Granbury brigade history wins 2012 Pate book award

John Lundberg's Granbury's Texas Brigade: Diehard Western Confederates (LSU, 2012) was announced last evening at the winner of the 2012 A.M. Pate, Jr. Award. The award recognizes "outstanding original research on the Trans-Mississippi sector of the Civil War".

Booknotes II (December '12)

New Arrivals:

1. The Battle of Carthage, Missouri: First Trans-Mississippi Conflict of the Civil War by Kenneth E. Burchett (McFarland, 2012).

See my Q&A with the author.

2. Command Conflicts in Grant's Overland Campaign: Ambition and Animosity in the Army of the Potomac by Diane Monroe Smith (McFarland, 2012).

This study considers the role of V Corps (presumably through the lens of leadership clashes and failures) during the Overland Campaign and the bungled initial Petersburg assaults.

3. Avenging Angel: John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry 1859 by Ron Field (Osprey, 2012).

One of the latest volumes from the publisher's Raid series, this one relates the story of Brown's Raid through narrative (80 pages) and Osprey's usual collection of photos, maps, orders of battle, original artwork, and drawings.

4. Ulysses S. Grant by Mark Lardas (Osprey, 2012).

Part of Osprey's Command series, a brief (65 pages) overview of Grant's military career.

UNC also sent a prepub copy of Earl Hess's Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign. Look for it in April '13.

Author Q & A: Kenneth E. Burchett

University of Central Arkansas professor Ken Burchett's The Battle of Carthage, Missouri: First Trans-Mississippi Conflict of the Civil War was released last week by McFarland. I don't have a copy yet, but, with my abiding interest in early Civil War Missouri, I've had my eye on it for a while.

DW: Hi Ken. You mentioned in our initial email exchange that this is your first Civil War book. What subject(s) do you teach at Central Arkansas and what got you interested in doing a book on an obscure Missouri battle like Carthage?

KB: I should have said that this is the first book I have published on the Civil War; one other manuscript is completed, a second well on the way and a third that covers American history from Jamestown to the Civil War. My first published book was on the subject of color, a subject more closely related to my academic field of art and humanities. When this question comes up—why is an art person interested in the Civil War—I always tell them that art is not about art; it is about life and the events that shape it and give it feeling. My interest in the Civil War probably precedes my interest in art and humanities as a field of study, and since the Battle of Carthage took place only a few miles from where I grew up in Missouri, it was a good subject to test my theory about art and life. I have always believed, too, that the qualities that go into making art are the same qualities for any of the arts whether art, music, architecture, or writing; the only difference is in the mechanics. One of the qualities of good writing, I think, is to be able to take the reader on a visual journey, to meet the characters, and come away feeling as if they were actually there as a part of something. As an artist, I feel I know how to do this; the mechanics of actually doing it is the challenge. I would not want to cultivate a misunderstanding about my ability to distinguish art from the Civil War. Nevertheless, my ideas about both perhaps do not flow from the expected definitions of each.

DW: Many readers interested in your book will already have read the only other serious study of the battle by David Hinze and Karen Farnham [The Battle of Carthage: Border War in Southwest Missouri, July 5, 1861 (Savas Publishing Co., 1997)]. How does your book differ in focus and scope?

KB: Hinze and Farnham is the best reporting of the events of the Battle of Carthage up to this point. In a well-researched account, the authors give a general background of the events that led up to the battle and go to some length to interpret the battlefield tactics of the opposing sides. The work focuses primarily on an analysis of the military history of the event to tell how the battle unfolded on the ground, to include a tourist section for anyone wanting to visit the battlefield. It has a few inaccuracies and some lapses in geography but overall is a good addition to Civil War literature. My book covers all the events in the Hinze book, plus more and in substantially more detail. The writing styles are very different. Hinze describes the events from a historian’s perspective; my book uses the individual experiences of the officers and soldiers on the ground to tell the stories and to take the reader inside the events. Hinze uses several modern photographs, diagrams, and maps to analyze the battle. I use only photographs, etchings, and maps of the vintage of the events portrayed. Another difference between the two books is in the voice of the writing. My book corrects a few oversights in the Hinze and Farnham account and goes into more detail to resolve some of the lingering issues surrounding the battle; e.g., the timeline of the rebel troop movements and a lengthy appraisal of casualties. Hinze and Farnham, VanGilder, and Schrantz each made their respective contributions to the understanding of the battle of Carthage. I am pleased to acknowledge each of them in my book.

DW: What reading audience do you foresee for The Battle of Carthage, Missouri?

KB: I wrote the book for readers from young adult upward. I would particularly like to see the book find its way into schools and colleges. The book is carefully researched, extensively footnoted, and hopefully will stand scholarly scrutiny; therefore, students of the Civil War may also find it of interest in their own work. Above all, the book tells a story, not unlike a novel inasmuch as there is a plot, interesting characters, and a made-to-order setting. The subject of the book is the battle of Carthage, but the book is about the men who fought the battle and the human consequences that the battle brought to one small community in southwest Missouri. To answer the question, though, I suppose I have to equivocate and say the book is for a general audience.

DW: Was there new source material associated with the Battle of Carthage that you uncovered that you would like to highlight for students of Civil War Missouri?

KB: Students of Civil War Missouri may not have previously seen some additions. (1) The book includes the only known photograph of General James S. Rains. (2) It publishes for the first time Brigadier General Sweeny’s battlefield map and letter describing the outcome of the battle for General Lyon. (3) A rare source discloses that Governor Jackson remained in command of Missouri State Guard forces, although not on the battlefield (heretofore, it was believed that General Rains as field commander led the rebel army into battle). The book publishes a rare photo of General Slack (the only known image of him) obtained from a copy of a glass negative taken by Mathew Brady. It also includes other original source materials that are included in the notes to the book and an extensive bibliography. One other document I will mention that was crucial to the description of the rebel batteries at the Battle of Carthage was the complete original inventory of arms taken by the rebels from the depot at Liberty, Missouri. This document helped to correct previous misinformation about the batteries. It is an important source because it also bears on the makeup of the batteries that the Missouri State Guard took into the Battle of Wilson’s Creek.

DW: With two books on the subject now available, do any particularly confounding mysteries remain?

KB: There will probably always be unsolved mysteries growing out of the battle of Carthage. One that I was not able to resolve to my own satisfaction concerns the very first contact between the two forces. Some argue that this occurred at the Carthage mills between rival squads of pickets, but the timeline of the battle does not appear to substantiate that. Another unresolved event, which I call the mystery of the Shoal Creek 200 in the book, is worthy of future investigation. When Colonel Franz Sigel began his retreat back across Dry Fork Creek, his men were concentrated at the ford and vulnerable to attack as they slowly tried to make the crossing. My research found reference to a large company of mounted men identified only as being from Shoal Creek who rode to the rescue of Sigel’s rear guard. I believe these men were part of a local home guard unit that had earlier joined Sigel. However, Sigel makes no mention of local soldiers in his after-action report, and further research did not identify the soldiers who were crucial to Sigel’s withdrawal. The last mystery I will mention concerns Sigel’s buried cannon. He supposedly buried two pieces in Spring River but no one has ever found them. There are many other stories that qualify as mysteries, especially concerning individual soldiers some of whom disappeared without a trace, and were never mentioned in any battle records. Whoever writes the next book on this battle, and on Wilson’s Creek that followed, should take a close look at the local men who comprised both sides of the conflict. There are many stories about the fight for Missouri that are yet untold.

DW: Did your foray into Civil War history whet your appetite for more? There’s certainly fertile scholarly ground remaining in your own general neck of the woods (e.g. Battle of Pine Bluff, Little Rock Campaign, etc.).

KB: Yes. The full story of the Trans-Mississippi history of the Civil War is a much longer story than has been written so far. While it is true that the war was won and lost in the great battles east of the Mississippi, what happened along the Kansas border and in the Border State of Missouri helped to shape what was to come later. If events west of the Mississippi had unfolded differently, it would likely have been a different war.

DW: Thanks for taking the time to speak with me about your book, Ken. I expect my copy to arrive any day now and the readers can expect a review soon.

Booknotes II (December '12)

New Arrivals:

1. Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861-1867 by James E. Potter (Bison, 2012).

This project started out as a regimental history of the First Nebraska (that would have been cool) but morphed into a more general study. Too bad the author didn't feel he could do both. Breaking it into two books would have been great. Then again, I should just be happy that someone tried to tackle this subject at all.

2. Major General Alexander M. McCook, USA: A Civil War Biography by Wayne Fanebust (McFarland, 2012).

A military biography of the lightly regarded McCook, based on published sources.

Knights of the Golden Circle

Yet another 2013 title from LSU Press of interest to me is David Keehn's Knights of the Golden Circle: Secret Empire, Southern Secession, Civil War. Few contemporary organizations were surrounded by more myth, fear, and exaggeration, and it will be nice to finally have a scholarly book that will hopefully make sense of it all.

Milliken's Bend

The military and cultural significance of the Union army's employment of black soldiers is part of an expanding literature, but detailed, scholarly book length looks at specific engagements comprise a more recent phenomenon. Deep Bottom and Crater books have been published within the past two years.  Honey Hill remains a notable omission, but next year will see the release of Linda Barnickel's Milliken's Bend: A Civil War Battle in History and Memory (LSUP, 2013). The military aspects of Milliken's Bend are well documented, but this is the first book level treatment.

From the publisher: "In addition to describing the battle and the situations leading up to it, the work also provides a much broader examination of the Southern fears over slave insurrection; the violent culture of Texas; what Emancipation meant to white Southerners, white Northerners and black slaves; prejudice against African Americans in the Union army; the violence of Reconstruction in northern Louisiana; and an examination of the ways Milliken’s Bend has been forgotten – and remembered, over the past 150 years."

Quantitative study of Overland Campaign

I'm a big enthusiast of military numbers studies and what they can tell us. Unfortunately, these emerge in published book form only rarely in our Civil War universe. The latest addition will be Lee's Army During the Overland Campaign: A Numerical Study by Alfred C. Young III (LSUP, 2013).  Quantitative studies are most widely useful when campaign numbers and losses comparisons over time figure largely in the accepted historical narrative, and one can argue that the 1864 Overland Campaign is the best example of this.

Booknotes (December '12)

New Arrivals:

1. The Confederate Approach on Harrisburg: The Gettysburg Campaign's Northernmost Reaches by Cooper H. Wingert (The History Pr, 2012).

As first glance, this is a very appealing book -- well illustrated, with good Heiser maps, and all indications are that it is thoroughly researched. This and Scott Mingus's Flames Beyond Gettysburg should form a nice pairing (Mingus wrote the foreword to Wingert's book). Among other things, Wingert covers the defensive preparations of Harrisburg, the fighting at Oyster Point and Sporting Hill, and the bombardment of Carlisle. While having gone no further than page flipping, I would venture that most Gettysburg students would want to grab a copy of this.

2. Confederate Incognito: The Civil War Reports of "Long Grabs," a.k.a. Murdoch John McSween, 26th and 35th North Carolina Infantry by Murdoch John McSween, edited by E.B. Munson (McFarland, 2012).

During the war, McSween wrote more than 80 letters to the Fayetteville Observer under the pen name "Long Grabs". His correspondence covers fighting in Virginia and North Carolina, as well as experiences training conscripts in his home state.

3. Colonel Edward E. Cross, New Hampshire Fighting Fifth: A Civil War Biography by Robert Grandchamp (McFarland, 2012).

Grandchamp, the author of several works of Rhode Island military history, here offers a biography of Edward Cross, who fought well in many great eastern theater battles before being mortally wounded at Gettysburg. It is a warts and all look at the man's life, with the book suggesting that he was an alcoholic with a combative personality off the battlefield, as well.

Lindmier: "THE GREAT BLUE ARMY WAGON: The History of Wheeled Transportation in the Frontier Army""

[The Great Blue Army Wagon: The History of Wheeled Transportation in the Frontier Army by Thomas Lindmier (Carriage Museum of America, 2009). Oversize softcover, photos, drawings, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. 139 pp. ISBN:1-880499-19-3 $30]

From the Revolutionary period all the way into the early twentieth century, the  wagon comprised the primary wheeled transport of the U.S. Army. Thomas Lindmier's The Great Blue Army Wagon is a wonderful illustrated history and reference guide to these vital pieces of equipment, primarily the workhorse four and six mule wagons.

Lindmier begins his study with a brief history of the Quartermaster Department, an institution that took decades to become truly professional. In typical early American fashion, military parsimony was in order, with massive expansion during wartime and equally drastic contraction during the following peace. For the Revolution and much of the first half of the next century, the department was underequipped and understaffed, with private contractors the mainstay of army transport.

The author traces well the development of what would become the standard wagon design for the army, first the four mule wagon followed quickly by the six mule wagon, the latter being the main vehicle used during the Civil War and beyond, really being only replaced by twentieth century motorization. Descriptive detail is very dense in the study. Field adaptations (e.g. chain bracing of the side boards) are evaluated, as well as long standing challenges associated with functional improvements on an official level, a prime example being the development of an effective braking system. Some attention is also given to macro-level issues like regulations for how many wagons would be assigned to the various army formations within the order of battle.

Later chapters describe the campaign to come up with a lighter, more mobile, vehicle for service on the plains, the result being the Escort Wagon. Sections cover spring wagons, hand carts, water wagons, post wagons, and portable forges. Some unsuccessful designs, like the metallic floating wagon (a vehicle, tested during the Civil War and apparently found wanting, that would double as freight hauler and bridging equipment) and the Sully 'pursuit wagon' are also introduced. The large ten mule wagon was used only for a brief time before being retired before the Civil War.

The book is beautifully illustrated throughout. Full page photographs of the various vehicles afford readers an excellent opportunity to see them close up and fully equipped for use. Line drawings of the wagons as well as the harness system (with labeled parts) are also provided. Lindmier's footnotes indicate a great emphasis on research in primary contemporary sources, especially in government documents at the National Archives. A series of lengthy appendices go into even more minute detail on wagon specifications. A particularly interesting appendix (G) sporting paint swatches reminds readers accustomed to black and white photographic images, as well as the unpainted replicas seen in movies and elsewhere, just how bright and colorful army wagons were in appearance.

Complaints include a thin index and perhaps a bit too much reader prior knowledge assumption in places, but these are very minor. The Great Blue Army Wagon succeeds in all that it attempts. Perhaps they exist (and, to be honest, I've never sought one), but I don't recall ever coming across another study of Civil War era wagons with this much substance. I would recommend this fine history and reference guide to anyone with a specialized interest in horse and mule drawn army vehicles.

Columns of Vengeance

There are many, many books out there that deal with the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota, but few authors have been interested in carrying the conflict out on to the Dakota plains, where it spread to tribes that had no involvement with the initial attacks. The last really substantive book addressing the topic was Micheal Clodfelter's The Dakota War: The United States Army Versus the Sioux, 1862-1865 (McFarland, 1998), but, in the spring of next year, University of Oklahoma Press will publish Columns of Vengeance: Soldiers, Sioux, and the Punitive Expeditions, 1863-1864 by Paul N. Beck. I'm looking forward to it, not least because it promises to link "the Punitive Expeditions of 1863 and 1864 to the overall Civil War experience".

2013 Catalogs

The new seasonal catalogs (Spring/Summer 2013) are now starting to trickle out. I've selected the CW-related titles below for the early birds.

North Carolina:
Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign
Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation
A Field Guide to Gettysburg: Experiencing the Battlefield through Its History, Places,
and People
Atlanta, Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath

Oklahoma:
Cotton and Conquest:  How the Plantation System Acquired Texas
Columns of Vengeance:  Soldiers, Sioux, and the Punitive Expeditions, 1863–1864
Los Angeles in Civil War Days, 1860–1865

Nebraska:
Maybe next time!

Kentucky:
Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South

Anyone read this?

The Seven Days' Battles: The War Begins Anew by Judkin Browning.

Opinions?

(Got denied on the review copy front and haven't seen any reviews anywhere)

Emerging Civil War Series

A few weeks ago, I found online notices of a pair of early 2013 eastern theater titles by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher White, Simply Murder: The Battle of Fredericksburg, December 13, 1862 and A Season of Slaughter: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864. It turns out my guess that Savas-Beatie had a new series afoot is correct. A S-B press release put out today introduced The Emerging Civil War Series, its purpose being to offer "compelling and easy-to-read overviews of some of the Civil War's most important battles and issues". It sounds similar to what The History Press has been doing with their prolific and sometimes excellent Civil War Sesquicentennial Series. I am glad to see the publisher did not succumb to a predictable Gettysburg and Antietam start to it all.

Matthews: "THE GOLDEN STATE IN THE CIVIL WAR: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California"

[The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California by Glenna Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Hardcover, 2 maps, photos, notes, index. Pages main/total:269/284. 978-0-521-19400-6 $95]

paperback cover art

Given the Golden State's contributions to the Union war effort, 17,000 men and a steady stream of gold bullion and other financial support, it is surprising that no scholar has attempted until now a survey of California's Civil War history. In terms of content, Glenna Matthews's The Golden State in the Civil War: Thomas Starr King, the Republican Party, and the Birth of Modern California follows the elective affinities of the author but, overall, the book succeeds in providing a much needed broad introduction to the subject.

An important element of the book is Matthews's mini-biography of Unitarian minister and abolitionist Thomas Starr King. A Massachusetts native, Starr King migrated from St. Louis to San Francisco right before the outbreak of the Civil War, where he became a popular public intellectual and strong supporter of pro-Union and Republican party causes. The author does a fine job of outlining Starr King's activist presence, which also included fund raising for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Even so, the focus on a single man and his works might create an exaggerated image of his political and cultural importance in the mind of the reader.  However, Matthews's narrative, while it does comparatively relegate other leading California Republican figures like Leland Stanford to the background, does recognize that the crowning of Starr King as the savior of California for the Union (like some have done) overstates his role. Even so, his short-lived efforts (he died in 1864) on behalf of the Union cause were important and deserve to be remembered.

In the 1850s, the Democratic Party in California was a commanding political force, but its division allowed Lincoln to win the state's electoral votes in the 1860 presidential election by a razor thin margin [32.32% to Douglass's 31.71%, Breckinridge's 28.35%, and Bell's 7.6%]. In contrast, by 1864, the state was firmly Republican. Unfortunately, the book does a more thorough job of explaining how and why the state reverted back to a Democratic majority in the post-war years than it does discussing the reasons behind the brief Republican transformation during the war itself.

A minor focus, the study's military features center on the famed California Column and passing mention of campaigns by California volunteers to brutally suppress Indians within state borders and beyond. Those events were significant, but the study's narrow emphasis upon them greatly undervalues California's military contributions to the Union cause. California volunteers became the guardians of public safety in the vast expanses of the sparsely settled West. When the regulars left, and the state of Oregon and Washington Territory were unable or unwilling to raise enough troops for their own defense, it was California volunteers that stepped into the resulting void, protecting settlements and western emigrant trails all over wide swaths of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Idaho, and Utah [the book contains a nice map of the extent of California troop dispersal].  This key history is underdeveloped in the book.  Use of the available literature exploring the central role played by California Column veterans in the economic development of the desert southwest (Arizona and New Mexico) might also have been fruitfully employed.

Among the book's best sections are those discussing California gold and its uses. National and state monetary policies are briefly explored. With so much gold and silver around, Californians decisively opposed soft money initiatives, passing their own hard currency laws in opposition to federal suspension of specie payments. Perhaps ironically, it was their own gold that helped maintain confidence in paper money in the east. According to Matthews, a ship containing 3 tons of gold left California for the eastern states every two weeks, supplying their banks with the gold reserves necessary to meet their paper obligations. Of course, given the enormous and constantly growing costs of the war, this influx of gold only delayed the inevitable, but it did keep banks afloat long enough for strategies of long term funding and currency viability to be developed and implemented by the Treasury Department. Readers will also learn (and this was a revelation to me) that California was also the state with the greatest contribution to the funding of the USSC mentioned above.

With so many Southern Democrats remaining within the state [spread all around but concentrated in southern California], a discussion of Copperhead activities was certainly in order and the "Coppery" California chapters discuss some of the opposition figures in the state, as well as the efforts of the authorities to suppress dissent. It is rather surprising so little violence occurred, with nearly all the comparatively small number of arrests made during the war for 'disturbing the peace'-type offenses. It is a marvel that the state experienced essentially no guerrilla violence, and it might make for a useful investigation why this was so.

Societal links between California and the rest of the country comprise another major theme of the book. Here, Starr King also comes into play as a prominent cultural bridge between the state (San Francisco in particular) and the U.S. northeast. California's minority groups (Indians, blacks, and Chinese) are also discussed, primarily in the narrow context of the violence, persecution, and exploitation directed against them.  One might quibble with the author's subject matter emphases and interpretations in places, but it can't be denied that in The Golden State in the Civil War we have the first truly worthwhile scholarly overview of the Civil War contributions and experiences of Californians.  It is fervently hoped that Matthews's work will inspire others, as much remains to be done.


[Note: For the budget minded, a very affordable paperback edition is available for $25.99]