Review - "The Second Manassas Campaign" by Janney & Shively, eds.

[The Second Manassas Campaign edited by Caroline E. Janney & Kathryn J. Shively (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). Hardcover, 3 maps, figures, chapter notes, bibliographical essay, index. Pp. 265. ISBN:978-1-4696-8536-6. $34.95]

With this latest release, there are now an even dozen titles in UNC Press's Military Campaigns of the Civil War series. With the earlier volumes reissued in paperback format, it happily appears that all of them remain in print. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and we've now reached the penultimate addition to the series, The Second Manassas Campaign. Though theme and content mix has altered over time, reflective of evolving scholarly trends, each anthology still aims to "reexamine common assumptions about pivotal campaigns, the experiences of major figures and common soldiers involved in the fighting, the connection between strategy and tactics on the ground, and the political and social ramifications of battles on the respective home fronts." The nine contributions to this volume collectively address that mission statement in fine fashion.

Union Army logistics is frequently, and with much evidentiary justification, presented as a marvel of volume and efficiency, but it took some time to get there. Steven Stotelmyer's work has highlighted serious gaps in the post-Antietam supply chain, but this essay shows that the shortfalls experienced during the fall of 1862 were an extension of earlier problems in the theater. Citing near logistical collapse as a major contributing factor to Union defeat at Second Manassas, contributor and volume co-editor Kathryn Shively paints a strong picture of the collective consequences of poor top-down decision-making (from Army of Virginia commander John Pope's almost laughable attempts at logistical micromanagement to his ill-timed dismissal of railroad specialist Herman Haupt), extreme levels of military-civilian traffic congestion along the Washington-Fredericksburg corridor, and lack of system when it came to balancing the Army of Virginia's own prodigious needs in the areas of food, forage, supplies, and medical needs with the sudden influx of reinforcements that needed transportation to the front. Significantly, her own views on some matters run counter to historian John Matsui's thesis, developed in his book The First Republican Army (2017), of the Army of Virginia as a distinctive radicalizing force of "hard war" advocacy within the Union war effort. Shively instead sees the crux of Pope's general orders as being an almost desperate attempt to establish order and discipline in his badly administered army, the harshness directed toward civilians being little different from what he and his military superior, Henry Halleck, had already done in Missouri much earlier. She also cites Pope's personal dismay at his army's interpretation of his orders as giving license to plunder the populace and his apparent ignoring of the growing black refugee problem as additional evidence of the prioritization of practical military matters over ideologically driven ones. What a harried Pope, knee deep in a very fluid military situation, might have done above and beyond what his subordinates had already been doing to alleviate the black refugee situation before his arrival (by either employing them with the army or directing them behind Union lines toward Washington, as outlined in the following essay by John Hennessy) is unaddressed.

Hennessy's chapter detailing how the infantry corps that would eventually comprise the Army of Virginia confronted slavery provides yet another example of the institution being critically disrupted, even destroyed, wherever heavy Union forces made their presence felt. This connection was certainly well known at the time. He agrees with Shively that Pope was less of an instigating force in bringing hard war to the Old Dominion countryside than he was an obliging commander carrying out the wishes and directives of both the President and the Congress. There is even some tantalizing evidence hinting at the possibility that much of the rhetorical bombast that Pope has been ridiculed over, then and now, actually originated from Secretary of War Edwin Stanton's office.

In contrast to Shively's interpretation of Pope's military-political agency as being primarily reactive in nature, Cecily Zander presents the general and his actions in ways that largely hearken back to their more traditional portrayal in the literature, with his failure to achieve a signal military victory in the field destroying any lasting footprint he might have left in the theater. Her article serves as a powerful reminder that the Civil War's political initiatives, especially ones invoking radical transformations, had to be paired with military victory in order to be credibly sustained.

Original series editor Gary Gallagher opens his essay by noting that the Battle of Second Manassas, sandwiched between the Peninsula/Seven Days and Maryland campaigns, has (until quite recently) suffered undue neglect, at least on a standalone basis. He goes on to explain that much of that can be traced back to the war itself, when the battle was viewed by many Confederate supporters as just one part of a sweeping series of events that collectively reshaped the war in the East, and by extension the course of the war itself. Of the modern interpretations of this period, the fullest and arguably best account can be found in B.F. Cooling's Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam (2007). Gallagher's interpretation of that strategic metamorphosis includes a geographic reorientation of the theater seat of war from the outskirts of one capital to another and a fundamental change in the character of Confederate strategy from passive defense to aggressive offense. Closely tied to both was the emergence of Robert E. Lee, who still lagged behind Stonewall Jackson in terms of popular acclaim but nevertheless gave the Confederacy an army commander that inspired confidence in the future. As Gallagher demonstrates here and in previous writings, the new style of war fought in the East proved enormously popular on both the Confederate military and home fronts, with victory (at least as measured through battlefield success) making the heavy casualties incurred more palatable.

The most interesting element of Peter Luebke's chapter, which explores the sources and nature of Lee's 1861-62 strategizing, is the bundle of lessons the Virginian drew from his frustrating time spent in command of the military department tasked with managing Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida's overextended coastal defenses. As Luebke outlines, the local/regional situation along the Lower Atlantic coast (where Union forces, on land and sea, possessed—whenever they had the will to do so—the capability of quickly concentrating overwhelming numbers and firepower against scattered defenders) mirrored the Confederacy's strategic challenges as a whole. The answer, seizing the initiative by concentrating one's own forces and employing risk-taking aggression utilizing rapid maneuver to put enemy plans in disarray and hopefully destroy significant parts of their forces by gaining local superiority at the point of attack, formed the core of Lee's response to taking command in Virginia with George McClellan's army at the gates of Richmond. That operational and strategic philosophy was also employed against Pope's growing concentration of forces in central Virginia.

Common to every volume in the series are essays recounting the key actions of prominent officers and unit formations. Fitting that mold in The Second Manassas Campaign are a pair of chapters, James Marten's focus on the Sixth Wisconsin at Brawner's Farm and Keith Bohannon's review of the part John Bell Hood played in delivering the resounding Confederate victory at Second Manassas. Marten not only traces the Sixth's part in the bloody fighting between what would become the Iron Brigade and Jackson's men but also integrates historical memory and home front components into his narrative. Bohannon's recounting of Hood's initiation to division command is generally laudatory in nature, and, although Hood committed a serious error in assigning a staff officer to lead the Texas Brigade, the writer deems his subject's overall leadership performance on the plains of Manassas as heralding a bright future in the ANV high command. Revisiting the infamous Fitz John Porter trial and conviction as well as that general's long and bumpy road to official redemption, William Marvel's chapter offers a spirited overview of salient points more fully addressed inside his book-length biographical study Radical Sacrifice: The Rise and Ruin of Fitz John Porter (2021) [site review].

Finally, co-editor Caroline Janney's essay tracks both the placement of the first Second Manassas battlefield monuments (a pair of permanent markers installed at Groveton and Henry Hill, both of which were built by Union soldiers just as the war in the East concluded) and the tortuous path toward securing protection via legislative creation of Manassas National Battlefield Park. This concluding chapter yet again reminds us that, like the friction of war itself, nothing is straightforward where partisan politics is involved.

It's a pretty tired reviewing cliche to say that an essay collection offers 'something for everyone,' but this volume's strong addressing of a wide range of subjects, and this series as a whole, really does achieve that type of impact better than most others. Of added interest are elements of the anthology that amplify, and in some cases even challenge, the conclusions of fellow contributors. Now it's on to First Manassas and the ironic outcome of the first major battle of the war being the last volume in the grand old Military Campaigns of the Civil War series.