Book Reviews - The Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia

Joshua L. Chamberlain:
A Life in Letters

Edited by Thomas Desjardin

The National Civil War Museum, 2012

312pp., $25.95

Review by Gordon Berg

Michael Shaara and Ken Burns have made Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain into a Civil War rock star. The publication of 300 never-before-seen letters and other related documents by The National Civil War Museum should please his legion of loyal acolytes.

Readers familiar with the Victorian art of letter writing may find the early letters between Chamberlain and his wife, Frances (Fanny) Caroline Adams, contain little more than overheated professions of romantic love and mundane recitations of day-to-day family activities and responsibilities. If they contain deeper character revelations, they lie hidden between the lines of 19th century rhetoric.

Not until Chapter Four do Chamberlain's Civil War letters appear. Written by the colonel of the 20th Maine and hero of Little Round Top, an officer six times wounded, and commander of Union troops that received the formal surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia, they are more revealing of the soldier behind the fawning husband, doting father, and studious professor.

An 1862 letter from Warrenton, VA, contains a clear statement of what Chamberlain believes he's fighting for. His notes about Fredericksburg written right after the battle, paint a vivid word picture of his first experience of “seeing the elephant.” But a hint of his lust for glory emerges when he uncharacteristically writes “one of the most thrilling sights to me on going into the fight” was “the parks of ambulances by the hundreds—all of them so orderly in line...ready to go on...when our mangled bodies lay writhing in the field.”

Chamberlain had a big ego and a burning desire for recognition. Failing to be promoted to brigadier general after his exploits at Gettysburg, he lamented “I have won it in the field and if Napoleon had seen it he would have made me a Genl. on the spot...Promotions, however, are managed strangely in Washington.” Even during his 1864 convalescence from an attack of malaria, he confides to Fanny that he told Maine Senator William Pitt Fessenden, “I wished very much that before any promotion was recommended the authorities would just look at my record at the military history of my last year.” Chamberlain consoled himself by concluding “Men may not do right towards me, but Providence will.”

After the war, Chamberlain achieved political and professional prominence. But his wartime experiences revealed the true measure of the man.

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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.

The Louisiana Scalawags:
Politics, Race, and Terrorism
During the Civil War and Reconstruction

Frank J. Wetta

LSU Press, 2012

244 pp., $42.50

Review by Gordon Berg

Louisiana has always been a state steeped in exotic scenery, elegant food, and dirty politics. Politics there was never more corrupt, as Frank Wetta so thoroughly documents, than during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Wetta reminds us that the term “scalawag,” used during that time “was a vicious slur often used with deadly intent.” It referred to “Southern white Republicans in positions of influence and leadership, or those native white men identified as voting the Republican ticket.” They were distinct from “carpetbaggers,” that is northerners who came to Louisiana after the Civil War. When joined by newly freed African Americans, these groups formed an unholy trinity in the eyes of most southern whites and a serious impediment to reinstating the dominant role the prewar plantation elite played in state politics.

Wetta asks and answers most of the important questions. Who were the leading scalawags? What role did they play in founding the Republican Party in Louisiana? Did they really believe in racial justice and political reform? What was the importance of the New Orleans riot of 1866 to Reconstruction policies in the South? What is the legacy of the scalawagism in Louisiana history?

The New Orleans riot of July 30, 1866 rightly forms the core of Wetta's investigation. Spurred by a radical attempt to rewrite the state constitution adopted in 1864, “the riot turned congressional and northern public opinion against the conservative, lenient Reconstruction program of President Johnson, gave weight to demands for harsher policies toward the defeated South, and contributed to the first impeachment effort of an American president.” It also marked the high water mark for the scalawags. The era of carpetbaggers and their black allies dominated Louisiana politics for the rest of Reconstruction.

Wetta tells a compelling story. His narrative, however, would read better if it were not shot through with the language and style of the dissertation from whence it surely came. Nevertheless, studies like this will help put Reconstruction on a more scholarly footing, thereby shining new light on America's first experience with military occupation and nation building.

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Envisioning Emancipation:
Black Americans and the End of Slavery

Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer

Temple University Press, 2013

224 pp., $35.00

Review by Gordon Berg

Their eyes are what you notice first. Staring deferentially or defiantly into the camera, they cry out “I am somebody.” The stunning array of photographs gathered in this unusual book, many never before displayed publicly, are powerful images of African American life before and after the Emancipation Proclamation forever remade the United States for everyone.

Ms. Willis, a professor of photography and imaging, and Ms. Krauthamer, a professor of history, have admirably succeeded in their goal of depicting “ways in which black people's enslavement, emancipation, and freedom were represented, documented, debated, and asserted in a wide range of photographs from the 1850s through the 1930s.” The photos are representative of black people enslaved and free, well-to-do and desperately poor, famous and unknown. The medium of photography brings out the humanity inherent in all of them and demands attention from the viewer.

The narrative accompanying the photographs is as strong as the subjects it describes. With eloquence and dignity, it places the pictures in their historical context and analyzes the meanings long hidden behind the images. Taken together, the authors contend, the photos serve “as a type of 'family album,' allowing contemporary readers to envision a collective history that recognizes the range and complexity of the black experience in slavery and freedom.”

The authors make a compelling case that “black Americans embraced photography not simply for its novelty or aesthetic value but for its recognized potential to present powerful social and political arguments.” Sojourner Truth sold copies of her portrait to raise money for the abolitionist cause. Printed on the back of every copy of Matthew Brady's famous 1863 photograph of the horribly scarred back of Private Gordon were the words “The nett proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the department of the Gulf now under the command of Maj. Gen. Banks.” In the early twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois, the eminent sociologist and a founder of the NAACP, knew that photography could challenge racist arguments about black inferiority by depicting the refinement, respectability, and economic success of an emerging black middle class.

The book concludes with Richard Avedon's iconic photographic portrait of William Casby. Born a slave in Louisiana, Mr. Casby's one hundred year-old face seems to hold, forever frozen on a silver gelatin print, the trials and triumphs of an entire race. Richard Avedon admirably captures Mr. Casby's humanity for all to see, but the proud man's memories and feelings remain hidden behind his piercing eyes.

Envisioning Emancipation is an important contribution in the documentation of African American culture in America. By visually capturing a moment in the lives herein portrayed, we re-imagine the mystic chords of memory linking us with our collective past, the better to understand who we are today and how we came to be this way.

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The Jackson County War:

Reconstruction and Resistance in Post-Civil War Florida

Daniel R. Weinfeld

University of Alabama Press, 2012
206 pp., $29.95

Review by Gordon Berg

From 1869-1871, a nondescript county in the Florida panhandle became a battleground. Its citizens terrorized each other with outbursts of brutal violence followed by anxious periods of eerie quiet. The period became known throughout the nation as the Jackson County War because the number of murders that occurred there far outnumbered those in the rest of the state combined.

Daniel Weinfeld has examined the causes and effects of these depredations, sometimes in almost mind-numbing detail (witness the 11-page biographical index of major figures chronicled in the book). One can hardly blame Weinfeld, however, for his enthusiasm. He makes excellent use of rich storehouses of primary sources including dozens of newspapers, Freedman's Bureau records, state documents, court transcripts, Congressional hearings, and collections of personal memoirs and letters. What emerges is a saga of social upheaval, economic devastation, political chicanery, and personal animus; a toxic scenario that was repeated time and again throughout the South after the Civil War.

Just how many people were murdered during the Jackson County War has never been definitively established. Weinfeld correctly maintains, however, the exact number is far less important than the issues that precipitated them. The author analyzes each in their turn.

While the county's black politicians tended to be conservative, Weinfeld maintains that the most serious problems arose from “the impression among whites that the [black] community was organized, disciplined, and heavily armed.” Also, a new generation of white leaders tended to come from the county's newly enriched merchants and lawyers, not the old patrician plantation elite which experienced a loss of power and prestige. The newly empowered class “were strongly associated after the war with the Regulators” and the Ku Klux Klan. Finally, a small but savage 1864 skirmish fought in Marianna, the county seat, continued to have repercussions between the races long after the war ended. No other Florida county suffered so many civilian casualties or so much property damage.

Today, there is nothing in Jackson County to memorialize the events that happened there. Weinfeld maintains this “shames our forgetfulness.” But as long as there are intrepid investigators like Daniel Weinfeld, the truth will out and it will set us free.

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Battle of Stones River:
The Forgotten Conflict between the
Confederate Army of Tennessee

and the Union Army of the Cumberland

Larry J. Daniel

LSU Press, 2012, 344 pp., $38.50

Review by Gordon Berg

Three book-length studies of the battle have been written since 1980. Nevertheless, Larry Daniel contends “that the mention of Stones River frequently brings puzzled expressions to those beyond the region” and that a new analysis of the battle is needed. Indeed, a comparison of the various bibliographies indicates that he made extensive use of letters, diaries, and manuscripts not previously examined. Using his considerable experience with Western campaigns, Daniel meticulously documents what was the war's bloodiest battle in relation to the number of combatants involved.

A good battle narrative is difficult to write. It weaves precise information about individual actions, unit movements, and anecdotal accounts into an evocative story that provides both expert and generalist with a clear understanding of the battle's pivotal events. Daniel meets all these criteria. Sometimes, however, he lets his enthusiasm for the trees obscure the forest. Daniel's specificity regarding the location of the battle's many units, the precise distance between so many places, and the exact time events occurred, can overwhelm the non-expert. This is especially true when he narrates the actual fighting. The book's thirteen maps help, but not enough.

The plans of each commander were mirror images of the other's. Union Major General William S. Rosecrans and Confederate General Braxton Bragg each planned to attack the right wing of the other while holding firm on the left. Bragg struck first at dawn on Dec. 31, 1862. The Union lines broke and swung back like a gate on a rusty hinge. But the hinge was held by the brigade of Colonel William Babcock Hazen and it held the end of the Union line at a place that came to be known as “Hell's Half Acre” with uncommon valor. Hazen's heroic stand in the face of repeated Confederate attacks allowed broken units to reform and probably saved the Army of the Cumberland from an ignoble rout. A perfunctory Confederate attack on Jan. 2, 1863 across Stones River against the Federal left was broken up by massed artillery superbly directed by Captain John Mendenhall.

The fight was a tactical draw but Rosecrans held the battlefield and Bragg retreated. The Emancipation Proclamation thus went into effect with news of a Union “victory” rather than under the cloud of the decisive Union defeat at Fredericksburg earlier in the month.. Daniel concludes that “the battle proved to be the first step in a drive that would lead the Federal Army toward Tullahoma, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, and ultimately Atlanta.” The carnage at Stones River, like that at Shiloh, convinced New Yorker George Templeton Strong that the North was willing to engage in a prolonged war of attrition to preserve the Union. He concluded that “The South could not win such a war.”

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