Booknotes: Lincoln's Campaign Biographies

New Arrival:

• Lincoln's Campaign Biographies by Thomas A. Horrocks (SIU Press, 2024).

This is the 2024 paperback reissue of the original 2014 hardcover edition, which is part of SIU Press's long-running Concise Lincoln Library series.

In pre-modern American political history, campaign biographies provided a great way to for a presidential campaign to expose its candidate to a wide audience while at the same time controlling the message. From the description: "During the 1860 and 1864 presidential campaigns, Abraham Lincoln was the subject of over twenty campaign biographies. In this innovative study, Thomas A. Horrocks examines the role that these publications played in shaping an image of Lincoln that would resonate with voters and explores the vision of Lincoln that the biographies crafted, the changes in this vision over the course of four years, and the impact of these works on the outcome of the elections."

According to Horrocks, Lincoln's campaigns were more adept than most when it came to using the campaign biography as an effective election tool. More from the description: "Horrocks investigates Lincoln’s campaign biographies within the context of the critical relationship between print and politics in nineteenth-century America and compares the works about Lincoln with other presidential campaign biographies of the era. Horrocks shows that more than most politicians of his day, Lincoln deeply appreciated and understood the influence and the power of the printed word."

Campaign biographies were also useful when it became necessary, or simply advantageous, for a candidate's public face to shift and evolve. That was certainly the case between 1860 and 1864. More: "The 1860 campaign biographies introduced to America “Honest Abe, the Rail Splitter,” a trustworthy, rugged candidate who appealed to rural Americans. When Lincoln ran for reelection in 1864, the second round of campaign biographies complemented this earlier portrait of Lincoln with a new, paternal figure, “Father Abraham,” more appropriate for Americans enduring a bloody civil war."

In the end, Thomas Horrocks's Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies "provides a new perspective for those seeking a better understanding of the sixteenth president and two of the most critical elections in American history."

Booknotes: A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 2

New Arrival:

• A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill by A. Wilson Greene (UNC Press, 2025).

The long-awaited second installment of A. Wilson Greene's epic three-volume series A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg has arrived. The excellent from top to bottom A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 1: From the Crossing of the James to the Crater arrived on our doorsteps back in 2018, so powers of recall will have to be sharp in order to pick up on the full range of recurring themes (and hopefully the Volume 1 review linked just above will assist in that area to some degree).

As stated in the Preface, A Campaign of Giants - The Battle for Petersburg, Volume 2: From the Crater's Aftermath to the Battle of Burgess Mill covers the period "between August 1 and the end of October." Thus, it encompasses the "Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Petersburg Offensives, all entailing concurrent efforts south of the Appomattox River and north of the James River. August also witnessed one of the war's greatest acts of sabotage, while in September the Confederate cavalry conducted a spectacular raid behind Union lines" (pp. xii-xiii). "But as winter approached, Grant had captured one of Lee’s primary supply routes and extended the lines around Petersburg and Richmond to some thirty-five miles."

If the past few decades of Petersburg Campaign scholarship haven't already disabused you of the common notion that its ten months were generally lacking in operational and tactical-level features of interest, Greene's series should be thoroughly convincing. As was the case with Volume 1, Volume 2 enhances its narrative through extensive map coverage, too. From the description: "Supported by thirty-four detailed maps, Greene’s narrative chronicles these bloody engagements using many previously unpublished primary accounts from common soldiers and ranking officers alike. The struggle for Petersburg is often characterized as a siege, but Greene’s narrative demonstrates that it was dynamic, involving maneuver and combat equal in intensity to that of any major Civil War operation."

In a nice touch, Greene dedicates this volume to Richard Sommers, who passed away the year following Volume 1's release. Grant and Lee were the giants who actually fought the campaign, but Sommers was also a giant, albeit of a different sort. Through his masterwork Richmond Redeemed and beyond, Sommers established himself as the dean of Petersburg Campaign historians, his work influencing all who followed in his footsteps.

Booknotes: The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War

New Arrival:

• The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment by James Marten (UNC Press, 2025).

The Sixth Wisconsin was, as we all know, an integral component of one of the most celebrated infantry brigades produced by either side, the Iron Brigade. "One of the core units of the famed Iron Brigade, the Sixth was organized in July 1861 and mustered out in the summer of 1865, playing major roles at Second Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg, and in the Overland campaign of 1864." The unit's service history has been well documented in that integrated context (and in field grade officer Rufus Dawes's well-used memoir based on his wartime writings), but I am not aware of any prior full-length regimental history. According to James Marten, author of The Sixth Wisconsin and the Long Civil War: The Biography of a Regiment, that might still be the case, as he categorically states that his book "is not a regimental history," but rather, as he calls it, a "regimental biography." Like a biography covering an individual's life, Marten's book "traces the birth, education, maturation, aging, and decline of its subject" (pg. 3).

From the description: "Reimagining one of the oldest genres of Civil War history," Marten's own brand of regimental study does not aim to recount in detail the Sixth's part in the various campaigns and battles. From the author's point of view, "the regiment’s full history is found in the stories of its men learning to fight and endure far from home amid violence, illness, and death, and in the lives of families that hung on every word in letters and news from the front lines. Those stories also unfolded long after the war’s end, as veterans sought to make sense of their experiences and home communities struggled to care for those who returned with unhealed wounds." Marten branches off from modern Civil War community, memory, and veteran studies by following "a single regiment through the entire gamut of experiences, from peace to war and back again" (pg. 4).

In his introduction, Marten explains his main goals for the book at some length. The first is to present the veteran lives of the Sixth's surviving members as being just as important as their soldier lives. This gets into the "long Civil War" part of the title. Most inspired by the focus and style of soldier studies from Gerald Linderman, Earl Hess, and Peter Carmichael, the second of Marten's goals is to "enrich and complicate the way we think about common soldiers' experiences." The third central intention is to explain, through the eyes of Sixth Wisconsin soldiers along with their loves ones and home communities, "how the Civil War generation invented the very idea of war" in the sense of "inventing a vocabulary, a series of acceptable responses," and "a way of explaining it to others and themselves." Finally, Marten uses his biography of the Sixth to develop the idea of "the Civil War regiment as a particular kind of constructed community" (pgs. 5-6). Through all of this, it is hoped that "readers will understand the long history of the Civil War" in a new way.