Booknotes: The Greatest Calamity

New Arrival:

• The Greatest Calamity: Tennessee in the Civil War Era by John D. Fowler (U Tenn Press, 2025).

From the description: "The last state to secede and the first to fall to Federal forces, Tennessee played a pivotal role in the war’s political, military, and industrial struggles. Crisscrossed by key rail lines and blanketed by rich farmland, the struggle to control it fueled both Union and Confederate war efforts. More than 450 battles—at Shiloh, Stones River, Chattanooga, and beyond—turned the state’s landscape into hallowed ground."

In terms of strategic value, Tennessee was arguably the most critical Confederate state outside of Virginia, the latter (of course) housing the Confederacy's capital city. John Fowler's new overview history of the Volunteer State's Civil War experience, The Greatest Calamity: Tennessee in the Civil War Era, certainly highlights what made Tennessee so important to both sides.

Fowler's book is the first installment in University of Tennessee Press's revival of its Tennessee Three Star Series. Existing titles address a number of topics related to the state's history, including "primers on such topics as the Civil War, Native American history, historic homes, and more." One way the series is being 'revitalized' is through revision and expansion of past volumes. Fowler's The Greatest Calamity "expands upon" Thomas Connelly's 1979 series contribution Civil War Tennessee: Battles and Leaders by integrating "new perspectives on the home front, Reconstruction, and the struggles of freed people."

More than triple the page length of Connelly's slim classic, Fowler's narrative explores Tennessee's antebellum history and development, the secession crisis, the major Civil War campaigns fought inside the state's borders, the homefront ("examining issues such as life under Federal occupation, wartime conditions, the struggle of East Tennessee Unionists, the plight of the freedpeople, and the collapse of slavery" pg. xviii), and Reconstruction. Augmenting the text are sixteen color maps.