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.

Coming Soon (December '24 Edition)

Scheduled for DEC 2024¹:
• The "Immortal Six Hundred" and the Failure of the Civil War POW Exchange Process by John Schmutz.
• A Union Tested: The Civil War Letters of Cimbaline and Henry Fike ed. by Jeremy Neely.
• In the Thickest of the Fray: Mississippians At Gettysburg ─ In Their Own Words by Owen & Ashton.

Comments: The Schmutz title is already in general release and available for purchase. I've been tracking this stuff online for twenty years now and can't recall a December this bare. I hope the Oct-Nov stragglers that I've been wanting/expecting arrive very soon so they can considered for the year-end list. I am very curious to find out how the first half of 2025 will play out. Hopefully, 2024 was just the bottom of a curve.

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: Hell by the Acre

New Arrival:

• Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January 1863 by Daniel A. Masters (Savas Beatie, 2025).

Stones River was an incredibly costly bit of concentrated mayhem, its level of bloodiness even more pronounced given the relatively small size (by major Civil War battle standards) of the two armies involved and the compactness of the battlefield.

From the description: "The opposing armies—44,000 men under Rosecrans and 37,000 under Bragg—locked bayonets on December 31, 1862, in some of the hardest fighting of the war. Bragg’s initial attack drove the Federals back nearly three miles, captured 29 cannons, and thousands of prisoners. Somehow the Union lines held firm during the critical fighting along the Nashville Pike that afternoon against repeated determined attacks that left both armies bloodied and exhausted. The decisive moment came two days later when, in the fading afternoon of January 2, 1863, Bragg launched an assault on an isolated Union division on the east bank of Stones River. The Confederates once again enjoyed initial success only to be repulsed by 58 Union guns combined with a daring counterattack. This repulse broke Bragg’s hold on Murfreesboro. He retreated the following night, leaving Rosecrans and his Cumberland army victors of the field."

Serious students of the Stones River/Murfreesboro campaign and battle are fortunate to have a number of major modern works at their fingertips. The first edition of James Lee McDonough's Stones River: Bloody Winter in Tennessee was published in 1980. That was followed in 1989 by Peter Cozzens's No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River. In 2012, prolific western theater specialist Larry Daniel made his own contribution with Battle of Stones River: The Forgotten Conflict Between the Confederate Army of Tennessee and the Union Army of the Cumberland. The Cozzens and Daniel titles are roughly similar in depth. In terms of following the actions of every unit involved (down to each regiment and battery from both sides) throughout the course of the campaign and battle, nothing is more detailed than Lanny Smith's two extraordinary self-published tomes 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). The other books referenced above are easily found, but both Smith books are long out of print and likely unobtainable today outside of a very lucky eBay/used bookstore find. Most recently, the mounted forces of both sides are placed at the forefront in Dennis Belcher's The Cavalries at Stones River: An Analytical History (2017).

Fast forward to today and readers just might have in Daniel Masters's Hell by the Acre: A Narrative History of the Stones River Campaign, November 1862-January 1863, which offers detailed perspectives of the campaign from the strategic level down to the views of those on the ground, the new standard when it comes to comprehensive single-volume treatments. At over 600 pages of main narrative, Masters's book is positively David Powellian in scope. Its bibliography displays strong breadth and depth of source materials consulted, and the 17 maps from Edward Alexander are filled with meticulously rendered small-unit and terrain details. My first impressions are very positive, and I'm looking forward to reading this.

Booknotes: Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920

New Arrival:

• Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920 by Gregg Andrews (LSU Press, 2024).

From the description: Hard Times in an American Workhouse, 1853–1920 "is the first comprehensive examination of a workhouse in the United States, offering a critical history of the institution in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Using the Old St. Louis Workhouse as a representative example, award-winning historian Gregg Andrews brings to life individual stories of men and women sentenced to this debtors’ prison to break rocks in the quarry, sew clothing, scrub cell floors and walls, or toil in its brush factory."

Obviously, this is a penal system history and not a Civil War history. Though the extensive period covered in the book includes the years 1861-65, nearly all of the text examines the postwar era and beyond. One might be interested in finding out how the unprecedented turmoil in St. Louis caused by secession and Civil War affected how the workhouse was run, but it doesn't appear (at least by my cursory thumb through) to be something addressed by the study. It is mentioned that the end of the Civil War in 1865 marked the beginning of a steep rise in prosecuting vagrancy offenses as a widespread effort to control who was on the streets.

More from the description: "Most inmates, too poor to pay requisite fines, came through the city’s police courts on charges of vagrancy, drunkenness, disturbing the peace, or violating some other ordinance." The casting of such a wide net led to workhouses becoming "overcrowded and inhospitable facilities that housed hardcore felons and young street toughs along with prostitutes, petty thieves, peace disturbers, political dissenters, “levee rats,” adulterers, and those who suffered from alcohol and drug addiction. Officials even funneled the elderly, the mentally disabled, and the physically infirm into the workhouse system."

Treatment of prisoners in the St. Louis workhouse was very harsh. More: "The ordinance that created the St. Louis complex in 1843 banned corporal punishment, but shackles, chains, and the whipping post remained central to the institution’s attempts to impose discipline. Officers also banished more recalcitrant inmates to solitary confinement in the “bull pen,” where they subsisted on little more than bread and water."

Such records of mistreatment led to the facility being targeted by concerned reformers. According to Andrews, "(t)he best opportunity for lasting change came during the Progressive Era, but the limited contours of progressivism in St. Louis thwarted reformers’ efforts. The defeat of a municipal bond issue in 1920 effectively ended plans to replace the urban industrial workhouse model with a more humane municipal farm system championed by Progressives."

Review - "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

[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). Hardcover, color maps, text, orders of battle, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages:xiv,305. ISBN:978-1-61121-708-7. $39.95]

Every new addition to the Savas Beatie Military Atlas Series is cause for celebration, and Bradley Gottfried's The Maps of Second Bull Run is no exception. The tenth volume in the series, it covers the period of time during the summer of 1862 that witnessed a series of sharp clashes between Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia and John Pope's recently organized Army of Virginia, the latter reinforced (not quickly enough in the opinion of many critics) by advance elements of George McClellan's Army of the Potomac. Events fully addressed in the atlas include the Battle of Cedar Mountain, the rear guard action at Kettle Run, the contest over possession of Thoroughfare Gap, the Battle of Brawner's Farm, the featured Second Manassas battle, and the Battle of Chantilly.

For those unfamiliar with the general format, when you open the book there is a full-page, multi-color map on the right-hand side and facing it on the left is a page filled with a narrative description of the action depicted on the corresponding map. Those pairings are further organized into "map sets" that collectively address smaller engagements in their entirety, operational interludes between battles, and key phases of the larger battles. In this case, their are twenty-four maps sets arranged in six parts, the whole housing 122 maps.

Several maps address the overall strategic situation at the onset of the campaign, but the overwhelming majority are of operational and tactical natures. Generally speaking, the tactical-scale maps are of two main types. One depicts larger sectors of the battlefield involving multiple divisions on each side, and the other represents much more close-in views of brigade-scale actions. Unit scale ranges from corps and divisions on the operational map sets to individual regiments and batteries on the tactical ones. Environmental map features include the expected man-made and natural elements (ex. roads, railroads, rivers, streams, vegetation, fence lines, crops, and the most prominent elevation lines) without becoming too busy. Distance scale and action time intervals are clearly denoted, as is compass direction. The last is important to keep in mind as many/most of the operational-scale maps are offset by 90 degrees (so north is to the left on those instead of up) in order to take advantage of that page dimension's wider lateral space.

In most military atlases, the maps (appropriately enough) are front and center and explanatory text is relegated to a secondary role at best. This series distinctively, perhaps even uniquely, offers the best of both worlds. It should really be called a 'history and atlas' series. Each volume contains a fully realized narrative account of the campaign and battle, one that provides abundant small-unit detail and transitions seamlessly from page to page. Integrated into map and text is a matching number system for highlighting the most noteworthy events. There is some analysis of decision-making and range of options available to commanders (and in that analysis Gottfried frequently defers to the written opinions of subject matter experts such as Second Manassas leading light John Hennessy), but the bulk of the text is reserved for describing movements and actions depicted on the facing map. Gottfried's explanatory endnotes frequently offer additional detail and commentary, too. Nearly every paragraph incorporates some pithy phrase or stirring passage from a participant account. That humanizing element inserted throughout the book effectively prevents the text from becoming just a dry recitation of unit movements and actions.

Gottfried's research is grounded in a solid body of manuscript resources, newspapers, government documents, books (particularly unit histories), and articles. As noted in the introduction, the narrative is intended to be a synthesis of the best available sources rather than a platform for new interpretation from the author. For a book of this type, that's likely the most common reader expectation.

As good as the narrative content is overall, there are some presentational problems that mar it. Numerous errors (ex. typos, missing words in sentences, and use of words that don't match intended meaning) made it through final editing. In the introduction, the author humbly asks readers to report mistakes that can be corrected in future printings. An example of a confusion-spawning error was the frequent misrepresentation of Confederate Col. Thomas Garnett's name. In Gottfried's index he is incorrectly listed as Thomas "Garrett" and both names (Garnett and Garrett) are used interchangeably within the map-facing text coverage of the Cedar Mountain fighting (on the maps, his command is correctly labeled as Garnett's brigade). In another case, Union Col. James Nagle's name is correct on the maps and in the index, but it is incorrectly spelled "Nagel" in the facing page titles and descriptive text starting on page 132.

Aforementioned flaws in presentation aside, The Maps of Second Bull Run is another excellent entry in the series. The best military atlas enhances reader understanding in ways that can only be achieved through effective leveraging of the kind of visual learning unique to cartography. That is very much the case with this volume. That strong measure of success, in combination with what is essentially a new full-length historical account of the campaign and battle, makes the book well worthy of recommendation.

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."