Authors: Adam Goodheart
The total number of books published on the Civil War since 1861 roughly equals the total number of soldiers—both Union and Confederate—who fought the First Battle of Bull Run. Sending my own off into that fray, I have of course benefited enormously from the work of those who went before, including trailblazing research during the past two decades that has done much to open new fields of inquiry and correct past imbalances.
Surprisingly, there are still some topics that remain too little explored, such as the presidential campaigns of 1860 (especially the Wide Awake phenomenon); the transcontinental telegraph; the distinctive roles of Germans and other white ethnic groups; and the story of the contrabands at Fortress Monroe and elsewhere during the opening year of the war.
Space does not permit a full listing of every source that I drew upon; the bibliographical essay below touches on a few highlights for each chapter, especially the secondary sources. A much more complete bibliography can be found on the website for this book,
www.1861book.com
.
The Civil War era is, of course, also incredibly rich in visual images. The technology of the printed page cannot do full justice to the astonishing detail captured in a glass-plate photograph, but that of the Internet can: zooming in bit by bit is like entering the vanished moment itself. High-resolution versions of the photographs in this book are available on my website. Readers will also find there the full texts of poems quoted as epigraphs.
In referring to African-Americans, I have used the terms “Negro” and “colored,” in keeping with the usage of the time. Unfortunately, giving a full sense of the period also compels the historian to quote racist rhetoric that is often quite ugly. But this was so much a part of the political culture of the Civil War era, in both North and South, that it cannot and should not be avoided. In providing verbal quotations from African-Americans themselves as reported by whites, I have, reluctantly, preserved the “dialect” versions used in almost all the original sources, even though some of the conventional spellings (e.g., “wuz” for “was”) served no conceivable phonetic purpose, and were as characteristic of Southern
whites’ speech as of blacks’. Trying to correct this would have required bowdlerizing the original sources, and I believe that the voices of the original speakers ring through eloquently despite the white writers’ reflexive habits of belittlement.
Period newspapers are essential sources for the Civil War era, but must be used with caution, since objectivity was an alien concept in the 1860s, and most editors cared more about providing sensational coverage than about being accurate. (For example, many Northern papers originally described the disasters at Big Bethel and Bull Run as magnificent Union victories.) On the other hand, the concept of eyewitness journalism was just coming into its own, and when a reporter was actually on the scene, he often recounted details quite vividly and usually with reasonable accuracy. Even “second-tier” papers such as the
Cincinnati Daily Commercial
and the
Philadelphia Press
often provide a surprising amount of valuable firsthand reporting by those papers’ national correspondents.
It is considerably more difficult to hear the voices of ordinary Americans from the months that this book covers than from later in the war. Eventually, of course, the long struggle would generate a tremendous outpouring of letters and diaries written by enlisted men and their families back home, papers that (unlike most routine correspondence during peacetime) would be treasured and preserved by them and their descendants. But there were simply far fewer soldiers in the early months of 1861, and even those who did serve were perhaps less likely to send as many letters, since most were on three-month enlistments and believed they would soon be home to recount their experiences in person. Perhaps, too, families were less likely to preserve the soldiers’ letters than they would be later, once it became clear to everyone that the war was going to be both a long struggle and an epochal event in the nation’s history. So far, I have been able to locate only two letters from an enlisted man at Fort Sumter during the siege. There are very few surviving letters or diaries of African-Americans from this period.
James M. McPherson’s
Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era
(Oxford University Press, 1988) has been justly hailed as the best contemporary one-volume history of the war. I would go further and call it the best one-volume history of the conflict ever written: it is astonishing how much narrative detail, period color, subtle analysis, and topical breadth the author is able to fit into a single (admittedly thick but never ponderous) book. Older accounts continue to provide fresh insights and are written with an elegance and wit, a sense of irony and a subtle appreciation of the complex (often contradictory) nature of the past, that are too rarely found in recent scholarship. Allan Nevins’s eight-volume
The Ordeal of the Union
(New York: Scribner, 1947–71) remains a monument of American historiography. Bruce Catton has gone somewhat into eclipse in recent decades, but his books—especially, for the purposes of my own work,
The Coming Fury
(New York: Doubleday, 1961)—are inspiring examples of how an author can write history as literature without sacrificing accuracy.
Russell McClintock’s
Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession
(University of North Carolina Press, 2008) is an invaluable recent addition to the historiography, meticulously reconstructing the events leading up to the fall of Sumter and illustrating the relationship between Northern public opinion and the inner councils of the Lincoln administration.
The compendious collection published by the War Department,
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1880–1901) is an indispensable resource for anyone studying almost any aspect of the conflict.
Michael Burlingame has done more than perhaps any other single scholar to assemble exhaustive information about Abraham Lincoln’s life and presidency—in the process also casting light into many other corners of nineteenth-century America. His two-volume
Abraham Lincoln: A Life
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008) is a true gold mine, and Burlingame has further earned the gratitude of researchers and readers by posting an unabridged version of the already almost two-thousand-page biography (including his full footnotes) on the website of Knox College’s Lincoln Studies Center.
Philip Paludan’s
A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil War, 1861–1865
(New York: Harper & Row, 1988) is a revealing account of how the Civil War transformed the identity and society of the North. Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sheriff’s
A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War
(Oxford University Press, 2007) lucidly portrays the various roles of ordinary American men and women. George M. Frederickson’s
The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union
(New York: Harper & Row, 1965) remains one of the most thoughtful and subtle treatments of American intellectual life in the Civil War era, and of the complicated relationships among poetry, philosophy, and politics.
Two of the Union officers besieged at Fort Sumter during the winter of 1860–61 left vivid accounts of their experience. Samuel Wylie Crawford’s
The History of the Fall of Fort Sumter
(New York: C. L. Webster & Co, 1887) not only recounts the events in Charleston Harbor but also puts them in their larger political context, based on information he diligently gathered after the war from both Northern and Southern participants. Crawford’s letters and diary in the Library of Congress provide even more detail. Abner Doubleday’s
Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860–’61
(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876) is another valuable source, colored somewhat by the author’s own cantankerous personality; it provides the fullest description of the move from Moultrie to Sumter. The first volume of
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
(New York: The Century Company, 1887) contains other, briefer, eyewitness accounts. The Robert Anderson Papers in the Library of Congress offer many clues to the enigmatic commander’s experience at Sumter, as well as his earlier career, including fan letters, poems, and
testimonials that he received from Northerners (and a few Southerners) during the siege.
The story of the Sumter crisis has been narrated many times by later historians. Among the best and most authoritative accounts, Maury Klein’s
Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) is notable for its richness of detail and deft interweaving of events in Washington and Charleston. David Detzer’s
Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), a fast-paced narrative, provides especially rich portraits of the various participants in the Sumter standoff. W. A. Swanberg’s
First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957) offers another well-researched account. Nelson D. Lankford’s
Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to the Civil War, 1861
(New York: Viking, 2007) is especially strong in its treatment of the political struggles in the border states during the secession crisis.
For the changing meanings of the American flag, see especially Mark E. Neely and Harold Holzer’s
The Union Image: Popular Prints of the Civil War North
(University of North Carolina Press, 2000), as well as Scot M. Guenter’s
The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990) and Michael Corcoran’s
For Which It Stands: An Anecdotal Biography of the American Flag
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
For Ralph Farnham, see C. W. Clarence,
A Biographical Sketch of the Life of Ralph Farnham, of Acton, Maine, Now in the One Hundred and Fifth Year of His Age, and the Sole Survivor of the Glorious Battle of Bunker Hill
(Boston, 1860); as well as contemporary newspaper accounts. George B. Forgie’s
Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age
(New York, W. W. Norton, 1979) is a provocative and important book that has unfortunately fallen somewhat out of favor; it offers an ingenious interpretation of the complicated feelings that the Civil War generation bore toward its antebellum parents and Revolutionary grandparents.
A magisterial survey of America’s transformation during the first half of the nineteenth century (although it stops a dozen years before the story in this book begins) is Daniel Walker Howe’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
(Oxford University Press, 2008).
There are surprisingly few good secondary sources on the presidential campaign of 1860, especially treating the Lincoln campaign as a grassroots cultural phenomenon rather than simply a product of machinations among Republican leaders. Burlingame’s Lincoln biography, cited above, offers some useful details. Gil Troy’s lively chronicle of American presidential campaigns,
See How They Ran: The Changing Role of the Presidential Candidate
(Harvard University Press, 1996), includes a chapter on Lincoln’s two campaigns. See also Wayne C. Williams,
A Rail Splitter for President
(University of Denver Press, 1951) and William E. Gienapp, “Who Voted for Lincoln?” in John Thomas, ed.,
Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition
(University of Massachusetts Press, 1986). Henry Mayer’s magnificent
All On Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1998) portrays not just the great abolitionist himself but also the larger movement of which he was a part.
A superb recent article by Jon Grinspan, “ ‘Young Men for War’: The Wide Awakes and Lincoln’s 1860 Campaign,”
Journal of American History,
vol. 96, no. 2 (September 2009) is, rather amazingly, the only in-depth treatment that the Wide Awakes have ever received.
Donald E. Reynolds’s
Texas Terror: The Slave Insurrection Panic of 1860 and the Secession of the Lower South
(Louisiana State University Press, 2007) offers an important (though horrifying) account of racial violence in the Lone Star State and throughout the South in the summer and fall of 1860, a pivotal but hitherto almost ignored factor in fueling the secession crisis.
Seven decades after its original publication, Margaret Leech’s
Reveille in Washington, 1860–1865
(New York: Harper & Bros., 1941) is still a paragon of historical writing, unsurpassed as an account of the nation’s capital just before and during the war. The London
Times
’s William Howard Russell arrived in Washington just before the attack on Sumter and recorded his impressions (both there and throughout the country) in
My Diary North and South
(Boston: T.O.H.P. Burnham, 1863), a delightfully wicked book. Mrs. Roger Pryor’s gossipy
Reminiscences of Peace and War
(New York: Macmillan, 1908) vividly recalls antebellum Washington’s social and political circles from the viewpoint of a congressman’s wife. Constance McLaughlin Green’s several books on Washington are rich in detail, with
The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation’s Capital
(Princeton University Press, 1967) ahead of its time in its portrayal of the local African-American community. Ernest B. Furgurson’s more recent
Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005) is another good account.
The only full-scale modern biography of John J. Crittenden is Albert D. Kirwan’s sympathetic
John J. Crittenden: The Struggle for the Union
(University Press of Kentucky, 1962). The senator’s papers in the Library of Congress are an invaluable resource.