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

by either European power. Howard Jones’s Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), Abraham Lincoln and a New Birth of Freedom: The Union and Slavery in the Diplomacy of the Civil War (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), and Blue and Gray Diplomacy: A History of Union and Confederate Foreign Relations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010) make it clear how limited British enthusiasm for the Confederacy really was, and also how differently the Emancipation Proclamation was read at the various levels of British government and society (some observers actually thought that the Proclamation, by inciting slave revolts in the South, actually made the case for intervention stronger). The other major studies of Civil War diplomacy are Frank Owsley’s King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), Frank J. Merli, The Alabama, British Neutrality, and the American Civil War (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004 [1970]), and Lynn Case and Warren Spencer’s The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970).

The Civil War navies have been the subject of many books, but a useful survey to begin with is Spencer Tucker, Blue and Gray Navies: The Civil War Afloat (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006). Of course, sooner or later the reader’s interest will wander back to the daring and duplicity of the blockade-runners and the dreaded commerce raiders, and at that moment, no better suggestions can be offered than the slippery, Latin-quoting John Wilkinson’s The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner (New York: Sheldon, 1877) and Raphael Semmes’s own memoir of his service on the Sumter and the Alabama in Service Afloat: Or, the Remarkable Career of the Confederate Cruisers, Sumter and Alabama, During the War Between the States (Baltimore: Kelly, Piet, 1887). The Confederate navy received its earliest chronicle from one of its own officers, an artilleryman-turned-sailor, John Thomas Scharf, whose History of the Confederate States Navy (New York: Rogers and Sherwood, 1887) is a highly partisan but far-reaching account of the Southern navy. More modern work on the Confederate Navy has been done by Raimondo Luraghi, A History of the Confederate Navy (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996) and Warren Spencer, The Confederate Navy in Europe (University: University of Alabama Press, 1983). The entanglement of Confederate diplomacy with the Confederate navy and its plans to build warships and commerce-raiders in Britain has been analyzed by Frank J. Merli in Great Britain and the Confederate Navy (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004 [1970]), while the ingenuity with which the Confederates fashioned a fleet of ironclad warships has been told by William N. Still in Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Armorclads (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1985). The Confederate secretary of the navy who was the spark for much of that ingenuity has been the subject of two biographers, Rodman Underwood in Stephen Russell Mallory: A Biography of the Confederate Navy Secretary and United States Senator (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005) and Joseph T. Durkin in Stephen R. Mallory: Confederate Navy Chief (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954).

Mallory’s opposite number in Lincoln’s cabinet has also enjoyed outstanding biographical treatment from John Niven in Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Secretary of the Navy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) and Richard S. West Jr. in Gideon Welles: Lincoln’s Navy Department (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Welles’s famous diaries have been edited by Howard K. Beale in three volumes as The Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). Welles’s squadrons have been well analyzed in Stephen R. Taaffe’s Commanding Lincoln’s Navy: Union Naval Leadership During the Civil War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009). The momentous combat of the Monitor and Virginia has never been better told than in William C. Davis’s lively Duel Between the First Ironclads (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975). In addition to Welles and his management of the Federal navy, Seward and the State Department have been discussed in Glyndon Van Deusen’s William Henry Seward (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), while Seward’s diplomatic faux pas in the first year of the war have been dealt with in a more positive fashion by Norman Ferris in his aptly titled Desperate Diplomacy: William Henry Seward’s Foreign Policy, 1861 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1976) and in Ferris’s The Trent Affair (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977). Managing the war fell in large measure to Stanton, whose biography by Harold Hyman and Benjamin P. Thomas, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln’s Secretary of War (New York: Knopf, 1962) is one of the models of Civil War biographical literature. Supplying the war was the task of Montgomery C. Meigs, who has also benefitted from a superb biography by Russell F. Weigley, Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M. C. Meigs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), although one should not miss a fine survey of wartime logistics in Mark R. Wilson’s The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). Coordinating the armies for the North really became the province of Henry Wager Halleck, the subject of a high-level biography from John Marszalek, Commander of All Lincoln’s Armies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). An outstanding general survey of the organization of the North’s economic resources during the war is Philip Shaw Paludan’s A People’s Contest: The Union and the Civil War (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).

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