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

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.

James M. Williams:
Civil War General and Indian Fighter

Robert W. Lull

University of North Texas Press, 2013, 290 pp., $24.95

Review by Gordon Berg

July 1863 saw significant Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Cabin Creek that made the careers of George G. Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, and James M. Williams. Never heard of the battle of Cabin Creek? That's probably because it was fought by just a few thousand Federals and Confederates on the banks of a muddy stream near the Grand River in northeastern Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). Never heard of James M. Williams? Read Robert W. Lull's assiduously researched, energetically written biography and learn about the trail-blazing Union commander of the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry serving in the Trans-Mississippi.

James Williams arrived in Leavenworth to open a dry goods store just as the blood began to flow along the Kansas-Missouri border. He got to know James H. Lane and his band of abolitionist Jayhawkers. Williams soon exchanged his clerk's apron for a Navy Colt and a Sharp's rifle. According to Lull, “Lane swept Williams up in his organization” and, by the outbreak of the Civil War, “Williams was a veteran commander and an unreserved subscriber to the Federal cause.”

After Kansas was admitted to the Union, Lane, now a U.S. Senator, advocated using African Americans and Indians as soldiers. He liberally interpreted the Militia Act of July 1862 as authorizing just that and sent Williams around the state to recruit black men, most of them former slaves, into Kansas state regiments. Lane rewarded Williams' efforts by making him commander of the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry.

The Civil War west of the Mississippi River was, for the most part, a continuation of the guerrilla warfare practiced between 1856-1861: quick-hitting, savage, and often personal. On October 29, 1862, the First Kansas got its baptism of fire before it was officially mustered into Federal service in a tall grass prairie field on the Toothman farm near the Marais des Cygnes River. The regiment suffered eight dead and eleven wounded.

Later, a larger engagement at Island Mound, the men Williams had trained proved their worth in battle. According to Lull, they “functioned as a team, maneuvered professionally, and responded quickly to orders.” Island Mound was a Union victory, the first for a black regiment against organized Confederate troops. The regiment would fight at Honey Springs in the Indian Territory, Poison Spring in Arkansas, and numerous skirmishes rarely found in history books. When the war ended, Williams commanded six regiments of United States Colored Troops brigaded together as part of the VII Corps before mustering out in October 1865.

The end of the Civil War did not end the military career of James M. Williams. Commissioned a captain in the Eighth U.S. Cavalry, Williams went west to fight Indians. Lull points out that about 600 men “were responsible for national security and civil protection over an area of 558,069 untracked square miles of what would become six different states.” After being severely wounded, Williams began his third career as a successful Colorado rancher until he died in 1907.

Lull's book is important because it highlights the importance of African American troops in the Trans-Mississippi, a region still insufficiently studied by historians of the Civil War.

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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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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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Review by Gordon Berg

Carol Reardon

Review by Gordon Berg