Booknotes: From the Center of America

New Arrival:

• From the Center of America: Steamboats and Shipyards Along the Lower Ohio River by Robert H. Swenson (SIU Press, 2026).

From the description: "In the heart of America, four major rivers converge―the Cumberland and Tennessee with the Ohio; then the Ohio with the Mississippi. These three confluences, which author Robert Swenson christens the Four Rivers Reach, played a unique role in the development of the steamboats that dominated American continental transport for almost 100 years. Between 1825 and 1936, the river towns of Smithland, Paducah, Metropolis, Mound City, and Cairo launched 295 wood-hulled, steam-powered vessels.

"Drawing from a wealth of archival sources," Robert Swenson's From the Center of America: Steamboats and Shipyards Along the Lower Ohio River "presents detailed histories of these steamboats over a span of 110 years, accompanied by nearly one hundred illustrations and photographs." Swenson's study "focuses on distinct events in steamboat history, tracing the impact of these shipyards on the economies and communities of the river towns where they were built. It reveals how the availability of steamboats along this sixty-mile Reach affected migration, politics, and the US economy of the nineteenth century."

As mentioned above, vessels produced in this region heavily influenced major events of nineteenth-century western American history and beyond. More from the description: "Steamboats built at the Four Rivers Reach played pivotal roles in the forced relocation of Native Americans from southern Appalachia to Oklahoma, the outcome of the Civil War, and the Montana gold rush." Of course, the area that Swenson calls the Four Rivers Reach was action central during the early phases of the Civil War in the West. The region's shipyards were also where significant parts of Union inland naval power were constructed or modified from earlier builds. Such vessels included "tinclads, troopships, ironclad gunboats, a propeller tug, a fleet of fast Mississippi River packets, and several Missouri River "mountain boats"" (pg. 57). As they are in those parts of the book covering other decades, Chapter 3 recounts the construction of various types of vessels during the 1860s. In helpful fashion, those steamboats built at each river town are compiled in a descriptive register that's arranged in rough chronological order. Photographs and drawings of many of these mid-century steamboats are provided as well.

In "(c)harting the legacy of mid-America's shipyards and iconic steamboats," From the Center of America "demonstrates how steamboat building shaped the culture, people, and economy of this region―and how, in turn, the area and its steamships influenced the growth of the young United States."

Booknotes: Haunted by Memory (with excerpt)

New Arrival:

• Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War edited by John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker (U Tenn Press, 2026).

Since this site's inception, a number of Civil War book series published by university presses have sadly either scaled back their offerings or disappeared entirely. On a happier note, though, others have broadened their horizons. One of those is the venerable Voices of the Civil War series from University of Tennessee Press, which has recently expanded beyond its traditional domain of edited letters, memoirs, and diaries into themed anthologies like this one. Roughly halfway to Halloween, we are treated to Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War, edited by John Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker.

Most Civil War readers possess at least a passing familiarity with the unique brand of supernatural and psychological horror writings of Ninth Indiana veteran and staff officer Ambrose Bierce, but apparently the postwar public's taste for such things was more widespread than many of us realize. From the description: "As America’s bloodiest conflict, it is no surprise that the Civil War gave rise to a golden age of ghost stories. Popular publications were filled with accounts of ghosts―ghosts that appeared in the heat of battle, in the fretful quiet of picket duty, and in the miserable confines of hospitals and prisons. Civil War ghosts continued to haunt the troubled peace that followed, revealing that even so deadly a conflict left unresolved issues in its wake."

The era's ghost stories were not just spooky entertainment for the reading masses. More from the description: "They provide powerful evidence of how a wounded country tried to put the trauma, grief, and anxieties inflicted by the Civil War to rest. By telling ghost stories, Americans created narratives that honored the dead, explained the unexplainable, and gave their experiences a broader sense of identity and purpose."

At over 400 pages, Neff and Fluker's Haunted by Memory addresses haunted tales in a great variety of formats. "(T)he first scholarly analysis of the significance of ghosts to the history and memory of the Civil War," this volume "includes hundreds of examples of ghostly tales that appeared in newspapers, periodicals, and books between 1861 and 1932. These tales both satisfied and fed popular demand for news, entertainment, and ghostlore, and became powerful tools of cultural memory." In addition to compiling the material, the editors establish historical and cultural context through a lengthy introduction and provide extensive chapter notes. Those annotations "provide important historical context, explanatory detail, and biographical information." Though the task proved not to be entirely possible, the goal was to "provide an annotation for all individuals named in the stories" (pg. xxi).

In sum: "(b)y bridging the study of the Civil War, folklore, and memory, this collection expands the parameters of cultural history and reveals how the supernatural became a lasting part of the commemorative landscape of the American Civil War."

The publisher has also kindly provided an excerpt for CWBA readers to consider (press the 'read more' button to view it in its entirety):

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Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War

excerpted commentary from Chapter 1: An Age of Spooks

John R. Neff and Amy Laurel Fluker

Understanding how ghost stories became a popular form of cultural expression in the Civil War era requires an understanding of the war’s nearly incomprehensible death toll. Still the deadliest war in US history, it claimed the lives of at least 800,000 combatants. Taken as an equivalent proportion of the US population in the early twenty-first century, that amounts to 8,000,000 lives. But, as historian J. David Hacker reminds us, even that number is a best-guess estimate. It does not account for civilian deaths, particularly among the enslaved, and only roughly accounts for African American soldier dead.ⁱ In short, the Civil War was far deadlier than historians will ever be able to fully appreciate.

...

Read more

The extent of grief in the postbellum era was so overwhelming that it exerted a palpable force. No one described this atmosphere more eloquently than novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. She reflected:

At that time, it will be remembered, our country was dark with sorrowing women. . . . Toward the nameless mounds of Arlington, of Gettysburg, and the rest, the yearning of desolated homes went out in those waves of anguish which seem to choke the very air that the happier and more fortunate must breathe.

Is there not an actual, occult force in the existence of a general grief? . . . It is like a material miasma. The gayest man breathes it, if he breathe at all; and the most superficial cannot escape it.ⁱⁱ

No surprise, then, that the war’s survivors were haunted by it. As the Indiana Plymouth Tribune observed in 1907: “The war is still present, a vivid reality and yet a memory. And it is not strange that from its bloody happenings have grown some superstitions, some curious fireside tales that ill assort with our arrogant workaday disbelief in ghosts and the unusual.”ⁱⁱⁱ

What is perhaps most interesting about the ghost stories collected in Haunted by Memory, however, is that they reveal that hauntings were not only a postwar phenomena. Veterans testified that ghosts were a part of the experience of Civil War soldiers in combat. Take, for example, the story of Private Henry Moode, who was confronted by the apparition of a Confederate soldier he recognized—having accidentally stumbled over his dead body just moments before. Or, the tale of the “mounted ghost” that terrorized Union pickets on duty near Blaine’s Crossroads. In the chaos of combat and confronted on all sides by the inescapable realities of death, Civil War soldiers manifested ghosts. Or, perhaps, ghosts manifested themselves.

The daily lives of Civil War soldiers, however, were not constantly characterized by terror and death. There were idle moments, too. At such times, soldiers called upon the supernatural as a form of entertainment. The men of the 116th Pennsylvania, for example, filled time during the siege of Petersburg by trading accounts of comrades who returned from the grave to visit their families.

Even when recounted as pastimes, ghost stories offer insights into nineteenth-century American culture. The ghosts of the 116th, like many others described in the stories included in Haunted by Memory, embodied an age-old theme in the Anglo-American tradition of supernatural tales: that of the purposeful ghost. The purposeful ghost appears not merely to frighten the living, but with the intention of achieving some end.

Oftentimes, the ghost returns because it is bound to an unfulfilled promise. Many Civil War soldiers felt the bonds of camaraderie they formed in combat might transcend death. Faced by the suddenness of death in battle and the likelihood they would be denied the opportunity to say final farewells, soldiers sometimes vowed to return from beyond the grave to visit their brothers-in-arms. They believed such visitations might bring closure to grieving friends and provide proof of “the state of the soul after death.” At least, that was the hope of two unnamed comrades from the 2nd Iowa Cavalry, who reportedly made such a promise to one another while on picket duty before the Battle of Farmington. The ghost of “Copleston” appeared to his friend in the prison barracks at Camp Chase to fulfill a similar promise and to relate the details surrounding his death.

In yet another tradition associated with the purposeful ghost, spirits sometimes returned seeking justice or vengeance. Two stories relate to wartime homicides, but the most notable is the story of Private John Rowley. Rowley swore before a US military tribunal that he was being tormented by the spirit of his comrade, Jerome Dupoy, whom he confessed to murdering. The haunting of Rowley serves as a reminder that not all violent deaths came at the hands of the enemy.

The stories also reveal how quickly Civil War sites became associated with hauntings. At locations where specific incidents of the war occurred, the past intruded on the present and stirred memories of the horrors of the war. Battlefields, in particular, emerge from the stories as unsettling places. Take, for example, the specters of Savage’s Station who cried for water from beyond the grave. Or, the ghostly regiments that stalked the cliffs at Pittsburg Landing.

The belief that battlefields were haunted undoubtedly stemmed from the knowledge that not only were they sites of deaths, but of bad deaths. The Civil War shattered the cultural construction of the “Good Death.” That is, a manner of death that followed a specific set of rituals designed to reinforce family bonds, provide assurances of Christian salvation, and offer closure to the grieving.^iv The Civil War bestowed precious few “Good Deaths,” leaving survivors with little consolation. They had no formula to follow when it came to mourning the sudden, violent deaths of loved ones far from home. Their grief was compounded by fears that their loved one’s remains were unidentified, unattended—or worse—unburied.

The tale of the “Ghost at Post 1” powerfully illustrates not only the unsettling realities of death in the Civil War, but also the cultural significance of ghost stories. In this case, the ghost’s purpose is multi-faceted. In the text, the repeated appearance of a Confederate apparition led the men of the 6th Illinois Cavalry on an investigation that resulted in the recovery of his forgotten remains. After providing the unknown Confederate a decent burial, the ghost never returned.

Beyond the text, however, the “Ghost at Post 1” serves a larger symbolic purpose. It is important to note that this particular story appeared in the National Tribune. Founded in 1877, the National Tribune played a pivotal role in the construction of Civil War memory among Union veterans.^v It actively encouraged veterans to submit their recollections of the war to its regular column “Fighting Them Over”—where the tale of the “Ghost at Post 1” appeared. Collectively, the column constituted a history of the war that was shaped by and meaningful for veterans.^vi

The story of the “Ghost at Post 1” must therefore be understood in the context of Civil War memory. It reflects the popular turn towards reconciliation that dominated Civil War commemoration in the late nineteenth century. In this period, aging white veterans increasingly relished recollections of the war that emphasized the common bravery of volunteer soldiers on both sides and minimized the moral and political opposition over racial slavery that drove them into conflict.^vii The “Ghost at Post 1” concludes with a particularly meaningful act of reconciliation. By respectfully tending to the remains of the unknown Confederate soldier, the men of the 6th Illinois Cavalry quite literally put the spirit of sectional antagonism to rest. Death, in this case at least, symbolically restored the common humanity of erstwhile foes.

There is one final and compelling thread that can be traced through the selection of stories in Haunted by Memory: that is the importance of women’s experiences to understanding the impact, prosecution, and subsequent interpretation of the Civil War. When, for example, Sarah Whiteside showed a Boston newspaper correspondent the spot where fifty soldiers had once been buried in her garden, she offered chilling testimony of how the war blurred the line between the battlefield and the home front and, in particular, how it violated the domestic world of women. Her story reminds readers that women’s experiences were not ancillary to the war, but rather central parts of the story.^viii

The fortunes of armies in the field rose and fell with those of the “Nameless Heroines” of the war, as one unknown contributor to the Anaconda Standard termed them. Women both inspired and compelled men to enlist. At the same time, painful and worrisome separations from female friends, relatives, and loved ones drove some men to desertion. The anonymous soldier in “The Corporal’s Story” claimed to have been so distressed by news that his wife was seriously ill that he put a plan to desert into action. Before he was missed, however, a female apparition frightened and shamed him into returning to camp.

Perhaps most powerfully, however, these stories call us to reframe our understanding of the destruction inflicted by the war. Particularly, the psychological damage, devastation, and death wreaked on women.^ix Elizabeth Stuart Phelps observed keenly the omnipresence of “sorrowing women” across the nation—“whose misery crowded the land.”^x In keeping with the popular gothic tropes of the day, writers often romanticized women’s grief. See, for example, A. L. Soule’s account of the death of “Miss Blaine,” who he said succumbed to a broken heart following the death of her lover in the cavalry. Another correspondent claimed the ghost of a woman led him to the grave of Robert H. Lane, who was killed in the Battle of Chantilly. He later learned the ghostly woman was Lane’s fiancé, who also died of a broken heart.

As the most divisive and deadly event in US history, the Civil War forever altered the lives of its survivors and the cultural landscape of the nation. It encouraged Americans, who already embraced the supernatural as an important element of their culture, to popularize ghost stories as a means of examining the unsettling legacies of the war. Whether they brought readers any degree of closure is hard to say, but their prevalence indicates the extent of suffering the Civil War inflicted.

i J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History vol. 57, no. 4 (December 2011), 307–348.

ii Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters From a Life (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 96–97.

iii Plymouth [In.] Tribune, February 7, 1907.

iv See John R. Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2005); Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2009).

v Crompton B. Burton, “‘Let Every Comrade Lend Us a Hand’: George E. Lemon and the National Tribune in James Marten and Caroline E. Janney, Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2021), 68, 69. See also Brian Matthew Jordan, Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War (New York: Liveright, 2014), 75–79; Steven E. Sodergren, “‘Exposing False History’: The Voice of the Union Veteran in the Pages of the National Tribune” in Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera, eds. The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 137, 139.

vi Steven E. Sodergren, “‘Exposing False History’: The Voice of the Union Veteran in the Pages of the National Tribune” in The War Went On: Reconsidering the Lives of Civil War Veterans, eds. Brian Matthew Jordan and Evan C. Rothera (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020), 143–144.

vii Neff, Honoring the Civil War Dead, 5; Caroline E. Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 5–7; Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 162; Paul H. Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (New York: Vintage, 1927), 310, 318–319.

viii See Stephanie McCurry, Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the Civil War (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019).

ix Lisa Tendrich Frank, “The Union War on Women” in The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts during the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017), 174–175.

x Phelps, 97.

Booknotes: Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville

New Arrival:

• Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: A Battlefield Guide by Brian K. Burton (Univ of Neb Press, 2026).

University of Nebraska Press's This Hallowed Ground series of Civil War campaign and battlefield guidebooks debuted in 1999. Over the next decade and a half, a total of seven volumes sampling battles from all three major theaters of operation were published. Time between releases widened significantly after 2008, with gaps of six and twelve years between the two most recent publications, but it is great to see that the series is still going. I've always found the books to be useful and interesting alternatives to those following the well-established U.S. Army War College guide format.

The newest installment, eighth in the series, is Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: A Battlefield Guide. Its author, Brian Burton, is the contributor of another series volume, 2007's The Peninsula & Seven Days. Since both campaigns shared significant physical space, it is natural for a guide to combine Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville into a single volume. That way, visitors, especially those from afar who might have only one chance to drive the routes and walk the ground, can take in all or most of the sites during a one-day outing.

From the description: "Through the winter of 1862 and spring of 1863, the U.S. Army and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia clashed along the Rappahannock River in two major battles. Both demonstrated the height of power for the Confederacy in the Eastern Theater. The Battle of Fredericksburg was a tactically defensive triumph for Lee over the Army of the Potomac. The Battle of Chancellorsville, often described as Lee’s masterpiece, was a surprisingly aggressive response to Joseph Hooker’s operational flanking maneuver, as Lee sent Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson on a flanking maneuver of his own, dividing an army that already was substantially smaller than its Union counterpart to deliver a crushing blow at a decisive spot. It was in the latter stages of that blow that Jackson was mortally wounded by his own men. The battles, failed campaigns with high casualty rates for the Union, were a lead-up to the armies’ meeting at Gettysburg in July 1863."

One of the strongest features of the series as a whole is how well the reader/user is oriented to the key visual cues at each stop (with solid maps to assist in that). In this volume, there are eleven stops for the Fredericksburg tour and thirteen for Chancellorsville, and if users follow only the most basic elements (with minimal walking) perhaps only eight hours are required to complete them.

Review - "William Watson and the Rob Roy: The Adventures of a Civil War Blockade Runner" by Walter Wilson

[William Watson and the Rob Roy: The Adventures of a Civil War Blockade Runner by Walter E. Wilson (McFarland, 2026). Softcover, maps, tables, photos, illustrations, appendix section, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vi,157/250. ISBN:978-1-4766-9903-5. $39.95]

A British citizen but long-term resident of Louisiana, Scotland's William Bryant Watson joined many other foreign nationals in being caught up in the whirlwind of America's Civil War. Volunteering with the Third Louisiana infantry regiment, Sergeant Watson fought at Wilson's Creek and Pea Ridge, and in October of 1862 he was wounded at Second Corinth. Returning home to recover, Watson eventually decided to switch gears and engage in the potentially lucrative pursuit of blockade running out of Texas. His vessel, the schooner Rob Roy, became perhaps the best remembered of that class to ply the trade, mostly due to Watson's event-filled 1892 memoir The Adventures Of A Blockade Runner; Or, Trade In Time Of War. A critical reexamination of that published account, Walter Wilson's William Watson and the Rob Roy: The Adventures of a Civil War Blockade Runner assigns itself the difficult task of correcting mistakes, filling in gaps and omissions, and addressing the various half-truths and embellishments that together seriously challenge the truthfulness of Watson's story. In the end, Wilson's research finds that much of Watson's memoir is backed by historical sources.

As Wilson confirms, Watson's blockade-running adventure had a rocky start. At first the Rob Roy was confiscated by Confederate authorities for government use. This caused a minor international incident due to Watson's foreign citizenship. After that matter was resolved and the Rob Roy was finally loaded with cotton bales to run the blockade, the schooner sank in its berth from gross negligence in cargo stowage. Eventually, the schooner was raised and completed its first voyage without incident. It speaks to the sheer vastness of the Gulf Coast and the difficulties involved with maintaining a tight blockade of even a limited number of ports, that a slow sailing vessel such as the Rob Roy was able to achieve a measure of success. This is especially notable given its relatively late start (near the end of 1863) in the high risk-high reward business of illicit trade, well after the U.S. Navy's blockade enforcement was in full swing. Watson increased his chances of avoiding capture by taking an indirect route to Havana, first stopping at Tampico, Mexico and then hugging the coast all the way to the Yucatan Peninsula's eastern extent before sailing directly to Cuba (the journey from the Tampico waypoint to Havana taking perhaps just over two weeks). For his second voyage to Havana, he changed the route to avoid predictability.

As Watson explains, feelings of considerable relief upon safely reaching a blockade-running harbor with a full cargo did not last long. Wilson confirms that such places were rife with unscrupulous speculators and corrupt brokers. In reading about Watson's two stopovers in Havana, one gets a sense of both the scale of profits involved as well as the complex behind-the-scenes activities attendant to finding crews, acquiring and financing return cargoes, and (related to the last point) negotiating new ownership shares. The number of shady characters swarming each arriving ship was legion, and it took considerable knowledge and interpersonal skills to determine who was worthy of trust. Politicking was also involved, with brokers, captains, and shipowners ingratiating themselves with local military commanders in ways that smoothed the permit process as well as hampered competitors or (in the case of Watson) those with whom they had business quarrels. Watson's encounters with other schooner owners, expanded upon by Wilson's research, also strongly suggests that the use of small, sail-powered vessels played a significant part in the international blockade running trade in the Gulf throughout the war.

In addition to shedding considerable light on a largely unsung and underappreciated aspect of Civil War blockade running, Watson's memoir also provides useful information about the tactics he employed to escape detection and capture. The most modern of contemporary steamships employed in blockade running relied on sleek hulls, long and low profiles, and sheer speed, but Watson developed effective strategies of his own that were tailored to both the strengths and limitations of schooners. In their case, it was best to move cautiously and methodically. Watson avoided unfurling sails during daylight hours, and moved at night as much as possible. When a blockader was sighted on the horizon during the day, it was best not to run. Instead, small boats were immediately launched to turn the schooner bow-on to the approaching steamer, making the runner's small profile difficult to discern among the waves. When approaching the destination, the shallow draft of the schooner was a strength, allowing it safe passage through channels that the much larger blockading steamships could not closely cover.

Among his wide-ranging efforts, Wilson performs yeoman work in attempting to uncover the full names of the litany of figures in Watson's account who were identified only by a single initial (ex. Mr. L). In the most difficult cases, Wilson provides readers with a number of possible candidates while offering his own opinion as to the most likely one. Wilson's research uncovers in-depth information on a great many of the historically obscure characters that figure large and small in Watson's story. The author's work also follows other individuals involved in captaining schooners, the most colorful of these being Capt. Dave McClusky. In addition to exploring the social and business networks and relationships that shaped Watson's experiences, those parts of the book collectively expand our understanding of the wider trade. One of the most important aspects of Wilson's analysis is his close reexamination of Watson's shaky, and occasionally non-existent, grasp of the where and when. Utilizing a variety of sources, Wilson imposes upon Watson's memoir an authoritative timeline of dates and events backed by solid evidence that serve to either confirm, question, or completely debunk Watson's claims. Much of the author's research in Gulf blockade runners, their cargoes, and the timing of their voyages is helpfully compiled in tabular format for current and future use.

Some of the volume's strongest historical detective work goes into investigating Watson's series of alleged voyages involving the Rob Roy, Phoenix/Pelican, and Jeanette that have no existing records or outside corroborating sources. The author calls these parts of Watson's story his "phantom voyages." As thoroughly documented and discussed among three chapters, there is no direct or even indirect evidence that Watson, as he claimed, completed a second return run into Galveston with Rob Roy, later sold his share in the schooner, and continued blockade running with steamships. By Wilson's best determination from the available sources, none of the steamship claims are supported by actual evidence. Instead of divesting himself of his ownership share in Rob Roy, the truth seems to be that Watson made a final voyage aboard it in early 1865, during which the schooner was forced onto a beach in Florida and burned to prevent its capture. After the war, Watson returned to his native land and, by all appearances, led a life of successful business pursuits.

In addition to constituting a significant addition to the Civil War blockade literature (in particular, the lesser-examined Texas, Mexico, and Cuba trading triangle in the Gulf), Walter Wilson's William Watson and the Rob Roy demonstrably affirms that Watson's celebrated yet controversial memoir does indeed possess considerable value as a historical document, if used with an abundance of caution. Indispensable to that necessity is pairing Watson's book with Wilson's impressive new critical evaluation.

Booknotes: Crisis At Antietam

New Arrival:

• Crisis at Antietam: The Cornfield and West Woods, September 17, 1862 by Steven Eden (Savas Beatie, 2026).

Steven Eden's Crisis at Antietam: The Cornfield and West Woods, September 17, 1862 "provides a meticulous tactical analysis of the opening brutal hours of the Civil War’s bloodiest single day."

As most Civil War readers already know, the sustained fighting on the northern end of the Antietam battlefield on September 17 was a horrifically bloody back and forth affair that could very easily have gone disastrously for the Confederates. That it didn't, and the Confederates narrowly but successfully held their positions at the end of the day, was the result of a combination of factors and decisions.

From the description: "Eden’s in-depth study of the fighting on the Confederate left uncovers critical missed opportunities, profound command failures, and the unpredictable hand of sheer chance. The fighting that raged through the Miller Cornfield and West Woods quickly spiraled beyond command control. Officers often failed to restore order amid the maelstrom; regiments and brigades acted independently, pushing forward without orders or full awareness of the battle’s unfolding horror. Union forces drove the Confederate front to the precipice of collapse on three occasions, only for the Rebels to miraculously rally each time, stabilizing their fragile lines against overwhelming odds."

Of course, much excellent work has already detailed the fighting in this sector of the battlefield as well as the battle on the whole, but there is always room for new angles. As Eden writes in his introduction, with both sides (at least in his view) poorly served by the generals at the top, his book differs most from previous accounts in its focus on "the decisions made by the colonels and captains" on the battlefield. Eden's text endeavors "to show what the men in the regiments saw, what they believed was happening, and why they acted the way they did" (pg. xi).

As was the case with very recent works from other Savas Beatie authors such as Joseph Boslet and Scott Fink, Eden's investigation of Civil War combat incorporates his own personal combat experiences on the modern battlefield. Eden "draws on extensive original sources, including memoirs, official reports, and soldier letters, together with his own invaluable combat experience as a retired Army officer and former West Point military history instructor. His insights are fresh and authoritative. Crisis at Antietam challenges even seasoned readers to fundamentally reconsider the traditional narrative of that pivotal bloody September day by exposing the raw, brutal reality of command and combat at Antietam."

Review - "Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862" by Timothy Snyder

[Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862 by Timothy R. Snyder (Savas Beatie, 2026). Hardcover, 6 maps, photos, illustrations, footnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxii,253/315. ISBN:978-1-61121-771-1. $32.95]

While he had justly earned his immortalizing nickname months earlier for his stalwart actions on Henry House Hill during the First Manassas battle, the Thomas J. Jackson of the winter of 1861-62 was not yet the "Stonewall" Jackson of legend. Though his lackluster performance during the Seven Days, a far more significant episode wedged between his Shenandoah Valley Campaign masterpiece and his daring drive into the Union rear that set up the smashing Confederate victory at Second Manassas, has inspired heaps of modern criticism, Jackson's operations along the Virginia-Maryland border from December 1861 to February 1862 clearly represent another Civil War career low point. Analysis of Jackson's flaws in personality, judgment, and command style that were exposed during that early phase of his Civil War career is central to the narrative presented in Timothy Snyder's Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862.

The reader will not progress very far into the book's introduction before realizing that the author does not rank among Jackson's modern devotees. While it is true that previous generations of writers too often downplayed the worst moments of Stonewall Jackson's Civil War career (of which this campaign was one), with some arguably blind to Jackson's faults, the more recent literature probably deserves more credit from the author for being reasonably well balanced in nature, with admirers, detractors, and those in between together presenting a suitably nuanced overall assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of Jackson's Civil War generalship.

Detailed in the book are Jackson's December raids along the Upper Potomac and his follow-on military operations against the Union-occupied towns of Bath and Romney. The goal was to inflict lasting damage to two strategically significant regional transportation networks, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal linking Washington, D.C. and Cumberland, Maryland. In addition to supporting the movement of troops and supplies, much of the region's coal was transported along those routes for military and civilian purposes. By sweeping Union forces from those parts of Virginia that effectively shielded the railroad and canal (hopefully destroying them in the process), Jackson intended to establish long-term disruption to both routes. For Union forces, in addition to protecting those vital logistical arteries, occupation of Romney and Bath threatened Confederate-held Winchester and the rest of the Lower Shenandoah Valley, the defense of which were key parts of Jackson's Valley District command responsibilities.

The author of the 2011 study Trembling in the Balance: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal during the Civil War, Snyder's established expertise on that subject serves him well in this volume. In addition to explaining why the C&O was such an important means of bulk transportation (especially for coal), the book details a series of Confederate winter raids—one against Dam Number 4 and three against Dam Number 5—none of which were able to inflict any lasting damage. As the author explains, the Confederate raids, which involved both infantry and cavalry forces, were ineffectual for a number of reasons. The Confederate raiders lacked blasting powder for breaching the dams and artillery fire was not used after it was determined that ammunition stockpiles were insufficient for that purpose. Instead, the dismantling process was to be achieved through hand-wielded tools, an iffy proposition under the best conditions let alone in icy winter waters against armed opposition. If that weren't bad enough, the well-positioned Union defenders across the water were both hypervigilant and highly mobile, able to quickly concentrate against as well as outrange their Confederate opponents with disruptive field artillery and rifle fire. Without the unrestricted freedom necessary to complete the laborious process of destroying the dams by hand, the Confederates were rather easily rebuffed at every turn. Description and analysis of these events, along with a properly framed appreciation of the canal's economic and military significance to the Union war effort, form one of the book's most important contributions.

Frustrated by the lack of success against the C&O but substantially reinforced by General W.W. Loring's small Army of the Northwest, Jackson was determined to clear Union forces from his district's western flank (hopefully eliminating the Union garrisons at Bath and Romney in the process) and destroy vital B&O infrastructure in the area. The problem was that achieving this would involve an arduous winter campaign in the Allegheny Mountains. As Snyder describes in the book, Jackson advanced on Bath from multiple directions, but the alert Union defenders were able to break contact and outrace his advance forces to the Potomac crossings. Finding further progress blocked at and around Hancock, Jackson bombarded the town, but the defenders there on the other side of river under fiery and aggressive Union commander Frederick Lander refused to surrender. Jackson next turned to Romney, but the defenders there retreated before his combined forces arrived, again denying the Confederates the possibility of capturing or destroying significant Union forces in the area. As was the case with the C&O, no long-term damage was inflicted upon B&O bridges and tracks during the brief Confederate occupation, and the campaign basically ended with Loring's men left behind to garrison Romney while Jackson's men returned to Winchester. The Confederates then fell into demoralizing internal squabbling that almost resulted in Jackson leaving the army altogether. In the end, Loring's isolated command was ordered to Winchester and Union forces rushed back into the ensuing void, reasserting control that would effectively last throughout the rest of the war.

At best, the benefits reaped from occupying Bath and Romney and in sweeping Union forces across the Potomac were minimal and temporary. Though it is difficult to fault Jackson too much for not being able to capture or destroy Union forces in the area given that they ran away at the Confederate approach, management of the campaign still left much to be desired. As the author explains, some of Jackson's missteps could be attributed to his high command inexperience, both in mountain operations during wintertime and in leading far more troops (approximately 8,500 officers and men, though fewer effectives) than he ever had before. Snyder also gives Jackson, who was without the services of his chief quartermaster John Harman, poor marks in logistical management of the campaign as evidenced by the extreme non-combat losses incurred during the campaign. By some estimates, these reductions in force numbered anywhere from one-quarter to one-third of the army's total strength, filling the military hospitals with sick and otherwise temporarily incapacitated soldiers. In analyzing those claims, Snyder justifiably contends that Jackson pushed too many of the men under his command beyond their physical limits, though one might also argue that other Confederate leaders during this time, notably those in charge of the concurrent Fort Donelson campaign over in Tennessee, contributed to military disaster by not being willing enough to test the limits of their men's endurance. At this stage of the war, Jackson also tended to overestimate the offensive capabilities of militia forces under his command. In relation to his militia and regular officers alike, he then compounded the situation by equating a lack of success (regardless of the cause or causes) with willful failure to perform their military duties. He also demanded blind obedience to the letter of his orders, rarely condoning independent initiative in reaction to changing circumstances. What couldn't be chalked up to inexperience were Jackson's extreme level of operational planning secrecy and his willingness to bypass the chain of command, both of which frustrated and infuriated principal subordinates such as Loring. These would be common complaints from those who served under Jackson (even the general's own staff members) throughout his remaining Civil War career.

Arguably Jackson's biggest mistake after securing Romney was in widely dividing his forces while in such close proximity to the enemy, who could easily rush in forces by rail to position superior forces against Confederate communications. By leaving Loring's command isolated in Romney and marching the rest to Winchester, Jackson was seemingly repeating Confederate president Jefferson Davis's disastrous national cordon defense strategy at the district level. Though the administration held on to that strategy for too long, leading to major military disasters in the West, the danger was immediately recognized on the Virginia frontier, with Jackson being directed through War Secretary Benjamin to withdraw Loring. Jackson considered (very wrongly, in Snyder's view) those orders to be improper "interference" in his own sphere of responsibility, that clash with his superiors prompting the general to submit his resignation. Snyder provides a detailed account of General Lander's ensuing offensive operation, one that would take advantage of the enemy dispersal and attempt to trap the Romney garrison. The fortunes of war would intervene, however, as Loring was already on the move. That and another of Lander's bouts with chronic illness (on top of the festering leg wound that would eventually kill him with sepsis) together allowed Loring to escape unmolested. Nevertheless, Union forces could take pride in how they performed during the winter operations covered in the book. Success or lack of success in any military campaign results from a combination of controllable and uncontrollable factors. One might argue that Snyder's narrative, by focusing so closely on the former, primarily in the context of Jackson's alleged failures and missteps, deflects reader attention from a full appreciation of the remarkably well-managed Union response to the Confederate canal raids and the Bath-Romney Campaign that followed them.

Inadequate map coverage was a clear drawback of the winter campaign's only other book-length account, Thomas Rankin's Stonewall Jackson's Romney Campaign, January 1-February 20, 1862 (1994). There is improvement on that score with Snyder's commissioned set, with its finely detailed maps of the Upper Potomac region and mountainous area of operations west of the Shenandoah, but, save for the skirmishing at Bath and the Confederate pursuit toward Hancock, troop movements associated with the canal raids and Bath-Romney campaign are not superimposed on any of the pictured road networks. It is also the case that map coverage ends completely just beyond the volume's midpoint, before the Confederate expedition to Romney begins.

Overall, this volume is a very fine raid and campaign history that measures up strongly as the most comprehensive account of Jackson's winter operations of 1861-62. At the same time, while the author provides a noteworthy service in shining a spotlight on the earliest manifestations of the generalship flaws that would most significantly color the remainder of Jackson's Civil War career, there does come a point when the volume and tone of the criticisms pass the threshold into becoming immoderate. In interpreting matters great and small in relation to Jackson's personality, command style, and decision-making during this period of the war, Jackson's behavior and actions are at nearly every turn presented in the least favorable light. But, as they say, opinions vary, and other readers and reviewers might see it differently. It is really only near the end of the book, with the final chapter having the tonally fitting title of "Stonewall Jackson Rebuked," that the author references the likelihood of positive benefits from Jackson's highly demanding leadership and command style. Most notable is the possibility, as suggested by veteran accounts, that Jackson's insistence that subordinates strictly follow his orders to the letter (regardless of intervening circumstances) and his pushing his men to the limits of endurance had the combined effect of steeling discipline in both the officer and enlisted ranks in ways that strongly prepared those volunteers, many of whom were still relatively green citizen-soldiers, for the rigors of hard marching and hard fighting necessary to achieving victory in the upcoming Valley Campaign and beyond. In the end, though, regardless of one's feelings about where the author's analysis of Jackson himself registers on the balance meter, it is undeniable that the book is a major contribution to the history of early-war military operations along the hotly contested Virginia-Maryland border.

Booknotes: Reasons We Fight

New Arrival:

• Reasons We Fight: Tejanos and American Wars, 1836-1972 by Alex Mendoza (OU Press, 2026).

Starting with the Texas Revolution and ending with the exit of U.S. forces from Vietnam, Alex Mendoza's Reasons We Fight: Tejanos and American Wars, 1836-1972 examines what motivated Texans of Mexican descent to fight for the United States. In the process, Mendoza "discovers a complex landscape of shifting loyalties, motivations, and notions of nationalism reflecting Tejanos' conflicted relationship with America as it changed over time."

From the description: During much of the long period covered in the book, Tejano military service "often had less to do with nationalism or patriotism than with individual decisions. A soldier might be motivated by local allegiances, ethnic pride, a desire to defend his home, escape poverty, or seek adventure in a foreign war." However, "(b)y World War II, these notions had become stronger, and the Tejano community responded to the attack on Pearl Harbor with the patriotic fervor of their Anglo-American neighbors."

More from the description: As referenced above, the twentieth century marked a significant transformation in Tejano patriotism and nationalism. Mendoza's study "traces a growing sense of nationalism through the mid-twentieth century, as Tejanos sought to refute their second-class status as "inferior" individuals—and to demonstrate their warrior tradition, thus confirming their rights to citizenship through battle. In essence, by the Second World War, Tejanos who joined the ranks of the military adopted the characteristics of American nationalism—sentiments that would only expand during the Cold War era conflicts in Korea and Vietnam."

Since this is an ACW site, it behooves us to look at how much Civil War-era content and analysis is present. The war with Mexico and the Civil War are covered in Chapter 2, while the following chapter pairs Reconstruction with the Spanish-American War. According to the summary in the introduction, Tejano participation in the Mexican War was minimal, with "less than two dozen Spanish-surnamed volunteers" among Texas forces. Tejano allegiances were split during the American Civil War, with around 2,500 joining the Confederate Army and 958 donning Union blue. During Reconstruction, Tejanos "served as a paramilitary force" until the U.S. Army fully took over frontier and border security (pp. 4-5).

In sum: "The first comprehensive record of Tejanos in war, Mendoza's account documents the forces and circumstances that shaped military attitudes among Mexican Texans, along with the challenges they faced navigating a complex of shifting ideas about identity, community, and nationalism—and America itself."

Coming Soon (May '26 Edition)

Scheduled for MAY 2026¹:
• Many a Hand: Michigan and the Civil War by Roger Rosentreter.
• The Man Behind the Cane: Preston Brooks, Political Violence, and the Road to the Civil War by Paul Quigley.
• Henry Eustace McCulloch: Texas Ranger, Legislator, Civil War General by David Paul Smith.
• Retreat from Victory: The Battle of Malvern Hill and the End of the Seven Days, July 1, 1862 by Francis O'Reilly.
• Crisis at Antietam: The Cornfield and West Woods, September 17, 1862 by Steven Eden.
• Don Troiani's Civil War Uniforms of Union and Confederate Soldiers by Troiani & Field.
• Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War by Neff & Fluker, eds.
• Civil War Camps and Soldier Health: Sanitation and Military Effectiveness in the Union Army by Earl Hess.

¹ - These monthly release lists are not meant to be exhaustive compilations of non-fiction releases. They routinely do not include reprints that are not significantly revised/expanded, publisher exclusives, 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: The Battle of Fort Stedman

New Arrival:

• The Battle of Fort Stedman: Lee's Forlorn Hope, March 25, 1865 by Edward B. McCaul, Jr. (McFarland, 2026).

Given the advanced nature of the Union siege lines on the Petersburg front in 1864-65, it often seemed like Grant and Meade were overcautious in retaining so many men in the trenches during their series of offensives south and west of the city. Clearly, they feared a Confederate breakthrough counterstroke against a siege ring too thinly occupied, but that understandable defensiveness often robbed their assaulting columns of overwhelming numerical superiority over already overstretched Confederate positions. In the spring of 1865, a desperate Lee finally did try to directly test the Union death grip on his army, but the resulting Battle of Fort Stedman failed with predictable results. Historian Edward McCaul revisits that late-campaign event with his new book The Battle of Fort Stedman: Lee's Forlorn Hope, March 25, 1865.

From the description: "The Confederate attack on Fort Stedman, near Petersburg, Virginia, was a desperate gambit that nearly succeeded in the final weeks of the Civil War. Shedding light on a battle that, despite being well known to historians, has received less attention than it deserves, this book examines the reasons for the battle, the Confederate preparations, the Federal defenses, the Confederate attack, the Federal counterattack, and the impact of the engagement in the overall war."

Hindsight suggests that the attack's goals were impossible to achieve given the state and position of Lee's army along with the disparity in numbers between the two sides, but at the time "both Generals Robert E. Lee and John Gordon had great hopes of success. "The plan was well conceived and the execution of it very well done indeed," wrote Ulysses S. Grant, but confusion, misorientation, and daylight, along with a stubborn Federal defense, doomed it to failure."

The Battle of Fort Stedman "analyzes the Confederate plan in depth, finding it prescient of much modern day military strategy. A breakthrough was to be followed by expansion of the breach and the entry of fast moving mobile units whose mission was to destroy the enemy's logistical base." McCaul's analysis is supported by maps and numerous period and modern photographs of the battlefield. Appendices explore the life of the fort's namesake (BG Griffin A. Stedman, Jr.), medal of honor awards associated with the battle, the Confederate force dispositions prior to the battle, Petersburg Campaign mining operations, and controversies. Discussion of the last seems to center around the signal for the attack and the time of the attack's launch.

In the author's view, Fort Stedman lacks detailed coverage in the literature due to it being quickly overshadowed by the flurry of dramatic events that followed it from Five Forks onward. McCaul also argues that the battle's brevity, the overall dearth of Confederate reports, and comparatively small losses in killed and wounded when weighed against major Civil War battles, were other factors that heavily contributed to Fort Stedman being a well recognized but underscrutinized battle. This book aims to fill in those details.

Booknotes: Deserter Declarations

New Arrival:

• Deserter Declarations: Letters from North Carolinians Who Abandoned Their Confederate Units edited by Judkin Browning (UGA Press, 2026).

It's easy to see why Judkin Browning selected North Carolina for his study of deserter appeals. In addition to his earlier published work on the Civil War in the state, North Carolina was a natural choice given that, among the Confederate states, it "had the highest number of deserters. The Old North State also represents a microcosm of the entire South’s geography and demography." Browning's Deserter Declarations: Letters from North Carolinians Who Abandoned Their Confederate Units "explores nearly two hundred letters from Confederate deserters to Governor Zebulon B. Vance from 1861 to 1865."

The letters, "from 169 individuals referring to 228 North Carolina deserters," were written by soldiers and citizens alike but "usually take the form of humble petitions written by those who were hiding in the woods or languishing in prison" (pp. 1-3).

More from the description: Browning's study "shares the voices of deserters or friends and family petitioning on their behalf. Browning helps us understand who deserters were and lets us tease out some of the factors that motivated soldiers to leave their posts. These letters add vivid specificity to the often-contentious debates over deserters in the Confederacy and shed light on the changing attitudes of deserters over the course of the war." These appeal letters petered out in number by the final six months of the war, a situation Browning primarily attributes to soldiers being "no longer willing to risk their lives to rejoin the army in a doomed cause" (pg. 1).

The letters are presented chronologically in six chapter groupings corresponding to time intervals of varying lengths. In addition to a general introduction, Browning contributes chapter introductions and footnotes identifying persons, places, and events mentioned in the letters. Browning has also posted supplemental material related to this study at the website www.tarheeltroops.org.

Booknotes: This Great Contest Afloat

New Arrival:

• This Great Contest Afloat: The Civil War on the Seas, Coastline, Rivers, and Oceans by Neil P. Chatelain (Savas Beatie, 2026).

From the description: During the Civil War, "(t)housands of ships took part, fighting battles alongside the armies and patrolling the globe. The actions of more than 100,000 sailors on both sides impacted military, naval, economic, and diplomatic aspects, all while providing the tools to realize the Anaconda Plan of isolating and splitting the Confederacy."

The enormity of the Civil War's naval component is not lost on any experienced reader, but you can make an argument that it still occupies second fiddle status to the land forces when explaining Union victory and Confederate defeat. Neil Chatelain's new overview of the subject, This Great Contest Afloat: The Civil War on the Seas, Coastline, Rivers, and Oceans, serves as a strong reminder of the "extent and impact of Civil War naval activity."

More from the description: Chatelain's discussion of the naval war divides the waterborne conflict into "four distinct theaters of conflict."

"(1)The offshore blockade was an economic and logistical campaign waged to determine whether Southern armies would remain properly supplied. (2) Sailors enacting that blockade worked in tandem with armies to assault cities and coastal areas to deny the Confederacy its ports and coastal infrastructure, while Confederate sailors fought to both break the blockade and keep control of its ports. (3) Meanwhile, fleets on both sides battled for control over the Mississippi River Valley in an effort to cleave off the Trans-Mississippi Theater from the rest of the Confederacy. (4) Finally, an economic and diplomatic war was waged across the oceans, where Southern privateers and commerce raiders prowled for Federal merchant ships."

As the author "unpacks each of these naval theaters," he is aided by numerous maps (17), photographs, and period illustrations. Additional topics—the role of black men in the war's naval activity (both aboard ship and ashore), the naval organization of each side, and prominent naval war sites to visit today—are briefly explored in the appendix section. Books included in the Suggested Reading section, part of every Emerging Civil War series title, are well selected.

Booknotes: The First Pariah State

New Arrival:

• The First Pariah State: How the Proslavery Confederacy Menaced the World by Robert E. Bonner (Princeton UP, 2026)

From the description: "In 1861, proslavery secessionists severed ties with the United States, launched the Confederacy, and readied their new government to join the international community as a sovereign nation." In The First Pariah State, historian Robert Bonner "tells the story of how a transatlantic publicity campaign dashed Confederate hopes by ostracizing its rebellion as an immoral, global menace."

With the largest South American state, Brazil, and the Spanish Empire still holding onto slavery (and they would do so for more than two decades after the end of the American Civil War), and with neither shunned internationally, convincing the world that the CSA was a unique proslavery threat was an essential part of the argument. According to Bonner, "anti-Confederates as a group routinely took up this issue, though never to the full satisfaction of skeptics." The chief proponent of the claim that the Confederacy displayed "unique depravity" as a slaveholding power was Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who was also the domestic ringleader of those who wanted to alter international law in ways that would formally ban recognition of states like the Confederacy (pp. 8-9).

Regardless, the international campaign went beyond antislavery activism in its scale and sophistication. More from the description: "Improvised indictments circulated secessionists’ most incendiary words across the world. The Union and its foreign allies condemned the marauding Southern navy for disrupting high-seas commerce, violating civilized norms, and preparing for the resumption of the African slave trade. Abraham Lincoln and Senator Charles Sumner sought to convert rhetorical barbs and maritime anxieties into novel doctrines of international law designed to counter rogue regimes. And Union opinion-makers, including Black abolitionists, worked with European supporters to stymie the South’s naval expansion, war finances, and diplomatic efforts to gain formal recognition."

In the introduction, Bonner acknowledges the pitfalls of applying modern diplomatic and political constructs to the mid-nineteenth century world order, but he nevertheless maintains that the Confederacy fits the mold as a precursor. One has to wonder, however, the degree to which things might have changed had the Confederate states achieved their independence. Attempting to paint the Confederacy as a rogue state seems to have been effective wartime propaganda on both sides of the Atlantic, but it's not difficult to imagine European powers, given past history, trans-Atlantic cultural ties, and the Confederacy having a form of government closely based on the USA model, forging diplomatic ties and trade agreements with a newly independent CSA. Perhaps he speculates on that in his coverage of the post-Civil War period.

More from the description: "International worries about the Confederate rebellion waned after U.S. victory, and the Southern pariahdom of the 1860s left few enduring traces in international law or overseas remembrances. In fact, over the next century and a half, the pro-Confederate “Lost Cause” mythology proved to be as powerful abroad as it was within the restored United States."

Book News: Napoleon’s Long Shadow

Without a doubt, the influence of Napoleon Bonaparte was felt in both popular and military circles for a good chunk of the nineteenth century following the French emperor's final defeat and exile. His impact on American officers is mentioned countless times in Civil War biographies and military history books and articles, yet writers only rarely delve into particular examples or analyze the connection at any meaningful depth. Timothy Smith aims to correct that with his next book, Napoleon’s Long Shadow: How French Military Genius Shaped the American Civil War.

From the description: "Despite decades of casual analogy, until now, no comprehensive study has ever examined how Napoleon’s campaigns shaped Civil War operations on the battlefield. Through a series of clear, apples-to-apples comparisons, author Tim Smith places nine of Napoleon’ campaigns alongside their closest Civil War counterparts. The result is a fresh interpretation of how the Civil War was fought. Smith argues that the war’s early years were profoundly shaped by earlier models of warfare, while its final year marked a decisive break toward a more modern, industrial style of conflict." Through that interpretation, Smith's book "not only clarifies how Civil War commanders operated, but also challenges long-held assumptions rooted more in legend than in reality."

Sounds very interesting. Look for it in November from University Press of Kansas.

Review - "A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers" by Henry Motty

[A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers by Henry B. Motty (Louisiana State University Press, 2026). Hardcover, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,183/272. ISBN:978-0-8071-8615-2. $50]

Themes associated with the military, social, and psychological ties cemented between the Civil War home and fighting fronts, both North and South, have been heavily incorporated into numerous modern studies. Those who have examined those themes frequently find broad application, but there are certainly unique facets to each state's Civil War experience. Henry Motty's A Desperate Fight is distinctive in that way for its focus on one state, Confederate Louisiana, but also for the emphasis it attaches to face-to-face interactions over the more commonly explored distant ones expressed through soldier correspondence (though a full chapter is devoted to letter writing and its significance). Motty's work concentrates on the communal forces that sustained Confederate morale among Louisiana's fighting men and civilians, a key part of which were the bonds between the two groups that were formed early on in the conflict and maintained until the end. Supporting that line of investigation are a multitude of firsthand soldier and civilian perspectives gleaned from various university manuscript archives located across Louisiana along with newspaper articles and a range of published primary sources.

With initial enlistment motivations well explained in previous works, those factors are only briefly summarized for background purposes. While popular reaction to the Confederate experiment was mixed among the Louisiana populace, once war broke out, mass mobilization resulted in strong family and community support being placed behind the fighting volunteers. Reflective of Louisiana's white ethnic and cultural diversity (the extent of which was unique among the Confederate states), it is estimated by the author that, among the initial rush of men sent to Virginia as Louisiana's contribution to collective defense of the national capital, the number of volunteers who were foreign-born approached that of their native-born counterparts, and they exhibited similar communal attachments. Though one might wish for more exploration of distinctive features of the Civil War experience among unique segments of the population (such as the Cajuns of Acadiana), the book does present interesting, and sometimes amusing, accounts of encounters between Louisianians of different ethnicities, cultures, and languages.

Countless modern works have explored the vital role of women in sustaining the Confederate home front, and Motty's book applies many of those well-developed concepts and themes to Confederate Louisiana. Women were among the most outspoken defenders of the Confederate national experiment. That, and the privations and sacrifices they were willing to endure in support of the war effort, sanctified the female sex as the ideal moral representation of what soldiers were fighting for. As they did across the Confederacy, Louisiana women sewed and presented unit flags, and they, both collectively and individually, supported the troops through fundraising and through the production or donation of clothing items that the government could neither adequately nor consistently provide. Where possible, they fed hungry soldiers who were camped nearby or were passing through. Women also took care of sick and wounded soldiers in both hospital and private home settings. All of those direct exchanges reinforced connections between the home and fighting fronts and further motivated soldiers to persevere amid escalating casualties, mounting battlefield defeats, general want, and enemy occupation.

Wealthier Louisianians frequently sponsored and financed local volunteer units. That and the leadership they also provided helped bridge the gap between social classes and enhance perceptions that everyone was working together and sacrificing for the common cause. However, certain measures such as conscription strained communal spirit and heightened the class divide, although, as John Sacher notes in his excellent study of the topic, conscription was far from universally despised. Within the army it was widely praised, and most of the public admitted its necessity in keeping the army in existence. It was the law's specific measures and their implementation (for example, those related to exemptions) that drew the most criticism, and the government responded through regular revision. Nevertheless, class tensions remained. Another result of conscription, in combination with impressment of slave labor, is that it both expanded and further complicated the household, farm, and plantation management responsibilities of women, heightening interdependence between the fighting men and the home front.

Encampments, both short term and long term, were another aspect of the war that fostered communal ties. While Confederate military authorities strove to isolate camps from outside influences, in practice Louisiana Civil War camps were busy with soldier-civilian interactions. Visitation by family and friends bolstered morale and inserted, however briefly, home comforts and pleasant diversions into otherwise restrictive military life, and civilians from the surrounding area also provided opportunities for soldiers to gain access to goods, services, and delicacies that were otherwise scarce. However, as Motty notes, that physical proximity was not always mutually beneficial or popular, as local civilians were often on the receiving end of unauthorized property destruction as well as official impressment of livestock and provisions by their own protectors.

Soldiers from all Confederate states benefited from civilian generosity that helped fill the many gaps in government supplies of individual needs and wants, but that relationship were arguably even more essential in Louisiana. Uniquely divided, courtesy of the Mississippi River, between the western and trans-Mississippi theaters, Louisiana quickly fell into geographical isolation from state government administration and sustained Confederate assistance. After the city of New Orleans, the state capital of Baton Rouge, and most the Louisiana stretch of the Mississippi River fell into Union hands in close succession during the spring of 1862, much of the state's interior was laid open to federal invasion and occupation. At the time time, across the state Confederate and state government control and lines of supply and communication were profoundly disrupted. Louisiana civilians stepped into that void by providing food and clothing to soldiers on a local level. The civilian population's own needs were addressed through trade, both legal and illegal (prominent among the latter both smuggling and the illicit cotton exchange), and most Louisiana soldiers reluctantly came to recognize that home front trading with the enemy was a temporary matter of survival, not a betrayal of them or the Confederate cause as a whole. While the widespread impression that the distant Confederate government failed to provide Louisiana's defense with the resources, care, and attention that it needed and deserved may have resulted in some erosion of Confederate patriotism as the war progressed beyond its early stages, Motty amply demonstrates that soldier-civilian interdependence that developed over that same period led to the rise of home and community defense becoming the principal factor that motivated Louisiana's Confederate soldiers to keep fighting against the odds.

Campaigns and battles were another aspect of Louisiana's Civil War that bound soldiers and civilians tightly together. Battles fought inside state borders were typically small to medium-sized affairs, mostly the former, but they were numerous and, as was the case elsewhere, commonly placed civilian lives and property in the line of fire. Conventional warfare was just part of the experience, though, with the Louisiana civilian as military participant being most clearly associated with the guerrilla warfare that erupted across the state as Union land and naval forces penetrated into the interior from early 1862 onward. Addressing that side of conflict, Motty's book adds Louisiana context to what modern scholarship has called the "household" war.

The inextricable interdependence between the home and fighting fronts of both sides during the American Civil War has been well established in the modern scholarship, but Henry Motty's A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers meaningfully expands that literature through both illuminating specificity at the state level and recognition that many distinctive elements within the broader theme exist across the board that are worthy of discrete examination.