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

Fort Fisher: The Civil War Letters of Edward King Wightman, ed. by E. G. Longacre (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985). Sometimes soldiers kept their opinions to themselves, or at least to their diaries, and several memorable soldier diaries have survived to be republished in scholarly editions. The most outstanding examples of this sort are Allan Nevins’s edition of the diary of the upper-class New York artillery chief Charles S. Wainwright in A Diary of Battle: The Personal Journals of Col. Charles S. Wainwright, 1861–1865 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962) and K. Jack Bauer’s edition of Soldiering: The Civil War Diary of Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York Volunteer Infantry (San Rafael, CA: Presidio Press, 1977).

Some veterans of the war chose to pour their experiences into a third genre, the personal memoir. The outstanding example of the Civil War memoir is Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, but the common soldiers also produced memoirs of their service which match Grant’s for interest if not for eloquence. Foremost among these soldier memoirs must be Hard Tack and Coffee: The Unwritten Story of Army Life (Boston: G. M. Smith, 1887) by John D. Billings. From the Confederate side, Henry Kyd Douglas’s I Rode with Stonewall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940) is the most famous, but it should not eclipse the edition of E. P. Alexander’s memoirs, Fighting for the Confederacy: The Personal Recollections of General Edward Porter Alexander, by Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

Not every memoir or regimental history necessarily took the form of a book. Civil War veterans organizations, such as the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States (MOLLUS), regularly met to hear members read papers related to their wartime experiences, and an almost bottomless well of material on the common soldier can be found in the sixty-five volumes of MOLLUS Papers, the fifty-five volumes of Southern Historical Society Papers, the forty-three volumes of Confederate Veteran magazine, and the nineteen volumes of Confederate Military History. In another postwar contribution to the history of the common soldier, the adjutants-general of many of the Northern states issued comprehensive volumes of rosters and unit histories of their state volunteer regiments, the most striking of which are the five volumes of Samuel P. Bates’s History of Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861–65 (Harrisburg, PA: B. Singerly, 1869).

A number of important studies of the Civil War soldier have attempted to synthesize the vast array of materials available in the regimental histories, letters, diaries, and memoirs into a comprehensive portrait of Wilkeson’s “private soldier.” The most famous of these synthetic studies are Bell I. Wiley’s famous The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982 [1943]) and The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978 [1952]). These two works have been supplemented by James I. Robertson’s Soldiers Blue and Gray (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988). Specific aspects of the soldier’s experience in combat have been skillfully analyzed in Gerald Linderman’s Embattled Courage: The Experience of Combat in the Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1987), Joseph T. Glatthaar’s The March to the Sea and Beyond: Sherman’s Troops in the Savannah and Carolinas Campaigns (New York: New York University Press, 1985), and Reid Mitchell’s Civil War Soldiers: Their Expectations and Their Experiences (New York: Viking, 1988).

The Civil War field officer has attracted comparatively less notice in the current literature than Wilkeson’s “private soldier,” although T. Harry Williams’s Hayes of the Twenty-Third: The Civil War Volunteer Officer (New York: Knopf, 1965) is a reminder that even the officer was a common soldier in the Civil War. James A. Garfield, an Ohio officer who later rose to become president of the United States (along with two other Ohio veterans of the Civil War, Hayes and McKinley) left examples of both diaries and letters, which have been edited and published as The Wild Life of the Army: Civil War Letters of James A. Garfield, edited by F. D. Williams (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1964), and The Diary of James A. Garfield, edited by H. J. Brown and F. D. Williams, 4 vols. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967–81). A particularly useful officer memoir is Jacob Dolson Cox’s Military Reminiscences of the Civil War, 2 vols. (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1900). One grade of officer that has enjoyed an outsize degree of attention has been the Civil War surgeon. George Worthington Adams’ Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York: H. Schuman, 1952), H.H. Cunningham’s Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958) and Ira M. Rutkow’s Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine (New York: Random House, 2005) make the very best of what could hardly help being an appalling story.

And even the regimental colors have biographies. Richard Sauers’ two- volume illustrated history of the flags carried by Pennsylvania’s volunteer regiments, Advance the Colors (Harrisburg, PA: Capitol Preservation Committee, 1987, 1992) photographs and documents every Pennsylvania regimental color, along with a brief history and bibliography for the units which carried them. Those who fled from the colors also have a remembrancer in Ella Lonn’s Desertion During the Civil War (New York: Century Co., 1928).

SEVEN. THE MANUFACTURE OF WAR

The romance of the blockade-runners is one of the great fictions of the Civil War, elaborated in large part by the post-war recollections of the blockade-runners and concealing the life-and-death struggle which was going on behind the curtain of foreign policy and military supply. The Confederacy’s attempts to draw France and England into the war as mediators or belligerents has received surprisingly good coverage from both English and American sources, although the consensus which has emerged from that literature leans toward the opinion that the Confederacy never really had much serious prospect of being actively protected