Booknotes: Our Comfort in Dying

New Arrival:
• Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermons by R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson’s Chief-of-Staff transcribed and edited by Jonathan W. Peters (Sola Fide Pub, 2021).

Religious revivals were pretty common events in the Civil War camps of both sides, but the one that began in spring 1863 in the Army of Northern Virginia (before spreading to other armies) is sometimes viewed as another "Great Awakening." One individual who played a key role in that process was Robert Lewis Dabney, who was a Presbyterian pastor and Stonewall Jackson's chief of staff.

From the description: Dabney preached "in Confederate camps throughout the American Civil War, serving as the chaplain of the 18th Virginia in 1861 and the parson-adjutant to Stonewall Jackson during the Valley and Peninsula Campaigns of 1862. Poor health forced Dabney eventually to resign, but his "sturdy piety," gripping sermons, and fervent prayers were "a great impetus" to the religious awakening which later swept through the Army of Northern Virginia."

According to the Encyclopedia Virginia entry on the general topic of ACW revivals written by historian Steven Woodworth "the soldier revivals tended to be ecumenical and to cross class boundaries. They were often marked by frequent, fervent, and heavily attended religious ceremonies, including preaching services, organized prayer meetings, and “experience meetings,” or gatherings in which individual soldiers took turns sharing with the group how God had brought them to faith in Christ. They were also evidenced by much private Bible reading and small informal prayer meetings among the troops." This restored faith is often said to have sustained many southerners, soldiers and civilians alike, through the dual traumas of war and abject defeat.

More from the description: "In the 1880s, Dabney wrote out a number of his wartime sermons which "were formed indelibly impressed upon [his] memory," hoping to have them published under the title, Army Sermons, or Discourses." Since that time, the manuscript has been stored in the archives of Union Theological Seminary, where Dabney studied and graduated from in 1846. Edited by Jonathan Peters, the collection has now been published under the title Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermons by R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson’s Chief-of-Staff.

The twenty sermons collected in the book discuss a variety of topics, among them temptation, patriotism, prayer, dying (see the title), procrastination, mercy, grace, courage, faith, and sin. According to Dabney's own preface, the "primary object" of the hoped-for publication of his sermons was "to glorify God in Christ, and to bless the souls of men, by giving further currency, in the way, to the doctrines of redemption." He also intended that the text would comfort veterans in their faith and recollections of past service and comrades, while also serving as a defense of the cause under which they fought.

In addition to the full text of the sermons, the volume contains a "glossary and introduction, along with some additional sermons. Eyewitness accounts are also included to illuminate Dabney's effectiveness as a minister of the Protestant faith in the Confederate armies." The bibliography lists a range of both unpublished and published sources, and the explanatory endnotes are extensive. The appendix section houses additional Dabney writings, but also includes a "humorous anecdote" about Dabney at the Battle of Malvern Hill.

Booknotes: Grant’s Left Hook

New Arrival:
• Grant’s Left Hook: The Bermuda Hundred Campaign, May 5-June 7, 1864 by Sean Michael Chick (Savas Beatie, 2021).

From the description: "Robert E. Lee feared the day the Union army would return up the James River and invest the Confederate capital of Richmond. In the spring of 1864, Ulysses Grant, looking for a way to weaken Lee, was about to exploit the Confederate commander’s greatest fear and weakness. After two years of futile offensives in Virginia, the Union commander set the stage for a campaign that could decide the war."

"Grant sent the 38,000-man Army of The James to Bermuda Hundred, to threaten and possibly take Richmond, or at least pin down troops that could reinforce Lee. Jefferson Davis, in desperate need of a capable commander, turned to the Confederacy’s first hero: Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard." During the ensuing fighting, Beauregard turned back Butler's army between Richmond and Petersburg and forced a stalemate.

The campaign has been covered well in the literature, with two full-length studies published a year apart in the late 1980s. Both William Glenn Robertson's Backdoor to Richmond and Herbert Schiller's The Bermuda Hundred Campaign are fine, complementary works, though I prefer the former overall. Sean Chick's new ECW book Grant’s Left Hook: The Bermuda Hundred Campaign, May 5-June 7, 1864 is the first serious standalone study to be published since then. It "analyzes and explains the plans, events, and repercussions of the Bermuda Hundred Campaign...The book contains hundreds of photographs, new maps, and a fresh consideration of Grant’s Virginia strategy and the generalship of Butler and Beauregard. The book is also filled with anecdotes and impressions from the rank and file who wore blue and gray."

Grant's Left Hook also includes an 11-stop driving tour. ECW series books often contain interesting essay-length appendix pieces, and those features form a prominent part of this volume. They discuss the Lee-Beauregard command relationship, the flight of President Davis's "most trusted" slave (Jim Pemberton), more details on the June 16-17 fighting at Bermuda Hundred, the story of the effort in some quarters to promote Ben Butler as a presidential candidate to replace Lincoln in 1864, more information on Butler's postwar life, and some preservation history. I'm looking forward to reading it. Hopefully, we'll get Chick's Beauregard book soon, too.

Booknotes: Decisions of the Seven Days

New Arrival:
• Decisions of the Seven Days: The Sixteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battles by Matt Spruill (UT Press, 2021).

From the description: "From June 25 to July 1, 1862, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia engaged Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac in a series of battles at the end of the Peninsula Campaign that would collectively become known as the Seven Days Battles. Beginning with the fighting at the Battle of Beaver Dam Creek, Lee consistently maneuvered against and attacked McClellan’s Army of the Potomac as it retreated south across the Virginia Peninsula to the James River. At the conclusion of the Battle of Malvern Hill, Lee’s second most costly battle, where McClellan’s strong defensive position of infantry and artillery repelled multiple frontal assaults by Lee’s troops, the Federal army slipped from Lee’s grasp and brought the Seven Days to an end. The Seven Days was a clear Confederate victory that drove the Union army away from the capital at Richmond, began the ascendancy of Robert E. Lee, and commenced a change in the war in the Eastern Theater. It set the stage for the Second Manassas Campaign followed by the Maryland Campaign of 1862."

That critical week of fighting is now the subject of the latest volume in University of Tennessee Press's Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series. Authored by series developer Matt Spruill, Decisions of the Seven Days: The Sixteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battles "explores the critical decisions made by Confederate and Union commanders during the Seven Days Battles and how these decisions shaped the outcome. Rather than offering a history of the battles, Matt Spruill hones in on a sequence of critical decisions made by commanders on both sides of the contests to provide a blueprint of the Seven Days at its tactical core. Identifying and exploring the critical decisions in this way allows students of the battles to progress from knowledge of what happened to a mature grasp of why events happened." If you're new to the series, you can examine any number of reviews on this website to get an impression of what's involved. To read my reviews of two other Spruill volumes go here and here.

Though the decision analysis format is pretty much set in stone, series authors have a great deal of freedom when it comes to organizational grouping and in identifying decision types that range among "strategy, operations, tactics, organization, logistical, and personnel" considerations. Spruill arranges his sixteen Seven Days decisions into four time frames: "Before the Battles" (6), "Mechanicsville and Gaines' Mill" (3), "White Oak Swamp and Glendale" (4), and "Malvern Hill and Retreat" (3). Three of these are strategic, four are operational, eight tactical, and one personnel related. As with the other volumes, there are numerous maps sprinkled throughout (mostly brigade and division scale here), and decision identification and analysis are accompanied by an extensive battlefield guide based upon them. Detailed orders of battle are also included.

Booknotes: Ohio at Antietam

New Arrival:
• Ohio at Antietam: The Buckeye State’s Sacrifice on America’s Bloodiest Day by Kevin W. Pawlak & Dan Welch (Arcadia Pub and The Hist Press, 2021).

From the description: "Among the thousands who fought in the pivotal Battle of Antietam were scores of Ohioans. Sending eleven regiments and two batteries to the fight, the Buckeye State lost hundreds during the Maryland Campaign's first engagement, South Mountain, and hundreds more "gave their last full measure of devotion" at the Cornfield, the Bloody Lane and Burnside's Bridge."

The participation of Ohio units, leaders, and men in the Antietam battle is the focus of Kevin Pawlak and Dan Welch's Ohio at Antietam: The Buckeye State’s Sacrifice on America’s Bloodiest Day. Chapters in the book address the role of Ohio regiments at South Mountain with the Kanawha Division, the Cornfield and West Woods attacks of Tyndale's Brigade (the fellow bookended by Cox and Crook on the cover art is Major Orrin Crane of that brigade), and the Eighth Ohio's assault on Bloody Lane with Kimball's Brigade. A pair of chapters explore the fighting on the Union left commanded by Ambrose Burnside, their focus being on the Ohio brigades of Crook and Ewing. The text is supported by an abundance of photographs (of individuals, graves, landscapes, and monuments) as well as a handful of detailed maps.

More from the description: "Many of these brave men are buried at the Antietam National Cemetery. Aged veterans who survived the ferocious contest returned to Antietam in the early 1900s to fight for and preserve the memory of their sacrifices all those years earlier." The second to last chapter presents a selection of stories of individuals buried at Antietam National Cemetery (also attached is a table of burial information for the Ohio slain). The final chapter briefly addresses Ohio remembrance and commemoration of the 1862 Maryland Campaign, while the volume's appendix offers a short history of future president William McKinley's Civil War service at Antietam and elsewhere.

Review - "Military Prisons of the Civil War: A Comparative Study" by David Keller

[Military Prisons of the Civil War: A Comparative Study by David L. Keller (Westholme Publishing, 2021). Hardcover, map, photos, tables, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xix,116/183. ISBN:978-1-59416-357-9. $32]

Rather than contributing anew to the mostly unproductive debates regarding whose American Civil War POW camps were worse given the attitudes and priorities adopted and the relative resources available, David Keller's Military Prisons of the Civil War: A Comparative Study instead frames itself around the larger truth that the camps of both sides were all too often terrible places to be confined within. A product of research in both primary and secondary sources that was sponsored by grants from the Andersonville National Site POW Research Program, Keller's lean study identifies and illuminates what the author's investigation has determined to have been the five most significant problems that both sides commonly addressed poorly.

Keller begins by explaining that confining large numbers of captured men for long periods of time was not a routine part of western warfare as adapted to the North American continent (with the exception of the infamous prison hulks of the American Revolution) until the Civil War, when hundreds of thousands of officers and men on both sides spent significant time in prisons. Dealing with that unprecedented situation made a certain amount of teething problems inevitable. The author also provides a good introductory summary of living conditions commonly present in the POW camps of the American Civil War. That section includes coverage of prison facilities and prisoner demographics along with brief discussions of essential issues related to shelter, clothing, food, medical care, sanitation, prisoner abuse, and more.

Getting back to the central theme of the book, upon close examination of dozens of Union and Confederate prison camps spread across the eastern and western theaters [Camp Ford, Texas is the only Trans-Mississippi facility examined. See Appendix II for the full list and data table] Keller has identified five major commonalities that led, to some degree or another, to needless suffering and mortality among confined persons. As first outlined in Chapter 2, these are (1) "Lack of a strategic plan for handling prisoners," (2) "Inadequate plans for long-term incarceration," (3) "Poor selection and training of camp command," (4) "Lack of training of guards," and finally (5) "Failure to provide soldiers with information on how to behave as a prisoner."

In addressing each of these points, Keller applies realistic expectations that do not hinge on the perfect hindsight available to today's critical observers. In discussing the lack of a truly comprehensive strategic plan for processing, transporting, and housing prisoners as well as similarly flawed planning when it came to holding and caring for those prisoners long term, the author points to the reasonable assumption made by Union and Confederate authorities that the parole and exchange system successfully implemented during the first half of the war would continue. Clearly the need to quickly mobilize mass national volunteer armies, of which no one had prior experience at that scale, drowned out other concerns, but there remains at least some room for criticizing the lack of contingency planning for POW camp development and expansion for 1862 onward. Because of that omission, the Union camp system was vastly underdeveloped when confronted all at once with mass incarceration upon suspension of the Dix-Hill Cartel, and the equally pressed Confederacy had the added burden of needing to constantly move facilities due to the approach of enemy armies. The author's suggestion that modern advances in transportation technology (i.e. railroads and steamships) and logistics should have made the leaders of both sides recognize earlier that parole would become an increasingly dispensable option for handling prisoners, and that those changes would make mass incarceration inevitable, is interesting to contemplate if perhaps a bit overcritical. The author does not dismiss the possibility of intentional neglect on either side, though his contention that if the South could feed its fighting men adequately it could also have fed its prisoners equally well seems an overly simplistic, and in some ways logically unconvincing, appraisal of a complex problem.

Similar expectations regarding prisoner exchange led to camp commanders having no training for the complicated task of leading and managing large POW facilities. Keller credits Union authorities for assigning higher-ranking officers as camp commandants but observes, as others have, that the priority of parsimony over prisoner care diminished many of the possible benefits of having a greater sphere of authority. With expediency being the primary selective factor on both sides and high turnover in the role, there was diminished chance of consistent enhancements in prisoner care even if training, however rudimentary, was applied. What is not discussed is how both sides should have selected camp commanders, what list of qualifications should have been viewed as essential, and where the desired training would have been best found or developed.

Just as camp commanders lacked training and preparation, camp guards (those with the most close and frequent contact with prisoners) generally lacked any kind of specialized direction. This deficiency was worsened by both sides commonly assigning guards that did not possess even the rudiments of military training, weapons handling instruction, and discipline to watch over prisoners. Casual brutality and other forms of inhumane treatment that ensued were never truly addressed by either side, although the author credits Union use of Veteran Reserve Corps soldiers and USCT units as camp guards as going some distance toward rectifying those issues (although employing the latter had obvious additional complications).

Finally, neither side ever codified or provided general guidelines about prisoner behavior once they were incarcerated. As explained at length in Kathryn Shively Meier's 2013 study Nature's Civil War, soldiers addressed the challenges of their environment in camp and in the field through a combination of army regulations and self care, but Keller points out that the US Army did not issue formal regulations for POWs to follow until the mid-twentieth century. In support of his findings that this lack of training led to avoidable suffering on a large scale, Keller refers us to the greatly reduced mortality present among the more internally regimented officer prisons of the Civil War, though that contrast could also be attributed to a number of other factors including better physical condition at initial incarceration and better overall treatment due to rank. Even so, it does seem more than likely that prisoner training, if for nothing else than in health and sanitation, might have significantly lessened overall mortality.

The final two chapters of the book contain the author's summaries of each Union and Confederate camp's performance in relation to the five factors that negatively impacted all Civil War prisons. The appendix section contains a number of relevant tables and documents. Perhaps of particular interest to readers is the one (Appendix VII) that weighs, for each camp, the relative impact (numerically scored from one, least important, to five, most important) of the five factors referenced throughout the book, and provides a ranked total. It will come as no surprise that Andersonville, Georgia and Elmira, New York—the two Civil War prisons with the most infamous reputations—lie at the top of the list.

Over recent decades, the scholarly and popular literature of Civil War prisons and prisoners has considerably enhanced our knowledge of the subject (as well as cut through much of the enduring mythology), and one clear conclusion is that the military bureaucracies that operated the facilities of both sides were deeply flawed in ways that could, and should, have been far better managed. Detailed explanation of how those shortcomings could have been realistically addressed is mostly beyond the scope of the book, but David Keller's Military Prisons of the Civil War certainly does identify and critically assess in a useful manner key failings common to the military prison systems of both belligerents.

Booknotes: The Summer of ’63 Gettysburg

New Arrival:
• The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg - Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War by Chris Mackowski & Dan Welch (Savas Beatie, 2021).

Gettysburg will always be the foremost Civil War battle in the public imagination, and that level of interest and attention is certainly matched by that of many historians and writers working today. "The public historians writing for the popular Emerging Civil War blog, speaking on its podcast, or delivering talks at the annual Emerging Civil War Symposium at Stevenson Ridge in Virginia always present their work in ways that engage and animate audiences. Their efforts entertain, challenge, and sometimes provoke readers with fresh perspectives and insights born from years of working at battlefields, guiding tours, presenting talks, and writing for the wider Civil War community."

Collected and edited by ECW head Chris Mackowski and Dan Welch, The Summer of ’63: Gettysburg - Favorite Stories and Fresh Perspectives from the Historians at Emerging Civil War "is a compilation of some of their favorites, anthologized, revised, and updated, together with several original pieces. Each entry includes original and helpful illustrations (among them nine maps)."

In addition to the foreword and an essay on photographing Gettysburg, there are (by my count) 26 essays/chapters in a book running nearly 300 pages. Generals and leaders are always among the most popular topics and that interest is present here along with discussions of enduring questions (ex. who were the first federal infantry to arrive on the field?), famous places and events (ex. the Railroad Cut, Oak Ridge, Pickett's Charge, etc.), Gettysburg memorialization, reunion, the plight of the wounded, logistical concerns, the retreat, politics, and more.

Of course, other major military events occurred during the summer of 1863, and this volume is meant to be read in conjunction with its companion book, The Summer of ’63: Vicksburg and Tullahoma. According to the distributor, that one is also currently available.

Booknotes: The Long Civil War

New Arrival:
• The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict edited by John David Smith & Raymond Arsenault (UP of Ky, 2021).

Reasonable people can agree to disagree over how much the emerging tenets of the "Long Civil War" school of thought shortchange the real and permanent results and accomplishments of the 1861-65 period (Gary Gallagher is a leading critic), but it has proven to be a popular interpretive movement in the academic literature. The Long Civil War: New Explorations of America's Enduring Conflict, edited by John David Smith and Raymond Arsenault, is another attempt to "build on the growing body of work on the "Long Civil War" and break new ground."

The ten essays in the book "cover a variety of related subjects, including antebellum missionary activity and colonialism in Africa, the home front, the experiences of disabled veterans in the US Army Veteran Reserve Corps, and Dwight D. Eisenhower's personal struggles with the war's legacy amid the growing civil rights movement. The contributors offer fresh interpretations and challenging analyses of topics such as ritualistic suicide among former Confederates after the war and whitewashing in Walt Disney Studios' historical Cold War–era movies." Other chapters look at the abolition lobby of the 1836-45 decade, Emory Upton's modernization of the US Army, slavery's shadow in the WW1 training camp at Camp Gordon (Ga), and Lincoln's image in black history and memory.

"Featuring many leading figures in the field," The Long Civil War "meaningfully expands the focus of mid-nineteenth-century history as it was understood by previous generations of historians."

Booknotes: Hell Comes to Southern Maryland

New Arrival:
• Hell Comes to Southern Maryland: The Story of Point Lookout Prison and Hammond General Hospital by Bradley M. Gottfried & Linda I. Gottfried (Turning Point Pub, 2018).

Located on a narrow spit of land where the Potomac River meets Chesapeake Bay, Point Lookout's breezy location was thought to be a fine place for building a military hospital. The first patients arrived in August 1862, and the massive Maryland facility began to take Confederate wounded the following year (including up to 10,000 from Gettysburg alone). After the exchange system broke down, new POW facilities were needed and construction of what would become the military prison at Point Lookout was ordered in summer 1863. Unfortunately, what was believed to be a healthy location turned out to be a troublesome site subjected to seasonal weather extremes and mosquito-born illnesses from nearby swamp lands. Hell Comes to Southern Maryland: The Story of Point Lookout Prison and Hammond General Hospital "takes a fresh look at all aspects of the prison from its formation to its closing and lasting legacy. Loaded with first-person accounts of both Confederate prisoners and Union personnel, the book helps the reader get a vivid picture of what it was like to be incarcerated in the camp."

A slim volume with a main narrative running 115 pages, the book introduces readers to the history of the Point Lookout's hospital (much of that in Chapter 1) and POW camp. For the latter, topics examined include camp leadership, prison discipline, living conditions at the facilities, military actions that occurred in the vicinity, the effects of overcrowding and disease on prisoner health, and more.

Review - "Moonlit Mayhem: Quantrill's Raid of Olathe, Kansas" by Jonathan Jones

[Moonlit Mayhem: Quantrill's Raid of Olathe, Kansas by Jonathan A. Jones (Author-Floating Spark Publishing, 2021). Paperback, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pp. 240. ISBN:978-1-7364633-0-7. $23.99]

Due in great measure to the target being the region's most prominent abolitionist stronghold, the incredible bloodshed involved, and the infamy of its perpetrators (among them William C. Quantrill and William T. "Bloody Bill" Anderson), the 1863 raid on Lawrence, Kansas and horrific civilian massacre that ensued have collectively gathered the lion's share of publishing attention on the topic of the Missouri-Kansas "Border War" within the larger American Civil War. However, a great number of towns on both sides of the state divide were visited with death, looting, and destruction inflicted by either pro-Confederate Missouri guerrilla bands or regularly enrolled (but all too often no less lawless) Kansas "Jayhawkers" led by Union officers such as James Montgomery, Charles "Doc" Jennison, and US Senator James Lane. Book-length works covering those raids appear only rarely (recent examples include locally published volumes detailing the destruction of the Missouri towns of Dayton and Osceola). Jonathan Jones's Moonlit Mayhem: Quantrill's Raid of Olathe, Kansas adds another title to the literature's short list of obscure border town raids deserving of more attention. In contrast to some of the affected settlements, several of which never recovered from the war's destruction, Olathe continues to grow by leaps and bounds, undoubtedly benefiting from being a part of metropolitan Kansas City.

Much of the book is composed of background and epilogue material. Of the former, chapters address Kansas statehood, the 1850s "Bleeding Kansas" period, and biographical sketches of key figures (most in-depth for Quantrill) in the many Missouri-Kansas border conflicts before and during the Civil War. Chapters following the volume's detailed coverage of the Olathe Raid summarize subsequent affairs in the region such as the 1863 Lawrence Raid and the draconian official response to it in the form of Order No. 11. The further careers of notable bushwhacker and Jayhawker leaders are also discussed, as are postwar events such as Quantrill raider reunions and the peculiar odyssey of Quantrill's bones. Depending on the background of the reader, some of these sections might be considered extraneous, and a strong editor might have usefully trimmed content and narrowed the focus down a bit, but the necessity of doing that is always in the eye of the beholder. The research behind those background sections of the book is primarily a synthesis of both popular and scholarly secondary works. That in itself can be a bit problematic, as the author perceptively acknowledges. A number of excellent works have been produced in recent decades that address the Bleeding Kansas period and broader aspects of guerrilla warfare in Civil War Missouri, but publications covering specific persons and events closely associated with the 1861-65 border conflict are still all too often the domain of either dated scholarship or local writers with heavily one-sided perspectives. Though quotes from several of the more deeply partisan authors are sprinkled about Jones's text, his own overall approach to the matters discussed in the book is more evenhanded than that found in many of the works referenced inside.

The volume's central topic, the September 1862 raid on Olathe, is covered thoroughly and well. Evidence seems to show that it was sparked by the execution at Fort Leavenworth of Perry Hoy, an early guerrilla associate and friend of Quantrill. Though Missouri bushwhackers jealously guarded their independence and flaunted most attempts at imposing formal military organization and behavior upon them, they did try to insist that they be treated as prisoners of war when captured. Thus, they were outraged by the issuing of General Henry Halleck's 1862 General Order No. 2, especially its stipulation that captured guerrillas not be treated as lawful combatants and instead summarily executed. After Hoy ran afoul of that order, Quantrill proclaimed that he would kill ten enemies in retaliation and targeted Olathe for a raid that would be the means of achieving that grim score. Using a combination of maps and text, Jones meticulously charts the course and conduct of the raid during which Quantrill's men (perhaps 140 in number, though estimates vary) killed both civilians and new military recruits along the route to Olathe and in the town itself. The physical layout of Olathe, the movements of the raiders in and around it, and the plundering that ensued in the town and across surrounding homesteads are all detailed.

The precise number of men killed during the raid cannot be determined, but sources seem to agree that somewhere between ten and fourteen individuals lost their lives (Quantrill himself claimed that his men killed ten, as promised). The raid demonstrated the vulnerability of Kansas border towns after the infamous depredations of Jayhawker leaders and units led Union authorities to remove them from the border altogether and deploy them elsewhere (for example, the Seventh Kansas Cavalry regiment, a.k.a. "Jennison's Jayhawkers," was sent all the way down to North Mississippi). Unfortunately for the Kansas citizens living near the border, no adequate replacement force was redirected for their protection. When Quantrill's band raided Olathe, the town had no plan of defense (antebellum courthouse squares were often fenced in and during the war some were converted into palisade defenses against surprise guerrilla and cavalry raids, but that was not the case at Olathe). Additionally, there was no organized garrison beyond a group of raw military recruits, all of whom were quickly captured. Estimates of the number of military prisoners taken by Quantrill vary widely up to 150, but the author offers sound reasons for believing that they did not actually number more than 25 or so. Quantrill paroled the prisoners after marching them some distance from the town, keeping a pair for use as hostages but who were later released unharmed under threat of retaliation. The raiders lost to pursuing forces their wagon train of plunder but escaped back to Missouri unharmed before once again disappearing into the brush.

The volume is abundantly illustrated. Historical events and movements are traced over dozens of modern maps, making it easy for readers to follow the marches and actions presented in the text. As a self-published effort, the book lacks some polish, and the odd statement or error that an independent proofreader or editor might have caught occasionally crop up. As an example of the latter, in the book's discussion of the retaliatory execution of Union Lt. Levi Copeland after bushwhacker Perry Hoy was shot (the instigating event of the Olathe Raid), the author more than once confuses Union General James Blunt with Quantrill lieutenant Andrew (Andy) Blunt. Devoid of most of the trappings that hinder so many other local histories of similar events, however, Moonlit Mayhem ends up shining substantial light on an often overlooked episode of the Missouri-Kansas border conflict during the Civil War.

Coming Soon (August '21 Edition)

**NEW RELEASES¹** Scheduled for AUG 2021:

• Theater of a Separate War: The Civil War West of the Mississippi River, 1861–1865 by Thomas Cutrer.
• The Horse at Gettysburg: Prepared for the Day of Battle by Chris Bagley.
• General John A. Rawlins: No Ordinary Man by Allen Ottens.
• Escape!: The Story of the Confederacy's Infamous Libby Prison and the Civil War's Largest Jail Break by Robert Watson.
• "We Gave Them Thunder": Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas by Piston & Rutherford.
• Crosshairs on the Capital: Jubal Early’s Raid on Washington, D.C., July 1864 - Reasons, Reactions, and Results by James Bruns.
• Ohio at Antietam: The Buckeye State’s Sacrifice on America’s Bloodiest Day by Pawlak & Welch.
• Our Comfort in Dying: Civil War Sermons by R. L. Dabney, Stonewall Jackson’s Chief-of-Staff edited by Jonathan Peters.

Comments: I received a very early copy of the Piston & Rutherford book and have reviewed it already (to read my thoughts on it go here). I've also previously commented upon the much-welcome revised edition of Theater of a Separate War at this link. I suspect that many readers will be interested in the Rawlins biography.

¹ - These monthly release lists are not meant to be exhaustive compilations of non-fiction releases. They do not include non-revised/expanded reprints of previously published books and digital-only titles. Works that only tangentially address the war years and those not reviewable 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.

Booknotes: Southern Strategies

New Arrival:
• Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed edited by Christian B. Keller (UP of Kansas, 2021).

Ultimately, the Confederacy collapsed because it was defeated militarily by the US, and numerous books, book chapters, and articles have been devoted to explaining the many internal and external factors (both on and off the battlefield) that contributed to that result. Edited by Christian Keller, the director of the US Army War College's Military History Program, the six essays in Southern Strategies: Why the Confederacy Failed adds to that existing body of work by applying a new framework of analysis. Its series of discussions comprise "the first-ever analysis of Confederate defeat using the lenses of classical strategic and leadership theory. The contributors bring over one hundred years of experience in the field at the junior and senior levels of military leadership and over forty years of teaching in professional military education. Well-aware that the nature of war is immutable and unchanging, they combine their firsthand experience of this truth with solid scholarship to offer new theoretical and historical perspectives about why the South failed in its bid for independence."

The essays selectively reexamine a number of ways in which the Confederacy was responsible for its own demise. More from the description: "The contributors identify and analyze the mistakes made by the Confederate political and strategic leadership that handicapped the prospects for independence and placed immense pressure on Confederate military commanders to compensate on the battlefield for what should have been achieved by other instruments of national power. These instruments are the diplomatic, informational (including intelligence and public morale), and economic aspects of a nation's capability to exert its will internationally. When combined with military power, the acronym DIME emerges, a theoretical tool that offers historians and national security professionals alike a useful method to analyze how a state, such as the Union, the Confederacy, or the modern United States, wielded or currently wields its power at the strategic level."

Half of the chapters enter specific campaigns into the discussion (the 1862 Valley Campaign, the 1862 Maryland Campaign, and the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign), while the rest look that the flaws in Confederate economic/financial policy, diplomacy, and Trans-Mississippi strategy. "Each essay examines how well rebel strategic leaders employed and integrated these instruments, given that the seceded South possessed enough diplomatic, informational, military, and economic power to theoretically win its independence. The essayists also apply the ends-ways-means model of analysis to each topic to offer readers greater insight into the Confederate leadership's challenges."

Reminding readers that the issues behind Confederate failure were complex and numerous, Southern Strategies "offers fresh and theoretically novel interpretations at the strategic level that open new doors for future research." It is also hoped that the volume "will increase public interest in the big questions surrounding Confederate defeat."

Booknotes: A Notable Bully

New Arrival:
• A Notable Bully: Colonel Billy Wilson, Masculinity, and the Pursuit of Violence in the Civil War Era by Robert E. Cray (Kent St UP, 2021).

With a name as indistinctive as Billy Wilson I suppose it is very easy to encounter it more than once somewhere and not have it stick. It doesn't ring any clear bells with me; however, according to his new biographer Robert Cray (not Strong Persuader Robert Cray), Wilson was a very prominent New York figure for much of the mid-nineteenth century. From the description of Cray's A Notable Bully: "Largely forgotten by historians, Billy Wilson (1822–1874) was a giant in his time, a man well known throughout New York City, a man shaped by the city’s immigrant culture, its harsh voting practices, and its efforts to participate in the War for the Union. For decades, Wilson’s name made headlines―for many different reasons―in the city’s major newspapers."

As the subtitle suggests, violence was a major part of Wilson's persona and public life. "An immigrant who settled in New York in 1842, Wilson found work as a prizefighter, a shoulder hitter, an immigrant runner, and a pawnbroker, before finally entering politics and being elected an alderman." With so many Zouave companies and regiments raised by both sides, it would be unfair to generalize as to their nature, but a number of prominent units contributed to an outward impression that they attracting a certain class of undesirables who resisted discipline more than the typical Civil War volunteer regiment. Unlike some leaders (Louisiana's Roberdeau Wheat being one) who could effectively channel that volatility on and off the battlefield into military usefulness, Wilson was a poor candidate for such a tall task. More from the description: "He harnessed his tough persona to good advantage, in 1861 becoming a colonel in command of a regiment of alleged toughs and ex-convicts known as the “Wilson Zouaves.” A poor disciplinarian, however, Wilson exercised little control over his soldiers, and in 1863, unable to maintain order, he was jailed for a number of weeks. Nonetheless, Wilson returned home to a hero’s welcome that year."

Many Civil War-era figures make it hard on potential biographers. "Wilson left behind no personal papers, journals, or correspondences, so Robert E. Cray has masterfully woven together a record of Wilson’s life using the only available records: newspaper stories." Though one might imagine the ways in which reliance on newspaper stories can present problems of their own, you work with what you have, and "(t)hese accounts present Wilson as a fascinating but highly unlikable man. As Cray demonstrates, Wilson bullied his way into New York, bullied his way into fame and politics, and attempted to bully his way into military greatness. The book should have a lot of crossover appeal for those interested in Wilson himself, Civil War history, midcentury New York City immigrant politics and culture, and Civil War-era political violence.

Review - "Campaign for the Confederate Coast: Blockading, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War" by Gil Hahn

[Campaign for the Confederate Coast: Blockading, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War by Gil Hahn (West 88th Street Press, 2021). Softcover, tables, notes. Pages main/total:255/313. ISBN:978-1-7349537-0-1. $21.95]

The fact that reasonably swift steamships stood an excellent chance of successfully running the US Navy's blockade of southern ports throughout the Civil War has led many critics to question its role in Union victory and the wisdom of the massive expenditures in men and resources devoted to it. However, others have more persuasively argued that the blockade imposed more than enough hardships upon an already overmatched Confederacy to have a major impact on its defeat. In full agreement with the latter view as well as providing a very broad survey of the blockade and coastal war from US, Confederate, and neutral European perspectives is Gil Hahn's Campaign for the Confederate Coast: Blockading, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War.

Written in popular fashion, the book offers a rather unusually comprehensive summary of related topics and events that should appeal to a wide range of readers. Avid students of Civil War naval affairs will benefit from the collective reinforcement of their prior reading through Hahn's able synthesis, and those new to the subject matter are exposed to an introductory history with remarkable range. Discussed in the volume are issues of overall strategy; the evolution of the ships, tactics, and technologies employed by each side to either facilitate or hinder blockade running; blockade logistics; and port defenses (in the context of how they aided blockade running).

As is appropriate, the international dimensions of the blockade and blockade running are also addressed at some length. The key roles assumed by European (primarily British) ships, crews, ship builders, and port facilities in trade with the seceded states are well outlined. Hahn does a fine job of summarizing the legal rights of neutrals under mid-nineteenth century international law when it came to overseas trade in times of war. He explains the many ways in which the primary stakeholders—the US, the Confederacy, and Europe (primarily Britain and France)—all jealously guarded their respective belligerent or neutral rights in the present while also attempting to manipulate those same laws in ways that might establish favorable precedents for possible future conflicts.

What proved to be by far the most effective means of blockade enforcement was the capture of ports, and a large section of the book is comprised of a solid chronological history (in four-month intervals) of combined military operations along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. Aided by a helpful tabulation of blockade running attempts, successes, and losses at each major port over those intervals, readers can clearly see in detail how port seizures (along with temporary or permanent closures) affected the scale and overall distribution of blockade running traffic. For example, tables confirm that Charleston was by far the most important blockade running port over the first half of the war. While the concentrated effort made to capture the city outright in 1863 failed, the attacks did succeed in forcing trade north to Wilmington  (though runners did return to Charleston in increasing numbers once Union authorities transferred army and navy resources en masse to other fronts).

Some expected features are missing from the book. While the author very effectively employs a great number of data tables to supplement the text and convey important information, there are no maps. The notes indicate a solid reliance on primary sources, but there is no bibliography and the numberless endnote system employed is rather reader unfriendly when it comes to tracing citations. The volume also lacks an index.

Critics of the Union blockade who cite mere success rate numbers to point out its intractable porousness often tend to inadequately appreciate what the blockade did do through its mere existence. The announcement of the blockade in 1861 caused ordinary trade to cease and commerce at southern ports immediately plunged, never to come anywhere close to regaining prewar levels. As Hahn and many other writers before him have argued, offering the Confederacy, through the lack of a serious blockade, substantially greater freedom to exchange cotton for war materials of all kinds would clearly have narrowed a wide resource gap that, as it stood historically, already took four long years of bitter warfare to exploit for total victory.

Proponents of the "never for want of arms" argument tend to diminish the very real deficiencies Confederate armies as a whole possessed in weapons technology and in the quality and quantity of fixed ammunition, and the problem steadily worsened the further west one looked. Even in the highly prioritized eastern theater, it was the war's midpoint before the Army of Northern Virginia—through captures, production, and importation—could fully modernize its shoulder arms and artillery (and the western and Trans-Mississippi armies never did reach that level). The lack of a strong blockade would clearly have both widened and sped up that process.

Hahn puts it well in saying that "(b)lockading prevented an adequate supply from becoming ample," (pg. 255), and one can reasonable argue that that difference might have tipped the scales. Among other things, Hahn might also have mentioned the blockade's effect on home front morale, where shortages of both luxuries and necessities were felt almost immediately and only worsened as the war progressed. Though the South benefited from high cotton prices, that in no way compensated for the domestic pricing inflation that the blockade materially contributed to and the demoralizing black market economy that made even common items, when available in limited amounts, unaffordable to most civilians. Depending on the degree to which one believes the war's outcome to have been a near-run thing, the book's logical conclusion that "(a) better supplied Confederacy would have been stronger and more resilient, and changed conditions might have changed the course of history" is difficult to refute.

Booknotes: Strategies of North and South

New Arrival:
• Strategies of North and South: A Comparative Analysis of the Union and Confederate Campaigns by Gerald L. Earley (McFarland, 2021).

From the description: "Since the Antebellum days there has been a tendency to view the South as martially superior to the North. In the years leading up to the Civil War, Southern elites viewed Confederate soldiers as gallant cavaliers, their Northern enemies as mere brutish inductees.

"An effort to give an unbiased appraisal," Strategies of North and South: A Comparative Analysis of the Union and Confederate Campaigns "investigates the validity of this perception, examining the reasoning behind the belief in Southern military supremacy, why the South expected to win, and offering an cultural comparison of the antebellum North and South. The author evaluates command leadership, battle efficiency, variables affecting the outcomes of battles and campaigns, and which side faced the more difficult path to victory and demonstrated superior strategy."

The book begins with a pair of chapters that examine antebellum and secession period perceptions of the martial prowess and traditions of each section. This is followed by a year by year analysis of campaigns and battles "with a view of delivering a non-biased assessment of performance as well as outcomes" that "takes into account the challenges and circumstances encountered during the course of the war" (pg. 2). The author readily admits that his approach (campaigns are selected "based on their relevance to the book's objective") is "inherently subjective." It's still unclear from reading the preface and description exactly how the author's analytical framework stands out from the crowd, but the topic interests me more than enough to give it a whirl to find out.