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

Knights of the Golden Circle:

Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War

David C. Keehn

LSU Press 2013, 308 pp., $39.95

Review by Gordon Berg

It thrived in a parallel universe, hidden in plain sight throughout the antebellum South. Ostensibly founded around 1858 by George W.L. Bickley, a filibustering wannabe and flimflamming medical doctor, the Mystic Order of the Knights of the Golden Circle (KGC) has been intimately linked by author David Keehn with almost every tangled conspiracy, ingenuous plot, and reckless adventure in the Civil War era.

Writing the history of a secret society is a daunting task but one that Keehn has undertaken with the gusto born of a true believer. After combing archives and personal narratives from Texas to Massachusetts, Keehn admits that “Verifying claims regarding the Knights is sometimes difficult.” Nevertheless, he makes a solid case for his conclusion “that the Knights were a much more powerful force and played more of a role in precipitating the Civil War than historians have heretofore recognized.”

Modeled after medieval orders like the Knights of Malta, Knights Templers, and the Masons, local KGC groups were organized into units known as castles. Membership was divided into three degrees. The first was the military arm, the second was the commercial and financial division, and the third was the governing body open only to a few select leaders. The organization had secret initiation rites and meetings, solemn oaths, passwords, and special hand grips allowing members to recognize fellow knights.

Keehn divides the antebellum activities of the KGC into three periods: filibustering schemes to extend slavery into Mexico, Cuba, and Central America; conspiring with disunionists to facilitate the secession of slave holding states from the Union; and clandestine operations to seize arms and ammunition from Federal installations throughout the South on the eve of the Civil War. He maintains that the KGC's most active years were before the actual outbreak of fighting. During the war, many prominent KGC leaders became officers in the Confederate Army.

Members came for all walks of life including the plantation elite, government officials, newspaper editors, merchants, lawyers, doctors, and “all southern men of good character as well as northern men who stood by the constitutional claims of the South.” Keehn uses four state commanders, “military men of substance and drive” as representative of KGC members who later became Confederate officers; Elkanah Bracken Greer from Texas, Paul Jones Semmes from Georgia, Robert Charles Taylor from Maryland, and Virginius Despeaux Groner from Virginia.

While these men may not be historically familiar, some KGC “fellow travelers” did achieve more public notoriety. John Wilkes Booth probably joined in 1859. President James Buchanan's Secretary of War leader John Floyd ordered substantial shipments of arms to Southern states ostensibly to support local militias. Cypriano Ferrandini, a Baltimore barber, allegedly organized the plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln when he traveled through the city on his way to be inaugurated. Texas Ranger and U.S. Marshall Ben McCulloch played a prominent role in orchestrating Texas's secession. California's first U.S. Senator William Gwin reportedly led 16,000 KGC members on the West Coast determined to form an independent Pacific republic. Former Virginia Governor Henry Wise was involved in plots to seize Harpers Ferry and Fort Monroe.

Keehn's most spirited chapter investigates KGC involvement with John Wilkes Booth's conspiracy, first to kidnap President Lincoln and later to assassinate him. After describing an array of possible scenarios, Keehn concludes “It remains unknown whether the KGC castles around Washington City remained active during the Civil War and whether the KGC was involved in the assassination on a organizational basis.”

In fact, much of what the KGC might have planned or done remains in the realm of the unknown or at least the unproven. Keehn himself admits “While much has been discovered, it is likely that some things remain unknown due to the loss or destruction of records during the Civil War.” But that's part of their mystique and why secret militant hierarchical organizations remain as much the stuff of legend as they do the stuff of history.

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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.

A Field Guide to Gettysburg:

Experiencing the Battlefield through
its History, Places, and People

Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler

University of North Carolina Press, 2013, 438 pp., $22.00

Review by Gordon Berg

Twenty-first century battlefield explorers have audio tours, computer apps, and GPS devices to help direct their wanderings. Would anyone be so old school as to carry a book to guide them? If they had Carol Reardon and Tom Vossler's comprehensive, easy-to-read, field guide to Gettysburg, they would. Reardon is a renowned Civil War scholar and author. Vossler is a combat veteran, a former director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute, and a licensed battlefield guide.

Both authors live in Gettysburg and their easy familiarity with the terrain, the historical facts of the battle, and eye-opening local anecdotes make the guide a valuable companion for first-time visitors, veteran battlefield trampers, as well as armchair explorers. Photographs and informative maps add a contemporary feel to the historic geography of the Civil War's most hallowed grounds.

Built around six critical questions, each of the 35 stops throughout the park's 6,000 acres offers “a detailed account of a specific element of the three-day engagement.” From the National Park Service's new and improved visitor's center to The Soldier's National Cemetery, the visitor/reader is told what happened there, who fought there, who commanded there, who fell there, who lived there, and what was said later about what took place there. Answering the same questions at each location helps the reader grasp how the multitude of individual actions fit together and contributed to the outcome of the battle. Along the way, marginal events gain prominence, accepted facts gain clarity, and old historical “truths” are interpreted anew in light of modern historiography.

More than two million people visit Gettysburg National Military Park every year. Accurately describing and interpreting events during this signature battle influences the nation's public memory of this seminal event. The authors state that their goal is to give both visitor and reader “a better appreciation for the complexities of mid-nineteenth century combat” and a better appreciation of the challenges facing historians “who seek to uncover an ideal called historical 'truth' in the midst of Gettysburg's myriad voices and assessments.” Reardon and Vossler succeed admirably on both counts.

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With a Sword in one hand

& Jomini in the other:

The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North

Carol Reardon

University of North Carolina Press, 2012
192 pp., $30.00

Review by Gordon Berg

In spite of the descriptive title given to Carol Reardon’s Steven and Janice Brose Lectures on the Era of the Civil War delivered at Penn State University, she concludes that “Jomini and the entire body of antebellum military thought he represented provided far less useful guidance than the Civil War generation required for the dimensions of the challenge they faced.”

In three succinct chapters, Ms. Reardon examines the public debate that exploded in the North over what military strategy would best defeat the Confederacy; the characteristics that made the best commanders; and the human element of war, a topic largely ignored by the military theorists of the day. Her conclusions are based on voluminous research into archival material, newspapers and periodicals, contemporary and historical works on military theory, and a prescient sampling of today’s rich Civil War historiography.

In the North a “cacophony of voices,” professional and amateur, inundated the Lincoln administration and the general public with detailed conceptual frameworks and hair-brained schemes, all designed to bring the war to a swift and successful conclusion. Unfortunately, no strategic Rosetta Stone materialized.

Second only to strategy in the public discourse was who best to command the Union forces, a professionally trained military intellectual or a natural born military genius who arises from the common people to lead the nation in a time of great peril like George Washington or Andrew Jackson did. Ms. Reardon notes that Northerners debated this issue “with enthusiasm and not a little vitriol.”

Finally, Ms. Reardon uses the Overland Campaign to assess how Union commanders painfully learned that victory doesn’t always lie with the best plan or the biggest battalions. Effectiveness against the enemy also depended on the physical, mental, and emotional state of the men in the ranks, a reality learned “at a high cost from practical experience.” These are issues still debated among military strategists today.

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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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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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Carol Reardon

Review by Gordon Berg