack Noe. Notes, Bibliography, and Index. 244 pp., 2021. Louisiana State University Press, lsupress.org. Cloth. $45.00.
Reviewed by David Marshall
Between May and November 1876, a world’s fair called the International Exhibition of Arts Manufacturers and Products of the Soil and Mine, also known as the Centennial Exhibition or Centennial was held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It attracted more than ten million visitors, one fifth of the U.S. population. Its purpose was to celebrate one hundred years of national existence, presenting an opportunity for whites, African Americans, Northerners, and Southerners to reflect and engage with ideas about their identity as Americans. It provided an opportunity for expressions of nationalism, patriotism, healing sectional wounds, or for the white South to reject reconciliation following the Civil War. Together with the 1876 presidential election of Republican Rutherford Hayes, Reconstruction ended partly due to agreements made with representatives from Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina.
Commemoration Contesting provides a captivating representation of post-Civil war reunion and reconciliation, using white Southern reactions to and involvement with these celebrations. Jack Noe offers a colorful discourse on the economic, social, and political aspects of reunification, and the difficulties behind the changes that occurred in a post- Appomattox American identity. Throughout this well written book, a comparison is made between the points of view of white Southerners and African Americans utilizing the voices of many.
Noe spends a considerable number of pages in his six-chapter study linking the recent work of historians such as Gregory Downs, Anne Sarah Rubin, and Richard Zuczek. They suggest that white guerrilla-style terrorism, a defiant white public, and Federal military control of the South, resisted the Radical Republican measures to completely unify and rebuild the New South during Reconstruction. An important argument is suggested by historian David Blight that sectional reunion was achieved at the expense of African Americans, resulting in reconciliation by both north and Southern whites and the beginning of the Jim Crow era.
In The 1976 Centennial, Independence Day, And The Reconstruction Era South readers will gain an understanding of how former slaves used the memory of the Revolutionary War, and its commemoration to demand the status of full citizenship as per the fifteenth amendment. Noe asserts that a reason for the Civil War was the emancipation of African Americans. Additionally, he further extrapolates the challenges between reunion and reconciliation in this deeply researched narrative.
Little has been written on the Centennial. What has been published on the fair itself, and its design is very different than what is examined throughout this study. Noe emphasizes how America experienced and felt about the events and celebration of American history and the meaning of the Fourth of July throughout this title. The writer tells a story that the North and the South were moving away from its agricultural past and into an industrial future with increased importance on the railroad and other inventions for manufacturers, farmers, and people allowing the U.S. to become a world economic giant.
Noe found that some southern women, such as Ellen Long of Florida, believed the Centennial would unite America, and restore the South to prosperity. Furthermore, he analyzed how over time that some Southern governments and businesses realized the Centennial was an opportunity to showcase their great states and benefit economically by participating in the fair. Finally, this tapestry was a focus of national memory and shared identity that used rituals such as the Fourth of July, and the Reconstruction era to portray our sectional identities and differences.
This tome depicts the nationalism fought for by the South between 1861-1865 through commemorative activities such as celebrating our nation’s founding and issues that Southern States had with the Centennial and the Federal government during Reconstruction. During this period, many African Americans were killed or harassed in the South, which resisted any recognition of citizenship for freed people. White Southerners both shunned and engaged with the celebrations of American nationhood. Noe contends that African Americans embraced the opportunity to claim full agency and citizenship. He further postulates that commemorations and historical memory during Reconstruction was intertwined with politics, biased newspapers, partisanship, and racial divisions.
While Southern participation in the 1876 Centennial was limited with only Mississippi and Arkansas having any official presence, the Southern States finally had opportunities to market themselves in future fairs in Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Nashville during the late nineteenth century. They were linked to the idea of a New South, progress, and patriotism. The fairs included black exhibits that focused on education. Noe points out that the fairs forged a link between race and progress during the Jim Crow era. In the end, he suggests that the United States was reunited but far from reconciled.
This reviewer recommends this new volume.
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, 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.
August 2022
The Cacophony of Politics: Northern Democrats and the American Civil War. By J. Matthew Gallman. Notes, bibliography, index, University of Virginia Press, www.upress. virginia.edu. 399 pp., 2021, hardcover. $35.00.
Reviewed by Wayne L. Wolf
This book encompasses the views and attendant dilemmas of politicians and ordinary citizens as they try to define their position on the Lincoln Administration, the war, constitutional issues, and emancipation. Northern Democrats were the loyal opposition to what they conceived as a radical Republican usurpation of the Constitution as
The Democratic response was anything but unanimous. Rather, Democratic views existed along a broad spectrum from supporting the war to preserve the Union (War Democrats) to total opposition to Mr. Lincoln’s war and the trampling of individual liberties (Copperheads). Along these polar opposites were found politicians and citizens whose views were in flux, changing their place on the spectrum as casualties mounted, when Emancipation became a war goal, and when, geographically, they represented a constituency who either supported the war or opposed it. Democrats generally did not believe the war and emancipation should be won at the point of a bayonet but differences settled through compromise and constitutional changes.
The Democratic Party had been formed as a people’s protest against the concentration of power in the federal government. Thus, it is not surprising that in speeches, newspapers, and pamphlets Democrats cast themselves as defenders of the Constitution in the face of a radical Republican agenda. Individual Democratic leaders, e.g. Fernando Wood, Clement Vallandigham, George McClellan, George Woodward, etc., occupied different spots on the continuum of views on the war but each realized that politics were essentially local, familial, geographic, and ethnic. Each of these groups needed to be listened to if success at the polls was to be the eventual outcome.
J. Matthew Gallman deserves kudos for using a wide variety of personal narratives, e.g. Johnathan Hale, Willie Waller, Francis Sherman, Manton Marble, etc., newspaper articles, private communications, and diaries (including many from women on the home front) to illustrate the vast range of views held by people belonging to the Democratic Party. The vast majority of these individuals, and Democrats in general, were conservative, patriotic, and merely opposing administration policies they believed ran amok from Constitutional restraints. They felt the Lincoln administration ran over civil liberties by suspending the writ of habeas corpus, closing down newspapers, and jailing dissidents, even incarcerating a United States senator and congressman.
This book is filled with primary source material that allows a reader to hear the actual words of the minority party. This is a positive for the reader who wishes to form his own opinion on the validity of each Democrat’s position, but this strength is mildly subverted in the concluding chapter when the author applies 20th Century moral assessments and evokes moral outrage on 19th Century actors. It is difficult for an author to avoid this common tendency to judge politics by contemporary standards but essential for an honest attempt to discern motivations behind political positions 150 years ago.
One historical error is noted. The lyrics to “A New Yankee Doodle” did not glorify the military exploits of Jubal Early. Aside from this minor point, the book is eminently readable, instructive, thoroughly researched, and a welcome addition to understanding the actions of the loyal opposition during America’s most trying fratricidal war.
Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College and the author of numerous books, articles and columns regarding Civil War history. He is the past president of the Lincoln-Davis Civil War Roundtable and a frequent speaker on the Civil War circuit.
Visual Aids Help Illustrate
the Life of Jefferson Davis
Following in the Footsteps of Jefferson Davis: Statesman – Soldier – Author – Planter – President. By Stan Cohen. Selected bibliography, 252 pages, Pictorial Histories Publishing Company, Missoula, Mt., www.pictorialhistoriespublishing.com, paperback. $25.00.
Reviewed by Thomas J. Ryan
The author of this publication portrays it as a “pictorial history of Jefferson Davis from his birth, his family, wartime experiences, political life, Secretary of War, his presidency, his capture and imprisonment, and his death and legacy.” Stan Cohen’s objective is to present to “the reader a comprehensive look at one of American history’s most interesting and productive individuals.” In fact, Cohen has put together a remarkable collection of visual aids to illustrate the life and accomplishments of a man who qualifies as one of the most controversial in U.S. history.
Jefferson Davis, in his nearly 90 years on the world’s stage, proved to be a talented, devoted, and energetic performer in a wide variety of significant roles. In fourteen chapters, this study represents Davis as a cadet, military officer, cabinet member, congressional representative, senator, president, prisoner of war, and elder statesman.
Cohen has chosen to devote several pages of visual representations of each stage of Jefferson Davis’s life and career; an effective way to permit the reader/viewer to follow along as they unfold. For example, included are various images of Davis in his role as president of the Confederate States of America, as well as pertinent flyers, posters, maps, notices, photographs, including Davis’s cabinet members and military leaders, pertinent newspaper articles, personal residences in Montgomery, Ala., and
Richmond, Va., along with their architectural drawings and interior furnishings. In addition, there are marble busts of key players in the Davis administration, historical statues, and structures that played important roles during Davis’s administration, including St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and the Virginia State Capitol.
Cohen devotes a chapter to Davis’s vice-president, the enigmatic Alexander Stephens, and multiple chapters deal with the Civil War period, as well as Davis’s eventual imprisonment. A separate chapter covers Davis’s time spent in retirement at Beauvoir in Biloxi, Miss.
Throughout this illustrated history of the life and times of Jefferson Davis, the author places the reader at the scene and provides appropriate descriptive narrative. Although this publication is not intended as an analytical history, it does whet the appetite for further knowledge about Jefferson Davis, and those who played important roles in his life.
A selected bibliography provides sources to pursue further the life and times of Jefferson Davis, including William J. Cooper Jr.’s Jefferson Davis, American, and Jefferson Davis, The Man and the Hour by William C. Davis. Other recommendations include Jefferson Davis’s twovolume autobiography titled The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, and Varina Howell Davis’s biography of her husband, Jefferson Davis, Ex- President of the Confederate States of America.
In effect, this pictorial history offers an opportunity to observe Jefferson Davis in a variety of roles during his productive, as well as more controversial, years. Following in the Footsteps of Jefferson Davis is heartily recommended. It serves as a reminder of the reservoir of knowledge still waiting to be discovered about the Civil War era.
Thomas J. Ryan is the former president of the Central Delaware Civil War Round Table, and author of the award-winning ‘Lee is Trapped and Must Be Taken’: Eleven Fateful Days after Gettysburg, July 4-14, 1863 with co-author Rick Schaus, and Spies, Scouts, and Secrets in the Gettysburg Campaign: How the Critical Role of Intelligence Impacted the Outcome of Lee’s Invasion of the North, June-July 1863.
Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. By Dillon J. Carroll. Notes, index, 368 pp., 2021. Louisiana State University Press, lsupress. org. $45.00.
Reviewed by Jonathan A. Noyalas
The Civil War proved a transformative experience for Corporal Robert Bradbury, a veteran of Battery D, First Pennsylvania Light Artillery. Decades after the conflict Bradbury’s sister Alice noted that her brother “was a perfectly healthy boy and full of fun until he came back from the army.” Pension records and Bradbury’s writings also indicate the war transformed Bradbury and took him, mentally, to a dark place. Bradbury’s experience, however, was not unique. Untold numbers of Union and Confederate soldiers were forever transformed by the experiences of camp, campaign, and battlefield. While historians such as Brian Matthew Jordan and Sarah Handley-Cousins have contributed much to our understanding of the manner in which the conflict impacted soldiers psychologically, Dillon Carroll’s recent volume offers an essential contribution to this growing and important body of literature.
Carroll, a history instructor at Butte College, centers this diligently researched and deftly-crafted volume around the question: how did the Civil War damage “the minds of its participants?” Throughout the book’s eleven chapters the author rightly asserts that a variety of factors impacted soldiers’ mental well-being. In addition to the stresses of combat, Carroll convincingly argues that other factors including lack of sleep, environment, and food shortages took their toll on Union and Confederate troops. In some instances, Carroll notes that the influence of those forces on significant numbers of soldiers adversely impacted an army’s ability to function properly; an argument posited by other historians including one of the most esteemed in the field today, Carol Reardon.
While some soldiers could not manage the conflict’s various stressors, Carroll notes that significant numbers of veterans in both armies employed an array of coping mechanisms throughout the conflict. Taking a cue from historian Kathryn Shively’s notion of “self-care,” Carroll analyzes how mechanisms such as repression, humor, religion, or immersing oneself in letterwriting proved useful. Some soldiers even engaged in the much frowned-upon practices of straggling or shirking duty to cope with the Civil War’s horrors.
Interestingly, however, Carroll asserts that the war’s emotional trauma among United States troops impacted white and African American troops differently. Carroll argues that the experience of combat, the cause of significant mental anguish among white troops, proved a cathartic experience for many who served in United States Colored Troop (USCT) regiments. The opportunity combat offered to engage and kill Confederate troops served as a form of therapy among USCT’s who struggled with the mental anguish of slavery. While Carroll does not suggest that black troops were entirely immune from the conflict’s mental ravages, the author convincingly shows that “far fewer Black veterans became insane.”
Beyond an analysis of the war’s mental toll, an examination of the lack of acceptance of veterans by some communities after the war ended, and an investigation into how poverty impacted veterans’ mental health in the conflict’s aftermath, Carroll broadens this book’s scope by examining how the mental health of veterans impacted families. While some families found the behaviors of their veterans an embarrassment and prompted families to hide veterans from the public eye, some behaviors created a dangerous environment in the home. One of Carroll’s subjects, George Bowen, a veteran of the 59th Illinois Infantry, illustrates this point. Bowen, wounded in the head during the war, frequently hit or threw things at his daughter Jennie, behavior uncharacteristic for Bowen prior to the conflict.
Some families attempted to deal with their veterans at home, but for others the task became too burdensome and family members made the difficult decision to admit loved ones into institutions. Sadly, as Carroll notes, the places family members believed would aid veterans transformed by the conflict presented another set of challenges. Beyond the limitations of treatment and understanding of mental illnesses at the time, Carroll notes that conditions in these hospitals could be quite violent and endangered a patient’s physical well-being. The author’s evidence reveals that fighting occurred at times between patients, patients and doctors, and patients and attendants.
Carroll’s study, deeply researched and engagingly written, is an important book. It offers a reminder that although armies ceased fighting in the spring of 1865, some veterans and their families fought personal battles for decades after the conflict. For those seeking a deeper understanding of the Civil War’s long-term consequences Carroll’s history is essential.
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 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.
A Union Indivisible – Secession and the Politics of Slavery in the Border South, by Michael D. Robinson. 2017, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press. 294 pp., paperback. $19.95.
Reviewed by Charles H. Bogart
It has often been said that Kentucky left the Union in 1866 to join the Confederacy. Why this came about is laid out in some detail in this book. While the author examines the political and social turmoil that buffered four of the five Border States, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware during the winter of 1860–1861, much of his focus deals with Kentucky and Senator John J. Crittenden of Frankfort, Kentucky. All four Border States were slave states, that is, slavery was legal within their borders. Two of the three largest slave owning cities were in the border states, Baltimore and Louisville. However, all four states chose to remain in the Union.
The author’s premise is that the Border States saw the existing Federal government as the best guarantee to preserving the institution of slavery. To them, the United States Constitution protected their rights to own slaves and these rights were guaranteed by numerous federal
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laws that further bolstered the rights of slave owners. Lincoln, they held, might have been elected president on a platform of non-expansion of slavery, but the slave owning states controlled Congress. Therefore, Lincoln and his supporters were powerless to make any significant changes in the laws governing slavery.
The Border State Unionists, however, were divided into two camps, unconditional and conditional. The unconditional Unionists supported any war effort by the Federal government to preserve the Union, while the conditional Unionists fought to preserve the Union as they understood it to exist on the day before Lincoln was elected president. The Kentucky Unionist who served in the U.S. Congress during the Civil War owned more slaves than the Kentucky Secessionist serving in the Confederate Congress.
Front and center in this story were the efforts of Senator John J. Crittenden to preserve the Union. Just as Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky had negotiated compromises that ended various slavery based secession crises during the 1840s and 1850s, Senator Crittenden sought to orchestrate such a compromise during the winter of 1860 and 1861. That he was unable to find a common ground for compromise was due to the fact that the time for compromise had passed. Crittenden, when he was unable to draft a compromise satisfying a majority in Congress, moved for calling a public meeting hosted by the states to find common ground to avoid war. Yet while this move for public meetings generated a lot of positive comments, it also failed to halt the drift to war. With his hope for a compromise settlement in ruins, Crittenden, in July 1861, introduced into Congress a War Resolution Act that did not hint at any change in the Federal slavery policy. Its passage strengthened the Unionist hold in the Border
