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.