Stonewall's Prussian Mapmaker: 
The Journals of Captain Oscar Hinrichs

Edited by Richard B. Williams

University of North Carolina Press, 2014, 392 pp., $45.00
        

Review by Gordon Berg

      Jedediah Hotchkiss is justly famous as "Stonewall" Jackson's principal mapmaker.  But almost no one has ever heard of Oscar Hinrichs  That's all changed now, thanks to the historical sleuthing of Richard B. Williams.  Historians, archivists, and researchers all dream of stumbling across a relatively obscure, previously unpublished, primary source that offers new perspectives on important people and events.  Williams' eureka moment came in 2000 when a Civil War memorabilia dealer tipped him off to the existence of the unpublished diaries of Captain Oscar Hinrichs, a Prussian born engineer officer who served the Confederacy with distinction throughout the war.  An experienced researcher and manuscript editor, Williams developed a plan-of-action to verify the journal and validate its content.  It proved to be a long and complicated process but Williams and a host of dedicated helpers stuck to their guns. The end-product is a treasure trove of detailed observation and candid insight that Robert Krik's forward rightly characterizes as "an enormously important primary source."

        Williams worked with Hinrichs' wartime memories in two forms; a wartime transcript covering November 1860 to September 1863 and a verbatim English journal and translation of his German journal spanning September 1863 to April 1865.  From this material, Williams has brought to life an opinionated man of considerable intelligence, excellent education, discerning insight, and a not inconsiderable amount of wit. 

       

        Hinrichs was an infant when his parents brought him to New York from Germany.  His comfortable childhood was interrupted by the death of his mother when he was only four.  His loving North Carolina-born stepmother, however, immersed him in the culture of her successful Southern family and his frequent visits probably sowed the seeds of the divided loyalties he experienced later in life.  Classically educated in Europe, Hinrichs returned to the United States in 1853 as a confident, idealistic, and ambitious young man steeped in the skills needed for a career as an engineer.  Williams' illuminating introduction concludes that "the close relationship Oscar had with his stepmother influenced his decision to join the Confederacy."  In a postwar essay not included in the monograph, Hinrich wrote "My sympathies were with the people of the South, among whom I had lived so long, and where I had many warm friends." 

         He joined the U.S. Costal Survey in December 1856 and his first assignment was to map the coast from Virginia to Georgia would be the first of many professional Southern sojourns.  When the war broke out, however, he found himself surveying the coast of Maine.  His clandestine journey south to join the Confederacy had enough nocturnal rendezvous, narrow escapes, and secret signs and safe houses to fill a Hollywood screenplay.  Shadowed by a government detective after he left New York, Hinrichs and a few colleagues headed to Baltimore.  With the help of Confederate sympathizers in southern Maryland, they crossed the Potomac River in a skiff on New Year's Eve and entered the camp of Colonel Wade Hampton on the first day of 1862.  John Wilkes Booth would follow nearly the same route in 1865.  Hampton quickly sent Hinrichs on to General Joseph Johnston's army camped near Centerville, Virginia.  

         Hinrichs' makes the purpose of his journals clear from the beginning.  He describes them "as notes public and private of my own personal feelings and experiences during the war"  which include "my opinion at the time of measures and affairs as they occurred to me."  In the future, Hinrichs hopes "they may become useful references and also records which have mostly been verified by subsequent events."  After early duty in Tidewater Virginia, Hinrichs was ordered to join Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley in May 1862, just in time for the battles of Cross Keys and Port Republic.  He would remain with Jackson's vaunted Second Corps throughout the war.  With a true engineer's eye for topographical detail, Hinrichs brought the same skill to his observations of men and events.  From his transcript, Hinrichs opines that the Gettysburg campaign failed "first in not getting possession when it was practicable of the ground commanding the Baltimore pike and the hill contested by [Edward] Johnson.  Second the want of unity of action on the part of the attacking columns; third, the not supporting of those columns which had effected lodgments in the enemy's lines in a manner adequate to the occasion." 

        He was equally as candid when assessing the qualities of his fellow officers.  Hinrichs believed General D.H. Hill  "uncouth and ungentlemanly in his manner" with "a mind narrow and shallow, he possesses no genius for command."  Jackson, on the other hand, was "In person, quiet, modest, diffident and unassuming, [Jackson] bears upon him his honors lightly and meekly."  Hinrichs observed Jackson on battlefields from Malvern Hill to Chancellorsville and found him "Brave to insensibility, insensible to rashness and obstinacy, he stands firm and cool among a shower of shot and shell which makes him stand aghast at the apparent tempting of God's mercy and kindness."  A man with a facility for the English language like that deserves to be published.

        Williams has done an excellent job of annotating Hinrichs' journals and provides insightful footnotes.  Appropriately, more than a dozen maps, drawn by George Skoch, help give geographical context to Hinrichs' rich narrative.  This journal should rank among the best contemporary surveys of the war in the East from the Confederate point-of-view.

______________________________________

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.

Our One Common Country: 
Abraham Lincoln and
the Hampton Roads Peace Conference of 1865

James B. Conroy

Lyons Press, 2014 390 pp. $27.95
        

Review by Gordon Berg

      On Jan. 29, 1865, Captain Thomas Parker of Pennsylvania walked out into no-man's land along the Petersburg, siege lines.  There, he met Lieutenant Colonel William Hatch of Kentucky.  Both men were unarmed and under flags of truce.  Hatch informed the dumbfounded Parker that three emissaries had just arrived from Richmond and wished to meet with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss terms for ending the war.  Four days later, Lincoln, traveling alone, slipped into a carriage in front of the White House, bound for a fast steamer destined for Hampton Roads, at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay.  Only Secretary of State William Seward knew the purpose of Lincoln's clandestine sojourn.  Thus began one of the most star-crossed secret missions of the Civil War, an audacious tale James B. Conroy tells with energy and eloquence.

        Conroy, a lawyer and former DC publicist and speechwriter, gives lie to the shibboleth that a thoroughly researched, abundantly footnoted, monograph can only be written in parched, overly academic jargon, by denizens of collegiate ivory towers.  Our One Common Country swings out at a quick step pace with a narrative strategy that manages to incorporate a myriad of detail and analysis into a universe of uncommon suspense.   It resonates with illustrative anecdotes, pithy turns-of-phrase, occasional hints of irony, and bon mons enough to fill a gossip column.  It's a Civil War story that experts and novices will find riveting and revelatory. 

        Rumors of a negotiated peace had been in the air at least since the summer of 1864 when influential Northern publisher Horace Greeley advised Lincoln to meet with Confederate agents on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls.  The President declined.  Re-elected in November 1864 and with the tide of battle turning in favor of the Union on every front, Lincoln was finally ready to do something no sitting President had ever done before or since: engage with the enemy in peace talks in the midst of a shooting war.  That makes the meeting aboard the steamer River Queen on Feb. 3, 1865, a unique event in American history; an event that has, until now, escaped an in-depth investigation.

        Conroy sets up his drama by giving readers incisive character portraits of the drama's leading players.  His description of Greeley is as priceless as it is accurate: eccentric, fickle, and powerful all at the same time.  Conroy conveys the essence of Ulysses S. Grant in two clear, concise, unpretentious paragraphs, a fitting tribute to the man himself.   Conroy lets Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' own Shakespearian rhetoric eloquently invoke his startling image:  "Weak and sickly I was sent into the world with a constitution barely able to sustain the vital functions…But all these are slight when compared with the pangs of an offended and wounded spirit."  Conroy needs only seven choice words to bring Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens to life: "Richard III in a Prince Albert suit."

        The Hampton Roads conference was spawned in the quixotic imagination of the Francis Preston Blair Sr., the senior Democratic senator from Maryland with influential friends throughout the North and South.  With Lincoln's permission, the old man traveled to Richmond with a fantastic proposal the wily politician had concocted but Lincoln had never backed. Nevertheless, Confederate government officials were interested, although President Jefferson Davis set conditions that insured its failure.  So the peace conference process, possibly the worst kept secret of the war, staggered forward.  Conroy describes it with melodrama worthy of a Stephen Spielberg film noir.

        The three Confederate peace commissioners, Assistant Secretary of War John A. Campbell, Senator Robert M. Hunter, and Vice President Alexander Stephens, expected to be received by General Grant and escorted to Washington.  But Lincoln, a wily politician himself, had a different agenda.  Congress was ready to consider the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibiting slavery and even a whiff of a negotiated peace might induce wavering Democrats to vote against it in hopes of ending the war without abolishing the "peculiar institution".  While Congress debated, Lincoln connived to keep the peace emissaries far from The Capital.  While they waited aboard the steamer Mary Martin, unaware of the machinations their visit had spawned, the Southern commissioners were treated like visiting royalty, replete with good food, cigars, and congenial conversations reminiscent of happier times.

        While the commissioners cooled their heels, the diplomatic game played by various Union participants turned downright byzantine.  Lincoln sent a carefully worded letter to the commissioners with conditions for a meeting.  The commissioners responded with a letter of their own.  Each side chose its words carefully, sensitive to nuance and innuendo.  The telegraph lines between City Point and Washington sizzled with rumors and hopes.  The parties began to founder on Lincoln's insistence of "our one common country" and Davis' commitment to "two nations" as a basis for any discussion.  The talks seemed doomed before they had begun.  Finally Grant, so far frozen out of this campaign, entered the fray.  He sent an impassioned telegram to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, confident that Lincoln would read it, too.  Lincoln was moved by Grant's sense of the commissioners' sincerity and agreed to a meeting and so informed Seward, already at Fort Monroe.  

        No one kept a transcript of the four hour meeting but Conroy has clearly digested the recollections of all the participants.  This allows him to recreate the diplomatic dance performed by the five old friends in dramatic tones befitting the grave issues discussed in the saloon of the River Queen. Through it all, Conroy contends, Lincoln's towering presence dominated the room.  Ironically, it was on the issue of slavery that he held out the possibility for some measure of negotiation.  Conroy reports Alexander Stephens recalling that Seward seconded the proposition that "A gradual end to slavery would be palatable if the war ended now and the South rejoined the Union freely.  If not, the Thirteenth Amendment would end it abruptly, with the Southern states excluded from the process."  But the commissioners, hide-bound by Jefferson Davis' delusions, had nothing to offer except a truce and possible renewal of trade.  "It was far from good enough," Conroy concludes.  

        Back in Washington, the cat was now out of the bag.  Many Democrats praised Lincoln's efforts for peace and reunion; many Radical Republicans chided him for showing magnanimity to the enemy when on the verge of victory.  But Lincoln could not let go of the possibility of ending the war.  Conroy relates the extraordinarily generous but little known "Fellow Citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives" message written on February 5 that could have formed the basis of Lincoln's reconstruction policy had he lived.  In it, he asked Congress to appropriate $400 million to compensate slaveholders and offered other lenient terms.  Lincoln read it to the Cabinet.  No one supported it.  Saddened, Lincoln put it in his pocket, leaving his proposal to the judgment of history. 

        Lincoln's offer would have probably fallen on deaf ears because, in Richmond, Jefferson Davis quickly demanded that his commissioners write a public report, leaving out anything positive that emerged from the meeting and to include absolute fabrications that vilified the Lincoln Administration.  Davis hoped to use the "doctored" report to steel the resolve of the South to endure even greater sacrifices.  He seemed determined to lead Southern citizenry into his own private "Gotterdammerung."  Senator William Graham of North Carolina would conclude "there has been a very great duplicity towards a large portion of the Southern people displayed in this little drama."  The war continued in all its ferocity.

        Conroy succinctly wraps up the final months of the war up to the assassination of Lincoln on April 14.  As a final, dramatic, epilogue, he provides thumbnail sketches of the postwar fate of the drama's leading players.  In the war's aftermath, Conroy poignantly quotes Confederate General Josiah Gorgas' May 4 diary entry.  "I am as one walking in a dream, expecting to awake.  I cannot see its consequences, nor shape my own course, but am just moving along until I can see my way at some future day." 

       Because of the failure of the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, thousands of young men in blue and gray never had a chance to see their way at some future day.

______________________________________

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.

Bloody Spring: 
Forty Days That Sealed the Confederacy's Fate

Joseph Wheelan

Da Capo Press, 2014, 448 pp., $27.50

        

Review by Gordon Berg

        On a bright Virginia spring morning, twelve men in pewter gray solemnly rode to the top of Clark's Mountain.  From there, they gazed down on a virtual city sprawling below them for miles.  They saw streets, huts, tents, wagons, horses, mountains of supplies, and thousands of men with gleaming bayonets.  Confederate General Robert E. Lee turned to his loyal lieutenants and presciently announced "I think those people over there are going to make a move soon."  Two days later, on May 4, 1864, that city of Union blue began to surge across the Rapidan River.  For the next 40 days, it would relentlessly pummel Lee's Army of Northern Virginia in an unprecedented campaign of bloodshed and maneuver. 

        Numerous books have covered the Overland Campaign, masterminded by newly appointed Union general-in-chief Ulysses S. Grant.  Those who have read them may not find much new in Joseph Wheelan's account.  But for those who haven't, this excellent one-volume account hits all the high points.  In clear, concise, journalistic prose, filled with energetic verbs and colorful adjectives, Wheelan vividly recreates those critical days that permanently turned the tide of the war in the East.  In addition, his rock-solid research and instructive anecdotes puts events and personalities into a context that brings clarity to the bloodiest spring of the war.

        Lee had fought in the 80 square miles of woods, thickets, and underbrush known as the Wilderness before.  It was there that he achieved possibly his greatest victory, Chancellorsville.  But Lee had never faced the relentless, unassuming, warrior from the West.  James Longstreet had, however.  Lee's most reliable lieutenant knew Grant personally and predicted "that man will fight us every day and every hour till the end of the war."  Part of Grant's master plan would require the Army of the Potomac, still under the titular command of Major General George G. Meade, to do just that.  Lee, ingenious and audacious himself, understood that the Confederacy was hanging on by a thread; he would have to oblige his bellicose foe or lose the war. 

        Grant never intended to fight in the Wilderness.  But by stopping early on the first day, Wheelan contends, Grant had "handed Lee a glittering opportunity to strike at the massive Union army while it was still inside the claustrophobic Wilderness, a place that nullified Meade's overwhelming advantages in numbers and artillery."  The two armies stumbled upon each other on the Orange Plank Road, the Orange Turnpike, and forest waste in between.  After three days of almost continuous carnage, the names of obscure country places like Parker's Store, the Wilderness Tavern, widow Tapp's house, Saunders Field, and the Chewning Farm would saturate newspapers stories, north and south, and Private Charles H. Wilson of the 18th Massachusetts would become the first name on dishearteningly long casualty lists.

        Both sides took a beating in the Wilderness, Grant worse than Lee.  Wheelan's frequent use of eloquent and descriptive quotes from participants adds a terrible beauty to the almost indescribable chaos.  "It was a wild and disconnected battling of regiment with regiment, of company with company, without plan, or purpose, or knowledge or result," wrote Norton Shepard of the 146th New York.  J.M. Waddell of the 46th North Carolina wrote, "It was a mere slugging match in a dense thicket of small growth,""where men but a few yards apart fired through the brushwood for hours."  Wheelan's own prose often approaches the melodic cadences of the antagonists.  After the fighting on May 6 ended, he describes how "the veil of night fell away in tense silence to reveal a spring morning that might have been delightful but for the fuliginous air, the splintered trees, and the dead and wounded lying everywhere."

        When Grant pulled his forces back from the stalemated battle, his men thought it was to retreat back across the Rapidan to lick their wounds, just as they had done before.  Lee knew better.  He assumed Grant would do what he would have done, strike out for open country around Spotsylvania Court House.  In the dark, Grant sat on his horse and watched as Fifth Corps turned south on the Brock Road, going exactly where Lee had predicted.  Tired, dirty, and grievously bloodied, the men in blue nevertheless cheered wildly for their new commander's decision. 

        But Lee got his exhausted army to Spotsylvania first.  Now, the general whose first inclination was to attack, immediately began to entrench.  Lee realized he faced a different kind of Union commander and different tactics would be needed to defeat him.  "Lee's objective was now to seize the initiative somehow and strike Grant's army a mortal blow," Wheelan contends, "Grant's was to retain the initiative and keep applying pressure to Lee until his army crumbled to pieces."  These character traits guaranteed that the bloody brawl would continue.

         Lee, a fortifications expert, "used the high ground his army occupied between the Po and Ni Rivers to bar the way to Spotsylvania and its web of roads pointing towards Richmond."  According to Wheelan, "the Army of Northern Virginia blocked the Union's path with better fortifications than anything seen in the Wilderness, and its defenses were becoming more impregnable by the hour."  Grant was determined to have at Lee but, with Sheridan and his troopers away running down Jeb Stuart and his horsemen, he was operating with virtually no intelligence.  Wheelan concludes that this led Grant to misread the tactical situation and make several critical errors that dramatically raised the Union body count.  Grant candidly admitted "We have had hard fighting today, and I am sorry to say we have not accomplished much."  Attack and counterattack continued in the Spotsylvania area through May 19, a textbook example of Grant's strategy of attritional industrial warfare. 

         The Overland Campaign was not meant to be conducted in a vacuum.  Wheelan wisely includes complementary operations such as a thrust toward Richmond by the Army of the James under politically astute but militarily impaired General Benjamin Butler and Sheridan's cavalry operation toward Richmond.  Neither action succeeded as planned although the irreplaceable Confederate cavalry "beau sabreur," Jeb Stuart, was killed by Union cavalry at Yellow Tavern on May 11.

        Checked at every turn, Grant finally decided to maneuver again.  On the night of May 20, the army wheeled south and east.  A shift in Union strategy now attempted to entice Lee to attack Grant.  Lee wouldn't bite.  Wheelan's chapter on the often-overlooked May 23-26 confrontation on the North Anna River encapsulates his ability to succinctly summarize a campaign without losing the telling anecdotes that give life to events.  It holds up well against longer accounts of that small, but potentially game-changing, action. 

        The grisliest encounter, however, was still to come.  After successfully withdrawing his army from positions opposite an entrenched enemy, always a risky gambit, Grant again sidled east and south, his movements masked by band music played far into the night.  The next stop would be June 1 at Cold Harbor, a blot on Grant's reputation and henceforth to be likened to murder on the battlefield.  Four and a half days of close-quarter's slaughter ended with a two-hour truce on the night of June 7 to collect the Union dead and wounded, almost 7,000 of them.  In his Memoirs, Grant admitted "At Cold Harbor, no advantage whatever was gained to compensate for the heavy loss we sustained."  But heavy losses never deterred Grant.  After another four days of inconclusive but deadly trench warfare, the Army of the Potomac disappeared again, this time to emerge south of the James River in front of Petersburg.  The Overland Campaign had become a siege operation.  Grant's strategy of exhaustion, he maintained, had "so crippled [the enemy] as to make him ever after of taking the offensive."  Wheelan's comprehensive monograph decisively describes how Grant accomplished his mission.  

______________________________________

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.

Glorious War: 
The Civil War Adventures of George Armstrong Custer

Thom Hatch

St. Martin's Press, 2013, 366 pp., $28.99

          

Review by Gordon Berg

        Probably only one Union officer can match the cult of personality that has grown up around Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jeb Stuart: George Armstrong Custer.  Thom Hatch undoubtedly agrees that Custer deserves the accolades appearing in the opening paragraph on the dust jacket of Glorious War.  "This thrilling and definitive biography of George Armstrong Custer's Civil War years is nothing short of a heart-pounding cavalry charge through the battlefield heroics that thrust the gallant young officer into the national spotlight in the midst of the country's darkest hours."  Even allowing for some marketing exuberance, it sets the bar high for Custer.
 

        Hatch makes an energetic case that Custer deserves the hype.  Glorious War is his fourth book with Custer as the main actor.  Hatch argues that the young officer's Civil War exploits have been undervalued because of his defeat at the Little Bighorn.  He contends that Custer should be seen as "a national hero on a grand scale due to his amazing achievements in the Civil War."  Hatch's unstinting effort to correct the record and his unreserved praise and admiration for his subject may cause more objective readers to question his conclusions.  To his credit, Hatch admits that his book is "a testament," and maintains that "Custer's entire military career should be reassessed by fair-minded historians under a more favorable light and found to have been commendable."

         Custer's war record, however, capably speaks for itself.  The spirited son of a staunchly Democratic Ohio family, Custer was a long shot to be accepted for West Point.  Given his propensity for hijinks and accruing demerits, it was an even longer shot that he would graduate.  Custer succeeded in doing both.   It was probably poetic justice that he was the last of his class to leave West Point in 1861.  Custer joined his unit, the 2nd United States Cavalry, in time to play a minimal role at First Bull Run.  His company did, however, form the rear guard as the disorganized Union Army retreated to the defenses of Washington.

        Custer saw his first real action on March 9, 1862, leading his company on a saber charge against Confederate pickets near Centerville, VA.  It would be the first of many.  The regiment soon joined the Army of the Potomac on The Peninsula.  There, the young horse soldier came to the attention of Major General George B. McClellan, a fellow Democrat but polar opposite in temperament.  Asked to serve on the commanding general's staff, Hatch assumes "Custer must have been bursting with pride as he reported to the commanding general ready to prove once again that he could assume any role thrust upon him and excel."

        At Antietam, Custer served mainly in a staff role but, while detailed to General Alfred Pleasonton, his detachment managed to capture several hundred Confederate stragglers near Boonsboro.  Custer's initiative caught Pleasonton's eye and McClellan reported the incident to President Lincoln.  Between assignments after McClellan was relieved of command, Custer used the time to vigorously pursue the hand of a reluctant Libbie Bacon.   It was probably only orders to return to duty in April 1863 that delayed his winning that battle, too. 

         His new assignment again found him with General Pleasonton, now in charge of Union cavalry after the disaster at Chancellorsville.  Accompanying hard-fighting Colonel Benjamin F. Davis's 8th New York Cavalry, Custer found himself at Beverly Ford at dawn on June 9, 1863.  When halted by Confederate pickets, Davis and Custer opened fire and launched the Battle of Brandy Station, the largest all-cavalry engagement ever fought in North America.  After Davis was killed, Hatch admits that Custer's actions "could be called a matter of interpretation."  Hatch favors the version whereby Custer, "by virtue of his actions became de facto leader of an entire brigade or at least an individual detachment."  Whatever the reality, Custer's aggressiveness put him in Pleasonton's good graces; fellow officers would soon be calling him "Pleasonton's Pet." 

        Pleasonton's patronage quickly paid big dividends.  While Lee moved his army into Pennsylvania in June 1863, Pleasonton recommended that new Union commander, Major General George G. Meade, promote three young cavalry officers to the rank of brigadier general.  Twenty-three year old George Armstrong Custer found himself the youngest general in the Union Army.  He commanded a brigade of four Michigan regiments known as "the Wolverines."  Four days after his promotion, in a farm field east of Gettysburg, a cavalry fight would solidify his career and launch his reputation. Hatch belongs to the school that believes the engagement in East Cavalry Field on July 3 was an integral part Lee's ingenious attack plan to break the Union center by coordinated attack by George Pickett's infantry and Jeb Stuart's cavalry.  This belief may be behind Hatch contention that this encounter and Custer's role in it probably saved the Union army but it "has all but been ignored by modern-day historians, likely due to prejudices and controversies from the Boy General's later career."  Unfortunately, Hatch's bibliography omits recent studies of Union cavalry operations at Gettysburg that differ from his point-of-view.

        Custer's star continued to rise.  His flamboyant battlefield presence caught the imagination of the Northern press.  Serving with distinction at Culpepper, the Bristoe Campaign, and as a decoy during the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid, Custer even found time to avenge an earlier defeat, finally winning the hand of Libbie Bacon.  When Ulysses S. Grant became commander of all the Union armies and came east to join the Army of the Potomac, he brought Major General Philip Sheridan with him.  Grant made "Little Phil" commander of the Union cavalry.  Sheridan gave Grant's pet, Brigadier General James H. Wilson, command of the Third Division, passing over a more qualified George Custer.  To his credit, Custer masked his disappointment and continued to serve with distinction.  His brigade was in the thick of the fight at Yellow Tavern where a trooper from the Fifth Michigan is credited with mortally wounding Jeb Stuart.  The brigade took a beating at Trevilian Station and fought with determination in the 1864 Valley Campaign where Custer finally earned command of the Third Division.  Custer distinguished himself at Five Forks and the first white flag at Appomattox appeared in front his troops.

        After his death in Montana in 1876, Libbie Custer "worked tirelessly to protect the image of her later husband and vigorously defended him against those who brought criticism."  Libbie Custerr would have loved Glorious War.   

______________________________________

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.

Appomattox: 
Victory, Defeat, and Freedom at the End of the Civil War

Elizabeth H. Varon

Oxford University Press, 2013, 305 pp., $27.95

          

Review by Gordon Berg

        The day Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in the parlor of Wilmer McLean's house in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, the two generals fired the first shots of a second, albeit different war: a war for the meaning of that iconic event and how it would be remembered.  Grant opened the battle with the magnanimous surrender terms he offered to the Army of Northern Virginia.  Lee countered with General Order No. 9, his melancholy farewell to the men he led for four agonizing years.  Each man understood his document in ways consistent with the ideology for which he had fought.  The political, social, and cultural debates these documents spawned in the months after the surrender are the subject of Elizabeth Varon's provocative and insightful study of an event most students of the Civil War thought they understood.

      

       Varon probes deep into the psyches of Lee and Grant and analyzes them with fresh eyes to understand what kind of nation they envisioned emerging from the wreckage of war.  Grant's surrender terms reflected a victor's generosity and spoke to the moral righteousness of the Union cause that promised a better future for all citizens of an improved, united nation.  Lee's unrepentant message looked to the past and lamented the loss of an idyllic, simpler time when the virtue, privilege, and honor of the white South prevailed, before it was ground down by the weight of the North's gross numbers and impersonal industrial might.  Varon contends that both Grant and Lee were men of peace on April 9, but peace of very different kinds.  The two men thus become touchstones for Americans struggling to understand how the war would affect their daily lives.  Grant's surrender terms and Lee's farewell order became the founding documents for 150 years of debate over the legacy of the Civil War.

        Varon also delves into the letters, diaries, and memoirs left by the men of the two armies who fought each other during those last desperate days.  "The Union and Confederate soldiers who fought the Appomattox campaign were keenly aware," she concludes, "of the political nature of the surrender and of the high stakes involved in interpreting it."  While the opinions of individual soldiers varied, most of them adhered closely to the interpretations enunciated by their leaders.  These feelings traveled with the soldiers as they returned home, forming the basis of Lost Cause mythology in the South and Reconciliationist vindication in the North.  Varon gives appropriate credit for the important, but often unreported, role played by United States Colored Troops (USCT) during the Appomattox campaign.  "In the eyes of black troops," she maintains, "the fate of the Union was still uncertain on April 9, 1865, and their own agency tipped the scales."   Varon emphasizes that, for them, the end of the war was much more than a military victory that preserved the Union.  They viewed their participation as an integral part of a victorious crusade that "incorporated the themes of not only racial pride and liberation but also of clemency: they attempted to inscribe a civil rights message into the magnanimous terms of the surrender."

        From the armies in the field, Varon gracefully moves to the two home fronts.  In the North, the mood of the populace quickly shifted from joy and relief to shock and anger in the wake of Lincoln's assassination, occurring less than a week after Appomattox.  Analyzing Radical, moderate Republican and Democrat, and Copperhead newspapers, Varon follows the panoply of public opinion toward the South in general and the Confederate government in particular.  It ranged from mercy grounded in moral righteousness to retribution fired by grief and all the various shades of each in between.  But through the cacophony of voices, the conciliatory words of Lincoln's last public speech and the magnanimous words of Grant's surrender terms reverberated throughout the North.  Varon also recognizes that these sentiments were mirrored in the restraint shown by African American troops toward the homeward bound Confederate soldiers they encountered.  Rather than responding with anger and violence in the wake of the president's assassination, she notes that "They paid tribute to Lincoln, as most white soldiers did, by upholding the fragile peace."

        Except for an almost universal reverence of Lee, feelings in the South were also divided about what the end of the war meant.  The theme of General Order No. 9 -- that the South succumbed only to the North's crushing numerical superiority and massive material advantages -- helped many salve feelings of shock, disbelief, and humiliation that the vaunted Army of Northern Virginia could be surrendered.  Again, Varon uses newspapers to take the pulse of public opinion.  It ranged from resignation and a wish for "peace and brotherhood" to angry defiance, urging "more determined and united action."  Southern Unionists felt vindicated in their loyalty to the old flag and Southern blacks "celebrated Lee's surrender as a day of jubilee."  The battle over the meaning of Appomattox, Varon astutely concludes, "did not simply pit South against North or even Confederacy against Union.  Instead it pitted those who opposed a thoroughgoing transformation of the South…against those who demanded such a transformation."  The  ideological battles of a second Civil War, less bloody, to be sure, but just as determined, had begun.

       

        In an earlier book, Varon expertly chronicled the turbulent decades leading to national disunion.  She now reveals an equal affinity for documenting the dramatic ending of that disunion.  Her scholarship provides readers with excellent bookends for the many volumes devoted to the Civil War.  At its root, Appomattox is a study of the power and subtlety of language.  In her clear, confident, yet elegant, prose, Varon gives renewed life to many of the players in the last act of America's greatest tragedy.  We can hear and understand their points-of-view, even if we don't agree with them.

   

______________________________________

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.