Digital Commons Network^™

Gettysburg Contested:150 Years Of Preserving America’S Cherished Landscape, Jennifer M. Murray

Civil War Book Review

Civil War historians have produced no fewer than 6,000 books on the Gettysburg Campaign, saturating the Gettysburg historiography and feeding our seemingly endless fascination with the three-day battle. Recent scholarship has focused on Gettysburg in memory, including an exploration of the process of preserving and interpreting America’s most popular battlefield. In Gettysburg Contested, Brian Black, an environmental historian at Penn State University’s campus in Altoona, focuses on the process of preserving the battlefield from 1863 to the battle’s sesquicentennial in 2013. As Black states, the vision for the book came from “a personal need to understand the ongoing effort to …

Look At Lincoln: Leadership: In Turbulent Times, Frank J. Williams

Civil War Book Review

Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses the four courageous and effective leaders she knows best: Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon B. Johnson. She examines their genuine leadership including their successes and failures. The four were ambitious and had a deep-rooted resilience that permitted them to overcome adversity. Despite confronting political necessities, they had the moral virtue to think primarily of “the whole” rather than just their own individual interest.

Fighting Means Killing: Civil War Soldiers And The Nature Of Combat, Sam D. Elliott

Civil War Book Review

“War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” Famed Confederate cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest’s well-known and brutally concise statement of the essence of war serves to set the theme of Jonathan M. Steplyk’s study of the nature of killing in Civil War combat. Utilizing wartime and postwar accounts of participants, a number of which are quite familiar to Civil War readers, Steplyk analyzes this peculiar and ultimate experience of war from the point of view of the men who were necessarily tasked with killing their erstwhile countrymen.

Petersburg To Appomattox: The End Of The War In Virginia, Christian B. Keller

Civil War Book Review

In this latest installment of UNC Press’s Military Campaigns of the Civil War series, Caroline E. Janney has made a strong mark for herself as Gary W. Gallagher’s literary successor. Most readers will be familiar with the storied list of previous titles in the series, the last of which on the end of the Overland Campaign and the Siege of Petersburg saw Janney and Gallagher team up as co-editors. That was a fine volume. This one is possibly even better.

One big reason this book succeeds is the uniform quality of writing among the nine essays, which range from traditional …

Women And The American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints, Lance Janda

Civil War Book Review

In Women and the American Civil War: North-South Counterpoints, Professors Judith Giesberg and Randall M. Miller have assembled a very strong edited collection of 16 essays designed to integrate women’s and Civil War history and to systematically compare the experiences of women across regional boundaries and throughout the entire Civil War era. The goal of the work is to confront what Giesberg and Miller consider the segregation and racial gendering of many histories of the period, and to broaden and deepen our understanding of the wide array of women’s experiences and their still underappreciated importance in any effort to …

A Campaign Of Giants: The Battle For Petersburg: Volume One, From The Crossing Of The James To The Crater, Benjamin F. Cooling

Civil War Book Review

The conclusion of the Centenary of World War I may be the appropriate moment to re-visit America’s forerunner to modern siege warfare, the ten-month Richmond-Petersburg campaign which all but concluded the agonizingly long struggle in the eastern theater. Just as the Western Front in France eventually cracked, opening the way to the Armistice, so too did Robert E. Lee’s determined stand for the Confederate capital, thus leading to the Appomattox solution. In a comprehensive, labor of love based on encyclopedic knowledge of men and events, long-time Petersburg authority A. Wilson Greene prepares a three-volume treatise, the first of which covers …

The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known: The North’S Union Leagues In The American Civil War, Timothy Wesley

Civil War Book Review

Paul Taylor’s The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War reestablishes the significance of an underappreciated force in America’s political past. Once celebrated roundly for their contributions to Union victory, Union Leaguers have faded somewhat from our collective national memory. However understandable such amnesia might be given the trend of historians in recent decades to question the significance of everyday politics in the lives of wartime northerners, it is nevertheless unfortunate. Indeed, Taylor argues that the collective effect of the Union Leaguers on wartime Northern politics and the broader home front was …

Fighting For Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, And Trenches In The Civil War, Robert L. Glaze

Civil War Book Review

Between 2005 and 2009, Earl J. Hess authored a superb trilogy of books that brought new light to oft-studied campaigns by focusing on the role of trenches and field fortifications in the Eastern Theater. More recently, the prolific historian published the Tom Watson Book Award winning Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness (2015) as well as a series of works detailing pivotal battles of the Atlanta Campaign. Thus, Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War seems to be the natural convergence of years of research and writing.

At The Forefront Of Lee’S Invasion: Retribution, Plunder, And Clashing Cultures On Richard S. Ewell’S Road To Gettysburg, Steven J. Ramold

Civil War Book Review

Campaign histories of the Civil War concentrate their efforts on the subsequent battles that offensives generate, but tend to overlook the movements that lead up to the battles themselves. Robert J. Wynstra’s At the Forefront of Lee’s Invasion: Retribution, Plunder, and Clashing Cultures on Richard S. Ewell’s Road to Gettysburg takes a very different approach in that it is purely an account of one Confederate corps’ movement to battle, with only a cursory description of the Battle of Gettysburg at the end. As the leading element of Robert E. Lee’s incursion into Pennsylvania in 1863, Lt. Gen. Richard Ewell’s II …

The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes To North Carolina, Robert Wooster

Civil War Book Review

The Last Battleground consists of forty-three chapters adopted from essays originally published over fifty installments in Our State: Celebrating North Carolina, a popular magazine, during the four-year sesquicentennial of the Civil War. Each chapter represents a self-contained story of some aspect of the war involving North Carolina, with an eye toward emphasizing the intensely personal nature of the terrible conflict. As Gerard explains of his original goals (p. ix), “The stories would not be sweeping accounts of regimental maneuvers in battle but personal tales of people making the hardest choices of their lives.” In so doing, the author captures …

War, Memory, And The 1913 Gettysburg Reunion, Brian Matthew Jordan

Civil War Book Review

Black-and-white photographs of former enemies gripping hands across the low, stone fence that rambles down Cemetery Ridge are among the most iconic images of Civil War veterans. Snapped at the fiftieth anniversary reunion in Gettysburg, an event that organizers billed as the “Peace Jubilee,” these disarming scenes came to epitomize the swift exceptionalism of sectional reconciliation in the decades after the Civil War. In 1990, documentarian Ken Burns successfully exploited the emotional power of those photographs—together with sepia-toned newsreel footage of the final reunion of Union and Confederate veterans, held in Gettysburg in 1938—in his nine-part PBS film series. A …

The Political Thought Of The Civil War, Michael Berheide

Civil War Book Review

There are fourteen essays in this volume, many of them based on lectures given at the Political Theory Institute at American University a few years ago. Each is a self-contained, extended piece of analysis of some relevant aspect of the Civil War. Reviewing each essay would make this piece far too long, and the editors’ “Introduction” does a fine job of that, anyhow. I will instead treat the whole as an example of doing “political theory” at a truly excellent level.

A Strife Of Tongues: The Compromise Of 1850 And The Ideological Foundations Of The American Civil War, Joshua A. Lynn

Civil War Book Review

Antebellum politicians knew that words mattered. In 1856 Louisianan Judah P. Benjamin complained in the Senate that remarks made by antislavery colleague William H. Seward “will be spread through the machinery of the federal post office. It is printed in your [Congressional] Globe. It will be read, probably, by millions of people.” “No such faint voice as mine,” Benjamin whined, “can follow it to every village, to every hamlet, to every cottage to which it has spread.”The prospect of antislavery sentiment invading southern villages, hamlets, and cottages worried this slaveholding politician. Years after the Compromise of 1850 had supposedly achieved …

Vagrants And Vagabonds: Poverty And Mobility In The Early American Republic, Timothy A. Hacsi

Civil War Book Review

Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan’s Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic examines the poor relief and criminal bureaucracies in Pennsylvania, New York, and neighboring Mid-Atlantic states that regularly judged, institutionalized, and transported people, often against their will, in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this era of urban growth and early industrialization, poverty was increasingly visible and seen as a fundamental danger. Vagrants and Vagabonds does an excellent job of describing and analyzing themes and approaches that were common throughout the region, and also traces the varied evolution of these approaches in different states.

Exposing Slavery: Photography, Human Bondage, And The Birth Of Modern Visual Politics In America, Jack Trammell

Civil War Book Review

The invention of the camera transformed the visual culture of the world; in essence it opened up a brand-new window onto the soul. Contemporary scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson have explored this new visual rhetoric, suggesting that the positionality of subject and object, and the impact of the gaze, have created a startling new social environment where all of the traditional ideas associated with visual judgement are now in flux or in question. In Exposing Slavery, Matthew Fox-Amato confirms this from a historical perspective, showing readers with actual photographs and through a narration on visual politics the surprising power …

Approaching Civil War And Southern History, Jessica Cannon

Civil War Book Review

In retrospective snapshots looking across a long and distinguished scholarly career, Approaching the Civil War and Southern History collects together ten essays written by William J. Cooper, Boyd Professor Emeritus at Louisiana State University. Individually these essays, initially published between 1970 and 2012, broadly examine a variety of topics in the Civil War-era South ranging from the leadership of Jefferson Davis to an analysis of the viability of cotton production. Taken together they highlight the clear argumentation and lucid prose that has long been a hallmark of William Cooper’s work.

No Property In Man: Slavery And Antislavery At The Nation’S Founding, J. Matthew Ward

Civil War Book Review

Noted historian Sean Wilentz offers a weighty and sure-to-be controversial contribution to the extensive historiography on slavery and the original intent of the Constitution. Many historians agree the Constitution was, explicitly or implicitly, a proslavery document, ratified by elite white men many of whom had an interest in slavery as an American institution. But Wilentz contends that the Constitution was more ambivalent toward slavery—even indirectly antislavery in its language—than most scholars acknowledge. The Constitution’s limited protection of slavery could not be equated to the recognition of slavery as a permanent institution. The national governing document failed to specifically recognize property …

A Civil Life In An Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur’S Struggle For Purpose, Sara Brooks Sundberg

Civil War Book Review

Wars oftentimes cause individuals to challenge themselves to reach beyond traditional expectations. In Paula Tarnapol Whitacre‘s biography of Julia Wilbur, Wilbur breaks through the traditional expectation of female dependency for a mid-nineteenth century unmarried, white, middle-class woman like herself. Instead, she becomes an independent, middle-class working woman, and social reformer. Based upon several decades of diaries and various correspondence, Whitacre reconstructs Wilbur’s life story dividing it into three sections that outline her life and work before, during, and after the Civil War. Two locations shape Wilbur’s life in significant ways: Rochester, New York, where she taught school, learned about social …

Civil War Barons: The Tycoons, Entrepreneurs, Inventors, And Visionaries Who Forged Victory And Shaped A Nation, Geoff Lybeck

Civil War Book Review

In Civil War Barons Jeffry D. Wert weaves the stories of nineteen businessmen together into a narrative of the Union’s organizational response to the demands of the Civil War. Wert’s approach widens the scope of his analysis beyond that of a group biography to elucidate the networks that these businessmen built between government administrators, natural resources, and the men that labored and fought to preserve the Union. This broad view does not obscure the role of the individual in his account. To the contrary, the self-determination of these particular historical actors plays a central role in Wert’s explanation of the …

Slave Law And The Politics Of Resistance In The Early Atlantic World, Alex Borucki

Civil War Book Review

Edward B. Rugemer substantially repositions the significance of the actions of the enslaved, by examining how slave rebellions (and more broadly, the behavior of enslaved people) shaped certain contours of slave law in Barbados, Jamaica, and South Carolina. He surveys how the political significance of slave resistance was reflected into the deliberation and writing of slave laws in the British Atlantic.

Conquered: Why The Army Of Tennessee Failed, Benjamin Franklin Cooling

Civil War Book Review

Yes, Virginia, to paraphrase David Goldfield’s book title (2002), we are “still fighting the Civil War.” Lest we forget, this is probably a good thing and the carnage of military history is always worth remembering. In this case, trying once again to explain (rationalize) Confederate military collapse, well-known authority on the Army of Tennessee Larry Daniel has taken on other doyens of the war in the western theater from Stanley Horn, Tom Connelly, James McDonough, Steven Woodworth, Earl Hess and Richard McMurray to Grady McWhiney, Nathaniel Hughes, Wiley Sword to Michael Ballard, and others. Sometimes pretentious and sometimes convincing but …

In God’S Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, And Religious Space During The American Civil War, Robert Miller

Civil War Book Review

In his book In God’s Presence, Benjamin Miller uses the philosophy of spatial theory as a prism to analyze how chaplains and missionaries in the Civil War attempted to preserve antebellum religious foundations and beliefs (“sacred space”) amidst the foreign chaos of battles, death, wounds, camp life, etc. (“profane space”). In doing so, he presents what is perhaps the most thorough and detailed analysis yet written of the religious life of Civil War chaplains and soldiers. Though thankfully more books are emerging of late which deal seriously with religion and the War, few have dealt as specifically as this …

Civil War Obscura: Barracoon: The Story Of The Last “Black Cargo", Meg Groeling

Civil War Book Review

Author and historian/folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who died in obscurity in 1960, is back on the bookshelves in a significant way. Her first book, Barracoon, has finally been published. She completed the work in 1931 but could never interest publishers in the true saga of Cudjo Lewis, thought to be the last living person enslaved in Africa and transported to the United States by the slave ship Clotilda. Part of the reason the book encountered obstacles was the inclusion of dialect in Hurston's interviews with Kossula, Lewis's African name. Another part was the topic itself. Not only is …

Slaves, Slaveholders, And A Kentucky Community’S Struggle Toward Freedom, Tom Barber

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

The Coming Of Democracy: Presidential Campaigning In The Age Of Jackson, Martin Hershock

Civil War Book Review

Mark Cheathem’s The Coming of Democracy, which examines the beginnings of the nation’s turn toward cultural politics during the Jacksonian era, thus appears at an incredibly prescient moment and offers an interesting lens through which to examine both the nation’s current political setting as well as the robust and colorful political campaigns associated with the Age of Jackson. In this well written and accessible work, Cheatem offers readers a detailed account of the evolving usage of cultural politics in the elections that marked the birth of the second American party system.

Annotations: Summer 2019, Tom Barber

Civil War Book Review

No abstract provided.

Civil War Obscura: Madame Castel’S Lodger, Meg Groeling

Civil War Book Review

In 2019, most folks know what fan fiction is, and this book definitely falls into that category. I have never read a book quite like Madame Castel’s Lodger, a semi-factual, semi-fictional biography of Confederate General P. T. G. Beauregard. Digging up old books that once were popular may seem like an odd hobby, but this particular volume reminds me of why I do it. It is truly an homage to Beauregard and gives some insight into his character only possible if the writer is southern herself.

Practical Liberators: Union Officers In The Western Theater During The Civil War, Zachery Fry

Civil War Book Review

Union officers in the Civil War’s Western Theater were uninterested in waging a purely moral crusade to free slaves. Instead, they executed pro-emancipation policy as a practical measure after recognizing it would help win the war. So argues Kristopher Teters in this powerful volume focusing on the role Union forces played in the complicated process of emancipation.

The Hidden Light Of Northern Fires, Meg Groeling

Civil War Book Review

Daren Wang is not the first author to write a Civil War novel, but he is one of the few to get a review in these august pages. Hidden Light is his first novel, but Wang has written for The Atlantic Journal-Constitution, Paste, and Five Points magazine. Additionally, he is the founding executive director of the Decatur Book Festival. Such an active mind was imprinted with an interest in history at an early age when he and his family actually moved to Town Line, New York.

Crossing The Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered, Angela M. Riotto

Civil War Book Review

In the volume’s foreword, John T. Hubbell, professor emeritus at Kent State University, succinctly summarized the historiography of Civil War prisons, remarking, “It seems that prisons and prisoners have been…a part of the narrative, yet somehow strangely apart from it.” Seeking to remedy this disconnect, Michael P. Gray, author of The Business of Captivity: Elmira and its Civil War Prisons (2001), tasked eight scholars to “reconsider” Civil War prisons and prisoners of war (POWs) and scholars’ interpretations of the topic. The result, Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered, is an enlightening essay collection that highlights the latest methodologies …