Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (101 page)

Under the Confederate flag, supply issues are covered in
Confederate Supply
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1969) by Richard D. Goffand
Confederate Industry
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002) by Harold Wilson, while the management of the Confederacy’s premier ironworks has received special study from Charles B. Dew in
Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Ironworks
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). However, none of the Confederacy’s supply managers has received as much praise or attention as Josiah Gorgas. Frank Vandiver provided a biography of Gorgas in
Ploughshares into Swords: Josiah Gorgas and Confederate Ordnance
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1952) and Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins has edited Gorgas’s diary, published as
The Journals of Josiah Gorgas, 1857–1878
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995). The Confederate rail system and its eventual breakdown has been chronicled in Robert C. Black,
The Railroads of the Confederacy
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952).

The argument that the Confederacy adopted a form of “state socialism” in order to meet the war’s industrial needs was first put forward by Louise Hill in
State Socialism in the Confederate States of America
(Charlottesville, VA: Historical Publications, 1936), and received a more recent restatement in Raimondo Luraghi’s
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South
(New York: New Viewpoints, 1978). Richard F. Bensel has presented a similar case for interpreting the Confederacy as an example of state centralization in
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1879
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), although less with a view toward portraying the Confederacy as a precapitalist state than toward seeing the war as an experiment in the centralization of state power for both North and South. The “state socialism” or “war socialism” thesis has some attraction, especially for those who interpret the Civil War as a struggle to impose a capitalist industrial order on America, but it has to be qualified by the ways private Southern industry found for dodging Confederate regulation, which Mary A. DeCredico has shown in
Patriotism for Profit: Georgia’s Urban Entrepreneurs and the Confederate War Effort
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

The movements of the eastern armies that led to the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville have always stood in the shadow of the great battle that followed them at Gettysburg in the summer of 1863. Fredericksburg used to be especially neglected as an object of military history, although that has changed dramatically with the publication of George C. Rable,
Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002) and Frank Augustin O’Reilly’s
The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). Among more recent books on Chancellorsville, two stand out as leaders: Ernest Furgurson’s
Chancellorsville, 1863: The Souls of the Brave
(New York: Knopf, 1992) and Stephen W. Sears’s
Chancellorsville
(New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1996). An excellent survey of both Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, conceived as being two parts of a single strategy, is Daniel E.
Sutherland’s
Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: The Dare Mark Campaign
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). The preeminent survey of Gettysburg is Edwin B. Coddington’s
The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command
(New York: Scribner’s, 1968), followed by Glenn Tucker’s
High Tide at Gettysburg: The Campaign in Pennsylvania
(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), Stephen W. Sears’s
Gettysburg
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), and Noah Andre Trudeau,
Gettysburg: A Testing of Courage
(New York: HarperCollins, 2002) as the best single-volume books on the battle itself. Breaking the campaign down into segments, it is impossible not to begin a detailed reading of Gettysburg without Harry W. Pfanz’s
Gettysburg: The First Day
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Pfanz’s meticulous study of the second day,
Gettysburg: The Second Day
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), leads the pack on day two of the Gettysburg battle, although it should be read alongside his
Gettysburg—Culp’s Hill and Cemetery Hill
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) for a full picture of July 2. The military action of the third day at Gettysburg is dominated by Pickett’s Charge (even though, in strict truth, it was not Pickett who was in command of the charge but his superior James Longstreet), and it has found several vivid and precisely detailed microhistories in George R. Stewart,
Pickett’s Charge: A Microhistory of the Final Attack at Gettysburg, July 3, 1863
(Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1959), and Earl J. Hess,
Pickett’s Charge—The Last Attack at Gettysburg
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Nothing on the subject of Gettysburg quite matches William Frassanito’s surveys of battlefield photography there in
Gettysburg: A Journey in Time
(New York: Scribner, 1975) and
Early Photography at Gettysburg
(Gettysburg, PA: Thomas, 1995).

In the west, the finest survey of the Confederacy’s desperate campaign in 1863 to hold on to its heartland is the second volume of Thomas Connelly’s history of the Army of Tennessee,
Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971). The major battles fought in the west from the end of 1862 till the dismissal of Braxton Bragg were for many years the orphans of Civil War military history. But since the 1970s, a series of outstanding battle histories has rejuvenated interest in such desperate but almost forgotten engagements as Iuka, Corinth, Murfreesboro, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga. James Lee McDonough has borne the burden of this rejuvenation with his
Stones River—Bloody Winter in Tennessee
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980) and
Chattanooga—A Death Grip on the Confederacy
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984). In addition, Peter Cozzens’s
No Better Place to Die: The Battle of Stones River
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990),
This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), and
The Shipwreck of Their Hopes: The Battles for Chattanooga
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) are outstanding Civil War battle histories, as is Glenn Tucker’s much older
Chickamauga, Bloody Battle in the West
(Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1963).

The overall struggle of the Confederacy to establish not only its independence but a sense of itself as a separate nation and culture has been brilliantly surveyed in Emory Thomas’s
The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971) and
The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865
(New York: Harper and Row, 1979) and Clement Eaton’s
A History of the Southern Confederacy
(New York: Macmillan, 1954). The best place to begin the story of Confederate politics is with Jefferson Davis himself, who provided his own history (and his own interpretation) of Confederate politics in
The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government
(New York: D. Appleton, 1881). Davis has also been the object of several major biographies, the most recent and the most outstanding being Hudson Strode’s three-volume
Jefferson Davis
(New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1955–64), William J. Cooper’s
Jefferson Davis, American
(New York: Knopf/Random House, 2000), and William C. Davis,
Jefferson Davis: The Man and His Hour
(New York: HarperCollins, 1991). The fractious politicians Davis dealt with in Richmond have also been analyzed individually and as a group by George Rable in
The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), W. B. Yearns,
The Confederate Congress
(Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1960), and Thomas B. Alexander and Richard Beringer,
The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress: A Study of the Influences of Member Characteristics on Voting Behavior, 1861–1865
(Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1972).

The Confederacy’s military leadership has generally gotten much higher grades than its political leadership, and more sympathetic biographies along with them. Douglas Southall Freeman,
Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study in Command
(New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1942–1944) offers in three massive volumes a collective biography of the command structure of the Army of Northern Virginia. Close behind Lee as an interesting biographical subject is Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, who was the subject of a biography by his chief of staff, Robert Lewis Dabney, even before the Civil War was over. James I. Robertson’s massive
Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend
(New York: Macmillan, 1997) can be supplemented by the essays on Jackson’s character and campaigns in
Whatever You Resolve to Be: Essays on Stonewall Jackson
, ed. A. Wilson Greene (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005 [1992]) and Robert Krick’s
The Smoothbore Volley That Doomed the Confederacy: The Death of Stonewall Jackson and Other Chapters on the Army of Northern Virginia
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002). The most frequently studied Confederate officer in the west is Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose colorful and combative career has been described in Brian Wills’s
A Battle from the Start: The Life of Nathan Bedford Forrest
(New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Braxton Bragg had only a half a biographical life from Grady McWhiney until Judith Lee Hallock’s
Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat, Volume Two
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) completed the two-volume biography McWhiney began in 1969.

The war was hardly over before its survivors began speculating on why the South lost the Civil War, and among modern attempts to answer that question, the most far-reaching, and also the most eccentric, is Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still,
Why the South Lost the Civil War
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). Beringer et alia are followed in interpreting the Confederacy’s defeat as a collapse from within by Paul D. Escott in
After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Confederate Nationalism
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), David J. Eicher in
Dixie Betrayed: How the South Really Lost the War
(New York: Little, Brown, 2006), and Armstead Robinson in
Bitter Fruits of Bondage: The Demise of Slavery and the Collapse of the Confederacy, 1861–1865
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005). But Anne Sarah Rubin in
A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) and Gary Gallagher in
The Confederate War: How Popular Will, Nationalism, and Military Strategy Could Not Stave Off Defeat
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) argue that the Confederacy succumbed to simple Union military might. Jefferson Davis’s last, desperate bid to save the Confederacy by sacrificing the South’s most potent symbol of localism and independence has been chronicled by Robert F. Durden in
The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972) and Bruce Levine in
Confederate Emancipation: Southern Plans to Free and Arm Slaves During the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

The opening vignette of Willard Glazier’s descent into powerlessness is drawn from Glazier’s own postwar descriptions (which were based on a wartime diary he kept) and on John Algernon Owen’s sensationalized biography of Glazier,
Sword and Pen: or, Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier
(Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1889). The agitation African Americans raised for civil rights and military enlistment has been ably discussed in George M. Fredrickson,
The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965) and James M. McPherson,
The Struggle for Equality:
Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964). These books are largely concerned with the record of Northern blacks, and Leon Litwack’s
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
(New York: Knopf, 1979) should be read for the attention it lavishes on the experience of freedom for former slaves. The record of the African American soldier, once he was permitted to volunteer, has been chronicled in Dudley Taylor Cornish’s
The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865
(New York: Long-mans, Green, 1956), Joseph Glatthaar’s
Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers
(New York: Free Press, 1990) and Noah Andre Trudeau’s
Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1998). The Civil War in the western territories has usually been told from the viewpoint of military action, without much consideration to the racial and ethnic significance of these small-scale conflicts in the context of a war that was preoccupied with the question of race. Alvin M. Josephy’s
The Civil War in the American West
(New York: Knopf, 1991) offers a highly readable survey of the various military actions west of the Mississippi.

Women’s history has become its own separate department within Civil War studies, and we may as well date its emergence to the nearly simultaneous publication of George C. Rable’s
Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991),
Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), a collection of essays edited by Catharine Clinton and Nina Silber that offers explorations of childhood, spies, nurses, divorce, and even illicit sex, LeeAnn Whites’s
The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), and Drew Gilpin Faust’s
Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Following hard on their heels have been numerous studies of gender—LeeAnn Whites’s
Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction and the Making of the New South
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), Silber and Clinton’s
Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), Nina Silber’s
Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), Tracy J. Revels’s
Grander in Her Daughters: Florida’s Women During the Civil War
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), Anya Jabour’s
Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women of the Old South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), Victoria Ott’s
Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008), and Nina Silber’s
Gender and the Sectional Conflict
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)—as well as editions of women’s diaries and letters.