Booknotes: Reckoning with the Devil

New Arrival:

• Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory by Court Carney (LSU Press, 2024).

Court Carney’s Reckoning with the Devil reexamines "the troubled, complex legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest―a slave trader, Confederate general, and prominent Klansman." In it, Carney "explores how historical omissions and erasures continually reshape perceptions of Forrest as well as the Civil War." Of course, Forrest's military brilliance in certain roles was a major part of his Civil War historical legacy (for a good modern overview of that see John Scales's The Battles and Campaigns of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, 1861-1865), but that aspect is not a focal point of Carney's work.

As Carney see it, "the slave trade, the Fort Pillow massacre, and his Klan affiliation were the fundamental elements shaping Forrest’s image." Forrest's wealth gained through slave trading was "a key to his ascent in the southern social hierarchy." In the book, Carney "traces Forrest’s trajectory from a prosperous slave trader in Memphis to a politician and eventual military leader in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Forrest’s postwar years reveal his struggle to rebuild his life, leading him to engage in various economic ventures and eventually join the Ku Klux Klan." The "ambiguity and malleability" involved in the above "allowed Forrest to attract admirers as well as detractors as his image was memorialized in postwar white southern culture."

Reckoning with the Devil "covers distinct phases of Forrest’s memorialization, from the unveiling of statues in Memphis in 1905 to his representation in literature and media and the controversies surrounding his monuments in the 2010s." In the end, it is Carney's view that "Forrest’s significance lies in his capacity to encompass conflicting narratives―hero and villain, rebel and patriot. Carney contends that understanding Forrest’s legacy is essential for comprehending the intricacies of the southern past and its enduring impact on American society."

Booknotes: "Digging All Night and Fighting All Day"

New Arrival:

• "Digging All Night and Fighting All Day": The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865 by Paul Brueske (Savas Beatie, 2024).

It dismays modern observers today as much as it frustrated contemporary proponents way back then that it took so long for Union forces to finally close the vital Gulf port of Mobile, Alabama to Confederate blockade runners. When the campaign against Mobile did get underway at long last, it unfolded in two distinct stages. The first, consisting of both a naval offensive into Mobile Bay that famously damned the torpedoes and accompanying amphibious attacks that forced the fall of bay entrance guardian forts Morgan and Gaines, occurred during August 1864. The second and final phase played out during March and April of 1865, culminating in the April 12 surrender of the city.

The finest modern overview of the 1865 campaign is Paul Brueske's The Last Siege: The Mobile Campaign, Alabama 1865 (2018), but given its nature the fights for the east bay Confederate forts (Blakeley and Spanish Fort) could only be summarized. The solid discussion of the action at Fort Blakeley (the April 9 assault in particular) found in Mike Bunn's The Assault on Fort Blakeley: The Thunder and Lightning of Battle (2021) addresses one of those two gaps in book-length standalone coverage, and Brueske's new study, "Digging All Night and Fighting All Day": The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865, fills the other with an even more detailed account.

From the description: "The bloody two-week siege of Spanish Fort, Alabama (March 26–April 8, 1865) was one of the final battles of the Civil War. Despite its importance and fascinating history, surprisingly little has been written about it. Many considered the fort as the key to holding the important seaport of Mobile, which surrendered to Maj. Gen. Edward R. S. Canby on April 12, 1865."

Canby had a large army at his disposal for operations on both sides of the bay (over 40,000 men), but the Confederates were able to slip in a number of veteran units, albeit battered ones, into the defenses. Though still greatly outnumbered, the Confederates were able to offer fairly stiff resistance given the circumstances.

More from the description: "After the devastating Tennessee battles of Franklin and Nashville in late 1864, many Federals believed Mobile’s garrison—which included a few battered brigades and most of the artillery units from the Army of Tennessee—did not have much fight left and would evacuate the city rather than fight. They did not. Despite being outnumbered about 10 to 1, 33-year-old Brig. Gen. Randall Lee Gibson mounted a skillful and spirited defense that “considerably astonished” his Union opponents. The siege and battle that unfolded on the rough and uneven bluffs of Mobile Bay’s eastern shore, fought mainly by veterans of the principal battles of the Western Theater, witnessed every offensive and defensive art known to war."

In support of the text are six maps. The appendix section offers a broad range of supplementary material, including army and navy orders of battle, ordnance information, casualty and prisoner lists, and much more.

Giving thanks, and a seasonal reminder of ways to support the site

With 2024 fast winding down, I wanted to pause and give thanks to the sponsors who support CWBA. Both the Windy City's Abraham Lincoln Book Shop and Charleston's The History Press/Arcadia Publishing are long-time partners that have been with the site since the very beginning. University of Tennessee Press has also come on board this year for a limited time. All are valued sustaining forces.

A big shout out also goes to 2024's individual patrons (for privacy I'll just use their first names): Steve, Anand, John, and Thomas. Any amount and frequency sent through the yellow donate button in the sidebar is greatly appreciated. Thank you again, gentlemen of generous spirit.

Just as important, some of you also help keep CWBA going by assisting the site through online purchases initiated through affiliate links. It's free, completely private, and nearly all items are eligible. This holiday season, or any other time throughout the year, please consider using these links (typically the boldface book titles with hyperlinks) as your shopping portal. In return, CWBA receives a % commission from the purchase total, all at no additional cost to you.

Review - "Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns: The Twenty-One Critical Decisions That Defined the Operations" by Edward Cotham

[Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns: The Twenty-One Critical Decisions That Defined the Operations by Edward T. Cotham, Jr. (University of Tennessee Press, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, appendix, orders of battle, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages:xiii,170. ISBN:978-1-62190-913-2. $24.95]

It's easy to see why Galveston, Texas was considered a strategic point of interest for both sides during the Civil War. Galveston was Texas's most populous city, its most important commercial center, and it possessed the state's finest deep water port. Its rail connection with the interior also made it a prime base for a Union campaign to seize Houston. The occupation of both places would make Union forces masters of the heart of Texas and its limited modern transportation network. Initially determined to be indefensible with the meager resources available at the time, Galveston was reluctantly abandoned by its Confederate Army defenders. It was quickly occupied in turn by a small Union garrison supported by a naval squadron that easily outgunned anything the Confederates could muster against it. Before the Union foothold on Texas soil could be exploited, however, the port city was recaptured during a dramatic and improbably successful New Year's Day 1863 land and sea assault. Compounding the US Navy's embarrassment, just ten days later the Confederate commerce raider CSS Alabama lured out to sea and sank the Galveston blockader USS Hatteras. City and island remained in Confederate hands for the duration of the war.

The hits to US naval pride only continued. Approximately sixty miles up the coast, another Confederate naval attack surprised and defeated a US blockading force at Sabine Pass in 1862, and on September 8 of the following year a tiny earthwork battery turned back a massive combined operation that outnumbered the defenders roughly 100 to 1. In the fall of 1863, a two-pronged grand campaign, which consisted of a large overland expedition through western Louisiana and a substantial amphibious landing at the mouth of the Rio Grande that was accompanied by a follow-up movement up the coast, also failed (through a variety of reasons) to knock Texas out of the war. The decision-making involved in all of these events, many of which had military and political repercussions felt far and wide, is examined in Edward Cotham's Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns: The Twenty-One Critical Decisions That Defined the Operations.

Fast approaching two-dozen volumes, University of Tennessee Press's Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series possesses a unique analytical framework that has proven its value over time. Rather than repeat background material that has already been covered numerous times here on this site, please refer to previous CWBA reviews (such as this one here) for the series definition of a "critical decision" and brief explanation of the flow and structure of the steps involved in the decision analysis.

With published expertise [see Battle on the Bay: The Civil War Struggle for Galveston (1998) and Sabine Pass: The Confederacy's Thermopylae (2004), both gold standard histories of their topics] and over thirty years of ongoing research at his disposal, Cotham is the ideal author for this particular series installment. Calling upon that unique body of knowledge and using it to identify key moments of contingency, Cotham's approach to critical decision selection along with his situational summaries, option formulations, result(s)/impact discussions, and visions of alternate scenarios all display levels of nuance that a less robustly informed contributor tasked with the matter at hand would find very difficult to match. At first glance, it might appear unlikely that one could come up with this high a number of critical decisions (21) for a series of mostly small-scale events that unfolded in the war's tertiary theater (and this reviewer still struggled with one or two), but Cotham's keenly developed arguments and analysis consistently remove most lingering doubts.

The typical book in the series addresses a campaign and/or battle fought between major eastern or western theater field armies, making tactical-level critical decision analysis a common feature. However, Cotham notes that in his own area of study it was faraway decisions that most often and most deeply impacted the course of events. Also, an unusually high number (for the series as a whole) of his volume's critical decisions are personnel related. As Cotham amply demonstrates, leadership selection alone went a long way toward explaining why the underdog Confederates were so successful and how it was that Union forces failed in such disastrous fashion. President Davis's selection of John B. Magruder, that general's reputation under a dark cloud from allegations related to underperformance during the Seven Days, matched man and moment with results few could have foreseen, and the officers Magruder chose as his own principal subordinates no less so. On the other side, US naval hero David Glasgow Farragut, commander of the West Gulf Blockading Squadron, made leadership appointments on the Texas coast that he would come to bitterly regret. As Cotham outlines, key officers at Galveston and Sabine Pass served their faraway superior poorly, delivering some of the few black marks against Farragut's otherwise sterling Civil War record.

Magruder proved to be a particularly interesting case to examine. So many Confederate generals thrust into unenviable coastal command situations similar to what Magruder faced wallowed in pessimistic passivity when tasked with pitting their own meager manpower and resources against Union combined operations having the overpowering capability of concentrating superior land and naval forces at nearly any point of their choosing. Magruder broke the mold, confidently seizing the initiative and making his own luck with boldness, creative planning, and decisive leadership. During this shining moment of his Civil War career, all of his decisions struck gold. Like Robert E. Lee did at Chancellorsville, Magruder employed against a dangerously superior enemy at Galveston a complicated battle plan with a lot of moving parts. Such high-risk plans often produced disaster, but, as Cotham effectively reminds us, it could also be an important factor in achieving success against long odds. Unfortunately for the rest of Magruder's Civil War career, his signal success along the Texas coast in 1863 did little to restore his profile as general worthy of being entrusted with coveted commands on major fronts.

Much like historian Donald Frazier has recently done in his Texas and Louisiana series of military history books, Cotham insightfully outlines significant connections (through decisions made and their results) between events in the Trans-Missisippi theater and future plans for the war on the other side of the river. Most notable among them are those involved in delaying the targeting of the key Gulf blockade-running port of Mobile, Alabama.

A mixture of modern maps and others borrowed from the atlas to the O.R. accompany Cotham's text. In the other series titles, the featured tour appendix is designed to be closely tied to the critical decisions presented before it. With his own subject matter more geographically dispersed than the others and with so many of its critical decisions produced from great distances, Cotham elected instead to include a walking tour of Galveston Civil War sites and some brief recommendations for hardy souls willing to take the 133-mile roundabout drive to Sabine Pass.

Joining the top rank of the Command Decisions in America’s Civil War collection of titles, Edward Cotham's Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns, in addition to its atypical features recited above, carries some notable series firsts. The author points out that his book is the first to have a major focus on ship vs. ship and ship vs. shore movements and encounters, and one can also add that it is the first Trans-Missisippi theater volume in the series. Another one, an 1864 Red River Campaign book, is soon to follow, with hopefully even more in the works.

Booknotes: The Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War

New Arrival:

• The Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War: "Obstinate Devils" from Middle Fork Bridge to Cedar Bluff by David D. Perry (McFarland, 2024).

Over roughly 150 pages (including preface and introduction), David Perry's The Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War: "Obstinate Devils" from Middle Fork Bridge to Cedar Bluff offers readers a briskly paced overview of the three-year regiment's Civil War service in Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky.

Mr. Dyer tells me that the Third was organized in June 1861 and saw its first action in western Virginia during McClellan's successful campaign there. This is the Middle Fork Bridge of the book's subtitle. The regiment went on to serve with Don Carlos Buell's Army of the Ohio, where it marched south through Middle Tennessee, eastward across northern Alabama, and back north into the heart of Kentucky (fighting at Perryville). When Buell was dismissed his command (including the Third Ohio) was reorganized into the Army of the Cumberland under William S. Rosecrans. The regiment fought at Stones River and was one of the unfortunate regiments assigned to Abel Streight's disastrous raid targeting Rome, Georgia that ended in surrender. Upon exchange, the unit was assigned rear area duties, often chasing Confederate cavalry raids, and was mustered out of service in June 1864.

Perry's main narrative essentially ends with the regiment's surrender to Nathan Bedford Forrest's pursuers near Cedar Bluff, Alabama in May 1863. The final year of service is summarized in a single paragraph. The epilogue briefly discusses postwar reunions. The appendix section includes a unit chronology from the 1861 campaign in Virginia through the May 3, 1863 surrender; a unit roster; a list of Union generals from Ohio; and a trio of organizational notes explaining the Third's place in the order of battle over the course of its war service.

Booknotes: Black Americans in Mourning

New Arrival:

• Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln by Leonne M. Hudson (SIU Press, 2024).

Of course, there were members of every race and ethnic group who disapproved of Abraham Lincoln as a person, politician, policy-maker, and war leader. Much more unifying in crossing party and racial lines was the collective nature of national grief that followed Lincoln's sudden passing from an assassin's bullet. The black population's responses to the president's sudden demise just as the Civil War was drawing to close are the focus of Leonne Hudson's Black Americans in Mourning: Reactions to the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln. According to Hudson, "no group mourned Lincoln more deeply than people of color. African Americans did not speak with a monolithic voice on social or political issues, but even Lincoln’s Black contemporaries who may not have approved of him while he was alive mourned his death, understanding its implications for their future."

More from the description: "Beginning with the assassination itself and chronicling Lincoln’s three-week-long national funeral, historian Leonne M. Hudson captures the profound sadness of Black Americans as they mourned the crafter of the Emancipation Proclamation and the man they thought of as their earthly Moses, father, friend, and benefactor. Hudson continues the narrative by detailing the postwar efforts of African Americans to gain citizenship and voting rights" during the Johnson administration.

In the book, Hudson attempts to gather contemporary first-hand perspectives of individuals from every level of black society while also examining group-level activities. Thus, his study "includes the tributes of prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Elizabeth Keckley, who raised their voices to honor Lincoln, as well as formal expressions of grief by institutions and organizations such as the United States Colored Troops. In a triumph of research, Hudson also features the voices of lesser-known Black people who mourned Lincoln across the country, showing that the outpouring of individual and collective grief helped set the stage for his enduring glorification."

Book News: "Yankee Autumn in Acadiana" back in print

Thanks to reader Curt T. for bringing to my attention the news that University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press has just released a third edition of David C. Edmonds's Yankee Autumn in Acadiana: A Narrative of the Great Texas Overland Expedition through Southwestern Louisiana, October–December 1863.

First published in 1979 in hardcover from Acadiana Press, the groundbreaking study of the campaign and the hard war effects it had on the local population received a paperback facsimile reprint in 2005 from ULL's Center for Louisiana Studies. This new 2024 edition from them, also a paperback release, has a new Foreword from historian and director of the Center for Southeast Louisiana Studies Samuel C. Hyde Jr. There is no mention of any other additional material being added.

If you're interested in the topic I would recommend picking it up. Richard Lowe has authored a fine overview of events in his 1998 book The Texas Overland Expedition of 1863 and Donald Frazier provided us with additional context crucial to our understanding of the campaign in his 2020 book Tempest over Texas: The Fall and Winter Campaigns of 1863–1864, but Edmonds's pioneering book remains the most densely detailed account.

Booknotes: The Lead Mine Men

New Arrival:

• The Lead Mine Men: The Enduring 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry by Thomas B. Mack (SIU Press, 2024).

Thomas Mack's The Lead Mine Men: The Enduring 45th Illinois Volunteer Infantry "explores the Civil War ordeals and triumphs of the “Lead Mine men” who hailed from eleven counties in northern Illinois." Whenever I encounter a new Union regimental study the unit number of which does not immediately flash images of the more significant events of its Civil War service in my brain, I immediately turn to Dyer's Compendium and its trusty summary of the unit's record for a refresher. Mustered into U.S. service in December 1861, the 45th had a long fighting career with the Army of the Tennessee, from Fort Henry to Bennett Place.

The description summarizes their time in blue thusly: "During their service the regiment compiled an exceptional record. The 45th fought under General Ulysses S. Grant in the war’s western theater, earning honors at Vicksburg and in Tennessee. The men later reenlisted as veterans and served in General William T. Sherman’s Atlanta, Savannah, and Carolina campaigns. Mack considers the soldiers’ community, discipline, and faith in Providence during their service in the Union Army of the Tennessee and how, despite the unit’s high casualties, they upheld the lowest rate of desertion due to their fervent patriotism."

Given the far more detailed attention directed toward all aspects of the West and Trans-Mississippi theaters in recent decades, it's become clear that elements of hard war (as it came to be known) developed much earlier in the conflict than previously supposed. Going from the amount of emphasis placed on it in the description, it appears the men of the 45th were among the practice's more ardent early adopters. From the publisher: Mack's study "uncovers the history on this unit of resilient midwesterners and how they brought hard-war to the Confederacy in 1862, earlier than other historians have previously suggested."

According to Mack's author bio, the soldiers of the opposing armies are his primary research interest. That perspective is reflected in this book. More from the description: "Throughout The Lead Mine Men, Mack’s focus remains on the soldiers—their extensive training in Galena and Chicago and their time in camp and in combat. He follows their experiences from recruitment to their celebratory march in the 1865 Grand Review to their postwar lives in which many struggled to adjust, receive their government pensions, and protect the unit’s legacy."

Booknotes: Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns

New Arrival:

• Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns: The Twenty-One Critical Decisions That Defined the Operations by Edward T. Cotham, Jr. (U Tenn Press, 2024).

Currently sitting at twenty volumes balanced between east and west (with more on the immediate schedule), University of Tennessee Press's Command Decisions in America's Civil War continues to release titles at a steady pace. One thing that has invigorated the series is the successful recruitment of top-level published subject matter experts, such as contributors David Powell for Chickamauga and Robert Tanner for the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign. The latest in that line of strong gets is Edward Cotham, the author of Battle on the Bay: The Civil War Struggle for Galveston (1998) and Sabine Pass: The Confederacy's Thermopylae (2004), the latter the winner of the 2005 Laney Prize. Both books are Civil War Texas classics and rank high among the very best studies of the war west of the Mississippi. Those publications and Cotham's decades of research and thoughtful consideration of the topics at hand make him the ideal author behind Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns: The Twenty-One Critical Decisions That Defined the Operations, which is also noteworthy for being the first Trans-Mississippi installment of the series.

In the book, Cotham explores the series of critical decisions that guided the course of events along the most important stretch of Texas coastline north of the Rio Grande. Coverage includes the series of contests for control of Galveston, Texas's best deep water port, between 1861 and 1863 along with events culminating in the September 8, 1863 battle for Sabine Pass. Both Sabine Pass and the New Year's Day 1863 Battle of Galveston were startlingly improbable Confederate victories.

From the description: "The Galveston Campaigns were a series of naval and overland battles that pitted Confederate General John B. Magruder and his often-improvised Confederate forces against General Nathaniel P. Banks and a variety of Union army and naval forces. A Federal fleet entered Galveston Bay on October 4, 1862, and the city surrendered after the expiration of a four-day truce. However, on New Year’s Day of 1863, Magruder coordinated a bold new attack to retake Galveston using a land bombardment and two cottonclad Confederate gunboats. Aided by victories at the Battle of Sabine Pass and two purely naval engagements in Texas waters, the city would remain in Southern hands and end the war as the last major Confederate port."

More: Edward Cotham's Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns "explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal commanders during the campaigns and examines how these decisions shaped their outcome. Rather than offering a history of the operations, Edward Cotham concentrates on a sequence of decisions made by commanders on both sides of the contest to provide a blueprint of each campaign at its tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of the battles to progress from a knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened." I am a fair bit into it right now and like what I'm seeing so far.

"Late to the Fight" - Another late-war Union unit and soldier study

Though confident in the conclusions presented in his award-worthy book High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor, Edwin Rutan recognized that his study of late-war Union volunteers and new regiments raised during the late-war period was selective in scope and more work on the subject was needed. I don't know if he knew or anticipated that help would arrive so soon!

Among the Spring '25 crop of upcoming LSU Press titles is Alexandre Caillot's Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg (May). The challenging process involved in defining and measuring unit combat performance was a major part of Rutan's 2024 book, which employed modern tools for grading unit effectiveness. Like Rutan's earlier study, Caillot's investigation is restricted to the Army of the Potomac. Concentrating his own historical lens even further, Caillot's research is devoted to examining two regiments, the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine (why those two, I am curious to find out). Using those units to "to assess the record of late-arriving soldiers under fire," Caillot, like Rutan, helps demonstrate "that these forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy."

Booknotes: The Maps of Second Bull Run

New Arrival:

• The Maps of Second Bull Run: An Atlas of the Second Bull Run (Manassas) Campaign from the Formation of the Army of Virginia Through Chantilly, June 26-September 1, 1862 by Bradley M. Gottfried (Savas Beatie, 2024).

With last month's release of The Maps of Second Bull Run, the Savas Beatie Military Atlas Series is now up to ten volumes. Aligned with the primary interests of its creator, Bradley Gottfried, the series has a predominant eastern theater flavor, with previous volumes covering Gettysburg, cavalry operations during the Gettysburg Campaign, First Bull Run, Antietam, Bristoe Station/Mine Run, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and the interval from Spotsylvania to Cold Harbor. The lone western theater atlas is David Powell and David Friedrichs's Chickamauga volume.

Charting future developments, Gottfried mentions in the Preface that his original intention was to finish The Maps of Petersburg and Appomattox next, but during the pandemic he decided instead to put that project aside temporarily and backtrack, filling in the first half of the war's remaining gaps. So the next installment after Second Bull Run will be the one that I have looked forward to the most, The Maps of the Peninsula Campaign. After that, there will be volumes dedicated to Chancellorsville, the 1862 Shenandoah Valley Campaign, and the 1864 operations in the Valley.

The Maps of Second Bull Run starts with the initial rounds of jockeying between John Pope's Army of Virginia and Stonewall Jackson's corps. From there, atlas coverage moves on to the Battle of Cedar Mountain and subsequent repositioning and skirmishing leading up to Brawner's Farm and the Second Battle of Bull Run itself. The volume concludes with the federal withdrawal toward Washington and the Battle of Chantilly.

From the description: The atlas breaks down the aforementioned series of events "into 24 map sets or “action sections,” enriched with 122 detailed full-page color maps. These cartographic originals bore down to the regimental and battery level. They include the march to and from the battlefields and virtually every significant event in between, including cavalry actions. At least two—and as many as ten—maps accompany each map set. Keyed to each piece of cartography is a full-facing page of detailed text describing the units, personalities, movements, and combat (including quotes from eyewitnesses) depicted on the accompanying map, all of which make the cavalry actions come alive." As was the case with all preceding volumes, orders of battle are provided and the accompanying text is annotated.

Booknotes: Playing at War

New Arrival:

• Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games edited by Patrick A. Lewis & James Hill Welborn III (LSU Press, 2024).

If you're a Gen X wargamer like me you grew up in time to catch a part of the golden age of traditional board gaming and experienced the additional opportunity to participate in the new and exciting rise of computer gaming. For those who lacked an abundance of long-term table space and, just as important, a dearth of flesh and blood opponents, playing these types of games on the home PC held a great deal of interest and promise. Though the current military board game scene remains both vibrant and innovative (along with being very high priced!), it has evolved into a very small sub-niche within the recent board game industry revival. In terms of wider cultural appeal, the current state of the hobby cannot match its heyday when every shopping mall of size and consequence had a store that stocked board games simulating an awe-inspiring range of history's conflicts. Even local department stores in the relatively small town that I grew up in sold them. Broadly speaking, today's youthful wargamers undoubtedly are grounded not in games of the physical kind but in console, computer, and app-based ones.

Emphatically of the opinion that video games were not art, the popular movie reviewer Roger Ebert famously ignited an online grudge match with those who claim otherwise. I don't recall if the flood of responses that he received ever led him to walk back on that opinion to any great degree before his untimely passing. Art or not, it's clear that video games continue to have a significant cultural impact, and they're the subject of countless academic authored and themed papers, books, and articles. Unique in its American Civil War focus is Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games, a new essay compilation edited by Patrick Lewis and James Hill Welborn. The editors apply a very broad-stroke definition of "video game" that encompasses everything from the most popularly appealing console-based first-person shooters to the most niche-oriented and micro-detailed wargames designed for the PC. In their volume, Lewis and Welborn enjoin their large group of contributors to apply the same serious critical eye toward video games that they would more traditionally apply to the media forms of fiction writing, movies, and music.

From the description: "Playing at War offers an innovative focus on Civil War video games as significant sites of memory creation, distortion, and evolution in popular culture. With fifteen essays by historians, the collection analyzes the emergence and popularity of video games that topically engage the period surrounding the American Civil War, from the earliest console games developed in the 1980s through the web-based games of the twenty-first century, including popular titles such as Red Dead Redemption 2 and War of Rights."

With the book's body of contributors consisting primarily of university-based historians and similar professionals, it's perhaps natural, as conveyed by the subtitle, that scholarly concerns surrounding identity, inclusivity, and memory would be the predominant themes explored by the essay writers. Though nuts and bolts matters such as design philosophies, gameplay mechanics, and gaming technology take a backseat to those concerns, there is also some discussion of game research methodologies and general issues related to differing perceptions of historical accuracy. An example of a particularly innovative approach is the Part III essay exploring game portrayals of the final-stage fight for the U.S. capital in the context of the common "boss battle" game convention.

More from the description: "Alongside discussions of technological capabilities and advances, as well as their impact on gameplay and content, the essays consider how these games engage with historical scholarship on the Civil War era, the degree to which video games reflect and contribute to popular understandings of the period, and how those dynamics reveal shifting conceptions of martial identity and historical memory within U.S. popular culture." A book of this type cannot offer more than a selective picture of its subject matter, thus many important games in the evolution of the genre are left out of the discussion, but it is nevertheless a bit odd that an entire essay is devoted to Oregon Trail, which is not by any stretch a Civil War game. On the other hand, one might consider that popular classic a roughly suitable stand-in for the great many violent conflicts that did occur along western emigrant trails during the 1861-65 period.

Playing at War "traces the drift of Civil War memory into digital spaces and gaming cultures, encouraging historians to engage more extensively with video games as important cultural media for examining how contemporary Americans interact with the nation’s past." In a Civil War publishing sphere that often exhibits extended periods of thematic and topical sameness, editors Lewis and Welborn (along with publisher LSU Press) are to be commended for their collective wherewithal in putting out this fresh-focused and completely original anthology.

Booknotes: A Wonderful Career in Crime

New Arrival:

• A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age by Frank W. Garmon, Jr. (LSU Press, 2024)

In a reading culture that continues to display great interest in true crime stories, largely of the murder variety, it's not too surprising that there would be a recent uptick (or at least it seems that way to me) in books about the lives and misdeeds of prominent Civil War-era criminals. Authors investigating some of the darker corners of postwar Gilded Age society especially are fairly common guests on a history podcast I regularly listen to. Often the subject of major newspaper headlines at the time, popular knowledge of most of these nineteenth-century figures rapidly dims with the passage of time, and they become virtual unknowns to modern generations of readers and scholars alike. That is likely the case with Charles Cowlam, the subject of Frank Garmon's A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age, which "brings Cowlam’s stunning machinations to light for the first time."

Cowlam's "career in crime" is notable for its length across multiple eras, great variety of dastardly enterprises, and intersection with famous historical figures. From the description: "Charles Cowlam’s career as a convict, spy, detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, and con artist spanned the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Gilded Age. His life touched many of the most prominent figures of the era, including Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. One contemporary newspaper reported that Cowlam “has as many aliases as there are letters in the alphabet.” He was a chameleon in a world of strangers, and scholars have overlooked him due to his elusive nature. His intrigues reveal how Americans built trust amid the transience and anonymity of the nineteenth century. The stories Cowlam told allowed him to blend in to new surroundings, where he quickly cultivated the connections needed to extract patronage from influential members of American society."

Charles Cowlam's career as a confidence man reached the highest levels of government. More from the description: "Rather than perpetrating frauds against average citizens, Cowlam reserved his most fantastic schemes for officials in the highest levels of government. He is the only person to receive presidential pardons from both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis during the Civil War. When the fighting ended, he conned his way into serving as a detective investigating Lincoln’s assassination, later parlaying that experience into positions with the Internal Revenue Service and the British government."

The times during which Cowlam lived experienced rapid changes, and he took advantage of every twist and turn. More: "Reconstruction offered additional opportunities for Cowlam to repackage his identity. He convinced Ulysses S. Grant to appoint him U.S. marshal and persuaded Republicans in Florida to allow him to run for Congress. After losing the election, Cowlam moved to New York, where he became a serial bigamist and started a fake secret society inspired by the burgeoning Granger movement. When the newspapers exposed his lies, he disappeared and spent the next decade living under an assumed name." He returned to the Civil War for his final scam, when he "resurfaced in Dayton, Ohio, claiming to be a Union colonel suffering from dementia in an effort to gain admittance into the National Soldiers’ Home."

Coming Soon (November '24 Edition)

Scheduled for NOV 2024¹:
• Lincoln vs. Davis: The War of the Presidents by Nigel Hamilton.
• The Forgotten Battles of the Chancellorsville Campaign: Fredericksburg, Salem Church, and Banks’ Ford in Spring 1863 by Erik Nelson.
• The Autobiography of Joshua Chamberlain: The Major Writings edited & annotated by Thomas Desjardin.
• Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates by Mark Neels.
• Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North by Jack Furniss.
• The Third Ohio Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War: "Obstinate Devils" from Middle Fork Bridge to Cedar Bluff by David Perry.
• The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 by William Marvel.
• War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North by Philip Gould.
• Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January 1863 by Daniel Masters.
• The Maps of Second Bull Run: An Atlas of the Second Bull Run/Manassas Campaign from the Formation of the Army of Virginia Through Chantilly, June 26 – September 1, 1862 by Bradley Gottfried.
• Gettysburg for Kids and Grown-ups, Too! by Gregory Christianson.
• Decisions of the Galveston Campaigns: The Twenty-One Critical Decisions That Defined the Operations by Edward Cotham.

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.

Snapshot from the Collection: "A Man And His Boat: The Civil War Career And Correspondence of Lieutenant Jonathan H. Carter, CSN"

One of the opportunities that these unpredictable gaps between new releases is affording me is the chance to finally get to some far too long neglected titles from the collection. Intrigued at the prospect of what it might have to say about Confederate Trans-Mississippi naval construction and operations, I purchased A Man And His Boat: The Civil War Career And Correspondence of Lieutenant Jonathan H. Carter, CSN (Center for Louisiana Studies, 1996), a now long out of print title edited by Katherine Brash Jeter, probably ten years ago or more. It has sat on the shelf frowning at me ever since, still in its original shrinkwrap. Last week, I finally read it.

Much of what is known about the Shreveport, Louisiana-built and based Confederate ironclad CSS Missouri comes from the official wartime correspondence of the man principally involved in managing its construction (and who later, through default, became its captain), Lt. Jonathan H. Carter. The volume's lengthy preface consists of an edited version of Jeter's 1987 Louisiana History journal article that explores the life and career of Carter, who was an 1846 Annapolis graduate. As one readily recognizes while reading the rest of the book, the research that went into that article relied very heavily upon Carter's (1863-67) correspondence, the edited collection of which follows the Preface and is reproduced in full.

Numerous documents in this compilation, perhaps most of them, are simple two-line administrative notes and personnel requests/orders. The names and dates are valuable to researchers, but on the whole probably of limited interest to general readers. There are many other letters, though, that exemplify the range of challenges faced by every Confederate ironclad construction project, among them shortages of skilled labor, raw and manufactured materials, and modern armaments. Additionally, army-navy disputes hampered (even blocked) timely efforts to build, arm, and man the vessel. Carter's frustration is palpable. He repeatedly points toward lack of cooperation with, and false promises from, the army, which seems to have greatly doubted the ironclad's value. Thus, it was no surprise that the vessel was designed for more but was fitted out with only three cannon (one of those being an antiquated 32-pounder), leaked badly from its green timber construction and insufficient caulking, was slower than promised, and had a glaring vulnerability in that the top of its single paddle wheel (center rear) was completely unprotected at the top. Building and maintaining crew strength proved to be a consistent thorn in Carter's side. Judging from the frequency with which the topic was raised in Carter's letters, when the army did release small groups of enlisted men for transfer to the Missouri's crew complement, many if not most seemed to have promptly deserted.

There are no detailed drawings of the Missouri provided, just two photos of a detailed scale model. The ironclad was described at the time as being vaguely similar in appearance to the CSS Tennessee, but to me it looks more like the child of a union between that vessel and a Pook turtle. That much of the center wheel was exposed is a really striking feature of the model. There's a contemporary watercolor painting that shows the wheel as having been, if not armor-protected, at the very least fully covered, but a close inspection of the vessel by a Union officer in June 1865 confirms that over 8 feet of the wheel was entirely unprotected.

Going by Carter's correspondence, it doesn't appear that the ironclad fired a shot in anger. Through still struggling with crew shortages, the Missouri was, at least in Carter's judgment, fully operational by the time of the 1864 Red River Campaign. However, low water kept it out of action. As we know, those same river conditions hampered Carter's Union naval opponents, too, though it was General Banks's defeat at Mansfield and subsequent retreat that conclusively removed the Union threat to the Missouri's Shreveport base. With no real opportunities to make a difference on either the Red or Mississippi Rivers, the Missouri was basically put into use as a floating battery until its surrender in June 1865, the last Confederate ironclad to lower its flag. In the end, the story of the Missouri provides little in the way of strong challenges to those critics who have argued that the Confederate ironclad fleet was an expensive resource drain that failed to produce enough noteworthy achievements to come even close to matching its exorbitant cost to the Confederate war economy.

Carter had wider responsibilities that those directly attached to the Missouri (for example, he was involved in off and on discussions, debates, and plans in regard to the prospects of building torpedo boats, and even an ironclad, in Texas), and his correspondence has additional value there. Jeter's extensive footnotes, especially those identifying and discussing lesser-known persons mentioned in the letters, are also helpful to other historians. A Man And His Boat has much to recommend it. It explores obscure subject matter such as Confederate naval activities in the Trans-Mississippi, and its central topic, the CSS Missouri, is one of the least known vessels in the Confederate ironclad fleet.

Fall/Winter 2024 catalogs - Civil War titles where have ye gone?

I don't have any numbers to back this up, just twenty years of close observation, but it's become pretty clear that the total number of Civil War titles published each year is currently in an extended period of contraction. As an outside observer I can only speculate as to the factors involved and have no access to raw sales data, but at least when it comes to the kinds of books typically addressed on CWBA the downward trend started trickling in that direction somewhere around the mid-point of the Sesquicentennial, with the fade becoming much more pronounced in recent years. On the reader side of things I only have my own site to go from, but there's been no corresponding drop in visitation. 2020 was the site's best year in terms of total visitor numbers (though the pandemic trapping people at home in front of their computers surely played some role in that spike), but the subsequent others haven't been far off.

Thankfully, a core of independent publishers such as Savas Beatie, McFarland, and The History Press are still chugging along pretty nicely, but it's been an increasingly dry well for some time now when it comes to Civil War books put out by museums, research libraries, small local publishers, and historical societies. Perhaps the most startling trend in all this involves the university presses, traditionally one of the bedrocks of Civil War publishing and major source of review submissions to this site.

Indeed, what prompted me to make this post was my survey of the Fall/Winter catalogs of those UPs that for much of this new century typically produced 2 or more Civil War titles per spring and fall publishing season. From a list of fifteen of these old guard UPs, eleven had no 1861-65 titles in their respective Fall '24 catalogs, only two had two titles with considerable CW content, and one had a single offering. Sure, the thinness of this current season is a bit out of the ordinary, but the absence of CW titles has been part of a noticeable trend. A large proportion of those fifteen have ceased regular publication of CW books, and a significant number haven't produced a CW title of any kind in years. If this continues, we'll just have to get used to a new normal of high quality yet much more infrequent releases.

The UP numbers outlook isn't all gloomy, though. Quality of individual releases remains high. That Tennessee has become a positive outlier in actually expanding its number and range of yearly Civil War offerings is a welcome development. Always reliable LSU Press continues to be one of the kings by publishing five titles during this current cycle:

• Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory (Sept)
• Playing at War: Identity and Memory in Civil War Video Games (Sept)
• The Mexican-American War Experiences of Twelve Civil War Generals (Oct)
• Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North (Nov)
• The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 (Nov)

LSU's traditional partner in crime, UNC Press, took a bit of a breather this fall, but they come back strong next spring with a big line-up:

• The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment
• The Second Manassas Campaign
• A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg - Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill
• Exceptionalism in Crisis: Faction, Anarchy, and Mexico in the US Imagination during the Civil War Era

Further on the UNC front, I haven't come across any solid indication online yet that Robertson's Chickamauga Campaign V2, as hoped for here, has been placed on the publisher's Spring '25 schedule. We'll have to await official release of their S/S catalog to find out for sure.

Update on UNC's Military Campaigns of the Civil War series

Back in 2015, University of North Carolina Press's classic Military Campaigns of the Civil War anthology series reemerged from a decade-long hiatus with the publication of Cold Harbor to the Crater: The End of the Overland Campaign and introduction of Caroline Janney as new general editor. That one was followed three years later by the release of Petersburg to Appomattox: The End of the War in Virginia. Filling in the final gaps in its eastern theater coverage, the remaining goals are to address the two Manassas battles, and we'll get the first installment in April '25 with The Second Manassas Campaign edited by Janney and Katherine Shively.

The more recent series volumes have applied similar weight to a wide spectrum of issues and topics both on and off the battlefield. The Second Manassas Campaign continues that trend by presenting an essay compilation that offers "valuable attention to matters of strategy, tactics, and logistics; the performances of key commanders on each side; the campaign's political dimensions; the connections between home front and battlefield; and the memory of the campaign's aftermath."

Ironically, the series grand finale will take us all the way back to the very beginning of the war in the East. Hopefully, it won't be another seven years until we see it!

Review - "High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor" by Edwin Rutan

[High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor by Edwin P. Rutan II (Kent State University Press, 2024). Softcover, 7 maps, 32 tables, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xii,211/317. ISBN:978-1-60635-486-5. $39.95]

Mistrust, even outright disdain, forced upon fresh replacements by grizzled army veterans has probably been around as long as war itself, and during the Civil War strong tensions certainly emerged between the Union volunteers of 1861-62 and the new regiments and later enlisting volunteers of 1863-64. Though the depth of hostility held by the former against the latter has perhaps been exaggerated, it was nonetheless a very real phenomenon. Beginning during the war itself, further ingrained through the pages of contemporary memoirs and veteran-authored articles and unit histories, and commonly accepted by trained historians ever since, the idea that late-war volunteers of the Army of the Potomac were less patriotic, overwhelmingly motivated by monetary gain, and poor fighters in the field has gained widespread and lasting traction. But are those profoundly negative views and historical interpretations actually supported by the evidence? Edwin Rutan's High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor reexamines those questions and more.

Rutan begins his study with a fine background overview of the evolution of economic incentives involved in Union Army recruitment. Though enlistment bounties offered by local, state, and federal governments reached $1,000 or more by the late-war period, it is correctly pointed out that economic inducements of varying kinds played a factor in recruitment from the very beginning, and direct bounties were around since 1862. In the end, the degree to which financial considerations drove enlistment choices remains, of course, up for debate. Perhaps more powerfully than anywhere else in the literature, William Marvel's Mr. Lincoln Goes to War (2006) and especially his Lincoln's Mercenaries (2018) persuasively argue that economic concerns have been greatly undervalued in the scholarship's attempts to explain what was behind early-war Union enlistment fervor. Rutan agrees and finds similar conclusions to be made, albeit reaching them from a different angle than that employed by Marvel.

Clearly, late-war enlistees were far more expensive to the country than their comrades of 1861-62, and Rutan is somewhat sympathetic to the notion that the largest bounties could be overly generous, but the author's assertion that the combination of high bounties with a conditional draft (the carrot and stick approach) was a societal necessity, one that productively balanced the priorities of both home and military fronts, forms a potent argument. In contrast to the Confederate South's economy, which was comprehensively wrecked over the course of the war, the North's economy boomed, and it needed to stay that way in order to close the deal during the conflict's second half. High-ranking Union officers, with the army's needs naturally foremost in their minds, urged the institution of a unconditional draft administered by the federal government. Civilian leadership recognized that such a draconian measure would be a political dead-end that additionally threatened flourishing local and state economies. With current wages several times their prewar levels, high bounties were necessary to pry workers from their jobs and incentivize late-war volunteerism enough to fill local and state draft quotas and forestall conscription on a scale disruptive to the work force. Readers are also reminded that the veteran volunteers, when reenlisting, also accepted not-insignificant economic incentives without being subjected to similar imputations against their patriotism. Broadly speaking, bounties represented cooperation at all levels of government toward a common goal, filling the ranks and defeating a faded yet still highly dangerous national enemy. With the alternative being divisive dictatorial measures handed down from Washington, high bounties undoubtedly assisted the war effort by helping secure continued broad-based home front support for the war. In the big picture, the benefits more than made up for the costs involved, and the negative fall out from desertion and bounty jumping proved manageable. Rutan's framing of high bounties in these ways is enlightening.

Self-gain certainly factored into the decision-making process, but a refreshingly nuanced picture of issues surrounding accusations that late-war recruits lacked patriotic motives is presented in the book. As other recent scholarship confirms, a number of factors impacted whether individuals enlisted in the army to do their part on the fighting front or stayed home and continued to contribute to the war economy. Rutan points out that contemporary evidence fully supports claims that family, work, and business obligations were socially acceptable (even desired) reasons for staying home and that local communities did not as a rule view that as being incompatible with patriotism. It should also not be forgotten that age also figured into the equation, with many late-war recruits willing enough to do their part but were simply underage up to that point.

Rutan does not gloss over the fact that the new regiments had higher rates of desertion than the old regiments, but his point that it never proved unmanageable is worthy of distinction. He also effectively reminds us that there were so many factors involved in desertion that more analytical work on the relative impact of each (including high bounties) is necessary in order to really draw sound conclusions. One interesting tidbit that emerged from Rutan's quantitative investigation is that desertion essentially ceased in late-war units once they reached the front, a quality that was not shared by old regiments restocked with large numbers of substitutes and later enlisting replacements.

Rutan's research suggests that rapid internalization of army culture (or as he puts it, the "normative influences of army life in the field") led these regiments to perform far better than their contemporary and modern critics have maintained. Indeed, as others have also noted, new units frequently offered the army a fresh injection of offensive elan, a much-needed trait that became tempered amongst many veteran units through their extensive records of high casualties, failed attacks, and past defeats. Traditional suggestions that the quality of manhood present in late-war recruits was somehow deficient in comparison to the early war volunteers are strongly disputed in the book. Recognizing that assessing soldier "quality" can be a highly nebulous process, Rutan selects a small number of quantifiable demographic traits that arguably correspond to soldier quality as felt at the time, and his number crunching reveals late-war and early-war recruits as being roughly comparable. It is also worthwhile to recall that these new late-war regiments were not entirely composed of rookies. The officers were typically experienced and it was also commonplace that a solid number of rank and file members previously served in short-time units.

In yet another body of strong writing and analysis, Rutan contests the common interpretation that the combat effectiveness of late-war regiments in 1864-65 was so poor by comparison with veteran regiments that they comprised an almost worthless addition to the army. Recognizing that rating effectiveness can be as ill-defined a process as grading quality, the author employs a modern two-step process that ties mission-based performance assessment to a set of seven readiness capability factors. Rutan persuasively argues that his sample sets of new late-war regiments and old regiments with more than half of their strength being late-war replacements fought generally well during both the Overland and Petersburg campaigns of 1864. Given how much the negativity directed against late-war recruits was based upon the outcomes of particular battles, specific attention is paid to the embarrassing Union defeat at Second Reams's Station. Contrary to the overgeneralized and self-serving claims of Winfield S. Hancock and other officers and generals, the late-war regiments did not as a group perform poorly during the battle or really that much different from the old regiments. At Reams's Station both groups suffered the consequences of remarkably poor command decisions and the debilitating effects of sustained combat attrition, but it would be the late-war regiments that would be scapegoated for the shortcomings of their leaders. Finally, though one might argue that the opposition was so run down by the spring of 1865 that demonstrating effectiveness on the attack was much easier than before, Rutan does clearly determine that late-war regiments [specifically six new regiments in Hartranft's Division at Ft. Stedman and five Fifth Corps regiments at Five Forks) could get the job done during the waning moments of the war and with noticeable merit.

Sure, the examples cited in the above-mentioned chapters are selective rather than comprehensive, but it was never the author's intention to try to argue that the fighting prowess and battlefield achievements of the late-war recruits and regiments were entirely on par with their longer serving predecessors. What he does powerfully show is that, without a doubt, a great many of these units proved highly capable in the field, more than enough in number to greatly complicate the oversimplified and vastly overgeneralized negative impression of their service as presented in most of the historiography.

Every chapter in the book reveals Rutan to be a meticulous researcher, skilled parameter setter, and effective sorter and presenter of data. Much of that quantitative approach is compiled in the volume's nearly three-dozen tables. As Rutan readily admits, this particular study, which employs limited sampling scope and no corresponding attention to late-war western theater replacements and new regiments, is far from the last word on the topic. From a reader's perspective, the work strikes one as being on the strong side of representative status, but there is more to be done and the author frequently offers insightful recommendations in regard to areas needing further research.

Edwin Rutan's High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac is a thoughtful, compassionate, and convincing exploration of the perceptions and realities commonly attached to the men comprising the massive body of late-war Union recruits that not only sustained the fighting strength of the Army of the Potomac during the bloody months of 1864-65 but were indispensable in finally defeating Robert E. Lee's powerfully resilient Army of Northern Virginia. Logic already suggested that the late-war infusion of nearly three quarters of a million men into the Union Army was instrumental in sustaining the momentum toward victory that was dearly bought through the blood and sacrifices of the early-war volunteers, but Rutan's truly groundbreaking study successfully confirms that uncommon assumption with strong documentary research, compelling writing, and deft quantitative analysis. As its subtitle suggests, this exceptionally fine book truly allows the late-war volunteers of the Army of the Potomac to reclaim service honors unjustifiably withheld for far too long.

Update on Krick's Gaines's Mill study

Robert E.L. Krick's Gaines's Mill and Frank O'Reilly's Malvern Hill books are two of CWBA's most highly anticipated releases. Both have been gestating for a very long time, but we've finally received some clarity on the former. Thanks goes to a pair of long-time site readers, Pete H. and John F., for sharing their recon.

The news brings some surprises. That the Gaines's Mill project will be two volumes is unexpected, but the publishing route taken, a partnership with the American Battlefield Trust, is the bigger surprise of the two. John sent me this link: https://www.battlefields.org/give/save-battlefields/phase-5-gaines-mill-cold-harbor-saved-forever-campaign. It reveals that Krick's The Battle of Gaines's Mill: Volume 1 - To the Banks of the Chickahominy will be, for a limited time, given as a gift by the Trust as a thank you for a $100 or more donation to their Gaines’ Mill Cold Harbor Saved Forever Campaign, which needs an additional $500K to meet its goals (see the link above for more details). Its release is slated for sometime in early 2025.

Whether the book will also be made available for standalone purchase is unknown at this time (at least by me). If memory serves, other ABT-affiliated "gift" books have received general releases. Two recent ones that come to mind are the eastern and western theater ABT atlases that were published through an outfit called Knox Press.

I wonder if spreading the material across two volumes means that Beaver Dam Creek will also be examined in some detail. Who knows. Again, thanks to John and Pete for bringing this to my attention. [edit (10/19): I've been informed (see comment below) that the books will be in hardcover format, so to head off any confusion I've removed the original ABT cover image of it on this post as it depicts a paperback version]

Booknotes: The 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters at Gettysburg

New Arrival:

• The 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters at Gettysburg: Like A Perfect Hornet's Nest by Mark W. Allen (McFarland, 2024).

From the description: "The many works on the Battle of Gettysburg have neglected the role of the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, known for their extensive training and specialized tactics. This history is the first to explore the actions on July 2, 1863, of this Union Army regiment largely composed of men from Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Vermont." Readers wanting to obtain a broader picture of the 2nd USSS's Civil War service can be referred to Gerald Earley's 2009 book The Second United States Sharpshooters in the Civil War: A History and Roster from the same publisher.

Mark Allen's The 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters at Gettysburg: Like A Perfect Hornet's Nest "revolves around the 2nd Sharpshooters' defense of the Union left flank from Slyder Farm to the Round Tops" on July 2, 1863. Its self-stated objective is to "tell the sharpshooters' important story and put their actions into context, knowing the events described did not happen in a vacuum" (pg. 1). Opposing Confederate perspectives along with the actions and command decisions of other Union units and leaders are brought into the discussion only as they directly affected the sharpshooters.

After a brief organizational summary, Allen's coverage moves on directly to the Gettysburg Campaign and events of July 2. Based on a diverse range of source materials, the volume's detailed, roughly 175-page tactical narrative is richly supported with cartography, seemingly one map placed every few pages or so (a remarkably large collection). Photographs are also sprinkled about liberally. The appendix section contains a selective order of battle, some unit numbers information; a few more supplemental maps, drawings, and images; and a set of 2nd USSS company commander capsule bios (with photos).

More from the description: "Drawing on newly discovered primary sources, this book seeks to clarify mysteries such as the identity of the non-commissioned officer who met with Company B of the 20th Maine and the location of Major Homer R. Stoughton during the battle. Following the understrength regiment as it confronts two Confederate brigades, this thorough historical narrative presents a long untold story of the Battle of Gettysburg."

Review - "United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration" by R. Gregory Lande

[United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration by R. Gregory Lande (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,219/253. ISBN:978-1-4766-9584-6. $39.95]

R. Gregory Lande's United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration is a descriptive and quantitative survey of cases prosecuted by the judicial arm of the Union military services.

Though the process employed in creating a statistically significant sample is not fully detailed, there is enough explanation in the author's introduction to leave the reader confident that the sample is representational in composition. At 5,000 cases, its size is certainly impressive. Sample breadth includes cases involving regular and volunteer officers and enlisted men of all three major services (Army, Navy, and Marine Corps), medical personnel, black and white servicemen, and individuals from every state. Proportions also strike one as being suitably representative, with largest sample contingents hailing from the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and the majority of army cases involving infantrymen followed in descending order by cavalry, artillery, and engineer defendants.

There are a lot of criticisms leveled against how military justice was handled during the Civil War, but Lande sympathetically reminds us that the American military courts, being tasked with maintaining the delicate balance between keeping the overall discipline and effectiveness of the Union Army from unraveling while also respecting the cherished civil rights of its individualistic volunteer citizen-soldiers, had a very difficult job to perform. After providing a very brief big-picture summary of court-martial law and practices, the book is organized around four major groupings of common offenses. Naturally, those sections begin with the two most prevalent charges, unauthorized absences of various kinds and alcohol-related offenses, the former encompassing "desertion, absence without leave (AWOL), leaving a duty area without permission, overstaying a pass, failure to repair, and straggling" (pg. 28). Military charges associated with the third group of charges—the "violent misconduct" explored in Chapter 4—include "assault, murder, mutinous conduct, rape and other sexual crimes, threats of violence, marauding, manslaughter, maltreatment, pillage, plunder, and torture" (pg. 129). The final chapter is reserved for the "subordinate military crimes," among them theft, forgery, consequential criticisms, malingering, gambling, and medical malfeasance, that were prosecuted by general courts-martial on a less frequent basis.

Each of the above chapters, and their subsections where applicable, start with numbers analysis of each charge's sample prevalence among the three major services. Conviction rates are also highlighted. Case summaries, ranging in length from just a few paragraphs to several pages, form the bulk of each chapter. These collections of examples drawn from the sample group demonstrate to readers the range of offenses within a given category along with insights into prosecutorial practices, defense strategies, types of sentences, post-conviction reviews, and trial misconduct. In places Lande also engages with the published scholarship, pointing out where his findings agree with or clash against the work of earlier researchers. Rather than being placed in footnotes or endnotes, the volume's source notes are embedded within the main text.

By representing all three services in his sample, Lande sheds light upon a number of noteworthy interservice differences among both court processes and prosecuted offenses. For example, in addition to its own officers, the U.S. Navy employed civilian lawyers and U.S. attorneys in their cases while all Army courts-martial were conducted solely by uniformed officers (the suggestion being that the Navy was more progressive in its legal processes). Data on specific offenses also frequently points toward stark differences between the services. In just one example, the large preponderance of unauthorized absence convictions for army officers were for AWOL offenses with desertion a distant second, while the direct opposite was the case for naval officers. Some of the widest interservice disparities defy easy explanation, and, in those cases, one wishes the author had more often attempted to explore possible reasons behind them.

While differences ranging from slight to truly striking abound between the services, there were significant commonalities, one being the shared preponderance of multiple charges attached to most Army, Navy, and Marine Corps court-martial cases. Another was the similarly high conviction rate (guilty verdicts were roughly 84 percent in the Marine Corps, a bit lower than the Army's nearly 88 percent and the Navy's 91 percent). Also, for many offenses, it was often generally the case that sentences increased in severity as the war progressed.

The volume ends rather abruptly, without a summary or conclusion chapter within which the author might have shared his own general thoughts on how effectively United States military courts enforced and maintained armed forces discipline. Given all the labor and thought that Lande has devoted to the subject, it would have been interesting to read his own views in regard to whether the evidence supports longstanding criticisms that Civil War-era court-martial practices and outcomes were too arbitrary in dispensing justice and unnecessarily draconian in their punishments. Even without that, though, the volume still serves as a very useful survey and reference guide to the numbers and practices involved in the Civil War military justice system.

Booknotes: Sherman's Other Army

New Arrival:

• Sherman's Other Army: The Second Army of the Ohio 1863-1865 by Michael J. Klinger (Little Miami Pub, 2023).

The first iteration of the Union Army of the Ohio (1861-62) was dissolved during the major transition period between the mixed results of the 1862 Kentucky Campaign causing its commander, Don Carlos Buell, to fall out of favor and the appointment of William S. Rosecrans to lead the successor Army of the Cumberland. In anticipation of the long-awaited (and frequently aborted) campaign to seize control of East Tennessee, the Army of the Ohio was revived in 1863 under the leadership of Ambrose Burnside. Its infantry strength was composed of Ninth and Twenty-Third Corps, though Burnside was forced to await the return of the former from Vicksburg.

Earl Hess authored the most recent (and only major) military account of the Confederate campaign to reverse Burnside's achievements in the region and just this year a fine study of Union cavalry operations in East Tennessee was published inside Dennis Belcher's The Cavalry of the Army of the Ohio: A Civil War History, but we still do not have a single volume designed to represent a comprehensive history of the Army of the Ohio's successful capture of Knoxville in 1863 and occupation of the region surrounding it. Michael Klinger's Sherman's Other Army: The Second Army of the Ohio 1863-1865 is not that book, but it does devote a significant portion of its just under 300-page narrative to those operations.

After describing the 1863 organization of the second Army of the Ohio, Klinger recounts the aforementioned operations in East Tennessee, the army's integral role in the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, and the Twenty-Third Corps's part in both the Franklin/Nashville Campaign and 1865 denouement in North Carolina. In our brief email exchange, the author hinted that his book contains some unique observations related to Spring Hill and Franklin.

The volume is heavily illustrated. Klinger reproduces from other publications a large collection of battle maps, encompassing actions both large and small. Two organizational tables are provided, and period and modern photographs are sprinkled about. Bibliography and chapter notes feature published primary and secondary sources, marking the study type as one of synthesis.

Released last year, Sherman's Other Army is only available direct from the linked publisher plus a few select outlets. I can't find the email to confirm, but I seem to recall that the author told me that copies can be obtained from one or more of the relevant NPS bookstores.

Booknotes: Robert E. Lee’s Reluctant Warrior

New Arrival:

• Robert E. Lee’s Reluctant Warrior: The Life of Cavalry Commander and Railroad Businessman, Brigadier General Williams Carter Wickham by Sheridan R. Barringer (Fox Run Pub, 2024).

I'm not sure how close we are filling out the full roster of modern biographies associated with Lee's cavalry brigade commanders, but retired NASA engineer Sheridan Barringer has spent the past decade doing his part to fill in the remaining gaps. His prolific work commenced with 2016's Fighting for General Lee: Confederate General Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade, and that was followed by Custer's Gray Rival: The Life of Confederate Major General Thomas Lafayette Rosser (2019) and Unhonored Service: The Life of Lee's Senior Cavalry Commander, Colonel Thomas Taylor Munford, CSA (2022). His latest contribution is Robert E. Lee’s Reluctant Warrior: The Life of Cavalry Commander and Railroad Businessman, Brigadier General Williams Carter Wickham.

Wickham's extensive public life embraced military service, politics, and postwar industry. From the description: "Williams Carter Wickham fought bravely for the south as a Confederate cavalry officer, finishing the war as a brigadier general. He also steadfastly opposed secession, believing that it was illegal. From a prominent Virginia family, he was a natural leader in the field and, late in the war, Confederate Congress. He rose from the rank of captain and after the war broke with his fellow generals by joining the Republican Party, urging compliance with Reconstruction. He became an organizer of railroad improvements and expansion, becoming leader of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and served in the Virginia State Senate."

In similar vein to the Munford book that preceded it, Barringer's Wickham study is a full biography. Though naturally the bulk of the book deals with Wickham's Civil War military career, additional chapters address his family history, early life, postwar activities, and death in 1888. The book has nine maps covering Wickham's battlefield exploits from First Bull Run through to his late-war entry into politics. During his active service he was elected to the Confederate Congress, and Wickham left the army (his resignation having been officially accepted in early November 1864) to take up his seat.