Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (98 page)

Simply listing the available literature on American slavery could easily consume a book on its own. Three exceptionally attractive general surveys of the history of slavery are Robert W. Fogel,
Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), Peter Kolchin’s
American Slavery, 1619–1877
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), and Ira Berlin’s
Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). The best single-volume compilation of first-person accounts by African Americans of the slave experience in
Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews and Autobiographies
, edited by John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). For this chapter, I have relied on the insights into Southern slavery offered by Albert Raboteau’s
Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), John W. Blassingame’s
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), and Herbert Gutman,
The Black
Family in Slavery and Freedom
(New York: Pantheon, 1976). Two historians have proven to be particularly significant for me, Eugene Genovese and James Oakes, and especially in Genovese’s
The Political Economy of Slavery
(New York: Pantheon, 1965),
The World the Slaveholders Made
(New York: Pantheon, 1969) and
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(New York: Pantheon, 1974), and Oakes’s
The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders
(New York: Knopf, 1982) and
Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South
(New York: Knopf, 1990) —this, despite the fact that Genovese and Oakes represent two very different ways of interpreting slavery. The arguments of Southern slaveholders in defense of slavery have been collected and analyzed by Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in
The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005) and by Drew Faust, especially in
A Sacred Circle: The Dilemma of the Intellectual in the Old South, 1840–1860
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and her biography of a South Carolina governor,
James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). John Majewski offers a powerful analysis of the paradox of a slave economy and its compatibility with liberal democracy in
Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). For the bird’s-eye view of the slave South, I have used William W. Freehling’s
The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). The abolitionist movement still lacks a single comprehensive narrative history, but it has a great biography of William Lloyd Garrison in Henry Mayer’s
All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1998).

The political history of the United States for the dozen years before the outbreak of the Civil War has enjoyed a remarkably rich crop of histories and biographies. For an overall narrative of the movement of North and South toward confrontation over slavery and its extension into the territories, Allan Nevins’s “Ordeal of the Union” volumes,
Ordeal of the Union: The Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852
and
Ordeal of the Union: A House Dividing, 1852–1857
(New York: Scribner’s, 1947) are still without peer in terms of their scope and excitement. David Potter’s
The Impending Crisis: 1848–1861
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976) offers a superb overview of these same events in a much shorter scope.

The politics of the Mexican War obviously deserve their own nod, and from this angle, I have found Charles G. Sellers’s two-volume
James K. Polk
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1966) and Paul Bergeron’s
The Presidency of James K. Polk
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987) quite helpful. But the other aspects of the war have also been well covered in a number of newer books on this almost forgotten conflict by K. Jack Bauer,
The Mexican-American War, 1846–1848
(New York: Macmillan, 1974), by Robert W. Johannsen,
To the Halls of the Montezumas: The War with Mexico in the American Imagination
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), and by John S. D. Eisenhower,
So Far from God: The War with Mexico
(New York: Random House, 1989).

The Compromise of 1850 was the offspring of the Mexican-American War, and the connection of the two events is magisterially handled by Nevins and Potter. But I have also found Holman Hamilton,
Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964) to be very helpful. The opposition to the Compromise can be understood through K. Jack Bauer’s biography
Zachary Taylor: Soldier, Planter, Statesman of the Old Southwest
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986). Calhoun’s political papers and the two great Compromise speeches he gave in 1847 and 1850 have been collected and published by Ross E. Lence in
Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun
(Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1992). Stephen A. Douglas, the rescuer of the Compromise, has been capably analyzed in Robert W. Johannsen’s
Stephen A. Douglas
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Lincoln’s early criticisms of Douglas and Kansas-Nebraska are discussed in Don E. Fehrenbacher,
Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the
1850s
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962). I have found David Donald’s
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War
(New York: Knopf, 1961) to be as useful as it is legendary.

For the general shape of American politics in the 1850s, no one can afford to ignore Michael F. Holt’s
The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Joel Silbey’s
The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). In addition to Holt’s heavyweight tome on the Whigs, I have turned to Thomas Brown,
Politics and Statesmanship: Essays on the American Whig Party
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), Eric Foner’s
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), Heather Cox Richardson’s
The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), Michael S. Green’s
Freedom, Union and Power: Lincoln and His Party During the Civil War
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), William E. Gienapp’s
The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and the essays in Robert F. Engs and Randall Miller’s
The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). Among the many political biographies of Republicans available, two of the most thorough are Hans L. Trefousse,
Benjamin Franklin Wade: Radical Republican from Ohio
(New York: Twayne, 1965) and Frederick J. Blue,
Salmon Chase: A Life in Politics
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986).

The
Dred Scott
decision was clearly the greatest juridical hot potato of the 1850s, and the single most important book on the case is Don E. Fehrenbacher,
The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law has been well described in Thomas P. Slaughter’s
Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Nat Brandt,
The Town That Started the Civil War
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990).

No other single figure in American history has generated so much biography and analysis as Abraham Lincoln. The most comprehensive modern biography of Lincoln is the two-volume magnum opus of Michael Burlingame,
Abraham Lincoln: A Life
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); the most famous and durable single-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln remains Benjamin P. Thomas’s classic
Abraham Lincoln
(New York: Modern Library, 1952), although David Donald’s
Lincoln
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995) is a very close competitor. For those who thirst after every detail, only Mark E. Neely Jr.’s
The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982) and Earl Schenck Miers’s three-volume
Lincoln Day-by-Day: A Chronology
(Washington, DC: Lincoln Sesquicentennial Commission, 1960) will suffice. Lincoln’s
Collected Works
were assembled by Roy P. Basler in a nine-volume set under the auspices of the Abraham Lincoln Association and published by Rutgers University Press in 1953 (two supplement volumes were subsequently issued), but these will be augmented by Don and Virginia Fehrenbacher’s
Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). Two other critical collections of Lincoln-related documents are Emmanuel Hertz’s
The Hidden Lincoln, from the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon
(New York: Viking, 1938) and
Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Statements and Interviews About Abraham Lincoln
, edited by Rodney Davis and Douglas Wilson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998). The finest study of the Lincoln-Douglas debates remains Harry V. Jaffa’s
Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959).

The preeminent surveys of the national agony that stretched from Lecompton to Sumter remain Allan Nevins’s two volumes,
The Emergence of Lincoln: Douglas, Buchanan, and Party Chaos, 1857–1859
and
The Emergence of Lincoln: Prologue to Civil War, 1859–1861
(New York: Scribner’s, 1950),
and Potter’s
The Impending Crisis
. Potter’s
Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942) remains a remarkably durable and interesting work, but for a much broader chronological sweep and a direct focus on the South and secession, William W. Freehling’s
The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) must be consulted.

For specific studies of secession in the Southern states, William L. Barney,
The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974), Steven A. Channing,
A Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) and Michael P. Johnson,
Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) remain important contributions. The literature of secession has been captured handsomely in Jon Wakelyn’s
Southern Pamphlets on Secession, November 1860–April 1861
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). The events surrounding the attack on Fort Sumter are gracefully recounted in William A. Swanberg’s
First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter
(New York: Scribner, 1957) and most recently in David Detzer’s
Allegiance: Fort Sumter, Charleston, and the Beginning of the Civil War
(New York: Harcourt, 2001).

The military history of the American Civil War has been so much the object of the military history buff that it is sometimes difficult to disentangle faddism and hobby writing from the serious history of Civil War combat. First reading for any serious student of Civil War combat must be Paddy Griffith’s
Battle Tactics of the Civil War
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), followed by Edward Hagerman’s
The American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), and Brent Nosworthy’s sprawling
The Bloody Crucible of Courage: Fighting Methods and Combat Experience of the Civil War
(New York: Carroll and Graf, 2003). Sharply focused studies of American strategic doctrine include Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones,
How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), Archer Jones,
Civil War Command and Strategy: The Process of Victory and Defeat
(New York: Free Press, 1992), and Donald J. Stoker,
The Grand Design: Strategy and the U.S. Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). One fairly eccentric but highly informative interpretation of Civil War combat is Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson,
Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage
(University: University of Alabama Press, 1982).

The opening campaigns of the war mentioned in this chapter can be traced in greater detail in a plethora of battle histories, beginning with William C. Davis’s
Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), Joanna McDonald’s “
We Shall Meet Again”: The First Battle of Manassas, July 18–21, 1861
(Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1999), Ethan Rafuse’s
A Single Grand Victory: The First Campaign and Battle of Manassas
(Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 2002), and David Detzer’s
Donnybrook: The Battle of Bull Run, 1861
(Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2004). George McClellan is the subject of two highly interesting biographies: Ethan Rafuse’s
McClellan’s War: The Failure of Moderation in the Struggle for the Union
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) and Stephen W. Sears,
George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1987), which should be read in conjunction with Sears’s book on the Antietam campaign,
Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam
(New Haven, CT: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), and his history of the Peninsula,
To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign
(New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1992).