Glorious War: 
The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer

Thom Hatch

St. Martin's Press, 2013, 366 pp., $28.99

          

Review by Gordon Berg

        Probably only one Union officer can match the cult of personality that has grown up around Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart: George Armstrong Custer.  Thom Hatch undoubtedly agrees that Custer deserves the accolades appearing in the opening paragraph on the dust jacket of Glorious War.  "This thrilling and definitive biography of George Armstrong Custer's Civil War years is nothing short of a heart-pounding cavalry charge through the battlefield heroics that thrust the gallant young officer into the national spotlight in the midst of the country's darkest hours."  Even allowing for some marketing exuberance, it sets the bar high for Custer.
 

        Hatch makes an energetic case that Custer deserves the hype.  Glorious War is his fourth book with Custer as the main actor.  Hatch argues that the young officer's Civil War exploits have been undervalued because of his defeat at the Little Bighorn.  He contends that Custer should be seen as "a national hero on a grand scale due to his amazing achievements in the Civil War."  Hatch's unstinting effort to correct the record and his unreserved praise and admiration for his subject may cause more objective readers to question his conclusions.  To his credit, Hatch admits that his book is "a testament," and maintains that "Custer's entire military career should be reassessed by fair-minded historians under a more favorable light and found to have been commendable."

         Custer's war record, however, capably speaks for itself.  The spirited son of a staunchly Democratic Ohio family, Custer was a long shot to be accepted for West Point.  Given his propensity for hijinks and accruing demerits, it was an even longer shot that he would graduate.  Custer succeeded in doing both.   It was probably poetic justice that he was the last of his class to leave West Point in 1861.  Custer joined his unit, the 2nd United States Cavalry, in time to play a minimal role at First Bull Run.  His company did, however, form the rear guard as the disorganized Union Army retreated to the defenses of Washington.

        Custer saw his first real action on March 9, 1862, leading his company on a saber charge against Confederate pickets near Centerville, VA.  It would be the first of many.  The regiment soon joined the Army of the Potomac on The Peninsula.  There, the young horse soldier came to the attention of Major General George B. McClellan, a fellow Democrat but polar opposite in temperament.  Asked to serve on the commanding general's staff, Hatch assumes "Custer must have been bursting with pride as he reported to the commanding general ready to prove once again that he could assume any role thrust upon him and excel."

        At Antietam, Custer served mainly in a staff role but, while detailed to General Alfred Pleasonton, his detachment managed to capture several hundred Confederate stragglers near Boonsboro.  Custer's initiative caught Pleasonton's eye and McClellan reported the incident to President Lincoln.  Between assignments after McClellan was relieved of command, Custer used the time to vigorously pursue the hand of a reluctant Libbie Bacon.   It was probably only orders to return to duty in April 1863 that delayed his winning that battle, too. 

         His new assignment again found him with General Pleasonton, now in charge of Union cavalry after the disaster at Chancellorsville.  Accompanying hard-fighting Colonel Benjamin F. Davis's 8th New York Cavalry, Custer found himself at Beverly Ford at dawn on June 9, 1863.  When halted by Confederate pickets, Davis and Custer opened fire and launched the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest all-cavalry engagement ever fought in North America.  After Davis was killed, Hatch admits that Custer's actions "could be called a matter of interpretation."  Hatch favors the version whereby Custer, "by virtue of his actions became de facto leader of an entire brigade or at least an individual detachment."  Whatever the reality, Custer's aggressiveness put him in Pleasonton's good graces; fellow officers would soon be calling him "Pleasonton's Pet." 

        Pleasonton's patronage quickly paid big dividends.  While Lee moved his army into Pennsylvania in June 1863, Pleasonton recommended that new Union commander, Major General George G. Meade, promote three young cavalry officers to the rank of brigadier general.  Twenty-three year old George Armstrong Custer found himself the youngest general in the Union Army.  He commanded a brigade of four Michigan regiments known as "the Wolverines."  Four days after his promotion, in a farm field east of Gettysburg, a cavalry fight would solidify his career and launch his reputation. Hatch belongs to the school that believes the engagement in East Cavalry Field on July 3 was an integral part Lee's ingenious attack plan to break the Union center by coordinated attack by George Pickett's infantry and Jeb Stuart's cavalry.  This belief may be behind Hatch contention that this encounter and Custer's role in it probably saved the Union army but it "has all but been ignored by modern-day historians, likely due to prejudices and controversies from the Boy General's later career."  Unfortunately, Hatch's bibliography omits recent studies of Union cavalry operations at Gettysburg that differ from his point-of-view.

        Custer's star continued to rise.  His flamboyant battlefield presence caught the imagination of the Northern press.  Serving with distinction at Culpepper, the Bristoe Campaign, and as a decoy during the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid, Custer even found time to avenge an earlier defeat, finally winning the hand of Libbie Bacon.  When Ulysses S. Grant became commander of all the Union armies and came east to join the Army of the Potomac, he brought Major General Philip Sheridan with him.  Grant made "Little Phil" commander of the Union cavalry.  Sheridan gave Grant's pet, Brigadier General James H. Wilson, command of the Third Division, passing over a more qualified George Custer.  To his credit, Custer masked his disappointment and continued to serve with distinction.  His brigade was in the thick of the fight at Yellow Tavern where a trooper from the Fifth Michigan is credited with mortally wounding Jeb Stuart.  The brigade took a beating at Trevilian Station and fought with determination in the 1864 Valley Campaign where Custer finally earned command of the Third Division.  Custer distinguished himself at Five Forks and the first white flag at Appomattox appeared in front his troops.

        After his death in Montana in 1876, Libbie Custer "worked tirelessly to protect the image of her later husband and vigorously defended him against those who brought criticism."  Libbie Custerr would have loved Glorious War.   

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Appomattox: 
Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War

Elizabeth H. Varon

Oxford University Press, 2013, 305 pp., $27.95

          

Review by Gordon Berg

        The day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, the two generals fired the first shots of a second, albeit different war: a war for the meaning of that iconic event and how it would be remembered.  Grant opened the battle with the magnanimous surrender terms he offered to the Army of Northern Virginia.  Lee countered with General Order No. 9, his melancholy farewell to the men he led for four agonizing years.  Each man understood his document in ways consistent with the ideology for which he had fought.  The political, social, and cultural debates these documents spawned in the months after the surrender are the subject of Elizabeth Varon's provocative and insightful study of an event most students of the Civil War thought they understood.

      

       Varon probes deep into the psyches of Lee and Grant and analyzes them with fresh eyes to understand what kind of nation they envisioned emerging from the wreckage of war.  Grant's surrender terms reflected a victor's generosity and spoke to the moral righteousness of the Union cause that promised a better future for all citizens of an improved, united nation.  Lee's unrepentant message looked to the past and lamented the loss of an idyllic, simpler time when the virtue, privilege, and honor of the white South prevailed, before it was ground down by the weight of the North's gross numbers and impersonal industrial might.  Varon contends that both Grant and Lee were men of peace on April 9, but peace of very different kinds.  The two men thus become touchstones for Americans struggling to understand how the war would affect their daily lives.  Grant's surrender terms and Lee's farewell order became the founding documents for 150 years of debate over the legacy of the Civil War.

        Varon also delves into the letters, diaries, and memoirs left by the men of the two armies who fought each other during those last desperate days.  "The Union and Confederate soldiers who fought the Appomattox campaign were keenly aware," she concludes, "of the political nature of the surrender and of the high stakes involved in interpreting it."  While the opinions of individual soldiers varied, most of them adhered closely to the interpretations enunciated by their leaders.  These feelings traveled with the soldiers as they returned home, forming the basis of Lost Cause mythology in the South and Reconciliationist vindication in the North.  Varon gives appropriate credit for the important, but often unreported, role played by United States Colored Troops (USCT) during the Appomattox campaign.  "In the eyes of black troops," she maintains, "the fate of the Union was still uncertain on April 9, 1865, and their own agency tipped the scales."   Varon emphasizes that, for them, the end of the war was much more than a military victory that preserved the Union.  They viewed their participation as an integral part of a victorious crusade that "incorporated the themes of not only racial pride and liberation but also of clemency: they attempted to inscribe a civil rights message into the magnanimous terms of the surrender."

        From the armies in the field, Varon gracefully moves to the two home fronts.  In the North, the mood of the populace quickly shifted from joy and relief to shock and anger in the wake of Lincoln's assassination, occurring less than a week after Appomattox.  Analyzing Radical, moderate Republican and Democrat, and Copperhead newspapers, Varon follows the panoply of public opinion toward the South in general and the Confederate government in particular.  It ranged from mercy grounded in moral righteousness to retribution fired by grief and all the various shades of each in between.  But through the cacophony of voices, the conciliatory words of Lincoln's last public speech and the magnanimous words of Grant's surrender terms reverberated throughout the North.  Varon also recognizes that these sentiments were mirrored in the restraint shown by African American troops toward the homeward bound Confederate soldiers they encountered.  Rather than responding with anger and violence in the wake of the president's assassination, she notes that "They paid tribute to Lincoln, as most white soldiers did, by upholding the fragile peace."

        Except for an almost universal reverence of Lee, feelings in the South were also divided about what the end of the war meant.  The theme of General Order No. 9 -- that the South succumbed only to the North's crushing numerical superiority and massive material advantages -- helped many salve feelings of shock, disbelief, and humiliation that the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia could be surrendered.  Again, Varon uses newspapers to take the pulse of public opinion.  It ranged from resignation and a wish for "peace and brotherhood" to angry defiance, urging "more determined and united action."  Southern Unionists felt vindicated in their loyalty to the old flag and Southern blacks "celebrated Lee's surrender as a day of jubilee."  The battle over the meaning of Appomattox, Varon astutely concludes, "did not simply pit South against North or even Confederacy against Union.  Instead it pitted those who opposed a thoroughgoing transformation of the South…against those who demanded such a transformation."  The  ideological battles of a second Civil War, less bloody, to be sure, but just as determined, had begun.

       

        In an earlier book, Varon expertly chronicled the turbulent decades leading to national disunion.  She now reveals an equal affinity for documenting the dramatic ending of that disunion.  Her scholarship provides readers with excellent bookends for the many volumes devoted to the Civil War.  At its root, Appomattox is a study of the power and subtlety of language.  In her clear, confident, yet elegant, prose, Varon gives renewed life to many of the players in the last act of America's greatest tragedy.  We can hear and understand their points-of-view, even if we don't agree with them.

   

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination:
The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theater

Thomas A. Bogar

Regnery Publishing, 2013, 375 pp., $27.95

          

Review by Gordon Berg

     Charles Francis Byrne, John Mathews, and Helen Muzzy are among forty six all but forgotten individuals who had unintended parts in the greatest tragedy ever played out in an American theater.  History has plentifully recorded what happened in Ford's Theater on the evening of April 14, 1865.  But what about backstage?  The assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth forever changed the lives of the men and women working in the theater that night.  Thomas Bogar resurrects these unintended actors in an entertaining, delightfully written narrative, that offers an innovative perspective on an oft told tale.

       Historians have generally followed the evening's two main protagonists; one across 10th Street to the Peterson boarding house and martyrdom, the other across the Navy Yard bridge to Richard Garrett's tobacco barn and infamy.  Bogar sets himself a more formidable task.  "I have consciously given preference to the perceptions and words of those who experienced that night," Bogar relates, "and its subsequent harrowing days, from backstage, rather than to accounts by audience members, as has largely been the case to date."  He found a few performers, like lead actress Laura Keene, who were already public figures and left a paper trail to follow.  Some backstage hands took advantage of their chance notoriety and later spoke freely and publicly of events of that night as they knew them.  But most of that night's unfortunate bit players and backstage staff sought to distance themselves from events and willingly faded into obscurity.  Bringing them to life is an accomplishment of the first order. 

        Bogar, a theater historian by trade, offers more than capsule biographies of unfamiliar individuals.  He interweaves the state of the theater in wartime America with the way thespians of the time lived and worked.  Booth was one of the highest paid actors of his era and a favorite of Lincoln's.  After one performance, the president asked to meet the actor; the request was curtly refused.  Lincoln loved attending the theater in Washington, and he especially liked going to see light comedy at the recently refurbished building owned and managed by the three Ford brothers. 

        In a brief, fast paced, chapter, Bogar vividly describes the confusion, pandemonium, and anguish that occurred immediately after Booth's fateful shot.  Even before Mrs. Lincoln's ear-piercing scream alerted cast and audience that something was amiss, Booth was already backstage, shoving past novice actress Jeannie Gourlay and orchestra conductor Billy Withers.  He hit "basket boy" Peanut John, who was holding his getaway horse in an alley behind the theater, with the butt of a Bowie knife and galloped away.  Many recognized the fleeing Booth even before they realized Lincoln had been shot.  Actor Tom Gourlay quickly brought a prop table that allowed Dr. Charles Taft to climb from the stage into the presidential box where he was soon joined by Dr. Charles Leale and Ms. Keene.  Manager Harry Ford ordered ticket taker "Buck" Buckingham to find Washington mayor Richard Wallach who was in the audience.  Wallach ordered the theater cleared and stage manager John B. Wright dropped the plush green curtain.  It would not rise again for more than a century.  An evening that began with farce ended in tragedy. 

        Bogar skillfully interweaves a summary of the plot of "Our American Cousin" with the thumb nail biographies of the players and how they came to be together at Ford's.  Some were experienced performers, others members of Ford's stock company, still making their way through the ranks.  Veteran Helen Muzzy had had personal contact with Lincoln the previous year.  Her brother, a Confederate blockade runner, was sentenced to be hung in Norfolk, VA.  Muzzy and her mother made their way to Washington to plead personally with Lincoln for clemency.  Lincoln spared her brother's life and Muzzy remained in Washington to work.  From the stage, she would notice Booth just outside the presidential box that night. 

        Young Ned Emerson bore a striking resemblance to Booth and knew him well.  Rehearsing some lines with actress May Hart the day before in the alley behind Ford's, he was observed gesturing and pointing by two local women who reported what they had seen.  But he was never questioned by authorities or called to testify.  Another friend of Booth's, John Mathews, sometimes entertained the assassin in his rented room at the Peterson house; the very room in which Lincoln would later die.  General and Mrs. Grant, who declined an invitation to accompany the Lincoln's to the theater, passed a mounted Booth on Pennsylvania Avenue on their way to catch a train to New Jersey.  The night of the assassination, theater owner John T. Ford was attending to business 120 miles away in Richmond.  Bogar's book abounds with "stranger than fiction" anecdotes such as these. 

        With close attention to detail, Bogar takes readers through the play's dress rehearsal and performance preparations earlier in the day.  That night, as the fateful moment in Act III, Scene 2 approached, his narrative strategy of short, staccato sentences, builds an atmosphere of anxiety and dread.  From the moment the fatal shot was fired, Bogar maintains, the world of all the personages in the theater "turned upside down."  Authorities relentlessly questioned the theater people, looking for links to the assassination conspiracy.  Only Ned Spangler, a stagehand, would be convicted of any complicity although others had been associated with earlier plans to kidnap Lincoln.

        What happened to the theater people after the investigation and trials were all over?  Ten of them would be dead within a decade.  Laura Keene kept to a rigorous performance schedule but died at age forty-seven in 1873.  John T. Ford became one of the most successful theater managers in America until his death in 1894.  Harry Hawk, the actor on stage when Booth leaped into history, continued to work until he stopped acting and started raising chickens and dogs in Bryn Mar, New Jersey.  He moved to the Channel Islands in 1911 and died there in 1916.  Helen Truman, whose secessionist brother was spared by Lincoln formed a small touring company, retired to Los Angeles, and died at her home in 1924.  The last to die was program boy Joseph Hazelton who was only eleven in 1865.  He moved to California, performed in silent films, became a radio personality, and insisted to his death in 1936 that John Wilkes Booth did not die in Richard Garrett's tobacco barn.  Hazelton insisted that Booth escaped to South America and later returned to the United States where he committed suicide in a hotel in Enid, OK in 1903.  Lincoln was the first of four presidents to die by an assassin's bullet and his death spawned conspiracy theories over the years that rival the finest theater ever performed on the American stage.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri:
The Long Civil War on the Border

Edited by Jonathan Earle and Diane Mutti Burke

University Press of Kansas, 2013, 360 pp., $37.50

          

Review by Gordon Berg
 

Long before the gunfire in Charleston harbor announced the opening act of the Civil War, the conflict's bloody violence was adumbrated by years of robbery, arson, torture, murder, and revenge waged on the tall grass prairies along the Kansas-Missouri border. The 15 uniformly excellent essays contained in Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri help explain what united and divided the men and women who inhabited these contested borderlands, why their social and political differences helped ignite a civil war that engulfed an entire nation, and the difficulties they experienced trying to rebuild their homes and reconstruct their lives after hostilities ended.

The editors have chosen not to focus on the military engagements that took place in the region between 1861-1865, wisely leaving those stories to other scholars. Rather, these essays, originally presented as papers at two conferences offering new regional research, examine how the conflict over slavery transformed the border region and eventually the nation, how the residents were affected by the "hard war" practices that evolved there, and why the myths and memories that influenced the rebuilding of the border states live on even to the present day. In the process, readers are offered nuanced definitions of liberty, manliness, loyalty, democracy, citizenship, and freedom that emerged from the borderlands' blood-drenched soil.
 

The late Michael Fellman, pioneering scholar of the region's vicious irregular warfare, sets the stage for the essays that follow. Immersed for years in the letters, journals, and memoirs of soldiers and civilians who lived and fought in Kansas and Missouri, Fellman takes a particularly harsh view of events transpiring there. For him, the border conflict is a continuation of an age-old practice running throughout Chrisindom from the medieval Crusades through the religious wars of 17th century Europe and the Indian Wars of colonial America; a holy "war of all against all," the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called it. Along the border, Fellman found, people who were once neighbors, spoke the same language, and shared cultural values "victimized one another, lied, dehumanized their enemies, lost all empathy and retreated into numbness, and buried their consciences behind a high, hard wall of utter antipathy." For those who see the irregular warfare along the border as an aberration, Fellman concludes "such assumptions may reassure us, but they are grounded in a refusal to look into the abyss that is actual war."

Kristen K. Epps begins the story during the original settling of the verdant prairie grasslands. Since many of the first pioneers came from the South, they brought their slaves with them. "Even from an early date," Epps observes, "slavery was a visible part of life on what would become the Kansas-Missouri border." Slavery was an integral part of the earliest stirrings of the "Manifest Destiny" spirit that spurred white westward expansion. "Progress was the leitmotif that bound white Americans, of all stripes, to the West," Epps concludes, "and for white Southerners, slavery's spread was part and parcel of that progressive spirit." Nicole Etcheson's reviews the proslavery party in antebellum Kansas and their claim to be the party of law and order. Kristen T. Oertel brings a new dimension to border war studies, arguing that an evolving sense of what constituted black and white manliness brought issues of race and gender into the era's sectional debates. 
 

Other essays analyze the debates over the legitimacy of the proslavery Lecompton Constitution of 1856 in Kansas and in Washington, how the Federal government and the state of Missouri responded to the violent cross border anti-slavery activities of Unionist Jayhawker bands in late 1860, and, according to Jonathan Earle, how Kansas played a pivotal role in the political life of Abraham Lincoln. "Without Kansas," Earle claims, "Abraham Lincoln would never have been president of the United States" even though he visited there only once, for a week, in the fall of 1859.

Once the war began in earnest, determining the loyalties of a divided citizenry in Missouri, a slave state within the Union, became a complicated and increasingly violent process. Christopher Phillips details how occupation by Federal forces, the suspension of civil authority, a provost marshal system, and trade and travel policies "restricted civil liberties at the local level as part of a broader strategy to establish control of a[n]…often armed population whose true loyalties were frequently uncertain and ephemeral." Many in that armed population, men like Bloody Bill Anderson, fought as guerrillas. Joseph M. Beilein, Jr. establishes insightful connections between guerrilla fighters, the women who supported and often clothed them in distinctive garb, and how "this cooperative effort between women and men became the logistical backbone for guerrilla warfare." 

No analysis of the border war would be complete without understanding how it was reconstructed and remembered in the post-war years. Aaron Astor shows how white supremacy lived on in Western Missouri in the pages of The Lexington Weekly Caucasian. According to Astor, the newspaper "quickly established itself as one of the leading papers west of St. Louis and acquired a national reputation for vituperation, sarcasm, and militancy." In the face of such strident opposition, newly emancipated and enfranchised African Americans sought to assert their new rights by organizing politically. But, according to John W. McKerley, "although Missouri's new constitution was arguably the most progressive in the former slave states in the period before the Reconstruction Acts, it failed to address many of the needs of black people." Factionalism between black and white Republicans quickly allowed Democrats to regain power in state government "leaving black men and women to continue their struggle to find a measure of power and protection in a new white supremacist order."

Finally, even though the Kansas City Star opined that the September 1898 Blue Springs picnic "differed in nothing from the dozen other country picnics which have been held this year," Jeremy Neely's fascinating essay reveals that this gathering was anything but ordinary. Organized by Frank James (older brother of Jesse), it brought together former Civil War comrades who had ridden with William Clark Quantrill. These get togethers, held until 1929, allowed aged bushwhackers "to share jokes and war stories" that, in the minds of many Lost Cause believers, justified their ruthless activities along the Kansas-Missouri border, including the notorious sack of Lawrence, KS on Aug. 23, 1863. For Neely, these reunions "illuminated the complex ways that memories of the border war served at once to unify and divide people along the Missouri-Kansas line well into the twentieth century." Neely finds that old stock Southern sympathizers defended "Quantrill and his men by emphasizing their courage and honor -- these were men who never harmed women, it was often said -- and by explaining their actions as justifiable responses to plundering Kansans and Unionists." It is small wonder that the bitter embers of the Civil War on the Kansas-Missouri smoldered for years after official hostilities had ended.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Summer Lightning:
A Guide to the Second Battle of Manassas

Matt Spruill III and Mat Spruill IV

University of Tennessee Press, 2013, 324 pp., $32.95

          

Review by Gordon Berg

The sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War is bringing thousands of battlefield trampers to the sites of the war's major engagements.  This has helped spawn the golden age of battlefield guidebooks, and the Spruill family seems to have perfected the genre.  The latest offering from these two former army officers offers readers a user friendly compendium to the August 28-30 1862 Second Battle of Manassas that enhances the quality of any on-site visit.  Since it's arranged in chronological order, the book is useful when visiting all or only a portion of the Virginia battlefield.

The model the Spruills employ is that of a military staff ride.   They primarily use after-action reports written by participants and compiled in the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.  Where reports are unavailable, postwar memoirs and speeches fill the gaps.  The authors provide a minimum of contextual continuity, rightly preferring the story of the battle to be told by those who were there.  Portraits of the major actors, along with period and contemporary photos, help readers to visualize the action as well as read about it.

The key ingredient of the guide, though, is the simple, yet informative, tactical maps "designed to be a frame of reference that will allow a reader to visualize the events transpiring around them as they read the various accounts of the participants."  The Spruills even give instructions on how to use them as "a brief snapshot in time of many unit movements."

The authors characterize Second Manassas as "a fluid battle" fought over acres of ground.  For 21st century visitors, a well planned twenty-stop driving guide is "designed to place you on the ground where the combat and events took place."  Detailed instructions are provided for each stop: which way and how far to walk, where to look and what's important that you'll be seeing, and where you are in relation to other action nearby.  There is also an Order of Battle for both armies, casualty estimates, and information about some related sites away from the battlefield.

The Spruills are dedicated battlefield preservationists and any review of their book would be remiss if it didn't include their plea for the public to become active in trying to save hallowed Civil War ground for future generations.  "The battlefields themselves provide the most direct contact we have with those veterans and the Civil War," and they remind us that this and other guide books are written "to provide that connection with past events on the actual spot where they happened."  In this, Summer Lightning succeeds admirably.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Barksdale's Charge:
The True High Tide of Confederacy at Gettysburg, July 2, 1863

Phillip Thomas Tucker

Casemate, 2013, 315 pp., $32.95

          

Review by Gordon Berg

Conventional Civil War wisdom has it that Pickett's Charge represents the Confederacy's "high tide" at Gettysburg.  But Phillip Thomas Tucker's thoroughly researched, if highly over-written, analysis of the attack by Brigadier General William Barksdale's Mississippi Brigade against Union forces in the Peach Orchard on the afternoon of July 2 presents substantial evidence for his claim that Barksdale's attack "came closer to achieving decisive success and winning it all for the Confederacy than any other assault of the battle."

Tucker has clearly spent substantial time in the Mississippi Department of History and Archives unearthing interesting, if not always informative, anecdotes about the 1,600 officers and men of the 13th, 17th, 18th, and 21st regiments, four of the eleven Mississippi regiments in the Army of Northern Virginia.  Veterans of every major engagement in the east since the war's opening salvoes, the yeoman farmers and sons of Mississippi's planter elite had "acquired a reputation for ferocity, combat prowess, and lethality" at the mouths of Union cannons on Malvern Hill and in the rubble strewn streets of Fredericksburg. 

They were led by a successful lawyer and politician with an egalitarian sensibility.  Sprung from humble roots, Barksdale's only previous military experience was as a staff officer during the Mexican War.  Nevertheless, he quickly became a successful combat commander and a firm disciplinarian with a reputation as a soldier friendly officer who could always be found at the front of his men.  At the end of the Seven Days campaign, Robert E. Lee declared that Barksdale exhibited "the highest qualities of a soldier."

The sweltering afternoon of July 2 found Barksdale's Brigade, part of James Longstreet's First Corps, in the cool shade of Pitzer's Woods facing Joseph and Mary Sherfy's peach orchard.  What they saw across a gently rolling field was a field commander's dream: an entire Union Corps, Daniel Sickles' Third, thrust out in a salient "hanging in the air," and vulnerable on three sides.   Tucker correctly concludes that "More than any other Southern unit because it directly faced the Peach Orchard, the Mississippi Brigade was now in the key position to exploit the tactical vulnerability of Sickles' salient."  After breaking through Sickles' front, Tucker contends, "the successful assault could be continued east all the way to Cemetery Ridge and the fulfillment of Confederate dreams."

Tucker insightfully conveys the feelings of Barksdale and his men as they waited impatiently for the order to advance.  When the order finally came, Tucker asserts, "it was Barksdale's charge more than any other that would reap the fruits of victory, or else signal the failure of Confederate strategy."  What happened next and why has been the subject of debate among old soldiers, historians, and Civil War enthusiasts ever since.  Those questions include whether the honor of achieving the Confederate high water mark.  In addition to Pickett's Virginians and Barksdale's Mississippians, some historians bestow the honor on the Georgia regiments of Brigadier General Ambrose Wright.  All agree, however, on the bravery of the Mississippians in the face of superior numbers and overwhelming artillery fire.  The Brigade lost about 800 officers and men, including its commanding general.

        Unfortunately, Tucker's scholarship is often overtaken by his purple prose.  He seems to have never met a cliche he didn't like or an adjective he didn't use.  An editor with an old fashioned red pencil would have benefited author and reader alike.   Nevertheless, this monograph takes a detailed look at an event in a battle about which so much has been written.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

The Fall of the House of Dixie:
How the Civil War Remade the American South

Bruce Levine

Random House, 2013, 464 pp., $30.00

           
Review by Gordon Berg

Accolades come easily for Bruce Levine's latest book.  His research is exhaustive, his arguments erudite, his anecdotes illuminating, and his prose crystalline.  The result is an exemplary work of historical synthesis, tracing “the origins and development of America's 'second revolution.'”     

Levine sets antebellum Southern society firmly on the shoulders of slavery.  His spokespeople, many of them elite Southern women, describe a system they deemed benevolent, permanent, ordained by God, and sustained by economic necessity.  But the social and political fissures that brought down the House of Dixie, Levine argues, existed throughout the antebellum years because they were part and parcel of the region's economy and culture.

Sustaining a long and bloody conflict stressed these fissures to the breaking point.  “A war launched to preserve slavery,” Levine observes, “succeeded instead in abolishing that institution more rapidly and more radically than would have occurred otherwise.”

Southern elites failed to understand the indomitable spirit of their slaves, determined to achieve freedom for themselves.  As the war dragged on, white supremacy and a rigid caste system led non-slave holding and poor whites to question why they were fighting to sustain a planter aristocracy of privilege and pride.  And the doctrine of states rights insured that the parochial interests of the individual states regularly trumped the collective needs of the Confederate nation. 

The evolution of Union war policy also contributed to Dixie's fall.  Levine traces Lincoln's conservative social and military war aims that evolved into a revolutionary policy to liberate and emancipate America's slaves   The Emancipation Proclamation, issued as a war measure, allowed former slaves and free blacks to fight in the Union Army.  Northern soldiers would now carry the promise of freedom and citizenship in their knapsacks.  Many Northerners also changed their understanding of the war, believing that only by destroying slavery could a new, more perfect, Union be created and preserved.

 

Was it worth all the spilled blood and expended treasure?  Levine uses the words of Frederick Douglas who wrote “The world has not seen a nobler and grander war.”  Those who fought to bring down the House of Dixie, Douglas proclaimed, were “writing the statutes of eternal justice and liberty in the blood of the worst tyrants as a warning to all aftercomers.”

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Kennesaw Mountain:
Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign
 

Earl. J. Hess

University of North Carolina Press, 2013, 344 pp., $35.00


Review By Gordon Berg

         

In the summer of 1864, two great armies engaged in a deadly, red-dirt minuet through the hills of North Georgia.  Union General William T. Sherman, had his sights set on Atlanta; his opponent, General Joseph E. Johnston, had his sights set on Sherman.

Their dance macabre halted on June 27 before the twin peaks of Kennesaw Mountain, near Marietta.  Frustrated by weeks of non-decisive flanking movements, Sherman broke from form and hurled 15,000 hard western men against a well-positioned, deeply entrenched, foe.  When the day ended in blood and rain, the troops who fought there would be forever changed by their experiences.  Their story is told in a succinct battle narrative by veteran Civil War historian Earl J. Hess with clarity and dignity as befits the uncommon valor he describes.

Hess's monograph reads like a staff ride organized by an officer intimately familiar with the area's topography, so important to the battle's tactics and the campaign's strategy.  Maps and photos help provide a sense of place but readers without some familiarity of the Atlanta Campaign might become overwhelmed with the many gaps, ridges, rivers, roads, and creeks that define the geography of North Georgia.

 

Hess recounts that the ball for this part of the campaign opened at Kolb's Farm on June 22.  It was a small Union victory and John Bell Hood's attack drew criticism from other Confederate officers involved in  the battle.  But Hess concludes that “Despite the mistakes and the needless sacrifice of one thousand men...Johnston would have been forced to evacuate his Kennesaw Line on June 23.”  Evaluating the larger tactical picture, Hess concludes that “Sherman once again was stymied in his efforts to compel the enemy to leave his Kennesaw Line.”  The inconclusive action at Kolb's Farm prompted Sherman to try and break the logjam five days later.

For the fighting men, Hess contends, “Kennesaw Mountain loomed large in the lexicon of battle as much for its challenges to the campaigning life of the common soldier as for the threat of injury and death from bullets or shell fragments.”  By deftly interweaving his own piquant analysis with experiences recorded in diaries and letters of the combatants, Hess makes a convincing case for the importance of this still unappreciated battle and argues for a new interpretation of  long-maligned Joe Johnston's tactics.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

A Civil War Round Table Quiz Book

Dave Smith

Potomac Books, 2013, 400 pp., $24.95

Review by Gordon Berg

It's probably happened to every Civil War round table president at one time or another.  The scheduled speaker cancels at the last minute.  What to do?  Have a Civil War quiz session.  Who knows enough questions to ask?  Dave Smith does.

 Born as part of his own round table's monthly meetings, Smith has gathered hundreds of interesting questions (and their answers) and topically arranged them for easy reference.  If this were a game, it would be advertised as "holding hours of wholesome fun for experts and novices alike" and "makes an outstanding gift for all your Civil War enthusiasts."  But it's not a game and many of its users may well have significant expertise on a variety of Civil War subjects, both mainstream and arcane.  Smith's book stands up well under the most scholarly scrutiny.

 To his credit, Smith seems to have vetted his answers from reputable sources among his personal 450 volume Civil War library, avoided the obvious slippery slopes found on the Internet, and, like a reporter he once was, requires multiple confirmations to substantiate his facts.  The answers are thorough and reflect the complexity of historical knowledge inherent in long ago events.  Nevertheless, Smith rightly reminds readers "Even the books of respected scholars are not totally free from errors.  Let the reader beware."

     

Smith gets it right, mostly.  The questions range from battles and leaders to bridges and railroads.  He covers the war on the water and the war on the home front.  There are nine questions about Joneses and 10 about Smiths.  Union General George Gordon Meade gets a whole quiz to himself; Ben Butler gets two.  There's even a vocabulary quiz.  The answers to many will send even the most enthusiastic buff scurrying to reference books indexes.   However, the only person to substantiate Oliver Wendell Holmes' claim to ordering President Lincoln off the rampart of Fort Stevens during Jubal Early's raid on Washington was Holmes himself.  And the leading scholar on the Lincoln assassination strongly doubts that Edwin M. Stanton or anyone else said "Now he belongs to the ages" when the president died.

      A word to writers looking for interesting topics to research.  Smith's book is filled with interesting anecdotes that could be expanded into articles.  So, round table presidents, share this interesting volume with your members.  Just make sure you get it back.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

President Lincoln's Recruiter:
General Lorenzo Thomas and the United States Colored Troops in the Civil War
Michael A. Eggleston
McFarland, 2013, 208 pp., $39.95

Review by Gordon Berg

When the Civil War began, Colonel Lorenzo Thomas was a paper pusher; as the army's adjutant general, much of his work involved processing resignations from officers planning to join the Confederate States of America.  If this were the extent of his wartime activities, he would have hardly merited Michael Eggleston's earnest, if uneven, effort to document his life.  But when Edwin M. Stanton was appointed Secretary of War in January 1862, Thomas' life changed dramatically.  His duties during the rest of the war more than justify documenting his vital contribution to the eventual Union victory.

Stanton and Thomas instantly disliked each other and, in March 1863, Stanton ordered his nemesis to the Mississippi Valley to get him out of Washington and to recruit African American men into military service as permitted under terms of the Emancipation Proclamation. Eggleston rightly concludes that Thomas "was not simply a senior recruiter, but a man charged with initiating a new Union policy, breaking down opposition to African American soldiers and resolving issues with the new policy." It was a big job and Thomas proved to be just the man to carry it out.  According to Eggleston, "he managed to recruit and organize 41 percent of the African Americans who fought in the Civil War."

Eggleston does an excellent job describing how the troops were raised and the process that was created to select and train white officers to lead the black regiments.  He rightly concludes, though, that Thomas' job involved much more.  Thomas had to address issues about unequal pay, the care and feeding of the women and children who frequently accompanied the men into Union camps, finding physicians to treat the sick, procuring quality equipment, and providing remedial education and training for an illiterate soldiery.  Eggleston quotes from Thomas' final report dated Oct. 3, 1865, in which Thomas admits, "I entered upon the duty by no means certain at what I might be able to effect."  Thomas' effect was indeed substantial; by the end of the war, African Americans comprised 12 percent of the Union Army's strength.

The end of the war did not end Thomas' military service or his contentious relationship with Stanton. Thomas resumed his duties as adjutant general until February 1868, when he inserted himself into the bitter confrontation between President Andrew Johnson and the Radical Republicans in Congress. Johnson asked Thomas to serve as Secretary of War, replacing Stanton.  Thomas accepted, with the provision that he be restored to his wartime rank of major general.  This arrangement violated the Tenure of Office Act, legislation passed by Congress to hamstring Johnson from filling his administration with supporters of his plans to reconstruct the South.  Thomas' appointment and the attempt to remove Stanton from office gave Radical Republicans the justification they needed to initiate impeachment proceedings against Johnson.

Thomas testified before the Senate to the effect that his actions were designed to test the Act's legality in the courts.  According to Eggleston, "Lorenzo Thomas may have turned a number of Radicals toward acquittal."  Johnson was acquitted by a single vote and Thomas' poor performance on the stand made him a pathetic laughingstock to many.  He returned to the position of adjutant general until he retired in 1869.  Thomas died in Washington, DC in March 1875.

Unfortunately, several sections of Eggleston's book do not seem germane to the story of Thomas as a "Recruiter of United States Colored Troops."  For example, Eggleston describes the significant battles fought by the USCT and the mini biographies of African Americans who received the Medal of Honor, which smack of padding. He also includes a "Biographical Dictionary," which takes up 14 pages with irrelevant personalities, including John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Benito Juarez, Sylavanus Thayer, Carl Schurz and James Monroe.  In addition, Eggleston reproduces all 11 Articles of Impeachment, which could easily have been summarized in the text.  Last, Appendix B, "Early Recruiting Efforts," documents claims of African American participation in the Confederate Army, which includes sources that readers should investigate and evaluate before drawing any conclusions.

Lorenzo Thomas deserves a comprehensive, scholarly biography. To Michael Eggleston's credit, he understands Thomas' important contributions to the Union cause and his monograph should be used by future biographers as an appropriate place to begin their investigations.______________________________________

Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Rethinking Shiloh:

Myth and Memory

Timothy B. Smith

The University of Tennessee Press, 2013, 200 pp., $38.95

Review by Gordon Berg

      

Ulysses S. Grant, who knew something about battles, wrote that Shiloh "has been perhaps less understood, or to state the case more accurately, more persistently misunderstood than any other engagement…during the entire rebellion."  Timothy B. Smith has spent a significant portion of his professional life working to correct Grant's perception.  The latest compilation of essays, most of which have appeared before, continues Smith's stellar efforts to explicate this important Civil War battle.

Some of the essays take a revisionist stance.  Two deal with the myth and memory of the Hornet's Nest.  "In actuality," Smith contends, "the Hornet's Nest's iconic status is a result of a few veterans' interpretation of the facts and that interpretation has been growing in reputation ever since."  Smith concludes that "The evidence points to the fact that the Hornet's Nest was not the most vicious, important, or decisive engagement at Shiloh."  Furthermore,  after carefully examining the historical record, Smith declares "The soldiers themselves stated as much, the position of troops does not support the idea, and the casualties and burials firmly argue against such a notion."

Smith takes a similarly clear-eyed approach to analyzing Lew Wallace's march to Shiloh on April 6 by actually taking a group of eight people and retracing Wallace's march and countermarch on that fateful day.  It took the intrepid band of hikers, unencumbered with wagons, horses, and artillery, 15 minutes longer than it took Wallace and 5,800 fully equipped soldiers.  "All doubt about the speed of Wallace's march," Smith declares, "should thus be muffled forever."

What about the civilians who lived on the land where the battle was fought?  Their story rarely makes the history books.  Most fled before the fighting started but a few remained.  "Several family stories have survived," Smith relates, "and they provide a clear picture of the horror and fright of being a civilian in the midst of a battle."  After the battle, the victorious Union forces remained on the inhabitant's land for weeks, turning the homes and farms into "a vast cemetery."  Almost all of the three thousand men who died during the battle were buried on the field.

One of Smith's most insightful essays analyzes the importance geography played on the battle.  A careful examination of the terrain of Shiloh, both natural and manmade, leads Smith to propose "that it is quite possible the Confederates never actually had a chance to win at Shiloh."  His essay on the New Deal's effect on Shiloh catalogues the remarkable transformation that remade an iconic battlefield into an outstanding National Military Park.  Finally, most visitors to Shiloh National Military Park begin their journey by viewing the park's introductory film in the visitor's center.  First shown in 1956 and retired only in 2012, “Shiloh: Portrait of a Battle” influenced how millions of people viewed and understood the battle.  Its influence, Smith contends, "has been immense."

Smith's writing is crisp and confident, his arguments convincingly supported, and his conclusions based on years of research.  Reading Smith's essays is almost like having the blue and gray wraiths that ride on the mists of the Tennessee River and sometimes roll over the hallowed ground whispering in your ear about how it really was when uncommon valor was a common virtue.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

The Day Lincoln Was Almost Shot:

The Fort Stevens Story

Benjamin Franklin Cooling III

The Scarecrow Press, 2013, 322 pp., $45.00

Review by Gordon Berg

            Every Civil War battlefield deserves a champion as passionate and learned as Frank Cooling is about the Defenses of Washington, the imposing ring of fortifications that surrounded the Union capital between 1861-1865.  Unfortunately, the remnants of those long ago defenses that still dot the urban landscape are mostly unknown and unappreciated by even the most ardent Civil War enthusiasts.

            Cooling has been studying Mr. Lincoln's forts for decades.  This, his sixth volume on the subject,  makes an eloquent case for reviving interest in them during the sesquicentennial commemoration of the war.  While not engaging in counter factual history, Cooling argues that the course of the war might have been very different had Lincoln been shot while standing on the fort's ramparts, only seven miles from the White House.

 

            Although not a major campaign by Civil War standards, the invasion staged by Confederate General Jubal Early and about 12,000 rag-tag troopers sowed anxiety and confusion in the North during the summer of 1864.  Since it was a presidential election year, the capture of Washington DC, even if only for a few days, might have changed the course of the war and prompted the election of a peace candidate in the fall.

            Cooling puts the July 11-12 engagement at Fort Stevens, the only action fought within the District of Columbia, into the larger context of the South's attempt to relieve relentless Union pressure against Richmond, Petersburg, and the once-vaunted Army of Northern Virginia.  Both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis knew chances for success were slim, but the audacity of the attempt makes the campaign worthy of study by a wider audience. 

            Nobody tells the story better than Cooling.  For the most part, he wisely uses the participants own words to move the narrative forward.  The book, therefore, is filled with interesting and arcane anecdotes about people and places; many long lost in the fog of war or in dusty archives. 

            There's Lee's pipe dream of using Early's raid to free 20,000 Confederate prisoners supposedly held at Maryland's Point Lookout prison; B&O President John W. Garrett's determination to save his railroad from destruction; the delaying action fought on the banks of the Monocacy River by disgraced Union General Lew Wallace that might have saved Washington; Lincoln's almost child-like determination to see a real fire fight; and the curious coalition of 100-day volunteers, convalescing soldiers, and government workers hastily rounded up to defend Fort Stevens until the timely arrival of Sixth Corps veterans.  Their story makes for a colorful, off the beaten path, Civil War tale.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.