Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

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).

FOUR. TO WAR UPON SLAVERY

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).

The Peninsula brought Robert E. Lee to the forefront of the Civil War, and the four volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s R. E. Lee (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936) and Emory Thomas’s Robert E. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995) remain the place to begin with the great Virginia general, although readers with a taste for iconoclasm should not miss Thomas L. Connelly’s The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York: Knopf, 1977), Michael Fellman’s The Making of Robert E. Lee (New York: Random House, 2000) or Alan Nolan’s Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). A more unusual approach to Lee’s life can be found through his letters in Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters (New York: Viking, 2008). John Hennessy’s Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) offers a particularly good account of this long-neglected battle, while the literature on Antietam is particularly rich in having for its chroniclers James V. Murfin in The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee’s Maryland Campaign, September, 1862 (New York: T. Yoseloff, 1965) and Benjamin F. Cooling in Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), as well as an unusual reference work in Joseph L. Harsh’s Sounding the Shallows: A Confederate Companion for the Maryland Campaign of 1862 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000).

The final object of the battles came back to the question of slavery and its future, and for understanding the agonizing position of blacks who wanted the war for the Union to become a war for freedom. The most comprehensive survey undertaken of emancipation and its consequences is that of the Freedom and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, and especially in the three volumes of the first series of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867—The Destruction of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and in a general anthology, Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War (New York: New Press, 1992). The controversial question of Lincoln’s motives and intentions in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation have been handled from numerous angles by Don D. Fehrenbacher, “Only His Stepchildren: Lincoln and the Negro,” in Civil War History 20 (December 1974), George M. Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” in the Journal of Southern History 61 (February 1975), and Paul Finkelman, “Lincoln and the Preconditions for Emancipation” in Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered, ed. W. A. Blair and K. F. Younger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). LaWanda Cox’s Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985) offers a sympathetic portrayal of Lincoln and race; at entirely the other end is Lerone Bennett’s forceful but erratic Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson, 2000). Burrus Carnahan’s Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation