Booknotes: Glorious Courage

New Arrival:

• Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War by Sarah Kay Bierle (Savas Beatie, 2025).

Major John Pelham had numerous things going for him on his path to legendary status among Civil War artillerymen. In Pelham, youth and high bravery were complemented with great leadership and competence, the combination drawing the personal attention and approbation of Lee himself. He was the Confederate Army's premier handler of horse artillery, and in commanding the long arm of Jeb Stuart's cavalry there was never a lack of visibility. Being mortally wounded in battle during the peak period of the Army of Northern Virginia's dominance of the eastern theater (in a reckless charge at Kelly's Ford in March 1863) further cemented Pelham's place among the Confederacy's most celebrated military martyrs.

From the description: "“It is glorious to see such courage in one so young!” So declared Confederate General Robert E. Lee on December 13, 1862, during the battle of Fredericksburg as he watched Major John Pelham fight at least five Union batteries with just one lone gun. The dashing and handsome 24-year-old Alabama officer earned the compliments and admiration of his men, the war gods of Virginia (Lee, Jackson, and Stuart), and Southern society—all while helping transform the concept of horse artillery on Civil War battlefields across Virginia and Maryland."

Sarah Kay Bierle's Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War, part of the Emerging Civil War series, "reconsiders Pelham’s extraordinary, if short, life." Her biography explores his battlefield greatness as well as his flaws. The resulting portrait frames Pelham's "place in history as he lived it, not varnished with the perspectives shoved upon him by later generations."

The book is a cradle to grave biography that covers Pelham's early life, his West Point education, his Civil War activities, and his historical memory. As we've come to expect from ECW titles in general, copious photographs and other illustrations pack the volume along with eight maps tracing Pelham's campaign and battlefield exploits. Other aspects of Pelham's life and Civil War career, such as his relationships with women, his parallels with G.A. Custer, and the CVBT's preservation efforts at "Pelham's Corner" (Fredericksburg), are explored in the appendix section.

Booknotes: Decisions at Forts Henry and Donelson

New Arrival:

• Decisions at Forts Henry and Donelson: The Twenty One Critical Decisions that Defined the Battles by Hank Koopman [(Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series) U Tenn Press, 2025].

From the description: "The Battles of Forts Henry and Donelson took place in February of 1862 and were early indicators of the success the US would have in the Civil War’s Western Theater. Due to Kentucky’s neutrality at the time, Brig. Gen. Daniel S. Donelson was instructed to find suitable sites for fortification along the Tennessee River but just inside the state boundaries of Tennessee. Forts Henry and Donelson were constructed in the summer of 1861 and were quickly identified by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant as strategic fortifications that, if conquered, would open the Federal Army’s path to Alabama and Mississippi. Fort Henry fell to Federal control on February 6, 1862, and Fort Donelson fell six days later. With the Tennessee and Mississippi Rivers now open to Federal gunboats, Grant and his army would head southwest to Memphis and on to Vicksburg."

This was one of those Civil War campaigns in which the actions of smaller forces produced enormous strategic consequences. While it may not have been, as Kendall Gott maintains, "Where the South Lost the War," there is no denying that the twin Union victories at Henry and Donelson were unmitigated disasters for Confederate fortunes. It also firmly placed the careers of two key generals of the war, Confederate western department commander Albert Sidney Johnston and Union army commander U.S. Grant, on opposite trajectories that were cemented conclusively at Shiloh. That things might have turned out differently at key moments during the campaign makes Henry-Donelson a strong candidate for an interesting addition to University of Tennessee Press's Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series.

More from the description: Hank Koopman's Decisions at Forts Henry and Donelson: The Twenty One Critical Decisions that Defined the Battles "explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Federal commanders during the battle and how these decisions shaped its outcome. Rather than offering a history of the battle, Hank Koopman hones in on a sequence of critical decisions made by commanders on both sides of the conflict to provide a blueprint of the Battles of Forts Henry and Donelson at their 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."

Of added interest is the presence of a new voice in the series, this being Koopman's first contribution. I look forward to delving into his interpretation of the campaign's key moments and how well he works within the well-established structure of the series.

Coming Soon (June '25 Edition)

Scheduled for JUN 2025¹:
• Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War by Sarah Kay Bierle.
• Reckless in their Statements: Challenging History's Harshest Criticisms of Albert Sidney Johnston in the Civil War by Leigh Goggin.
• Lincoln’s Lady Spymaster: The Untold Story of the Abolitionist Southern Belle Who Helped Win the Civil War by Gerri Willis.
• The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign by Nese & Harding.
• Politics and Memory: Civil War Monuments in Gilded Age New York by Akela Reason.
• American Civil War Amphibious Tactics by Ron Field.
• West Virginia's War: The Civil War in Documents by William Kerrigan.
• The National Tribune Remembers the Atlanta Campaign: Battles, Skirmishes, Marches, and Camp Life as Recalled by the Union Veterans Themselves ed. by Stephen Davis.
• The Civil War by Jeremy Black.

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.

Upcoming Honey Springs battle study

Advance notice of anthropologist/archaeologist William Lees's Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield (Sept '25) recently popped up. Needless to say, my interest was immediately piqued.

Readers who have been following this site over its nearly two decades of existence know what types of subject matter grab me most, and this one checks a lot of boxes for me. First off, the long-awaited return of Texas A&M University Press to a Civil War topic is worthy of celebration. Check. An original contribution to Trans-Mississippi theater military history (which has been languishing in recent years). Check. First book-length study of one of the most significant battles fought in Indian Territory. Check. Battlefield archaeology being a central component of the study. Check. All nice. I can hardly wait to get my hands on a copy of it.

Booknotes: Late to the Fight

New Arrival:

• Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg by Alexandre F. Caillot (LSU Press, 2025).

From the description: In Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg, historian Alexandre Caillot "explores the combat performance of the Union soldiers who filled newly raised regiments that fought through the Civil War’s final year. Historians have typically regarded these late enlistees as substandard to those who signed on at the war’s start. Using the experiences of the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiments to assess the record of late-arriving soldiers under fire, Caillot shows that these forgotten boys in blue left behind a record of valor and sacrifice essential to achieving the destruction of the Confederacy."

Focusing on late-war volunteer units that fought in the eastern theater, this looks like a strong companion work to pair with Edwin Rutan's excellent High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor (2024). In addition to the more specific insights offered through concentrating one's efforts on only two regiments, it'll be interesting to compare how Caillot defines and assesses combat performance/effectiveness with how Rutan did so in his broader examination.

So why the 17th Vermont and 31st Maine? According to the introduction, they were selected because both regiments were conventional infantry, their ranks were filled with new enlistees, no conscripts served in either, and they shared the same heavy combat record. With both assigned to the Second Brigade of the Ninth Corps's Second Division, they fought in the same eight battles that were part of the 1864-65 Overland and Richmond-Petersburg campaigns. Thus, the author feels that the two regiments were "ideal choices for a comparative study of combat performance because of their similar experiences" (pg. 5).

Booknotes: Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas

New Arrival:

• Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs by Paul A. Thomas & Matt M. Matthews (Arcadia Pub and The Hist Press, 2025).

From the description: "Both before and during the American Civil War, ragtag groups of Kansas militants patrolled the Kansas-Missouri border. Known as “Jayhawkers” and later “Red Legs,” they raided anyone they believed sympathetic to secession. For many in the state, these irregular warriors were heroes fighting for a Free Kansas and preservation of the Union; for their victims, these men were little more than opportunistic thieves."

The pro-Union/antislavery irregulars that operated along the Missouri-Kansas borderland have long been overshadowed by their pro-Confederate counterparts, especially Quantrill's raiders and lieutenants. That has changed a great deal in recent years, prominently through with a pair of James Lane biographies from the early 2000s, a 2009 history of the Lane Brigade, and, most recently, two James Montgomery biographies released in 2022 and 2023. In addition to revisiting the lives and Civil War careers those two towering Border War figures, Paul Thomas and Matt Matthews's Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs offers mini-biographies of four other leading individuals: Charles "Doc" Jennison, George Hoyt, Marshall Cleveland, and William Tough (the latter pair probably the least commonly recognized among the wider Civil War readership).

History has presented the Border War militants of both sides in a variety of ways that have changed over time. In their own words, Thomas and Matthews "have consciously chosen to neither gloss over nor exaggerate" the more infamous actions of the Kansas Jayhawkers. Instead, they "have attempted to describe these men in a way that fairly highlights the diverse and often complex reasons they did what they did." Their book might be summarized as "the story of both good and bad men who did good and bad things" (pg. 18).

Review - "The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864" by Eric Wittenberg

[The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864 by Eric J. Wittenberg (Savas Beatie, 2025). Hardcover, 5 maps, photos, illustrations, appendix section, footnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:ix,127/173. ISBN:978-1-61121-619-6. $29.95]

After the Dix-Hill exchange cartel dissolved amid mutual recriminations and irresolvable differences, the prisoner of war camps of both sides, which were unprepared for that eventuality, rapidly filled to overcrowding. Some of the worst conditions on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line were found at Point Lookout, Maryland, which held captive roughly 15,000 Confederates by the summer of 1864. If there was a chance that those prisoners could somehow be freed and reintroduced into the depleted ranks of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, any risks involved in the process would be well worth it. Timed to coincide with, and branch off from, Confederate general Jubal Early's raid on Washington by way of the lower Shenandoah Valley, just such a daring scheme was put into play by Confederate authorities. Its history is recounted in Eric Wittenberg's The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864.

With Point Lookout's military prison and hospital complex separated from Confederate lines by a wide body of water, the camp was to be liberated through the tandem efforts of cavalry raiders moving down the peninsula from above and an amphibious force landing directly at the point from below. Unfortunately for its Confederate planners, all-important operational secrecy was lost right off the bat. With public discussion of the naval raid (which would have been led by one of the Confederate Navy's most competent and highly respected officers, John Taylor Wood) overheard on city streets, the waterborne component was abruptly cancelled. Though doing so basically wrecked the entire plan, cancellation was necessary given U.S. naval supremacy in the Chesapeake and all along the coastal approaches to the bay.

The ground component of the operation, however, went ahead as planned. On July 9, Confederate Brigadier General, and Marylander himself, Bradley Johnson left the main body of Early's army at Frederick and initiated his part of the Point Lookout operation. Ranging in a wide arc across central Maryland and zig-zagging down toward Washington (and, along the way, burning the country home of Maryland Governor Augustus Bradford in retaliation for Union general David Hunter's firing of Virginia Governor John Letcher's Lexington house), Johnson slipped past Washington to the northeast and continued on toward his goal. The expedition was operating under a very tight timetable (made even more unyielding by a two-day delay in receipt of orders for its launch), however, and Johnson was forced to turn back one-hundred miles from the POW camp. How much closer he might have gotten had all extraneous activities been ruthlessly excised is difficult to assess.

On the other hand, while Johnson was ordered back well before reaching his destination, Major Harry Gilmor's side raid (July 10-14), aimed toward threatening Baltimore, disrupting its rail and telegraph communications with the North, and destroying key bridges, achieved quite a bit for its size (only 150 troopers were assigned to it). Fanning out north of Baltimore, Gilmor applied the torch to what infrastructure he could and caused the enemy general consternation. A particularly interesting episode involved his capture of William B. Franklin, one of the Union Army's highest ranking generals. The book's account of that event, along with the hobbled officer's escape and trek to restored freedom, is an engrossing tale told well. While the damage inflicted by Gilmor's men was restored quickly, the raid went about as well as could be expected, and the author offers high praise for what was accomplished by so few and at comparative negligible loss.

Civil War mounted operations and military biography are Wittenberg's forte, and this slim volume exhibits all the best characteristics of the author's previous works. The background and wider context of the raid are fully explained, and the operations themselves revealed to the reader in a blow-by-blow fashion that makes for a reading experience that is both engaging and easy to follow. The steadily mounting tension and fatigue that went hand in hand with long-range cavalry raiding ooze out of every paragraph, as do the many possible dangers that lurked around every crossroads and fence corner. The volume's fine collection of maps further enhance reader knowledge and understanding of the paths of Johnson and Gilmor's raiders.

The author's lucid descriptive account of the Johnson-Gilmor raid is accompanied by his equally typical clear-eyed analysis and sound conclusions. In line with the general consensus (Jack Shairer's 2008 book Lee’s Bold Plan for Point Lookout is likely the only study to insist that the plan should have succeeded), it is Wittenberg's studied viewpoint that the original plan clearly constituted an act of extreme desperation. As Wittenberg explains, the combined land and seaborne operation was already highly unlikely to accomplish its designed goal of freeing the prisoners en masse. Dropping the naval component then rendered the meeting of that goal nearly impossible, with the slashed timetable finally excluding even reaching Point Lookout from the realm of possibility. While the ultimate objective may have been beyond reach from the start, as Wittenberg maintains, the mounted raid as it unfolded was "bold and well-executed" (pg. 126), a credit to the leadership abilities of both Johnson and Gilmor.

Material found in the appendix section includes an order of battle, insights into equine care during raiding operations, brief discussions of Point Lookout POW burials and the state of the site today, and a new look into the "strange case" of Maryland Agricultural College president Henry Onderdonk's actions during the raiders' visit to his campus. Another appendix examines the Point Lookout operation in the context of two other long-range raids aimed toward freeing prisoners, the piece focusing in particular on shared reasons as to why they failed.

With the publication of Eric Wittenberg's The Johnson-Gilmor Cavalry Raid Around Baltimore, July 10-13, 1864, the Savas Beatie Battles & Leaders series now sits at four volumes. Those campaigns, battles, and raids that can be fully addressed through mid-size publications seem to be primary targets for the series, and this volume fits very well within that range. With the quality already displayed, future titles should be regarded with eager anticipation.

************************** Finally, on a more personal note, I am sure I join everyone in wishing Eric the best on his long road to recovery from a recent series of serious health setbacks. According to what I've read, it's been a bumpy road filled with ups and downs, and here's to a future filled with much more of the former and much less of the latter.

Booknotes: The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign

New Arrival:

• The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign by John M. Nese & Jeffrey J. Harding (Arcadia Pub and The Hist Press, 2025).

Among the many unappealing aspects of Civil War soldiering, horrific wounding on the battlefield and intense suffering from any number of camp diseases without the benefits of modern medicine tend to send shivers down the spines of today's readers. However, one of the things that gets me most is the prospect of marching twenty miles or more for any number of days in a row during extremely hot summers amid choking humidity and dust, all the while enduring a thick woolen uniform, little protection from the sun, poor hydration, and iffy footwear. The other side of the equation, having to navigate days of seemingly endless driving rain and seas of mud, offered challenges of their own. Throw in some chronic diarrhea and the fact that you have to fight a major battle at the tail end of all that, and you gain nothing but respect for the physical and psychological hardiness of our Civil War forebears. Such weather effects and human endurance tests are on full display in John Nese and Jeffrey Harding's The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign.

The 1863 Gettysburg Campaign has been viewed from a variety of perspectives, but while we all know that heat and other elements of weather played a major role in the soldier experience there hasn't been a full-length volume specifically dedicated to the subject until now (I could be wrong about that, but no others immediately come to mind).

From the description: "As the nation’s future hung in the balance, the Weather Gods delivered a wrath of fury on Union and Confederate forces throughout the Gettysburg Campaign. First, record-breaking heat and humidity wore down the warring armies during ungodly forced marches. Next, relentless storms plagued the soldiers with resultant muddy slogs on nearly impassable roads. As the armies met in mortal combat, soul-crushing heat turned the bucolic fields of Gettysburg into a sanguinary and barren expanse. Finally, torrential rains haunted the Confederate retreat and narrow escape across a swollen Potomac River."

In The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign, meteorologist Nese and independent scholar/licensed GNMP battlefield guide Harding "present firsthand accounts, harrowing narratives and groundbreaking meteorological research that reshapes how we view the Civil War’s Gettysburg Campaign." Background material includes some introductory-level weather science discussion as well as information as to where Civil War-period weather data was recorded and compiled. How weather affected the campaign on a day by day basis is then presented and analyzed through narrative text heavily augmented with primary source excerpts, that writing in turn supported by copious numbers of combat maps, weather maps, data tables, photos, and other illustrations.

This study looks to be a real treat for readers on a constant search for those rarities that offer fresh lenses through which our previous understanding of Civil War military campaigns can be materially enhanced and/or altered.

Booknotes: Sisterhood of the Lost Cause

New Arrival:

• Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South by Jennifer Lynn Gross (LSU Press, 2025).

With over a quarter of all Confederate combatants losing their lives during the Civil War, postwar southern society was left with a lot of widows. Even so, according to historian Jennifer Lynn Gross, this "mass widowhood" has been "studied very little by scholars" (pg. 12). Gross's Sisterhood of the Lost Cause: Confederate Widows in the New South "helps rectify that historical omission by supplying a sweeping analysis of women whose husbands perished in the war."

The two chapters of Part I center on exploring the "myriad of experiences of Confederate widowhood for the widows themselves, with the primary focus on women who lost their husbands during the war or shortly thereafter because of it." This "includes a focus on how widows grieved and dealt with the emotional pain caused by their loss." The "practical realities" of these women's unexpected and undesired new role in traditional southern society, including the many financial challenges involved with it, are also discussed (pg. 11).

Part II, in three chapters, "shifts attention outward to how other southerners perceived Confederate widows and their plight." According to Gross, white southern society enshrined these women as angels of the Lost Cause "rhetorically through poetry, literature, and memorial activities; and practically through the benevolence of postwar Confederate associations and the distribution of pensions." Their sheer numbers as well as their practical and symbolic significance meant that these widows would play a key role in reconstructing southern society, and closely studying them "necessarily reconfigures how historians have understood the postbellum period" (pp. 11-12).

Booknotes: Lincoln's Assassination

New Arrival:

• Lincoln's Assassination by Edward Steers, Jr. (SIU Press, 2025).

Reader and writer interest in many important Civil War-period topics tends to wax and wane. While these days we don't hear much about new books or new information related to the Lincoln assassination (or at least it seems that way to me), there was certainly a lot of that going on around the time that Edward Steers's popular and influential study Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln was first published back in 2001. In 2014, Steers's Lincoln's Assassination was published as part of SIU Press's Concise Lincoln Library series, and today (or rather last month) marks the release of that same title in paperback format.

Steers's work addresses numerous myths and controversies surrounding the assassination, and he's always been a leading opponent of those who have fought to drum up sympathy for Mary Surratt and Dr. Mudd. From the description: "Over time, the traditional story of the assassination has become littered with myths, from the innocence of Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd to John Wilkes Booth’s escape to Oklahoma or India, where he died by suicide several years later. In this succinct volume, Edward Steers, Jr. sets the record straight, expertly analyzing the historical evidence to explain Lincoln’s assassination."

The author has also resolutely rejected some of the more popular conspiracy theories that have developed over time. "As Steers explains, public perception about Lincoln’s death has been shaped by limited but popular histories that assert, alternately, that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton engineered the assassination or that John Wilkes Booth was a mad actor fueled by delusional revenge. In his detailed chronicle of the planning and execution of Booth’s plot, Steers demonstrates that neither Stanton nor anyone else in Lincoln’s sphere of political confidants participated in Lincoln’s death, and Booth remained a fully rational person whose original plan to capture Lincoln was both reasonable and capable of success." Lincoln's Assassination again "implicates both Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd, as well as other conspirators, clarifying their parts in the scheme."

This volume's intended audience is "anyone seeking a straightforward, authoritative analysis of one of the most dramatic events in American history."

Review - "Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union" by Kenneth Burchett

[Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union by Kenneth E. Burchett (McFarland, 2025). Softcover, 4 maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,219/277. ISBN:978-1-4766-9626-3. $39.95]

A number of solid overview-level explorations of political and military events in Missouri from the secession crisis period through the Battle of Wilson's Creek have been published. Revisiting that well-trodden ground (up to, but not including, Wilson's Creek) at length while also offering up some fresh perspectives and additional details are three interconnected volumes from Kenneth Burchett. Rearranged in chronological order rather than order of release, they are Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War (2024), Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union (2025), and The Battle of Carthage, Missouri: First Trans-Mississippi Conflict (2012).

Picking up where Massacre at St. Louis left off, the middle volume in Burchett's 1861 Missouri trilogy sets the stage with a fairly conventional picture of the political situation in the state between that seminal event and the outbreak of general hostilities. The ongoing political influence the powerful Blair family exerted on the policy decisions and personnel appointments of the Lincoln administration, which looked on events from distant Missouri with considerable apprehension in Washington, is duly addressed, as are the Price-Harney Agreement (a failed peace initiative) and the infamous Planter House Hotel meeting. The last represented the final attempt at defusing an increasingly volatile situation. The meeting broke down spectacularly, inaugurating open war between the state and federal governments.

In recounting the above, Burchett also clearly shows that the shocking amount of bloodshed spilled during the aftermath of the Camp Jackson surrender did not end the cycle of violence between soldiers and civilians. By documenting ongoing incidences of street violence in St. Louis, and clashes elsewhere, that are outside those typically covered in the general histories, Burchett adds to our understanding of this precarious period that soon boiled over into open conflict between federal volunteers and the new state militia army (the Missouri State Guard). As was the case with Kentucky, it was clear that Missouri neutrality, however seriously that stance was contemplated by parties involved in governance, was never going to be a workable state strategy of weathering the storm of Civil War.

As the book's title implies, General Nathaniel Lyon's aggressive move to seize control of the Missouri River, one part of a three-pronged offensive designed to isolate, surround, and crush the Missouri State Guard before it had time to organize and grow into a dangerous adversary, is its centerpiece. As other chroniclers have done, Burchett credits Lyon for his boldness and decisiveness in conducting what might seem from the outside to have been a risky ad-hoc riverine thrust deep into the heart of "Little Dixie," the part of the state with the most secession sympathizers. That single-minded aggression paid off in spades, though, as the state capital was quickly seized without a fight, leaving the gathering state opposition off balance and struggling to keep up with the rapid tempo of operations.

As Burchett explains, the speed and efficiency of Lyon's offensive placed Missouri Governor Claiborne Jackson in a profound quandary with little time to consider his available options. With the State Guard's commanding general, Sterling Price, sick and away recuperating, Jackson, a complete military novice, assumed the leadership of state troops. The question of what to do weighed heavily in the governor's mind. Jackson desperately needed a military victory to bolster his wavering position. However, taking a stand at either Boonville or upriver at Lexington was a risky proposition as it involved pitting his untrained, badly under-equipped, and majority unarmed forces against Lyon's well-drilled and well-armed Home Guards and volunteers. The other major option, declining battle for the immediate future in favor of a concentration of forces in the southwest corner of the state, arguably offered better military prospects but risked the collapse of popular morale among his strongest base of supporters on both sides of the Missouri River line.

As Burchett recounts, the decision to meet the enemy at Boonville proved foolhardy, and Guard forces were utterly routed by Lyon's men after a brief firefight and subsequent running skirmish. Paul Rorvig's 1992 Missouri Historical Review journal article is widely regarded as the best account of the June 17, 1861 Battle of Boonville, and Burchett's coverage is of similar descriptive depth and interpretation to that and other more recent secondary histories of the fight. Boonville still lacks a really top-level battle map, and the one in this book, borrowed from another source, simply offers readers a general picture of the fighting area between Rocheport (where Lyon landed) and Boonville. The other two major prongs of Lyon's offensive, east out of Kansas and southwest overland and by rail from St. Louis, are also addressed in the narrative, albeit more briefly. Additionally, all of this conventional fighting in the field occurred amid a backdrop of continued rear-area violence, and threats of violence, within Union-controlled St. Louis.

Burchett's study fully conveys the strategic significance of Lyon's successful land-naval campaign, which seized control of the Missouri River's entire course across the state's midsection. This signal achievement effectively isolated the pro-secession supporters of the northern and southern halves of the state from each other. The only thing that slowed Lyon's further advance against the now fleeing State Guard was the need to stockpile supplies. During their incursions into Missouri, Union forces also grabbed control of the state's limited rail net. That, combined with the river offensive, placed Missouri's water and railroad transportation networks out of the reach of Jackson's supporters. Although challenged at various times, that logistical stranglehold established during the first half of 1861 was maintained throughout the rest of the war. As the book's subtitle asserts, Lyon's campaign (regardless of how it ended for him at Wilson's Creek) had indeed played an essential part in securing Missouri for the Union.

Of course, divided communities existed in towns and counties across the state, their relations ranging from wary co-existence to open hostility directed toward each other. While mentioning a number of other similar situations, Burchett devotes several chapters to Benton County, which had a large, fervently pro-Union German population that was deeply opposed by most of the native-born population, both sides forming home guard companies. In addition to possessing the potential for instigating localized outbreaks of violence, these forces were also tied to the events of Lyon's campaign. Indeed, the pro-Union Home Guard forces of Benton County that were assembled at Cole Camp sat directly astride the retreat path of Governor Jackson's growing State Guard army of followers. Burchett's book details the successful surprise attack by local pro-secession forces on the carelessly policed Union home guard encampment. Supported by two solid maps, this account is more expansive than most others found in the 1861 Missouri Campaign literature. In addition to breaking up Union support in the county, the victory cleared the way for Jackson to link up with other gathering state forces and potentially with Confederate Army allies poised across the border in Arkansas and Indian Territory.

Complaints are not of the deal-breaker variety. The book could have used a few more good maps, and the volume's frequent content repetition, along with its occasional small errors and contradictory passages, might have been massaged out through another editorial pass. For those who value bookshelf symmetry, it is also perhaps worthy of mention that this middle volume of the "trilogy," which was produced in the smaller of the two trim sizes offered by the publisher, does not match the taller and wider physical dimensions of the other two.

The volume concludes with a brief overview of events in Missouri over the remaining balance of 1861, a period that included passage of the secession ordinance at Neosho, the establishment of a new pro-Union provisional state government at Jefferson City, and the post-Wilson's Creek revival of secessionist military fortunes (capped by the successful siege and surrender of Union forces at Lexington). From that epilogue there is no indication that Burchett plans to continue his line of books to include a new history of the Battle of Wilson's Creek. Applying perspectives from both sides, Burchett's Missouri trilogy offers an abundance of freshly presented details and insights on the volatile military and political situation that existed in Missouri beginning with the secession crisis and extending well into the events of the summer of 1861 that ultimately decided the state's fate within the Union.

Booknotes: The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship

New Arrival:

• The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family edited, with commentary and notes, by Henry M. McKiven Jr. (LSU Press, 2025).

The material found in The Consequences of Confederate Citizenship: The Civil War Correspondence of Alabama's Pickens Family is different from most Civil War letter collections in that it is not a one-way street when it comes to the source(s) of the surviving documents passed between the home and fighting fronts. From the description: "Unlike nearly all published letter collections from the era, the Pickens family correspondence includes letters written on the home front as well as those penned by family members serving in the Army of Northern Virginia. The correspondence provides rare insight into the mutual dependence of family on the home front and kin at war to sustain morale and foster the formation of Confederate national identity."

More from the description: The edited collection consists of "the correspondence between Mary Gaillard Pickens, a widow, and her two sons in Lee’s army reveals the challenges she faced managing three plantations with at least two hundred enslaved people while struggling with anxiety and despondency brought on by fear that her sons would die in the war. The dispatches from Sam and James Pickens reveal much about their emotional struggle to maintain a commitment to the Confederacy, while their sister Mary’s letters show how she grappled with the emotionally devastating impact of her fiancé dying in battle."

At the front end, editor Henry McKiven adds a general introduction as well as a full chapter recounting the Greene County, Alabama family's pre-Civil War activities. The eight following chapters organize the material in chronological bunches, those periods ranging from a few months to half a year. Each of those is given a brief introduction and the letter material within is footnoted. The family's postwar lives are discussed in an epilogue.

Finally: "As the letters attest, apprehension, dread, and despair were constants in the lives of the Pickens family. That emotional burden only served to bind the family together in defense of a way of life dependent upon the labor of enslaved people. The Pickens clan continued to grasp flickering hopes for victory until the bitter end, believing that somehow the Confederacy and the world they had known before the war would survive and ultimately flourish."

Booknotes: Green and Blue

New Arrival:

• Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 by Damian Shiels (LSU Press, 2025).

From big-picture narratives to biographies, unit studies, and edited officer and enlisted soldier writings, the Irish American contributions to Union victory in the American Civil War have been well documented. Of the first variety is Irish historian Damian Shiels's new book Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865.

While influential recent studies such as Susannah Ural's The Harp and the Eagle and Ryan Keating's Shades of Green use men from particular locations and units as lenses through which to draw broader conclusions about attitudes, ideological beliefs, and motivations of these Union volunteers, Shiels has long been determined to a craft a more broadly representative picture of Irish American war service "through the microanalysis of individuals and family groups" (pg. 8). The pension record part of that research underpinned Shiels's 2016 book The Forgotten Irish, and Green and Blue is the result of Shiels's fuller investigation of the written connection between Irish American soldiers at the fighting front and their families and friends back home.

From the description: Green and Blue "explores Irish American service in the United States military by analyzing the written correspondence of ordinary rank-and-file soldiers drawn from across the Union’s armed forces. Using a vast and largely untapped collection of letters penned by Irish American combatants to their families during the war, Shiels explains how these enlisted men navigated their duties from multiple perspectives, including how they adapted to and experienced military life, how they engaged with their faith, and how they interacted with the home front."

Using the pension records as his starting point for gathering information about these soldiers and their families, Shiels eventually gathered a body of 1,135 letters from 395 Irish soldiers and sailors (supplemented by hundreds of other correspondence documents associated with those persons). In Shiels's estimation, his sampling of writings [from individuals who served in 260 units raised from "twenty-two different states and districts" and who fought in every major theater of war], is "the most fully representative group of Irish American servicemen ever gathered together for analysis" (pg. 9).

Based upon that unprecedented sample breadth and depth, Green and Blue "offers the most detailed and intimate picture yet of Irish Americans’ service in the United States military during the Civil War." Grab a pint of Guinness and give it a read!

Booknotes: North Carolina's Confederate Hospitals, Volume II

New Arrival:

• North Carolina's Confederate Hospitals 1864-1865, Volume II by Wade Sokolosky (Fox Run Pub, 2025)

Back in 2022, I reviewed Wade Sokolosky's North Carolina's Confederate Hospitals 1861-1863, Volume I, which traced the organizational origins and development of a Civil War military hospital system on the state level. In addition to providing detailed histories of the hospitals within that system, the book insightfully discussed management issues and challenges associated with this network of care facilities as well as how their operations and locations were affected (and in ways determined) by military events nearby and in neighboring states.

North Carolina's Confederate Hospitals 1864-1865, Volume II carries this narrative into the late-war period, documenting further expansion of the state hospital system as well as the disrupting influence of direct invasion as Union forces, their presence before then largely limited to the eastern seaboard, finally penetrated into the heart of North Carolina and crushed all remaining resistance.

Themes developed in Volume II include the profound effects late-war shortages in food and medical supplies had on hospital operations and the expansion of the state's hospital network into the Piedmont interior (a previously "safe" region that was exposed by late-war enemy mounted raids and the inexorable advance of General Sherman's army during the Carolinas Campaign of 1865). In support of the text are numerous maps, tables, photos, and other illustrations.

Review - "From Dakota to Dixie: George Buswell's Civil War" by White & Connelly, eds.

[From Dakota to Dixie: George Buswell's Civil War edited by Jonathan W. White & Reagan Connelly (University of Virginia Press, 2025). Softcover, 3 maps, illustrations, footnotes, index. Pages main/total:xxxii,245/285. ISBN:978-0-8139-5278-9. $35]

Edited volumes of Civil War soldier journals and letters continue to be published with regularity. One constant among them is the fact that the vast majority of these firsthand accounts were written by officers and enlisted men who spent the bulk of their service with the principal field armies that fought in the primary theaters of war. That's not necessarily a negative thing, and, after all, sheer numbers would dictate it, but it does make the better writings from soldiers with very different Civil War experiences all the more distinctive, insightful, and valuable. That is certainly the case with From Dakota to Dixie: George Buswell's Civil War, a far from ordinary diary edited by Jonathan White and Reagan Connelly.

In August 1862, twenty-one year old Winona County, Minnesota resident George Buswell put down his carpentry tools in response to the Lincoln administration's July call for 300,000 more volunteers and signed up as a private soldier in the newly formed Seventh Minnesota Volunteer Infantry. One need not conjecture as to why Buswell enlisted as he spells it out very clearly that he felt it his sacred duty to do his part in crushing the rebellion and restoring the "glorious old union," its flag representing "the best country that ever existed" (pp. 6-7).

Buswell's war diary begins on August 13, 1862, the date of his enlistment, and continues on a daily basis until the end of 1864. As was the case with most Union volunteers from his part of the country, young Buswell held heady aspirations of fighting great battles on the other side of the Mississippi River. However, fate had an entirely different course in mind for him, and he fully appreciated that matters closer to home needed to be dealt with first. Early diary entries describe his unit's sweep through the area of his home state most devastated by the late-summer settler massacres and subsequent Santee Sioux attacks on nearby settlements and military outposts. Buswell's diary contains a detailed firsthand account of the Battle of Wood Lake, and he also witnessed the mass execution at Mankato on December 26. Between then and the following May, Buswell mostly guarded prisoners. During his free time, he made a close study of Silas Casey's Infantry Tactics, which the editors credit as helping set him up to be a strong officer candidate later on in the war. In the spring of 1863, Buswell set out with the Sibley Expedition and spent the summer on the northern plains marching and fighting in the widening Dakota War. He provides a strong eyewitness account of the Battle of Big Mound in July, as well as the battles of Dead Buffalo Lake and Stony Lake that followed days later, with some revealing commentary on the foe's style of fighting.

Upon conclusion of the 1862-63 Dakota War, Buswell and the 7th switched theaters and opponents. Between then and the end of 1863, he spent time in Chicago, St. Louis, and Nashville. For a time, his detachment was sent on a sweep through southern Illinois to weed out bushwhackers and alleged Copperhead militants, capturing (by his count) some sixty men and a few deserters. Returning to St. Louis by late December, Buswell was determined to try his hand at obtaining an officer commission in one of the new black regiments forming in the area. He studied hard outside his office work duties and by his own account did very well during the examinations. His diligence was rewarded in the spring with a promotion to second lieutenant, though he wouldn't receive his official commission and company assignment with the 68th USCT until later.

On an interesting side note, Buswell, observing from afar, became a very early admirer of U.S. Grant, frequently commenting confidently and favorably on that general's upward career projection. It's an interesting contrast to the widespread attitude, as revealed in Jonathan Engel's recent study of the junior officers of Grant's Army of the Tennessee, among those who actually served under Grant and who maintained serious reservations about their commander until the final triumph at Vicksburg erased all doubts. Eventually, Buswell did get to see his idol in person, and one diary entry offers a pretty thorough description of Grant's personal appearance in January 1864 during that general's visit to St. Louis.

Central motivations behind seeking an officer position in a USCT regiment varied widely. On one end of the spectrum was the idealistic crusader and on the other the opportunistic seeker of personal advancement. One supposes that the great majority were guided by impulses that lay somewhere in between those two poles. Certainly, becoming a company officer in a USCT regiment offered ambitious and experienced enlisted soldiers substantial advancement up the promotional ladder, the type of leap in rank, pay, and prestige they were unlikely to obtain through staying in their white regiments. Buswell himself jumped from private to second lieutenant, and was told by those impressed by his examination results that only his age kept him from first lieutenant. His earliest remarks from this period indicate more of the practical careerist motivation, but Buswell quickly found that his new assignment profoundly altered his preconceptions about slavery and its degrading influences on human and social development. His descriptions of his men do reflect common prejudices, but he believed from the beginning that those placed under his charge would develop into good soldiers.

In June 1864, Buswell's regiment was assigned guard and picket duty in occupied Memphis. Some of the more enlightening diary passages from that time describe the extensive smuggling that passed between the lines and how Union troops stationed on the outskirts of the city (like his own) attempted to interdict that lucrative illicit trade in goods and medicines. The only major military operation that Buswell experienced that year was the Tupelo Campaign, the operation recounted at some length in his diary. Buswell was absent in the field when Confederate cavalry raider Nathan Bedford Forrest slipped behind Union lines and launched his Memphis Raid that reached the city on August 21.

The balance of 1864 was filled with routine garrison duty back in Memphis and its primary defense installation, Fort Pickering. Referencing that year's momentous presidential election, Buswell describes the reasoning behind his political transformation from Douglas Democrat to Republican supporter, placing himself fully behind Lincoln's re-election. Though he maintained respect for McClellan the soldier, he decried the influence of the peace faction during the election cycle and lost all faith in the Democratic Party.

In addition to footnotes more fully identifying persons and places mentioned in Buswell's writings as well as expanding upon referenced events and their background, editors White and Connelly contribute a fine general introduction along with chapter introductions that both review and contextualize what follows. With Buswell's diaries leaving readers hanging by inexplicably ending on December 31, 1864, the volume epilogue also briefly follows the thirteen-month remainder of Buswell's military service with the 68th. Also recounted are some details their research uncovered in regard to Buswell's postwar life, his involvement in Republican politics, and his tragic drowning death at age 80 during a steamship sinking off the Pacific coast.

If you are looking to read a Civil War diary far different from those commonly published by popular and academic presses, yet no less engaging and informative than those, this is the one for you. Between his August 1862 enlistment and his final mustering out in February 1866, George Buswell never fought with any of the war's main armies, his only sizable Civil War battle being Tupelo and only major campaign the one directed against Mobile in 1865. From Dakota warriors on the distant northern plains to guerrillas and anti-Republican militants in Illinois to St. Louis prisoners and Memphis smugglers to Forrest's cavalry in West Tennessee and northern Mississippi, the variety of wartime opponents and sheer breadth of fronts faced by Buswell during his long 1862-66 army service are highly remarkable, perhaps even unique, among Civil War diarists. Expertly framed and edited by Jonathan White and Reagan Connelly, the Buswell diary contained in From Dakota to Dixie is an extraordinary reading experience. Highly recommended.

Booknotes: Five Flags

New Arrival:

• Five Flags: The Warship that Reshaped the World by Stuart Buxton (Stackpole Bks, 2025).

Bridging much of the time gap between late-sail/early-steam warships all the way to the pre-Dreadnought era of the 1880s and early 1900s, the ironclad ram Sphinx/Stonewall/Kotetsu/Azuma existed within a period of very rapid development in worldwide naval ship design that, amidst all the feverish technological progress, also produced innumerable disappointments and evolutionary dead-ends.

From the description: "As wooden ships gave way to ironclads, and sail gave way to steam in the nineteenth century, one warship fought through the civil wars that shaped modern America, Germany and Japan. Its career spanned high politics and secret diplomacy, arms dealers and royal courts, spies, sailors, and samurai across three continents. In a vivid narrative travelling from London to Paris, from Copenhagen to Havana, from Washington to Tokyo," Stuart Buxton's Five Flags: The Warship that Reshaped the World "brings this incredible true story to life."

The book begins with an overview of the vastly asymmetrical contest between Union and Confederate naval forces, and the latter's attempt to use ironclad ram technology, still relatively new at the time, to offset the former's vast superiority in wooden warship numbers and heavy-gun firepower. A major part of that innovative strategy was to supplement the Confederacy's meager domestic industrial capacity with foreign purchases and construction. More from the description: "Strangled by the Union’s naval blockade, the Confederacy needed ships - and turned to Europe to build them. In 1862, Emperor Napoleon III agreed to deliver a unique new design whose 300-pounder cannon, 5 inches of armour, and twenty-foot bow ram made her a threat to every warship on earth."

As several recent books have revealed at some length, the United States countered these Confederate efforts in France and Britain with effective overseas surveillance networks and diplomacy. The result was that the ship was kept out of Confederate hands until it no longer mattered. More: "Before the mighty ironclad was finished, U.S. agents discovered it, and she was sold to Denmark, only to be smuggled back after her defeat by Prussia. Christened (CSS) Stonewall after the legendary general, the ship took on an elite crew with 5 captains among them, narrowly survived terrifying storms, took refuge in Spain and had to run the gauntlet of Union warships and Spanish courts to escape. The Stonewall reached Cuba in May 1865 - too late to change the Civil War - before her sale to the Queen of Spain, and a handover to a newly re-united America."

Though the ship's original mission passed unfulfilled, its naval career was far from over. Glancing through the table of contents, it looks like a bit more than half of Buxton's study is devoted to the vessel's noteworthy post-Civil War service in the Far East. "Though sold to the Tokugawa shogun in 1867, she was delivered to his bitter enemy the emperor and led the brutal and harrowing war at sea that secured the Meiji restoration and set Japan on a path of modernization, industrialization, and expansion that would end in World War II."

Booknotes: In the Thickest of the Fray

New Arrival:

• In the Thickest of the Fray: Mississippians At Gettysburg - In Their Own Words by Joseph L. Owen & J. Douglas Ashton, eds. (Fox Run Pub, 2024)

With Union forces cutting a swath of destruction across the heart of their home state and the Lower Mississippi Valley's principal army of defenders bottled up tightly at Vicksburg, the Mississippians of Lee's army camped in Virginia must have been highly distracted by the seemingly constant stream of bad news from out west. Nevertheless, the upcoming campaign north into Pennsylvania would soon command their full attention.

From the description: "The Magnolia State sent eleven infantry regiments and one artillery battery to Gettysburg," and the officers and men that fought with those units left behind a rich record of their experiences during the campaign and battle. "The individual memories were published in newspaper articles, written in diaries, and recorded in interviews throughout the lives of the veterans."

More: In the Thickest of the Fray: Mississippians At Gettysburg - In Their Own Words "is the first book collecting the recollections of the common Mississippi soldiers who fought at Gettysburg and in the Pennsylvania Campaign. Tracking from the march to Pennsylvania, on each of the three days, and through the retreat back into Virginia, this work describes what the soldiers related about their participation in the great battle.."

In addition to organizing the material into chapters, editors Joseph Owen and J. Douglas Ashton contribute footnotes and, in select places, bridging text. They also introduce the volume with a summary of Mississippi's contributions to the Confederate war effort and provide brief organizational histories of the Mississippi brigades attached to Lee's Army of Northern Virginia during the Gettysburg Campaign. An appendix listing Confederate Army recruitment numbers by state, reveals that Mississippi, though it didn't contribute the most men of any other state in terms of raw numbers, did (according to this table) put the highest percentage of its total white population into Confederate ranks. The other appendix supplements the earlier organizational summaries with detailed, company-level orders of battle for Mississippi troops that fought in the campaign.

In addition to including a good number of Mississippi soldier photos and other images, the book also contains nine fine maps that further highlight Mississippi's role in the campaign and battle.