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

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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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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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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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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