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

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).

EIGHT. THE YEAR THAT TREMBLED

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