Author: James M. McPherson
Date of Publication: February 1988
Overview: Published in 1988 to universal acclaim, this single-volume treatment of the Civil War quickly became recognized as the new standard in its field. James M. McPherson, who won the Pulitzer Prize for this book, impressively combines a brisk writing style with an admirable thoroughness. He covers the military aspects of the war in all of the necessary detail, and also provides a helpful framework describing the complex economic, political, and social forces behind the conflict. Perhaps more than any other book, this one belongs on the bookshelf of every Civil War buff. Amazon Review.
Author: James M. McPherson
Date of Publication: April 1996
Overview: In Drawn With the Sword, McPherson offers a series of thoughtful and engaging essays on some of the most enduring questions of the Civil War. Drawn With the Sword explores such questions as why the North won and why the South lost (emphasizing the role of contingency in the Northern victory), whether Southern or Northern aggression began the war, and who really freed the slaves, Abraham Lincoln or the slaves themselves...
Author: Gregory Acken, Edwin C. Bearss
Date of Publication: July 1998
Overview: Donaldson's fiercely candid observations reveal much about the political life of the Army of the Potomac, and his letters contribute unforgettable descriptions of actions at Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg. Fiercely idealistic in the early days of the war, his letters and diary soon betray a growing disenchantment that leads to a startling climax. 28 photos, 6 maps. Ingram.
Author: Stephen W. Sears
Date of Publication: Reissue addition March 1993
Overview: Of all the days on all the fields where American soldiers have fought, the most terrible was September 17, 1862. The Civil War battle waged on that date at Antietam Creek, in western Maryland, took a human toll never exceeded in our history. Winner of the Fletcher Platt Award for best nonfiction book about the Civil War, here is the definitive work on this bitter struggle. 16-page photo insert; 10 maps. Ingram.
Author: Richard R. Duncan
Date of Publication: February 1999
Overview: Basically well written and excellently researched , this book offers insights on the critical battles of the Civil War in western Virginia during the Spring of 1864, a subject usually not covered in detail. The details provided and the sequence presented on military operations give a very useful overview of strategy and tactics in this area in 1864.
Author: Douglas Southall Freeman
Date of Publication: Reprint edition April 1997
Overview: Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command is the most colorful and popular of all of Douglas Southall Freeman's works; it is generally considered the most penetrating study ever written of military personalities and tactics during the American Civil War. A sweeping narrative that presents a multiple biography against the flame-shot background of history, it is the story of the great figures of the Army of Northern Virginia who fought under Robert E. Lee as they came forward on the stage of war. Amazon Review.
Author: John Jakes
Date of Publication: 1982
Overview: The book begins with a prologue giving a detailed explanation of how the Hazard and Main family end up in the American colonies.
Two young men, George Hazard from Pennsylvania, and Orry Main from South Carolina, meet on their way to the United States Military Academy. They soon become close friends who frequently confront their regional differences within the frame of their friendship. During their time at West Point, Orry and George meet up with a sadistic cadet named Elkanah Bent from Ohio, who constantly torments the two companions. In time, Orry, George and a couple of other cadets enable Bent's expulsion from West Point.
Eventually, Orry and George graduate from West Point and become officers in the United States Army during the Mexican-American War. On a stopover in Texas on the way to Mexico, George courts a young Irish woman named Constance. George and Orry end up in the Battle of Vera Cruz, where Orry is badly wounded in the arm, resulting in its amputation. Orry is sent home after the battle, but George stays instead.
When George is released from the Army due to the death of his father, he and Constance return to George's home in Pennsylvania and marry. George and Orry eventually meet up again and resume their friendship as tensions strengthen between the North and South. Soon, Orry's sister Brett falls in love with George's brother Billy. Later, Billy and Orry's cousin Charles are classmates at West Point.
In 1858, as Orry is planning a trip to Pennsylvania, Brett begs Orry to take her with him so they can continue to St. Louis, where Billy is stationed with the Army Corps of Engineers. On the train back to South Carolina, the train is stopped by raiders under the command of the radical abolitionist, John Brown at the town of Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, then part of the state of Virginia. Brett and Orry are not harmed by John Brown's men, and are sent on their way to Pennsylvania.
Two years after the Mains and the Hazards rendezvous in Pennsylvania, Billy joins the U.S. Army as the American Civil War draws near. He is stationed in Charleston, South Carolina, at Major Robert Anderson's garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, only a few miles away from the Main plantation. Billy is leave and marries Brett late one night. That same night, Confederate forces under the command of Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Fort Sumter, setting off the Civil War. So, Orry and George say their final good-bye before the war, hoping for the best for each other.
Author: Shelby Foote
Date of Publication: Reprint edition July 1994
Overview: This careful study of the 1863 Gettysburg campaign assumes the contours of a classical tragedy. Foote positions readers on the field of battle itself, among swirling smoke and clattering grapeshot, and invites us to feel for ourselves its hellishness: "men on both sides were hollering as they milled about and fired, some cursing, others praying ... not a commingling of shouts and yells but rather like a vast mournful roar." Foote's fine book is history as literature, and a welcome addition to any Civil War buff's library. Amazon Review.
Author: Shelby Foote
Date of Publication: December 1986
Overview: This beautifully written trilogy of books on the American Civil War is not only a piece of first-rate history, but also a marvelous work of literature. Shelby Foote brings a skilled novelist's narrative power to this great epic. Many know Foote for his prominent role as a commentator on Ken Burns's PBS series about the Civil War. These three books, however, are his legacy. His southern sympathies are apparent: the first volume opens by introducing Confederate President Jefferson Davis, rather than Abraham Lincoln. But they hardly get in the way of the great story Foote tells. This hefty three volume set should be on the bookshelf of any Civil War buff. Amazon Review.
by Tim McKinney
This is the story of a place, and a war. It makes sense that this area would be of utmost significance in the Civil War, as it sits on the spot where Virginia was ripped apart to form two states. A place where the war "came early and stayed late." Although strong Union support characterized Greenbrier County before the war, the majority of its citizens sided with the South when forced to choose. Greenbrier County sent no delegates to the conventions that gave birth to the Reorganized Government of Virginia.
It cast no votes for Abraham Lincoln. When war came, the county supported the Confederate military with money, arms and men. An estimated 2,000 men and boys from Greenbrier County wore Confederate gray. This number represented approximately 80% of the countys males of "military age." Greenbrier County was strategically important to both sides. It was a gateway to northwestern Virginia, Ohio and the rich Shenandoah Valley. It was a base from which either side could attack, or defend, the vital railroads of southwestern Virginia and the prized salt mines of the Great Kanawha Valley. In the years after the war Greenbrier County played a prominent role in shaping the new nation. At a meeting at the Greenbrier in 1868, General Lee and other prominent veterans from both sides signed the Greenbrier Manifesto, a document calling for reconciliation between the North and South. In this way, Greenbrier County - crossroads of a nation divided - became a conduit for lasting peace.
The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War. By Charles S. Aiken. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
For nearly two hundred years the cotton plantation has been a defining feature of the southern landscape, yet remarkably few studies of the institution have focused on its economic, social, and political geography. Charles Aiken's The Cotton Plantation South helps to redress the imbalance. Although not all readers will view the geographer's interpretive lens as the key to perfect vision, few will dispute its sweeping panorama.
The book identifies three eras in the history of southern cotton plantations-the Old South (from the seventeenth century through the Civil War), the New South (from the Civil War through World War II), and the Modern South (from approximately 1970 to the present). The analysis concentrates primarily on the latter two. Readers with a knowledge of the historical literature will find a familiar cast of characters, including growers large and small, tenants and sharecroppers, merchants and ginners, and state and federal officials. Although other members of the plantation hierarchy, such as owners and managers and their political allies, do not as a group occupy center stage, they assume important individual parts in the narrative. The book's great strengths derive from Aiken's keen eye for landscape, particularly his ability to relate the use of space to human action.
The book's central thesis holds that cotton plantations evolved along two major paths during the twentieth century. The first, best exemplified by the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, headed toward mechanization and continued viability; the second, illustrated by Alabama's Black Belt and Georgia's lower piedmont, led to stagnation or extinction. If at first glance this general explanation appears obvious, the interpretive sparkle lies in the details. Aiken's analysis of changing patterns in the design, construction, and physical location of housing, for instance, demonstrates the social and political roots that lie beneath decisions regarding land use in plantation areas. Likewise, his treatment of the Barrow family's Sylls Fork Plantation in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, builds nicely on the work of earlier commentators and carries the analysis forward to the present.
The middle third of the book explores the relationship between the Civil Rights movement and the broader pattern of change in plantation agriculture during the 1950s and 1960s. Though perceptive in the main, the analysis is a bit long and cluttered by well-known persons and events. Moreover, it is faulty in places, as the treatment of mechanical innovation illustrates. By insisting that "the primary factor that caused agricultural mechanization across Southern, as across Northern and Western, farmlands was economic, not social," Aiken sets up an unnecessary polarity (p. 226). Cutting against the grain of the best recent studies of these developments, which emphasize the complex motives animating the participants and the ultimate uncertainty of the outcome, such a rigid formulation also leaves unexplained why cotton planters resisted mechanical innovation for so long only to adopt it seemingly wholeheartedly overnight.
By the same token, his assertion that "[m]anagement failure was the underlying basis of the decay" in southern agriculture during the twentieth century sacrifices subtlety for interpretive sweep (p. 68). Failure and success, like prosperity and decay, are relative terms. Aiken's formula does not recognize that even during periods of greatest apparent prosperity the successful management of cotton plantations has entailed social impoverishment to one degree or another. His assessment of local white leadership during the heyday of civil rights agitation suggests other dangers associated with overly ambitious generalizations. "Astute" leaders, by his reckoning, were those who wished to avoid embarrassing media coverage and who had a Machiavellian sense of when to abandon segregation and disfranchisement in the larger interest of preserving 11 white domination" (p. 194). Relatively absent from "regions of agricultural demise such as the Alabama Black Belt," such persons, he contends, played significant leadership roles in "the viable agricultural regions such as the Yazoo Delta and the north Mississippi Loess Plains" (p. 194). Even apart from whether or not these characterizations accord with the facts-a point that readers may legitimately dispute-such a notion of astuteness runs roughshod over the complex historical and political contexts in which the movement unfolded. Astute leadership assumed multiple faces among opponents of the status quo no less than among its supporters.
Although the study merits a mixed review, its strengths outweigh its weaknesses. In the end nothing rivals in scope or depth its treatment of the twentieth-century cotton plantation as contested space.
Author: Michael Shaara
Date of Publication: Reissue edition April 1993
Overview: This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book, however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose 20th Maine regiment of volunteers held the Union's left flank on the second day of the battle. This unit's bravery at Little Round Top helped turned the tide of the war against the rebels. There are also plenty of maps, which convey a complete sense of what happened July 1-3, 1863. Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages. Amazon Review.
Author: Earl J. Hess
Date of Publication: May 1997
Overview: Drawing extensively upon the letters, diaries, and memoirs of Northern soldiers, Hess reveals their deepest fears and shocks, and also their sources of inner strength. By identifying recurrent themes found in these accounts, Hess constructs a multi-layered view of the many ways in which these men coped with the challenges of battle. He shows how they were bolstered by belief in God and country, or simply by their sense of duty; how they came to rely on the support of their comrades; and how they learned to muster self-control in order to persevere from one battle to the next. Amazon review.
Author: Gari Carter
Overview: Troubled State is the recently discovered Civil War journals of Franklin Archibald Dick, a prominent St. Louis attorney, who acted as an advisor for Lincoln, Grant, Lyon, Blair, and other important political figures at that time. From an insider’s point of view, he described the Civil War as a loyal Unionist in the politically torn city of St. Louis.
More importantly, Franklin Dick’s journals uncover first hand accounts of historically pivotal moments during the war, such as the Camp Jackson incident, where he acted as Captain Nathaniel Lyon’s Assistant Adjutant General. Franklin Dick’s observations also add great details to the known literature on the Civil War in Missouri, a barely pro-Union border state during those turbulent years.
Brother-in-law to Frank Blair, Franklin Dick served as Missouri Provost Marshal General under Major General Samuel Curtis in 1862. After the war, he practiced law in Washington with Montgomery Blair, Lincoln’s Postmaster General.
On the cover of Troubled State is a hand colored lithograph of Camp Jackson, MO, by Ch. Robyn and Co. after George G. Friedlein, 1st Lt. Topographical Engineers, 1861, owned by the Missouri Historical Society. Part of the lithograph is reproduced in the banner of my website. Camp Jackson is where the Civil War began in Missouri, and in the life of Franklin Dick.
Franklin Dick’s eyewitness account of the events leading up to the famous Camp Jackson incident is just the first of many new insights into the true landscape of Civil War St. Louis. Dick’s detailed descriptions of such important moments as the secret Unionist meetings held in his office, and his role on the Assessment Committee formed to punish Southern sympathizers, make this book historically priceless. His frank account of his own emotional journey over the course of the war also makes Troubled State an extremely engaging read.
Much like the Pulitzer Prize-winning Mary Chestnut’s Civil War, Franklin Dick’s journals offer events of the Civil War from a truly unique point of view. Dick is an ardent supporter of the Union, but is frequently troubled by the slow progress and terrible cost of the war. For him, the divided city of St. Louis presents a heartbreaking test of personal strength.
These journals contain my great-great-grandfather’s outspoken views on the Civil War, the country, the state of Missouri, leaders he knew, politics, daily life, concerns about morality, inner thoughts, and private worries. His entries changed from early optimism to later doubts about his future due to pressures from his loyalty to the Union and war issues.
He felt he was “a tree in a moveable vessel,” and feared returning to the turmoil in St. Louis, as he mourned the loss of his twenty years of effort in Missouri. Franklin Dick’s unique record of American life during the Civil War reminds us that we are what we were, and gives us an irreplaceable new perspective on the impact of history in our lives.