Booknotes: The Final Bivouac

New Arrival:

• The Final Bivouac: The Confederate Surrender Parade at Appomattox and the Disbanding of the Virginia Armies, April 10-May 20, 1865 by Chris Calkins, with Bert Dunkerly and Patrick A. Schroeder (Savas Beatie, 2025).

I don't recall exactly how many at this point have been given the treatment, but Savas Beatie has revisited a number of classic titles from the long out of print H.E. Howard Virginia Battles and Leaders series, republishing them in revised and expanded form. Around a year ago, with the assistance of Bert Dunkerly, Patrick Schroeder, and Melody Bage, the publisher released a fresh version of Chris Calkins's 1980s book The Battles of Appomattox Station and Appomattox Court House, April 8-9, 1865 under the new title "No One Wants to be the Last to Die": The Battles of Appomattox, April 8-9, 1865. Calkins's follow-up from the same period, The Final Bivouac: The Surrender Parade at Appomattox and the Disbanding of the Armies, April 10 - May 20, 1865, has now received its own new version (and slightly different title wording) with The Final Bivouac: The Confederate Surrender Parade at Appomattox and the Disbanding of the Virginia Armies, April 10-May 20, 1865, and Dunkerly and Schroeder return to assist with the project.

The book addresses a number of questions related to the surrender and its immediate aftermath. Among others, they include: "What actually happened during the first six weeks of new-found peace once General Lee surrendered the remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia to General Grant? What were the initial reactions of the soldiers and Virginia citizens to the devastating news of Lincoln’s assassination? How did they handle the situation of the emancipated slaves?"

In its coverage of the surrender parade, Calkins's work "vividly captured the intense feelings and emotions of Union and Confederate soldiers as the former enemies faced each other for the last time. The honor and respect shown by the victorious Federal troops toward the defeated Southerners is one of the most moving episodes in American history." The text, which combines author narrative with extensive blocks of material from eyewitness and participant letters, diaries, official reports, and other writings, "continues the story with marvelous firsthand accounts by homeward-bound Confederates, the members of the Union encampment at Burkeville, men involved in the Danville Expedition, and those present for the occupation of Southside Virginia. The narrative concludes as the last few regiments in blue cross the James River at Richmond on their way to Washington, D.C., and then, finally home."

In addition to support from seven maps, the volume sports an extensive appendix section filled with interesting supplemental information and data tables. The first highlights a number of archaeological investigations of the ground, the second provides insights into the condition of Lee's army during the period (particularly in areas of clothing and food), the third delves into the neverending debate over how many men Lee surrendered at Appomattox, and the final appendix reviews the sun rising and setting times over the course of the campaign.

Review - "Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation" by Michael Lang

[Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation by Michael S. Lang (University of Tennessee Press, 2025). Softcover, 16 maps, illustrations, appendix, orders of battle, strength tables, notes, bibliography, index. Pages:xx,293. ISBN:978-1-62190-916-3. $24.95]

Michael Lang's Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation is one of the more unique installments in UT Press's ever-growing Command Decisions in America's Civil War series. In a series now approaching two-dozen volumes, this is only the second Trans-Mississippi theater entry, and its subject, the 1864 Red River Campaign, is the only one to lack a comprehensive book-length treatment that anyone would consider definitive in nature. While numerous overview-level books covering the campaign's operations in the Red River Valley and Arkansas exist, it is still the case that no full-length studies of the campaign's climactic battles, those fought at Mansfield (April 8) and Pleasant Hill (April 9), have been published. In contrast with other series topics, which tend to address major military contests fought between principal field armies, the Red River Campaign is also atypical in that it was driven by political and economic considerations more than military ones. How that mix affected critical decision-making and its consequences adds some interesting elements to the analysis.

For those unfamiliar with the series and its structure, please refer to the site reviews of the early series titles for more explanation. In short, critical decisions are, as Lang explains, those that are "not only consequential in their own right, but also so important that they substantially shape the decisions and events that follow, thus forming the course of history" (pg. xiv). For each critical decision, identification and analysis unfolds in the following sequence: Situation, Options, Decision, and Result/Impact. Situation describes a particular state of affairs (be it "strategic, operational, tactical, organizational, personnel related, or logistical" in nature) at a pivotal moment prompting a critical decision. That background element provides readers with the context necessary to recognize and evaluate the Options (two or more in number) available to the decision-maker. The historical Decision that was selected by that high-level decision-maker is then described. The ensuing Result(s)/Impact section recounts what happened and how those historical events shaped what followed. An Alternative Decision/Scenario section is optional for contributors (some really get into the alternate history conjecture while other omit it altogether), and Lang includes a brief one or two paragraphs of that type of content for all of his fifteen decisions.

Series contributors typically organize their critical decision compilations into several sub-groupings (most often by specific time intervals). Task ten knowledgeable individuals with the same job of identifying critical decisions and you'll undoubtedly receive back ten different lists. With that in mind, one might quibble with a few of Lang's selections, but that's alright as he brings all of the most centrally important situations and decisions into the conversation. In Lang's analysis, eight decisions are assigned to an extended stretch (January 1863-April 1864) of campaign preliminaries. This is where the bulk of the strategic, organizational, and personnel-related decisions reside. The second grouping, five in number (including the volume's only two tactical-level decisions), addresses the campaign's first big inflection point, the April 6-9 sequence of events encompassing the battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. The third and final grouping, covering the period April 9-May 30, discusses the two critical decisions that most shaped the finishing stages of the campaign on both fronts, Union commander Nathaniel Banks's decision to withdraw to the Red River after his tactical victory at Pleasant Hill and Confederate commander Edmund Kirby Smith's decision to divert the bulk of his resources to Arkansas.

Like most others who have examined the campaign at length, Lang wonders what Richard Taylor, Kirby Smith's principal subordinate in the Red River Valley, might have accomplished against Banks's increasingly divided and demoralized command at Cane River had Kirby Smith not redirected the bulk of his available infantry firepower (the Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas divisions of Parsons, Churchill, and Walker) to Arkansas. What more that larger force might have done against the river fleet trapped above the falls at Alexandria is another interesting matter to contemplate. Lang is more noncommittal than most when it comes to taking sides in the epic clash of wills between Kirby Smith and Taylor, instead offering readers the tools to form their own opinions.

Two decisions are tied to the fighting in Arkansas, the first a logistical decision on the part of Frederick Steele, the Union general charged with leading what came to be known as the Camden Expedition, and the second Kirby Smith's weighty decision over where to concentrate his counteroffensive after Banks retreated back to the Red River and the naval support it provided. That relative paucity of critical decisions assigned to the Camden Expedition (essentially 1.5 out of 15) possibly represents a determination that Steele's column and its overextended supply line possessed little in the way of ability and opportunity to truly transform the course and results of the campaign (an opinion that Steele himself held from the outset).

Even though it's not explicitly part of the standardized structure of decision analysis adopted by the series, at times it might be helpful to explain why seemingly important decisions did not, in the mind of the author, qualify as critical decisions. For example, Steele's decision to abandon, perhaps temporarily (he did not yet know that Banks had been defeated at Mansfield and had retreated after Pleasant Hill), his advance on Shreveport and redeploy to Camden, where his supply line to Pine Bluff was shortened, might be considered a critical decision. Similarly, Steele's final decision to abandon Camden (after his two primary foraging missions were smashed by the Confederates and official confirmation arrived that Banks was not only no longer advancing but in trouble) and retreat back to his Arkansas River base might also be considered a critical decision. That said, critical decisions have to have realistic options and, in both cases, the author perhaps determined that Steele's supply situation left him no reasonable alternatives. On the Confederate side of the Arkansas operation, there are no critical decisions assigned to the execution, upon heavy reinforcement from the Red River Valley, of Kirby Smith's plan to cut off Steele's retreat. Cavalry division commander James Fagan was ordered to block Steele's retreat route (a movement that was apparently very feasible), but Fagan instead cleared out his entire force off to the west toward better foraging grounds, leaving Steele's path wide open. Some deem Fagan to have spoiled a golden opportunity to force the outright surrender of Steele's desperately low-supplied army. Of course, we'll never now what might have happened had Steele been compelled to fight his way out of a surrounding cordon of infantry and cavalry, but it was arguably a critical decision left unexamined.

As is the case with a few structural elements of the series, the scale of the driving tour appendix can vary between volumes. With eleven stops that begin in New Orleans and spread across Louisiana and Arkansas, Lang's tour is a substantial journey. In addition to providing driving directions and visual field orientation, the text attached to each stop explains how it is tied to a critical decision. Helpfully, many of the key orders and communications between leaders that are cited in the main text's decision analysis are reproduced at length in the tour appendix. Added to the orders of battle for both sides are some strength tables (divisional for Union forces and district level for the Confederates) and lists of naval forces (gunboats and transports) deployed by both sides.

One of the most noticeable changes in the series between its inception and today is in the cartography, the earliest volumes having wider coverage (with maps in the dozens spread over both the main decision analysis and integrated driving tour) and more small-unit detail. Lacking insider knowledge, one might guess that evolving economics of publishing played some part in this. It's less of a concern in this volume, which has very few tactical-level critical decisions.

In addition to its strong consideration of the campaign's most momentous decisions, Michael Lang's Decisions of the Red River Campaign also, more than any other entry in the series, starkly demonstrates the ways in which leadership and personality factors can erase seemingly overwhelming one-sided advantages in manpower, firepower, materiel, and waterborne support. Lang's measured analysis of Union plans and their execution, as well as Confederate lost opportunities, only confirms General Sherman's caustic condemnation of the campaign's conduct as being, at least from the Union perspective, "one damn blunder from beginning to end."

Booknotes: Hundreds of Little Wars

New Arrival:

• Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War edited by G. David Schieffler & Matthew M. Stith (LSU Press, 2025).

In a body of major scholarship encompassed by the 1995 publication of his now classic study Seasons of War: The Ordeal of the Confederate Community, 1861-1865 and the 2009 release of A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War, historian Daniel Sutherland established himself as a towering influence in the modern examination and understanding of the Civil War's local impact beyond the conventional battlefield. Across several works, Sutherland powerfully argued that, in many ways, the irregular war on the domestic front was the war as experienced by the majority of the southern and Border State populations. Using Sutherland's pioneering contributions as a springboard, the essays collected in the new anthology Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War "reveal how viewing the war from the vantage point of singular communities allows us to better understand the larger conflict." Those 'singular communities' include "towns, regions, counties, regiments, prisons, and even refugee camps" across the country. Together, they "played a significant role in shaping the contours of the Civil War."

Volume editors G. David Schieffler and Matthew Stith invited their contributors to define the term 'community' in a manner that reaches expansively beyond more traditional labels. The result is twelve essays organized into six themed sections (with a pair of essays attached to each): (1) Regimental Communities, (2) County and Environmental Communities, (3) Border Communities, (4) Hybrid (in terms of race and demography) Communities, (5) Irregular Communities, and (6) Transnational and Comparative Communities. In summary, "Lesley J. Gordon and Eric P. Totten examine military outfits, namely the 126th New York Regiment and the 4th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry. Madeleine C. Forrest provides an analysis of Fauquier County, Virginia, in 1862, and Matthew M. Stith evaluates a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in East Texas. Christopher Phillips and Scott A. Tarnowieckyi investigate the middle border region spanning the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. Lorien Foote and G. David Schieffler assess the demographically diverse Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Helena, Arkansas. Barton A. Myers and Terry L. Beckenbaugh employ Sutherland’s framing while considering irregular war, first with an examination of partisan officers and then with a survey of the White River Valley in Arkansas. Finally, Niels Eichhorn and Michael Shane Powers assume a transnational viewpoint, comparing Richmond with Vienna, Austria, and analyzing a community of Confederate veterans in Central America."

The cumulative effect produced by the essays in this volume is to "show that no one single conflict defined the Civil War. Instead, hundreds of wars existed, variously categorized by geography, race, gender, environment, and myriad other factors. Only by concentrating on these communities can we grasp the scope and complexity of the Civil War."

Review - "The Shiloh Campaign, 1862: Battle for the Heartland" by Sean Chick

[The Shiloh Campaign, 1862: Battle for the Heartland by Sean M. Chick (Casemate, 2025). Softcover, 5 maps, timeline, photos, illustrations, reading list, index. 128 Pages. ISBN:978-1-63624-369-6. $24.95]

The American Civil War titles that are a part of the Casemate Illustrated series offer access to concise and up to date histories of major campaigns and battles that are supplemented by color maps and additional visual aids of all types. The latest installment is Sean Chick's The Shiloh Campaign, 1862: Battle for the Heartland.

Chick, who is in the midst of writing a major multi-volume history of Shiloh, situates the battle within the context of a broad wave of Union offensive operations in the western theater that began in February 1862 and quickly produced major land and water advances through Kentucky and deep into Tennessee. The Confederate attack on the Union encampment around Pittsburg Landing on April 6 is properly presented as a desperate attempt to reverse the profound effects of the unmitigated disasters that befell the South's western defense line over the previous two months.

Conventional thought, in both the popular imagination and among scholars, in regard to the personalities, decisions, and events most central to our understanding of the Shiloh campaign and battle has evolved greatly over time. In his book Rethinking Shiloh: Myth and Memory, Timothy Smith identified what he considers to be three distinct historical schools of thought and an evolving fourth. In their own writings and other forms of public engagement, modern subject matter experts such as Smith, Stacy Allen, and others have directly questioned much of what was commonly thought to be true about Shiloh and have rejected many longstanding lines of interpretation along with a number of equally long-cherished myths. Much of that recent reappraisal is reflected in Chick's sound narrative of events. Thus, Chick, though he certainly appreciates its significance, does not make the Hornet's Nest fighting the central event of his April 6 narrative, nor does he opine that it was Confederate army commander Albert Sidney Johnston untimely death that allowed Grant's army to escape defeat on that day. While Chick does wonder what might have been had another hour of daylight been available, the author generally reinforces the consensus view that the Confederates were by no means on the cusp of achieving victory when Johnston's successor, P.G.T. Beauregard, ordered the army to stand down late in the day. That decision was opposed by some front line commanders at the time and was later criticized by pro-Confederate chroniclers seeking a scapegoat for what they saw as a battlefield defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

Chick, who recently authored a Beauregard biography, gives the general a mixed review for this part of his Civil War career. Beauregard's mistakes, such as his ill-conceived initial battle plan and the disorganized state of his command on April 7 (when he was surprised by the timing and strength of the Union counterattack), are duly acknowledged, but the general is also praised for his inspirational battlefield leadership against the combined armies of Grant and Buell before enemy numbers and sheer exhaustion pushed his diminished army to the brink of collapse during the fierce morning fighting on April 7.

In assessing the Union side of things, Chick, as Timothy Smith has similarly argued, finds that Grant's early-war overconfidence displayed at Belmont, Donelson, and Shiloh was a personality trait that barely escaped producing disaster (for the general's own career as well as for the forces under his command). In arranging his divisions around Pittsburg Landing, Grant's lack of defensive preparedness is deemed by Chick to have been particularly "inexcusable," but, on the other hand, Grant is complimented for weathering the crisis on April 6 in his typically cool and determined fashion, even leading from the front in ways that he generally avoided later on in the war. Sherman is similarly criticized for his lack of defensive preparation (and for his crude dismissals of clear signs that the enemy was near), but the author highly commends Sherman's handling of his green division on April 6, when it held its ground for several critical hours against superior numbers and inflicted crippling losses on its attackers. In the author's view, the stand of Sherman's division was a key factor in staving off defeat on Day One. In addressing a point that still divides opinion, Chick's interpretation of the role of Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio concludes that those forces didn't "save" Grant's army from defeat or annihilation on April 6. Instead, they should be considered the essential reinforcements without which the outright driving of the enemy from the field on April 7 was an uncertain proposition. The Lew Wallace controversy, which has been addressed in-depth inside several recent books, is treated briefly and in evenhanded fashion.

Overall, Chick does fine work in condensing a big topic into a very limited amount of space. The narrative provides both big-picture analysis and an appropriate degree of small-unit (brigade and regiment) detail. Well-selected passages from participant writings further enrich the text. Battlefield maps (two for each day) are brigade-scale and useful mostly for general orientation. Among the large collection of illustrations are a number of less commonly reproduced ones, and the informational sidebars also focus on lesser-known figures and topics related to the battle.

Sean Chick's The Shiloh Campaign, 1862 is a strong modern overview that should readily appeal to readers seeking their first exposure to the greatest western battle of the early-war period. There's also enough interesting, non-'run of the mill' commentary on personalities and decisions scattered about the text to draw the interest of deeper students of the subject.

Savas Beatie to publish Francis O'Reilly's Malvern Hill book in 2026

I just received a press release from Savas Beatie announcing that the publisher has struck a deal with Frank O'Reilly to publish his looooooong anticipated Malvern Hill study, which will be titled Retreat from Victory: The Battle of Malvern Hill and the End of the Seven Days, July 1, 1862.

From the release:

"O'Reilly’s forthcoming and long-awaited book on the Battle of Malvern Hill promises to be a milestone in historical literature, blending deep and original research with outstanding prose and cutting-edge analysis.

O'Reilly, a longtime historian on the Fredericksburg-area battlefields known for delivering outstanding battlefield tours and presentations, garnered critical acclaim and multiple awards for his book The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock (2003). He brings the same detailed and insightful analysis to Retreat from Victory—the first book-length study on this critical combat that had important ramifications for the course of the Civil War and many of its prominent leaders."

This is certainly exciting news for anyone interested in the eastern theater's early-war period and the Peninsula Campaign/Seven Days in particular. As regular visitors to this site know, the project has ranked high on CWBA's list of most highly anticipated titles for a very long time.

Of course, the next question is 'when will we see it?' The answer to that is: "Retreat from Victory is slated for release in May 2026 and will be available in hardcover, digital, and audiobook formats."

Booknotes: Our Onward March

New Arrival:

• Our Onward March: The Grand Army of the Republic in the Progressive Era by Jonathan D. Neu (Fordham UP, 2025).

The GAR was first and foremost a veterans fraternal organization, with posts all around the country (even in the former Confederacy), but Jonathan Neu's Our Onward March: The Grand Army of the Republic in the Progressive Era emphasizes the GAR's political activism component of its mission.

According to Neu, "Union veterans of the GAR drew on lessons they learned in the Civil War―lessons about broad principles like democracy, freedom, and loyalty―to undertake grassroots civic projects designed to address the rampant social ills and challenging foreign policy issues associated with US modernization. Armed this time with sage wisdom and unwavering principles, they mobilized again to consummate their wartime victory with reform-minded activism on behalf of establishing an even more perfect Union."

Over the decades following the end of the Civil War and into the new century, GAR passion for public engagement and reform took many different forms. More from the description: "Extending the boundaries of America’s post–Civil War era, Neu investigates the GAR during the Progressive era, a period in the organization’s history that scholars have overlooked. Countering stubborn notions that the GAR was merely a pension advocacy group or an insular bastion of sentimental nostalgia, he reveals instead that the organization reached a turning point in 1890, after which it became an active and decentralized civic association whose members worked to instill a commitment to public life, engagement with community issues, and pride in the democracy they had defended as young men."

The author arrived at his conclusions through fresh examination of neglected source materials. "Anchored by illuminating new source material, including post-minute books and fraternal records, Our Onward March places aging GAR members squarely among the diverse constellation of turn-of-the-century social reformers, using their memory of the Civil War to promote robust, veteran-led civic engagement. By situating Union veterans in this context, we see a more accurate portrait of the GAR post in American culture―as a local center of progressive activism."

Booknotes: Fractured Freedoms

New Arrival:

• Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana by David T. Ballantyne (LSU Press, 2025).

When, in April 1862, Union army and naval forces captured New Orleans, not only Louisiana's largest city but the most populous city by far in the entire Confederacy, that stunning event opened the floodgates for carrying the war into the Lower Mississippi Valley. By May 1862, the state capital, Baton Rouge, fell to Union forces and control of much of Louisiana's transportation and economic infrastructure soon followed. This early-war period occupation of the heart of a Deep South state offered the Lincoln administration a golden opportunity to test its wartime reconstruction policies.

Rather than attempting a comprehensive examination of reconstruction in Louisiana during the Civil War years and beyond, David Ballantyne's Fractured Freedoms: Reconstructing Central Louisiana employs a more localized approach to the topic. Its focus is on 1860s through 1890s Rapides Parish, which was located smack dab in the center of the state, had a large land area, and had a majority black population. The location of the parish seat, Alexandria, on the right bank of the Red River (and a relatively short distance from the Red's confluence with the Mississippi) meant that the small city was heavily visited by the war's kaleidoscope of effects.

From the description: "Using the region as a case study, Ballantyne reveals what is, in part, a rural Reconstruction success story, emphasizing the resilience of Black politics and the persistence of significant divisions among white residents that allowed the Republican Party to gain and maintain power there. It was only with the collapse of state-level Republican power in 1877 that Democratic forces in the parish were able to dismantle local Republican political control and gradually constrict Black freedoms."

Review - "More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee" by Jonathan Engel

[More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee by Jonathan Engel (Kent State University Press, 2025). Paperback, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,224/303. ISBN:978-1-60635-489-6. $39.95]

The title of this study is derived from a well-known quote from William T. Sherman, a general never at a loss for words, who commented the following about his Army of the Tennessee: "We have good corporals and good sergeants and some good lieutenants and captains, and those are far more important than good generals." Though the rank and file of the Confederate Army of Tennessee might beg to differ, and the sentiment is easier to swallow when your own army was consistently blessed with good to great leadership at the army, corps, division, and brigade levels, but it's a point well taken. If one agrees that the regiment formed the foundation of the Civil War army, then it certainly follows that regimental officers—captains and lieutenants that led companies and the colonels, lieutenant colonels, and majors who commanded the regiment—formed the bedrock of an army's leadership and administration. As Jonathan Engel, author of More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee, points out in his introductory remarks, his examination of the duties, motivations, and experiences of junior officers in the North's most consistently successful army addresses a neglected middle ground in Civil War personnel studies, a research space that remains far less developed than the vast scholarship devoted to both the general officers at the top levels of army organization (mostly through the avenue of biography) and the common soldiers at the bottom.

In addition to providing a useful synopsis of the current state of the Civil War officer and soldier literature (and where his own study resides within it), Engel's introduction also explains the challenges involved in his sampling process. First, he had to decide which units to include (as many batteries and regiments were attached to the Army of the Tennessee for only a brief interval) and take into account when and for what amount of time the unit actually served with the army. Simply who might count as an officer was its own source of difficulty, particularly in the context of how long an individual would have needed to serve in that capacity before his perspective could be considered relevant to the study. The impracticalities involved in formulating strict rules on these matters are core reasons behind the author abandoning the quest for producing a truly scientific sample. Nevertheless, while this choice precludes much in the way of quantitative analysis, the sheer size of the officer sample obtained in the end (481 individuals) leaves little reason to doubt the possibility of drawing meaningful interpretation from it. A particularly harrowing stat is that one in five of the sampled officers died during his service (with uncounted others suffering wounds of varying severity). That only 12% of those deaths were due to disease speaks to the great perils involved in leading from the front as well as the presumed advantages that officers possessed for maintaining overall well-being (although some in the sample complained about the quality of medical services in the same way that private soldiers commonly did).

The study explores the full gamut of day-to-day regimental officer duties that were distinguished from those carried out by general officers above them and the non-commissioned officers and private soldiers below them. One of the most interesting parts of the discussion looks at the breadth and scale of administrative matters that fell under the responsibilities of these officers. The anxiety that these duties could produce was clearly apparent in one officer telling his wife to make sure the new house they were purchasing was put in her name as he was going to scared of owning anything of great value for years after the war ended for fear the government would seize it to hold him accountable for monies held against him through some old service audit or lost paperwork.

In evaluating the writings of these officers, Engel joins leading historians Gary Gallagher, James McPherson, and others in finding strong evidence to support that notion that ideology was a strong motivational force. The junior officers of the Army of the Tennessee regularly cited the sacred cause of Union and defense of the American political process that both sections abided by before 1860 as primary reasons behind joining the army. He also finds that, far from being disillusioned by the war's constant parade of death and destruction, these officers only strengthened in resolve as the war progressed and, in the author's words, emerged from the conflict "with their moral and political worldview intact" (pg. 4). As it was with common soldiers, faith and family were consistent sustaining forces for junior officers. The letters that form the basis of Engel's study also express strong political engagement from the start, and that characteristic was maintained throughout the war. A clear majority were in accord with federal laws drafted in support of conscription, confiscation, and hard war.

The only period of time when Engel could detect a noticeable breach in the army's aura of self-confidence and certainty in achieving ultimate victory was during the latter part of 1862 and early months of 1863 (the time that corresponded with the joint failures of the 1862 Chickasaw Bayou and Mississippi Central operations and the stalemate months of the Vicksburg Campaign that extended into the following year). At this time, officer writings frequently questioned the Army of the Tennessee's leadership, peaked in their anger and frustration directed toward home front opposition (in particular, the Midwest Copperhead movement), and believed the nation's political elites were truly bungling the war effort. In Engel's estimation, this was a "uniquely despondent period" for these officers.

Of course, with the Army of the Tennessee operating across vast swaths of the middle and deep South, its officers and men were regularly exposed to southern slavery. It's clear that very few of the army's junior officers could be considered abolitionists by the prewar definition, but, as the war progressed, opposition to slavery was more frequently and more explicitly expressed in their letters. Reinforcing the findings of other researchers of Union soldiers, the correspondence of these officers reveal that both emancipation and black enlistment became widely accepted as practical means toward strengthening the Union war effort and weakening Confederate resistance. Following sample letter writers over time, as the author does, also communicates noteworthy patterns of both softened attitudes among those previously ambivalent to, or even hostile toward, the black population and expressions of increased solicitude toward their welfare.

In the area of random stats and trivia that readers might be interested in, Engel found only three references in his sample of officers overseeing target practice. Much more surprising is that the author found no evidence of officer examination boards being set up on an official basis in the Army of the Tennessee. According to Engel, that is a unique omission.

How junior officers viewed the proper relationship between themselves and their men is also a topic of some discussion. Western Civil War armies such as the Army of the Tennessee are often portrayed as being less disciplined than their eastern theater counterparts when it comes to regulating soldier behavior, and the officers of Engel's sample indeed expressed widely differing views on the need for, and propriety of, tightly restraining their men's conduct in the field. A corollary to that attitude is that a number of officers in the sample actively strove to maintain an informal relationship between themselves and the rank and file soldiers that served under them.

One major section of the study that will undoubtedly appeal to a great many readers explores what these officers thought about their superiors. Unsurprisingly, their letters contained many comments about Grant and Sherman. Interestingly, positive approval of Grant's abilities did not begin to coalesce among the junior officer corps until the Vicksburg Campaign was in full swing in Spring 1863, and the same did not happen for Sherman until the 1864 Atlanta Campaign. These men saw that their top leaders shared earnestness and tenacity from early on, but it was a long process before conviction settled in that actual ability and performance matched those generally recognized qualities in both generals. Curiously, respect for later army commanders, James McPherson and O.O. Howard, arrived much faster, with the former's long association with the army (and close relationship with Grant and Sherman) undoubtedly aiding that process. The army's consistent record of victory, which continued under both generals, also undoubtedly meant that neither had to start from square one in the eyes of their men. Readers will also find numerous other insights and opinions on a number of brigade, division, and corps commanders. Generally speaking, as revealed in their writings, Army of the Tennessee junior officers valued bold aggression and dogged determination of purpose. In writing about their fellow regimental officers, the personal traits "they most associated with being a worthy leader included battlefield courage, good character, and respectful relationships with their subordinates" (pg. 112).

In addition to being a highly unique contribution to our knowledge and appreciation of those who fought in the armies of the Civil War, Jonathan Engel's officer study anticipates a number of fruitful avenues for further research. Readers of this book are reminded on more than one occasion that the content and analysis of this study applies to only one army, and an exceptional one at that, with the Army of the Tennessee being the Union's most consistent winner in the field. It would be wonderful to see this type of study applied to the other principal Union armies. A contrast between the western Army of the Tennessee and the eastern Army of the Potomac alone seems almost surely to be productive. It is easy to imagine a great many facets of Engel's study as applied to the much more star-crossed, politically interfered-with, and New England/Mid-Atlantic-flavored Army of the Potomac drawing very different conclusions. More Important Than Good Generals is a fresh and original study that all Civil War students should read.

Booknotes: Decisions of the Red River Campaign

New Arrival:

• Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation by Michael S. Lang (U Tenn Press, 2025).

This is only the second Trans-Mississippi theater entry in UT Press's highly prolific Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series, which is fast approaching two-dozen volumes. The first, Ed Cotham's Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns (2024), was one of the best in the series.

On the face of it, the 1864 Red River Campaign is a fascinating topic for critical decision analysis. Personality clashes within the Confederate high command in the theater hover heavily over the campaign, but its strategic and operational aspects ooze contingency in ways that still divide opinion. One chronicler of the Red River Campaign and its associated Camden Expedition, Michael Forsyth, even goes so far as to say that the Confederates bungled a golden opportunity to alter the course of the war. Michael Lang's Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation tackles a campaign that resulted in a clear Confederate victory that nevertheless left both sides dissatisfied with the result.

From the description: "By the time of the Red River Campaign, which occurred between March 10 and May 22, 1864, Federal victory in the American Civil War was nearly assured. This final Union offensive in the trans-Mississippi theater was launched to capture Shreveport, a strategic river port and Confederate military complex. The fall of Shreveport would split Confederate forces, allowing the Federals to encircle and destroy the Confederate Army in western Louisiana and southern Arkansas as well as open a gateway to an invasion of Texas. But the dense piney woods and swamps of Louisiana made for difficult maneuvering, and both sides made severe tactical mistakes, leading General William Tecumseh Sherman to declare the Red River Campaign “one damn blunder from beginning to end.”"

In support of the decision analysis are sixteen maps, an 11-stop driving tour, orders of battle, and strength tables. I've already started reading this so the review should appear sometime in the coming weeks.

Booknotes: The Confederate Resurgence of 1864

New Arrival:

• The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 by William Marvel (LSU Press, 2024).

From the description: William Marvel’s The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 "examines a dozen understudied Confederate and Union military operations carried out during the winter and spring of 1864 that, taken cumulatively, greatly revived white southerners’ hopes for independence. Among the pivotal moments during this period were the sinking of the USS Housatonic by the CSS Hunley; Nathan Bedford Forrest’s defeat of William Sooy Smith’s cavalry raid; and the Confederate army’s victory at Olustee, Florida. The repulse of Union advances on Dalton, Georgia; botched Union raids on Richmond; and the capture of the Union garrison in Plymouth, North Carolina, likewise suggested that the tide of fighting had turned toward the Confederate cause."

While the land and sea actions and battles mentioned above are commonly known to readers and are well documented in the literature, Marvel states that Gary Gallagher was the first to recognize them as a collective series of events that held strategic significance. In Marvel's estimation, that close together string of Confederate successes "boosted the morale of southern troops and citizens, and caused grave concerns about the war effort in the North and in the mind of Abraham Lincoln."

Preceding the roughly ten-week period examined in the book, war news was generally miserable for the Confederacy's supporters. More from the description: "In late 1863 and early 1864, dejection and despair prevailed in the South: Union soldiers had vanquished Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, the Confederate nation had been cut in two, Tennessee was lost, and Braxton Bragg’s army had been utterly routed at Chattanooga. Defeatism loomed in the South during the first weeks of 1864, and the ease with which William T. Sherman rampaged across Mississippi illustrated the dominance of Union forces, while Confederates’ ineffectual assault on New Bern accentuated their weakness."

In late-February, however, hope emerged from the gloom. "(B)etween February 20 and April 30, southern troops enjoyed an unbroken string of successes that included turning back a concerted Union offensive during the Red River campaign as well as Forrest’s incursions into Union City, Paducah, and Fort Pillow. Aided by flawed strategy implemented by Union army officers, the achievements of Confederate forces restored hope and confidence in camp and on the southern home front."

With the exception of the Red River Campaign and perhaps Olustee, the Confederate victories referenced above, when considered on their own, are principally localized in nature and lack strategic significance, so it will be interesting to see how well the book supports the notion that their collective effect (which, according to Marvel, has never been studied until now) produced a strategic-level boost to national morale. If you think of national morale as a reservoir from which the war freely draws, Marvel sees the events of Feb 20-April 30 has an early-spring freshet that raised the water level enough to ensure that it wouldn't run dry during the brutal summer months that followed. "The victories invigorated southern combatants, demonstrating how abruptly the most dismal military prospects could be reversed. Without that experience, Marvel argues, the Confederates who faced Sherman and Grant in the spring of that year would certainly have displayed less ferocity and likely would have succumbed more quickly to the demoralization that ultimately led to the collapse of Confederate resistance."

Coming Soon (March '25 Edition)

Scheduled for MAR 2025¹:
• Hope Never to See It: A Graphic History of Guerrilla Violence during the American Civil War by Fialka & Carman.
• Our Onward March: The Grand Army of the Republic in the Progressive Era by Jonathan Neu.
• Antebellum America, 1787-1861: A Sourcebook on States' Rights, Limited Government, Slavery, Political Violence and the Road to Civil War compiled & edited by Ebert & Carden.
• Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War by Michael Vorenberg.
• Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia by Michael Hardy.
• The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864 by Eric Wittenberg.
• The Shiloh Campaign, 1862: Battle for the Heartland by Sean Chick.
• The First Day at Gettysburg, July 1, 1863 by James Hessler.


¹ - These monthly release lists are not meant to be exhaustive compilations of non-fiction releases. They do not include reprints that are not significantly revised/expanded, special editions not distributed to reviewers, children's books, and digital-only titles. Works that only tangentially address the war years are also generally excluded. Inevitably, one or more titles on this list will get a rescheduled release (and they do not get repeated later), so revisiting the past few "Coming Soon" posts is the best way to pick up stragglers.

Booknotes: Lincoln's Peace

New Arrival:

• Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War by Michael Vorenberg (Knopf, 2025).

In the broadest sense, Lincoln's Peace: The Struggle to End the American Civil War represents author Michael Vorenberg's "journey to find the end of the Civil War." Big, lengthy, and destructive wars like the American Civil War tend to not conclude in a neat and tidy manner, and even the end date is frequently a source of debate among historians. From the description: "Was it April 9, at Appomattox, as conventional wisdom holds, where Lee surrendered to Grant in Wilmer McLean’s parlor? Or was it ten weeks afterward, in Galveston, where a federal commander proclaimed Juneteenth the end of slavery? Or perhaps in August of 1866, when President Andrew Johnson simply declared “the insurrection is at an end”?"

But that's not the only major theme or objective involved. The book also seeks "to expand our understanding of the nature of war itself and how societies struggle to draw the line between war and peace." As the title suggests, Lincoln himself, acting in the capacity of the nation's chief executive, strove to be the leading force in shaping the societal and political reconstruction that followed the guns going silent. Lincoln's Peace thus explores "the peace Lincoln hoped for but could not make before his assassination. A peace that required not one but many endings, as Vorenberg reveals in these pages, the most important of which came well more than a year after Lincoln’s untimely death."

It also appears that Vorenberg's analysis engages with debates surrounding the modern conceptualization of the "long war." More: "To say how a war ends is to suggest how it should be remembered, and Vorenberg’s search is not just for the Civil War’s endpoint but for its true nature and legacy, so essential to the American identity. It’s also a quest, in our age of “forever wars,” to understand whether the United States's interminable conflicts of the current era have a precedent in the Civil War—and whether, in a sense, wars ever end at all, or merely wax and wane."

Upcoming study of Fremont's 100 Days in Missouri

On this site, I've more than once expressed earnest hope that someone would publish a standalone modern study of John C. Fremont's brief but event-filled and controversial time in charge of the Union Army's Western Department. This period is commonly referred to as "Fremont's Hundred Days in Missouri." Thus, after years of anticipation, I was happy to discover that there is indeed such a project in the works. Gregory Wolk's John Fremont's 100 Days: Clashes and Convictions in Civil War Missouri will be published this coming September through Missouri Historical Society Press. My only prior exposure to Wolk's work is this Missouri Civil War tour guide, which I considered rather well put together.

On a related note, author John Bicknell also let me know that his upcoming book The Pathfinder and the President: John C. Frémont, Abraham Lincoln, and the Battle for Emancipation (Stackpole, April '25) will devote around four chapters to this topic.

Review - "The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863" by Erik Nelson

[The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863 by Erik F. Nelson (Kent State University Press, 2024). Softcover, 21 maps, appendix section, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxiii,280/407. ISBN:978-1-60635-480-3. $39.95]

Of the single-volume Chancellorsville histories produced over the more than eleven decades that have passed since the 1910 publication of John Bigelow's groundbreaking study, those from Edward Stackpole, Ernest Furgurson, and Stephen Sears have contributed most to the popular understanding of the campaign and battle, the last being the most detailed in addition to being the most recent. Generally speaking, the fighting between the main bodies of each army, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and Joseph Hooker's far more numerous Army of the Potomac, within the tangled forests and clearings surrounding Chancellorsville has garnered the lion's share of popular and scholarly attention. Presenting the battle primarily through that lens is not unexpected given that the intense combat in that sector produced the great bulk of the campaign's very heavy casualties and witnessed Stonewall Jackson's famous flanking attack and subsequent mortal wounding.

Even so, just over a quarter of the total losses to both armies during the campaign were suffered on the eastern half of the battlefield, an area that comprised an expansive military chessboard in its own right. Within that sector—bounded on its northern side by the Rappahannock River, its southern edge the unfinished railroad running roughly parallel to the Orange Plank Road, and, from west to east, the ridge atop which sat Salem Church all the way to the city of Fredericksburg itself—the possibility to alter the entire character and result of the battle loomed large. In 2013, Savas Beatie published a book-length study of the fighting that occurred at Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and during the Union Sixth's Corps's fighting withdrawal toward its pontoon bridge communications near Banks's Ford. That excellent study, Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White's Chancellorsville's Forgotten Front: The Battles of Second Fredericksburg and Salem Church, May 3, 1863, provided readers with the first comprehensive narrative history of those events. Now, more than a decade later, Erik Nelson's The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863 revisits the same ground with noteworthy coverage of a complementary nature as well as new interpretation¹.

Nelson's book possesses all the highlights and components that the most demanding readers of modern Civil War battle studies expect to find. Nelson's research, heavily weighted toward primary source materials of all kinds, feeds a sequence of battle narratives that are noteworthy for their small-unit detail and seamless incorporation of first-hand accounts left behind by the officers and men of both armies. Terrain analysis is exceptionally fine. The author's intimate knowledge of the sector's urban and rural fighting landscapes, from the streets of Fredericksburg to the surrounding hills, ridges, ravines, canals, river crossings, fields, forests, and streams, is used to convey a highly nuanced understanding of the ways in which the environment shaped how each of the engagements examined in the text was fought. The volume's twenty-one maps, all produced by noted cartographer Steven Stanley, thoroughly enhance reader comprehension of events through their tracing of troop movements described in the text atop a finely detailed rendering of underlying elevation contours and terrain features.

The better books of this type never fail to express proper regard for the artillery support arm, but Nelson's narrative is exceptional in the amount and depth of attention directed toward the batteries employed by both sides. Few battle studies, even the very good ones, offer the amount of information that Nelson provides when it comes to denoting the composition of individual batteries and describing their tactical deployment, the type and weight of the gun tubes being critical factors in determining where they were deployed and what effect they had on enemy units at various ranges². While much of the tale of the use of the long arm during the Chancellorsville Campaign is focused on the opposing concentrations of firepower at Fairview and Hazel Grove, it could be argued that artillery produced its most outsized contributions to the campaign on the eastern half of the battlefield. There, the artillery of both sides materially impacted events through effective firing at ranges both close and extreme, the Confederates frequently employing ad-hoc concentrations of rifled sections (though their efforts were often hindered by faulty shell fuzes). Additionally, for front coverage Confederate artillery batteries often had to substitute for infantry, which was stretched thin on the eastern sector before reinforcements from the main body arrived at Salem Church following the Union breakthrough at Fredericksburg.

Specialist troops were another support arm whose efforts came to the fore on the eastern half of the Chancellorsville battleground. Nelson's study offers fresh details about the challenges and struggles involved in getting the Army of the Potomac's pontoon trains to the river and getting set up once they arrived. While inevitable friction spawned by the need to strike a balance between secrecy and speed put the bridging operations hours behind schedule, they were successful. Engineer officer Henry Benham, a Civil War figure often ridiculed for his heavy drinking as well as the disastrous offensive action he directed outside Charleston in 1862, is credited by Nelson for creating well-trained engineer troops for the Army of the Potomac and praised for his efforts in coordinating their use on the Rappahannock in May 1863. US Signal Corps and Military Telegraph Corps specialists also went to work to establish communications between the Union army's widely separated wings. As Nelson explains, ill-timed interruptions caused by certain orders to the Signal Corps detachments and problems with deteriorated wire contributed mightily to the creation of lengthy lapses in communication between Hooker and Sixth Corps commander John Sedgwick at critical moments.

Nelson also highlights how staff work problems affected each side. Lee staff officer Robert Chilton nearly caused disaster by prematurely ordering Jubal Early to withdraw his division from Fredericksburg, that potential catastrophe only narrowly averted by a timely reversal that put Early's command back in the trenches before Sedgwick's main attacks. Though Hooker's own muddled orders to Sedgwick and indecisive leadership at the top led to cascading problems, Nelson is unrelentingly critical of the manner in which Hooker's chief of staff, Daniel Butterfield, handled communications between army headquarters and Sixth Corps headquarters.

After the campaign ended, Hooker attempted to attach blame for the disaster to three high-ranking subordinates: Thirteenth Corps commander O.O. Howard, Cavalry Corps commander George Stoneman, and the man he assigned to lead the eastern sector of the battlefield, John Sedgwick. That self-serving assessment of what went wrong at Chancellorsville is largely dismissed in the text for what it was, a disgraced commander seeking to scapegoat others for his own profound leadership failures. Though the overall result of the Chancellorsville Campaign, which got off to a tremendous start, was a fiasco for Union forces, Nelson sees the performance of Sedgwick's Sixth Corps as the one shining light. "Success" at Fredericksburg was arguably not terribly impressive given how thinly the defenders were distributed in comparison to the previous December, but the breakthrough forced Lee to detach a total of seven brigades (in two stages) to contain Sedgwick's advance and keep it away from the rear of Lee's main forces facing Hooker. In Nelson's view, this was the moment for Hooker's forces to resume the offensive against an even more diminished foe, but instead Hooker refused to risk leaving his fortified bridgehead north of Chancellorsville. Curiously, Nelson is not critical of Sedgwick's failure to adequately cover his southern flank and rear as Sixth Corps pressed westward toward Salem Church, an oversight that allowed Early's Division to return to the scene, reclaim the high ground above Fredericksburg, and threaten the Sixth Corps spearhead's sole remaining line of retreat and communications (the floating bridges below Banks' Ford). Also, to be more convincing, Nelson's claim that Sedgwick's attacking success at Fredericksburg created a larger sense of confidence that carried over to Gettysburg could have used more development.

In addition to providing arguably the literature's best tactical-level discussion of events east of Chancellorsville, Erik Nelson's study of Second Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks' Ford strongly argues for greater recognition and appreciation of a sector of the battlefield that produced a significant proportion of the combined casualties suffered during the first week of May 1863 and gifted the Union army commander with a golden opportunity to reclaim squandered initiative in a campaign he had no business losing after such a promising start. Highly recommended.

Additional Notes:
1 - The site review of that earlier title can be found here. Both books cover the same series of topics in very fine fashion overall and preferring one or the other might best be judged a matter of taste. If you have a deep interest in the topic there's no reason not to read both. Generally speaking, both works devote a great deal of space to the initial river crossings, both offer excellent tactical discussion of the various engagements, and both emphasize human and technological communication breakdowns and confusion as substantially hindering coordination between Hooker and Sedgwick. Mackowski and White focus more than Nelson does on praising Cadmus Wilcox's noteworthy efforts in organizing and situating a blocking force to stop Sedgwick's advance toward Salem Church, and they are much more critical of Sedgwick's post-breakthrough leadership (which they deemed overcautious in both allowing Early to escape relatively intact and employing an unnecessary delay in organizing the Sixth Corps order of march for its westward advance). Nelson's analysis of the former is not of a reproving nature, and the latter point does not enter into his own discussion as a matter of pointed criticism. Nelson's map coverage is the more thorough of the two.
2 - For future reference purposes, the artillery data presented throughout the main text is also compiled into a helpful appendix. The appendix section also contains orders of battle as well as analytical discussion of the Fredericksburg flag of truce controversy that dogged those involved with it and complicated future historical interpretation of the battle.