Coming Soon (January '25 Edition)

Scheduled for JAN 2025¹:
• More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee by Jonathan Engel.
• A Grand Opening Squandered: The Battle for Petersburg, June 6-18, 1864 by Sean Michael Chick.
• Decisions of the Red River Campaign: The Fifteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Operation by Michael Lang.
• Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten.
• Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln's Union by Richard Carwardine.
• The First Confederate Soldier: George Washington Lee and Civil War Atlanta by Robert Scott Davis
• Trouble, Trials, and Vexations: The Journal and Correspondence of Rachel Perry Moores, Texas Plantation Mistress ed. by Thomas Cutrer.

Comments: The Engel book listed at the top is out already. Looks like it might be a good companion to recent works such as Andrew Bledsoe's Citizen-Officers and Zachary Fry's A Republic in the Ranks. For a preview of the Parten book, see my Booknotes entry for it here.

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

Booknotes: Between Extremes

New Arrival:

• Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North by Jack Furniss (LSU Press, 2024).

Much of the recent scholarly attention paid to the U.S. home front during the Civil War has been defined by the management of internal strife and political division along the path to Union victory, but it is just as profitable now and then to reassess (and appreciate) the scale and power of the common ground that existed within northern society. As author Jack Furniss writes in his introduction, the "core contention" of his book Between Extremes: Seeking the Political Center in the Civil War North is that the "centrist politics" of a collection of Union parties composed of allied Republicans, Democrats, and unaffiliated Whigs "played a critical role in enabling Union victory in the American Civil War by allowing northern voters to support revolutionary changes for conservative reasons" (Pg. 2). A related facet of the study is its claim that the North's two-party system was much less stable during the period than popularly believed.

From the description: "Between 1861 and 1865, northern voters fortified Abraham Lincoln’s administration as it oversaw the end of the institution of slavery and an unprecedented expansion in the size and scope of the federal government. Since the United States never considered suspending the democratic process during the Civil War, these revolutionary developments―indeed the entire war effort―depended on ballots as much as bullets. Why did civilians who, at the start of the conflict, had not anticipated or desired these transformations to their society nonetheless vote to uphold them? Jack Furniss’s Between Extremes proposes an answer to this question by revealing a potent strand of centrist politics that took hold across the Union and provided the conservative rationales that allowed most northerners to accept the war’s radical outcomes."

This one will definitely go into the 'to-read' pile. I have my fingers crossed that a couple more LSUP titles from October and November that I was hoping would arrive before the end of this month make it in.

Review - "Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January 1863" by Daniel Masters

[Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January 1863 by Daniel A. Masters (Savas Beatie, 2025). Hardcover, 17 maps, photos, illustrations, footnotes, orders of battle, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,615/671. ISBN:978-1-61121-712-4. $39.95]

Before now, Civil War readers have had three main options to choose from when it comes to single-volume narrative histories of the winter 1862-63 battle in Middle Tennessee between Braxton Bragg's Confederate Army of Tennessee and William Rosecrans's Union Army of the Cumberland. Each of them, in chronological order those from James Lee McDonough, Peter Cozzens, and Larry Daniel, have served us fairly well up to this point and all are roughly comparable in scale, with the latter two vying for recognition as the best of the trio¹. Still, far surpassing each of those earlier efforts in operational depth and level of tactical detail is Daniel Masters's newly published Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January 1863.

With its bibliographical bounty of newspaper, manuscript, and unit history resources, the research underpinning Masters's study exhibits all the primary source variety and depth one would expect to find in a modern campaign microhistory of this grand a scale. In a fashion that invites favorable comparison to the celebrated work of the Civil War field's most able professional and non-professional military history practitioners (a group that includes consistently reliable authors such as Earl Hess and David Powell), Masters skillfully utilizes the research material at his disposal to weave together a comprehensively authoritative, yet still accessible, account of the Stones River campaign and battle. The lavishly descriptive text contained in every chapter is enriched on a consistent basis through the author's seamless integration of revealing firsthand quotes and passages left behind by participants of all ranks. That interlacement produces a profoundly revealing ground-level exploration of the intensity and character of the fighting at Stones River as well as the human cost that combat left behind.

Along the way, Masters quite evidently has gained a degree of expert knowledge about the contested ground between Nashville and Murfreesboro that few others possess, and that background allows him to thoroughly convey to his readers the ways in which key terrain factored into the course of the battle. The many places upon which the battlefield's unusual topography, in particular the area's numerous densely choked cedar groves and forests as well as its ubiquitous pockets of limestone outcroppings, restricted both fields of fire and maneuvering space for infantry and artillery alike are keenly observed throughout.

David Powell's acclaimed Chickamauga Campaign trilogy offers strong arguments in favor of that great western clash being deemed a three-day (rather than two-day) battle. Given Masters's description of the events of December 30, one might be tempted to similarly add another day of battle to Stones River. Masters himself doesn't quite reach that far, though, with the heading of his chapter relevant to the December 30 fighting labeling those events as "Almost A Battle." In this case, he's probably right in resisting revisionist tendencies.

Regardless, the main Stones River fighting on December 31, 1862 and January 2, 1863, those days bookending the battle's interrupted three-day span, has already been documented in strong detail among several works, but Masters embarks on an even deeper dive. His volume is roughly twice the length of its strongest predecessors. Additionally, those with a particular interest in gaining more information about the movements and events leading up to the beginning of the Battle of Stones River should find themselves well satisfied with Masters's expansive pre-battle operational history, which comprises well over a third of the book's content. Indeed, it is fast approaching page 250 before the Confederate army's December 31 dawn attack on the Union right is finally launched.

The clashes between infantry are front and center, but the battle narrative also devotes an appropriate degree of attention to the support arms. Masters's text clearly shows where and how Union qualitative and quantitative superiority in artillery deployed on the defensive proved critical in helping slow and ultimately stop the massive series of Confederate assaults against the Union right and center on December 31. The Union long arm also proved instrumental in shattering the subsequent January 2 Confederate attack initiated on the east side of Stones River. On the other hand, as it would throughout much of the war, the Army of Tennessee's artillery arm, saddled with a high proportion of antiquated smoothbore tubes, struggled at Stones River to both adequately support their infantry comrades on the tactical offensive and deliver effective counterbattery fire. With batteries assigned individually to brigades, organization also played a part in hindering concentration of fire.

A comprehensive description and analysis of the mounted forces of both sides and what part they played in this campaign already exists², and Masters's own interpretation is more supportive than not of historian Dennis Belcher's central findings. Both authors credit General Rosecrans for effectively reorganizing and bolstering the Union cavalry in his department prior to the campaign, though that prodigious effort was far from complete by the time Stones River was fought. Both writers rate David Stanley's appointment as cavalry chief to be a faultless executive decision matching man with moment. Belcher and Masters are also on the same page when it comes to the cavalry not being assigned primary blame for the intelligence failures and/or miscommunication on the Confederate right on December 31, a situation that hampered timely reshuffling of forces between the wings of the army separated by the river. Unlike Belcher, Masters does not weigh in heavily on the matter of whether Joseph Wheeler's cavalry, instead of raiding the wagon trains of Rosecrans's army to mixed results, might have been better utilized in the role of providing direct tactical support to the December 31 Confederate attacks on the exposed Union right.

If anything can be criticized about the book's presentation, which is stellar overall, it is the uncomfortable gaps that exist in map coverage. Seventeen maps are often a sufficient number for studies of this general type, but within this particular densely detailed campaign and battle narrative (one that's over 600 pages in length) the rate of change in the progression of events that unfold in the text all too frequently outpaces corresponding map coverage. On the other hand, the quality of the cartography itself is first-rate, with the maps having everything one might wish for in both small-unit detail and terrain representation.

Stones River arguably doesn't possess the weight and number of endlessly debated what-if scenarios that other Civil War battles of similar significance provide as speculative fodder for conversation. One such matter that undoubtedly shaped Stones River to some degree or another was the Davis administration's insistence pre-campaign that Carter Stevenson's large infantry division (some 8,000 men) be transferred from Bragg's army in Tennessee to John C. Pemberton's command in Mississippi. Much like what happened earlier at Shiloh and Perryville, at Stones River the ferocity of the initial Confederate assaults shoved their Union opponents across the battlefield (at Stones River, some three miles) but lacked the reserves to break them. An argument can be made that the troops of Stevenson's Division could have added enough additional punch to Bragg's assaults on December 31 to successfully cut across the Nashville Pike and make decisive tactical victory possible, but Masters elects to not weigh in strongly on either side of that debate. In his very brief overview of the matter, he does cite one historian's grave doubts that Bragg possessed the battle management acumen to utilize Stevenson for decisive effect (an argument along similar lines has long been raised in regard to the consequences of the Army of the Potomac's First Corps being withheld from General McClellan on the Peninsula), but the text is not clear as to where on that interpretive spectrum Masters's own views reside.

The Civil War battle historiography is replete with late-day drama surrounding how certain actions and decisions robbed attacking armies of clear opportunities for achieving complete victory . Much of that brand of speculation is unrealistically conceptualized, one of the oldest examples being persistent claims from Confederate partisans that total victory was in their grasp at the end of the first day's fighting at Shiloh (if only General Beauregard had not halted the attack). There is also the other side of the coin, with particular units or individuals hailed as exceptional saviors of their armies during key defensive actions. The ability of the battered Army of the Cumberland to maintain its hold on the Nashville Pike during the waning daylight moments of December 31 has often been represented as a near-run thing. While Masters does title his chapter corresponding to that defining event the "Miracle at the Three-Mile Marker" and singles out the spoiling attack of Bradley's Brigade as providing saving grace to Rosecrans's shaken army, it is at the same time also strongly suggested that the heavy assembly of artillery concentrated along the pike raised significant doubts that the Confederates, nearly fought out by that point in the battle, could have closed the deal. It was along this sector that the absence of Stevenson's Division was most keenly felt. Of course, the numerous Union army defensive stands that preceded it, among them the stout resistance of Philip Sheridan's division in The Cedars and the determined defense of the Round Forest by the brigades of William Hazen and George Wagner, are fully addressed and their significance duly appreciated.

In contrast to the volume's very extensive coverage of pre-battle events, the aftermath of Stones River, including discussion of those factors that went into Bragg's final decision to retreat as well as the retreat itself (Polk's corps to Shelbyville and Hardee's to Manchester), is handled in a single chapter at the end. At several places in the book, the plight of the wounded of each side receives due attention. The casualty levels suffered by both armies at Stones River (some 27% of Bragg's army and 31% of Rosecrans's) were stunning losses by any measure, and Masters cites the literature's standard numbers. He reports no evidence that would suggest the need for major revision of those figures in killed, wounded, and missing, though perhaps with the caveat that the prisoner hauls might have been higher than those typically accepted.

True to its author's name, Hell by the Acre displays mastery of every major element that goes into creation of the best type of modern Civil War campaign and battle history narrative. When it comes to single-volume treatments of Stones River, this study has indisputably become the new standard. With the high-level research and writing skills amply on display here, Masters joins the upper echelon of talented avocational historians who have contributed so much to the Civil War literature over recent decades. Hopefully, we will get even more of this brand of fine work from him in the future³.

Notes:
1- These traditional battle narratives are James Lee McDonough's Stones River: Bloody Winter in Tennessee (1980), Peter Cozzens's No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River (1989), and Larry Daniel's Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict Between the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland (2012). In structure and form, Lanny Smith's massive two-volume set [The Stone's River Campaign 26 December 1862 - 5 January 1863: The Union Army (2008) and The Stone's River Campaign 26 December 1862 - 5 January 1863: Army of Tennessee (2010)] is a different animal entirely.
2 - See Dennis Belcher's The Cavalries at Stones River: An Analytical History (2017).
3 - For a collection of the author's short-form writings, visit his regularly updated blog Dan Masters' Civil War Chronicles.

Booknotes: Somewhere Toward Freedom

New Arrival:

• Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation by Bennett Parten (Simon & Schuster, 2025).

Numerous books have been written about William T. Sherman's famous "March to the Sea," and they collectively bring to the table a variety of perspectives. In terms of major modern works, Burke Davis's Sherman's March (1980) got things going with its popular-style rendering of the 1864 Georgia and 1865 Carolinas campaigns. Those events are examined through the lens of the common Union soldier experience in Joseph Glatthaar's celebrated book The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman's Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (1985). More recently, Noah Andre Trudeau's Southern Storm: Sherman's March to the Sea (2008) provided readers with the first detailed military account of the operation. In subsequent works, home front interactions between slaveholding Confederate women and Sherman's men are the focus of Lisa Tendrich Frank's The Civilian War: Confederate Women and Union Soldiers during Sherman's March (2015), and Anne Sarah Rubin's Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March and American Memory (2014) is a prominent Civil War memory study. Bennett Parten's upcoming book Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman's March and the Story of America's Largest Emancipation adopts yet another important perspective, that of the many thousands of slaves that attached themselves to Sherman's columns.

According to Parten, "as many as 20,000 enslaved people had attached themselves to Sherman’s army" by the time the hard-marching federals finally reached their goal, the city of Savannah and the Atlantic Ocean. Along the way, they "endured hardships, marching as much as twenty miles a day—often without food or shelter from the winter weather" and their ability to stay with the army, which operated deep behind enemy lines during the march with severed lines of supply and communications, was frequently tenuous (even hostile).

More from the description: In Somewhere Toward Freedom, Parten expansively "reframes this seminal episode in Civil War history. He not only helps us understand how Sherman’s March impacted the war, and what it meant to the enslaved, but also reveals how it laid the foundation for the fledging efforts of Reconstruction. When the war ended, Sherman and various government and private aid agencies seized plantation lands—particularly in the sea islands off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts—in order to resettle the newly emancipated. They were fed, housed, and in some instances, taught to read and write. This first real effort at Reconstruction was short-lived, however. As federal troops withdrew to the north, Confederate sympathizers and Southern landowners eventually brought about the downfall of this program."

This is a 2025 title that will go into general release about a month from now.

Booknotes: Lincoln and the War's End

New Arrival:

• Lincoln and the War's End by John C. Waugh (SIU Press, 2024).

By its very nature, SIU Press's Concise Lincoln Library series lends itself toward a long run of titles limited only by the imagination of its contributors, with each compact volume exhibiting a focused bearing on some aspect of the celebrated president's life, personality, character, relationships, career, and elected office. Many of the installments also get paperback reissues, and that is the case with John Waugh's Lincoln and the War's End, which was first published in hardcover in 2014.

From the description: "On the night of his reelection on November 8, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln called on the nation to “re-unite in a common effort, to save our common country.” By April 9 of the following year, the Union had achieved this goal with the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House." Waugh's book addresses the events of that momentous five-month interval, "revealing how Lincoln and Grant worked together to bring the war to an end." The words of a number of other well-known voices from the war, "including New Yorker George Templeton Strong, southerner Mary Boykin Chesnut, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay, writer Noah Brooks, and many others" contribute to the discussion.

Naturally, the volume highlights the series of Union military victories that together extinguished any remaining Confederate hopes for independence. Thus, Waugh "recounts the dramatic final military campaigns and battles of the war, including William T. Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea; the Confederate army’s attempt to take Nashville and its loss at the battle of Franklin; and the Union victory at Fort Fisher that closed off the Confederacy’s last open port. Other events also receive attention, including Sherman’s march through the Carolinas and the burning of Columbia; Grant’s defeat of the Army of Northern Virginia at the Battle of Five Forks, and Lincoln’s presence at the seat of war during that campaign; the Confederate retreat from Petersburg and Richmond; and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox."

Just as important as the battlefield results were their social and political ramifications. Intertwined with his military narrative, Waugh "presents the key political events of the time, particularly Lincoln’s final annual message to Congress, passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the Second Inaugural, Lincoln’s visit to Richmond the day after it fell, and Lincoln’s final days and speeches in Washington after the Confederate surrender." The celebratory capstone to the Union Army's victory, "the farewell march of all the Union armies through Washington, D.C., in May 1865," is also covered.

Major modern biographies of Lincoln's cabinet secretaries

Yesterday's post about the new Bates study got me thinking about remaining gaps in the modern biography of Lincoln's cabinet. I know "major" and "modern" are subjective labels, but I tried to keep the selected list below to conventionally published works from the past fifty years or so.

State

William H. Seward (1861–1865):
• Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man (2012) by Walter Stahr.
• William Henry Seward: Lincoln's Right Hand (1991) by John Taylor.

Attorney General

Edward Bates (1861–1864):
• Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates (2024) by Mark Neels.
James Speed (1864–1865):
None

Navy

Gideon Welles (1861–1865):
• Gideon Welles: Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy (1973) by John Niven.

War

Simon Cameron (1861–1862):
• Amiable Scoundrel: Simon Cameron, Lincoln's Scandalous Secretary of War (2016) by Paul Kahan [site review].
Edwin M. Stanton (1862–1865):
• Stanton: Lincoln's War Secretary (2017) by Walter Stahr.
• Lincoln's Autocrat: The Life of Edwin Stanton (2015) by William Marvel.

Postmaster General

Montgomery Blair (1861–1864):
None
William Dennison (1864–1865):
None

Treasury

Salmon P. Chase (1861–1864):
• Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival (2022) by Walter Stahr.
• Salmon P. Chase: A Biography (1995) by John Niven.
• Salmon P. Chase: A Life in Politics (1987) by Frederick Blue.
William P. Fessenden (1864–1865):
• Civil War Senator: William Pitt Fessenden and the Fight to Save the American Republic (2011) by Robert Cook.
Hugh McCulloch (1865)
• Hugh McCulloch: Father of Modern Banking (2004) by Susan Lee Guckenberg.

Interior

Caleb B. Smith (1861–1863):
None
John P. Usher (1863–1865):
A short biography was published in 1960, but none since then
James Harlan (1865): - Appointed by Johnson after Lincoln's assassination
None

It's expected that the cabinet biggies would have multiple treatments, and it still surprises me that it's been half a century since the last Welles biography. Blair is another notable omission.

Booknotes: Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor

New Arrival:

• Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates by Mark A. Neels (SIU Press, 2024).

When it comes to fresh biographies of Lincoln administration cabinet secretaries, empty boxes continue to get checked on a fairly regular basis. The latest is Mark Neels's Lincoln’s Conservative Advisor: Attorney General Edward Bates. According to the description, it has been nearly six decades since the last full biography [presumably Lincoln's Attorney General: Edward Bates of Missouri (1965) by Marvin R. Cain] was published.

Covering all the essential ground, Neels's study "begins with Bates’s youth in Virginia and follows him through his political and judicial career, his candidacy as a Republican presidential nominee in 1860, and his appointment to Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet as attorney general." Missouri, and Border State support in general, was critical to Lincoln's goal of keeping the Union together, and its easy to see why Bates, "a founding father of Missouri and leader of the Missouri Whig Party," would be considered for a high position in the new administration.

In the unprecedented times that would follow the outbreak of Civil War, Lincoln's war policies and measures would operate within a legal gray zone subjected at various times to attacks from all sides. As Attorney General, "Bates became an essential advisor to the president on key legal, military, and political matters from emancipation to civil liberties and equal rights, and his official opinion on Habeas Corpus would have a permanent effect on presidential authority and separation of powers."

As a political moderate, though, Bates also at times found himself at loggerheads with both the president and the more radical wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, he was a central figure in navigating the divide. More from the description: "When Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation, Bates found himself at odds with the president and the radical anti-slavery members of the cabinet. But more than simply highlighting the conflict within Lincoln’s administration, Bates’s example lays bare the strong philosophical divisions within the Republican Party during the Civil War era. These divisions were present at the party’s inception, crystallized during the war, and ultimately sparked a political realignment during Reconstruction. Bates was at the center of this divide for most of its existence, and in some cases assisted in its promulgation."

According to Neels, Bates's conservative values and principles guided him throughout his lengthy public life and service. More: "Bates, a fierce opponent of radical Republicanism, embodies the conflict among Republicans over issues of slavery and citizenship. In both judicial and elective office, he was compelled by a sense of duty to defy the populism of President Andrew Jackson and Senator Thomas Hart Benton, and, later, the proslavery forces that threatened to tear the nation apart. Though he had owned slaves, Bates represented at least one enslaved woman’s suit for freedom, released from bondage the people he had enslaved, and aided Lincoln in his efforts to end slavery nationwide. Bates’s opinion on citizenship as attorney general helped pave the way for equal rights. His opinions were not always popular with either his colleagues or the greater populace, but Bates remained true to his conservative principles—a set of values shared by a large swath of Lincoln’s Republican Party—which positioned him as a leading opponent of radical Republicanism during the Reconstruction Era."

Booknotes: Dread Danger

New Arrival:

• Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War by Lesley J. Gordon (Cambridge UP, 2024).

I've been looking forward to reading Lesley Gordon's Dread Danger: Cowardice and Combat in the American Civil War for quite a while now, and after some publishing delays (it was in my June "Coming Soon") it's finally here. With so many subjective elements involved with it, evaluating cowardice in Civil War combat seems like it would be a daunting task to undertake. Nevertheless, I fully anticipate that Gordon has come up with some valid and interesting ways of looking at the topic that together impart "a fuller understanding of the soldier experience and the overall costs and sufferings of war." The book is surely an extension of Gordon's highly praised earlier work in A Broken Regiment: The 16th Connecticut's Civil War, which also examined a regiment that suffered from a stained martial reputation (the 16th broke at Antietam and suffered further humiliation in 1864 at Plymouth, North Carolina).

The book is structured around two case study regiments, one a Union short-timer and the other a Confederate unit that served throughout the entire war. From the description: "When confronted with the abject fear of going into battle, Civil War soldiers were expected to overcome the dread of the oncoming danger with feats of courage and victory on the battlefield. The Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas Infantry went to war with high expectations that they would perform bravely; they had famed commanders and enthusiastic community support. How could they possibly fail? Yet falter they did, facing humiliating charges of cowardice thereafter that cast a lingering shadow on the two regiments, despite their best efforts at redemption."

The two unit selections are intriguing ones. I'm familiar with the reputational hit suffered by the 11th New York "Fire Zouaves" regiment, which infamously broke and ran at First Bull Run, but, at least for me, nothing like that immediately comes to mind for the 2nd Texas. My own lasting image of them is their incredibly brave and costly charge against Battery Robinett on October 4, 1862 at Corinth (you might recall the fairly frequently reproduced photograph of Texas bodies, including that of its colonel, William P. Rogers, piled up against the earthwork battery's exterior slope) and the regiment stalwartly defended the 2nd Texas Lunette at Vicksburg. The specific circumstances surrounding the substance of General Hardee's charges against the Texans at Shiloh doesn't ring a bell for me (was Hardee a major general who frequently singled out regiments for alleged bad behavior?), and I'm quite interested to learn more about that.

According to Gordon, public allegations of collective cowardice directed toward the 11th New York and 2nd Texas didn't much survive the conflict itself let alone stalk those individuals throughout the rest of their lives. More from the description: "By the end of the war, however, these charges were largely forgotten, replaced with the jingoistic rhetoric of martial heroism, a legacy that led many, including historians, to insist that all Civil War soldiers were heroes."

Booknotes: The "Immortal Six Hundred" and the Failure of the Civil War POW Exchange Process

New Arrival:

• The "Immortal Six Hundred" and the Failure of the Civil War POW Exchange Process by John F. Schmutz (McFarland, 2024).

Thanks to McFarland for breaking the site's near month-long cold spell of no new arrivals.

One among many of the war's large-scale human tragedies was the mid-war collapse of the POW exchange system. Both sides contributed to it, and, predictably, each blamed the other for the general breakdown. John Schmutz's The "Immortal Six Hundred" and the Failure of the Civil War POW Exchange Process is not intended to be a broad examination of the exchange system. Instead, it "focuses on 600 Confederate officers, made prisoners of war, who were dispatched to Charleston Harbor to act as human shields, and were subsequently imprisoned elsewhere and deliberately starved nearly to death. These actions were the result of the breakdown of the exchange cartel, as well as the "retaliation" policies promoted by the Secretary of War and the Lincoln administration."

The descriptive passage quoted above might be construed as adopting a particular angle and tone, but the author insists in the Preface that his book is "not intended to display either a pro-Confederacy or Yankee bias. Nor is it intended to glorify the "Lost Cause"...Nor is it merely a "victim's history"."(pg. 3)

At a glance, the book offers detailed accounts of the Six Hundred's initial capture and their assembly as a human shield on Morris Island, South Carolina. The men were housed in the line of fire as a retaliatory measure against the Confederate confinement of Union officers in the bombarded district of nearby Charleston. Detainment of the Confederate prisoners in camps located on Hilton Head Island and Fort Pulaski, where deprivations to the extent of causing preventable deaths have been alleged, are also detailed, as is the prisoners' final stop at Fort Delaware in 1865. The book does not contain a roster of the Six Hundred, but a pretty substantial selection of prisoner "Post-Release Sagas" is included in the appendix section. Another appendix offers some general commentary on the military prisons of both sides and analysis of the circumstances/consequences surrounding the national exchange system's suspension.

Review - "'Digging All Night and Fighting All Day': The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865" by Paul Brueske

["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). Hardcover, 6 maps, photos, illustrations, footnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxiv,243/331. ISBN:978-1-61121-710-0. $32.95]

By the summer of 1864, northern military planners and political leaders had been advocating a combined operation to seize Mobile, one of the South's largest cities and the western theater's most significant remaining blockade-running haven in the Gulf, for nearly two years. Everyone recognized Mobile's strategic importance, but organizing a campaign against it always got derailed by other priorities. When finally underway, Mobile's reduction proceeded in two major phases: (1) the August 1864 sea and land assault that wrested control of Mobile Bay from Confederate naval forces and captured the masonry forts guarding the bay's entrance, and (2) the March-April 1865 operation that drove the Confederates from their eastern shore fortifications and forced the evacuation of the city. One can argue that each of these stages was sufficiently spaced apart from the other to be considered a separate campaign, and no existing scholarship integrates the two into a single study devoting equal detail and attention to the events of 1864 and 1865.

In terms of modern book-length treatments currently available, readers wanting to learn about the August 1864 Battle of Mobile Bay commonly consult Chester Hearn's Mobile Bay and the Mobile Campaign: The Last Great Battles of the Civil War (1993), its content overwhelmingly weighted toward the 1864 campaign, or Jack Friend's West Wind, Flood Tide: The Battle of Mobile Bay (2004). Preceded only by Sean Michael O'Brien's scantily detailed Mobile, 1865: Last Stand of the Confederacy (2001) and even briefer works from John Waugh and Russell Blount, Paul Brueske's The Last Siege: The Mobile Campaign, Alabama 1865 (2018) provided readers with the first truly satisfactory book-length overview of the land campaign against Mobile. Even then, though, only limited space could be devoted to the campaign's two main actions, the siege of Spanish Fort and the storming of Fort Blakeley. In his new book, "Digging All Night and Fighting All Day": The Civil War Siege of Spanish Fort and the Mobile Campaign, 1865, Brueske is able to offer his full attention to the strongly contested fight over the east bay's southernmost guardian.

Some contend that the results of the 1864 Mobile Bay campaign effectively neutered the city of Mobile's strategic significance, rendering a massive spring campaign against it unnecessary, but Brueske effectively argues that proponents of that view unduly benefit from the advantages of hindsight. In addition to its value as a logistics and communications hub that effectively blocked Union forces from gaining river access into the Alabama interior, Mobile's defenses also housed in early 1865 one of the western theater's few remaining Confederate troop concentrations of any great consequence. The Confederate Army of Tennessee was never again able to conduct army-scale operations after its devastating defeat at Nashville in December 1864, but it was nevertheless the case that powerful sub-units, though reduced in manpower strength, retained combat effectiveness. Some were dispatched east to North Carolina and others south to Mobile. The handful of veteran brigades sent to Mobile formed the backbone of its defense in 1865, and Brueske makes a strong case for the city's enduring military significance during this waning period of the war.

Brueske's deeply researched operational and tactical-level narrative devotes equal attention to the military actions and strategic concerns of both sides. Union land forces during the 1865 Mobile Campaign were led by Major General Edward S. Canby, and strong elements of two army corps (Thirteenth and Sixteenth) were directed against Spanish Fort upon completion of a brief west bay diversion. Canby's men outnumbered the Confederate defenders of Spanish Fort, initially a mixture of garrison troops and Army of Tennessee veterans under Brigadier General Randall Gibson, by roughly eight to one. Many expected Canby to launch an immediate assault, but he elected instead to reduce the fort by siege approaches. After nearly two weeks of progress, Colonel James Geddes's brigade was able to traverse a covered route around and behind the Confederate left that was previously thought impassable to organized forces. His thinning defenses finally unhinged by Geddes's bold action, Gibson withdrew the garrison overnight, escaping under the enemy's noses using a previously built plank causeway to march north to safety. There was little time for Gibson and his men to celebrate their close call, however, as the subsequent storming of Fort Blakeley left too few men overall to attempt a final combined defense of Mobile. The city's remaining garrison, including Gibson's command, withdrew upriver to Meridian, Mississippi and surrendered soon after.

Events of the two-week siege are meticulously recounted in the text and their details visually well represented in the accompanying cartography. All of the elements of offensive and defensive siegecraft honed by both sides during the war were displayed by the Spanish Fort combatants, including controversial use by the Confederates of subterra shells. Brueske credits the veteran presence of Gibson and the stubborn fortitude of his men for dragging out the operation as long as possible. Gibson's Confederates were able to make expert use of the preexisting earthworks and slowed enemy progress through well-timed sorties and effective sharpshooting. The besiegers were initially stymied through lavish expenditures of rifle and artillery ammunition along with naval support fire, but dwindling powder, bullet, and shell stocks eventually forced the Confederates to adopt drastic cutbacks. With Rebel guns increasingly silent in response, Union superiority in manpower and firepower gradually gained ascendancy. After two weeks, the garrison was forced to either surrender or withdraw. As Brueske details in the book, the latter operation was astoundingly successful.

The siege was noteworthy for the Confederate Navy arguably having a greater impact than its more typically dominant Union counterpart. Before ammunition ran short, the heavy guns of the Confederate naval squadron, in particular its pair of partially completed ironclads, was able to successfully hinder the Union advance by providing enfilade fire down the line. Rear areas also came under heavy fire, disrupting Union command and control. Additionally, Confederate vessels were able to ferry men, guns, and supplies into the fort (and out, as necessary) relatively unhindered. On the Union side, Admiral Henry Thatcher struggled to get his ships within range close enough to materially affect events. The east bay's network of distant shoals, water obstructions, and well-placed torpedoes hindered Thatcher's approach toward Spanish Fort and its supporting batteries, and the admiral's insufficient precautions against floating mines contributed to the shallow water sinking of two monitors and a tinclad.

Though respected by his peers, Canby was widely known to be an abundantly cautious general, and many critics (including U.S. Grant then and later) condemned his methodical approach to reducing the east bay forts as not keeping requisite pace with military events developing elsewhere. Nothing in Brueske's study is about significantly elevating Canby's modest historical stature among Union Civil War army commanders, but he does persuasively lead readers to approach Canby by fairly assessing the general's actions within the context of what was known and expected at the time. Canby initially had to overcome challenging weather limitations (ones that his critics consistently overlook), but he also got the job done with relatively low casualties. We can never know for certain whether an all-out assault to open the campaign would have resulted in fewer overall casualties than those accumulated over the two-week siege, but one can certainly take the position that the probability of suffering high casualties against the small but well led, strongly situated, and highly motivated band of Confederate defenders backed by plentiful artillery made an immediate attack not worth the risks involved. At this stage of the war, no apology was needed for employing a methodical approach that minimized casualties.

A very useful compilation of supplemental material is assembled in the volume's extensive appendix section. Found within are detailed army and navy orders of battle for both sides, lists of casualties and naval vessels lost, POW numbers, and an inventory of captured stores. Another appendix traces the postwar journey of the siege's most famous cannon, the Lady Slocomb. Preservation information is also provided as is a brief but interesting look at the history of the old Spanish Fort, its colonial period origins (Spanish versus British) still in dispute.

In addition to providing the Civil War literature with the first full-length account of the siege of Spanish Fort, the strategic arguments presented in Paul Brueske's "Digging All Night and Fighting All Day" (combined with the author's earlier work on the campaign) offer powerful counterpoints to those that maintain that the late timing and slow pacing of the 1865 Mobile Campaign essentially erased its strategic utility within the overall plan to end the war that spring. Highly recommended.