Booknotes: Napoleon's Long Shadow

New Arrival:

• Napoleon’s Long Shadow: How French Military Genius Shaped the American Civil War by Timothy B. Smith (UP of Kansas, 2026).

From the description: "For the generation that fought the American Civil War, the wars of the early nineteenth century were not distant history—they were a professional guide. Military education at West Point and elsewhere immersed American officers in the campaigns of Europe’s great commanders, and none cast a longer shadow than the Corsican general Napoleon Bonaparte."

References to Napoleon and his campaigns are sprinkled throughout the Civil War military history literature, but analysis is most often superficial at best. Timothy Smith aims to change that with his new book Napoleon’s Long Shadow: How French Military Genius Shaped the American Civil War.

More from the description: "Despite decades of casual analogy, until now, no comprehensive study has ever examined how Napoleon’s campaigns shaped Civil War operations on the battlefield. Through a series of clear, apples-to-apples comparisons, author Tim Smith places nine of Napoleon’ campaigns alongside their closest Civil War counterparts." For the curious, the chapter pairings are: the Italian and Valley campaigns, Marengo and Fort Donelson, Ulm and Vicksburg, Austerlitz and Chickamauga, Jena and Second Manassas, Wagram and Chancellorsville, Borodino and Gettysburg, Leipzig and Antietam, and Waterloo and Shiloh. Before I got into the ACW, I was a pretty heavy Napoleonic Wars reader and wargamer, so I'll be very interested in these comparative assessments, especially given that strong parallels don't immediately come to mind for a number of them.

The result of all this "is a fresh interpretation of how the Civil War was fought. Smith argues that the war’s early years were profoundly shaped by earlier models of warfare, while its final year marked a decisive break toward a more modern, industrial style of conflict."

Coming out next June, Smith has another interesting-sounding study related to the Napoleonic Wars that adopts a similar type of approach. Also published through Kansas's excellent Modern War Series, The Operational Mind: Jomini, Clausewitz, and Civil War Command "analyzes how commanders translated military theory into decisions regarding movement, concentration, timing, and the employment of force," all through "a series of engaging case studies, each centered on a specific campaign."