Blogs
Have you ever belonged to a Civil War Round Table? These are highly local groups of people interested in the Civil War who meet regularly to discuss the war and just about everything around it. I was active in a very friendly Round Table in Nassau County on Long Island for several years, although I had to leave when this group, made up entirely of non-Southerners, decided to join in the misbegotten defense of the flying of the Confederate Battle Flag from government buildings! Boy was that a bridge too far! Anyway, if you are active in a Round Table you may want to find resources for it in a blog post over at Emerging Civil War published by a leader in the Civil War Round Table Congress. It links to videos and materials that are useful for leaders in these groups.
Emerging Civil War also has a post by Sheritta Bitikofer on an officer of the Louisiana Native Guards, one of the first Black regiments in the Union army, named Captain André Cailloux. This is part of a series.
At the same site, Sarah Kay Bierle writes about an abolitionist action at McAllister’s Mill near Gettysburg on July 4, 1836. Mill owner James McAllister was an abolitionist who hid runaway slaves on his property. A group of Black and white abolitionists met there that Independence Day to issue this resoultion:
“Resolved, That although we may be denounced, for our efforts in the cause of human rights, by office-holding and office-seeking politicians, and even by men wearing clerical robes, we will not be “afraid of their terror,” but, disregarding their denunciations, we will continue to open our mouths for the dumb [silent], and to plead the cause of the oppressed and of those who have none to help them…”
Chris Mackowski, who heads things at Emerging Civil War, has a nice consideration of the statue of Rafael Semmes that was recently taken down in Mobile, Ala. and moved to a museum. Semmes was the Captain of the Confederate commerce raider (or pirate ship, if you will) Alabama. The new site of the statue provides context, rather than glorification, for the statue.
Harry Smeltzer, the popular Bull Runnings blogger, has an article up at the Civil War Monitor on five books to read about the First Bull Run battle. July 21 is the Anniversary of the battle, so the Monitor also had an essay on First Bull Run using illustrations of the battle.
Al Mackey, who may have posted more in the last year than any other Civil War blogger, has an interesting look at how Richmond museums are recontextualizing their displays of Confederate iconography. He also looks at how a book by Ron DeSantis excuses slavery in the United State’s Constitution.
Al Mackey reflects on Sam Watkins’s famous account of his years in the Confederate army titled Company Aytch. The book has been getting renewed critical attention lately, so you may want to read this. Mackey writes;
It’s easy to see why Ken Burns gave such visibility to Sam Watkins in his “The Civil War” miniseries. The book is written in a compelling narrative and the stories Watkins tells are entertaining, if not always true. However, it’s obvious that though he affects a persona of a common man, Watkins was one of the South’s elites, educated and coming from a wealthy family.
Niels Eichhorn at Muster writes about two Civil War Era rebellions, the 1863 Polish rebellion and the Dakota rising in the Old Northwest. The article looks at the impact of Polish refugees fleeing into Germany and Dakota seeking refuge in Canada on domestic and foreign policy in the receiving states.
Civil War Picket has an interesting article on a new park near St. Louis named after a former slave who served in the United States Colored Troops. Honoree Benjamin Oglesby served in the 56th USCT.
Substack
Kevin Levin discusses the newly reopened Virginia Museum of History and Culture’s exhibition of Lost Cause art promoting a sanitized and heroic image of the Confederacy. In particular, the centrality of “The Four Seasons of the Confederacy” set of four large murals by Charles Hoffbauer is discussed by Levin.
Levin also has an interesting reflection on Confederate veteran Sam Watkins and his memoir Company Aytch. Watkins is among the most read of “ordinary” Confederate soldiers, yet his father owned more than one hundred slaves. Patrick Lewis, writing in the Journal of the Civil War Era, found that roughly a third of the men of Company H were from slave-owning families.
Levin also has a Substack on a historian having empathy for a Confederate soldier. Levin writes:
Unfortunately, it has become more difficult to talk about Confederate soldiers over the past few years. Attempts to explore the history of these men beyond the subject of slavery is often interpreted as explicit or disguised Lost Cause rhetoric. Any attempt to humanize these men is viewed as racist.
Levin is a renowned historian of the Battle of the Crater, which he wrote about on its anniversary on July 30.
Finally, I never put anything I wrote in this feature, but my recent article for Emerging Civil War on Stonewall Jackson’s statue in Richmond, Va., whether or not is is a great article, has gotten over 100 comments in five days!
Book Reviews
To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner by Carole Emberton gets a nice review by Cooper Wingert at Civil War Monitor who calls this book “a remarkable microhistory.” Wingart writes about the long journey to freedom for Priscilla Joyner, born just before the Civil War:
As Emberton tells it, Priscilla Joyner’s full life story affirms that emancipation was a protracted process that for freedpeople was not complete with the legal end of slavery, but continued through the search for the emotional sanctuary long denied them under slavery. In doing so, Emberton joins a growing number of scholars who have begun to write about a “long emancipation,” the notion that emancipation was a decades-long process involving successive generations rather than the work of a single act or individual. By Emberton’s account, that process was only beginning with the legal abolition of slavery. To be sure, Emberton does not dismiss the importance of the new legal protections freedpeople secured in the wake of emancipation. State-recognized marriages, for instance, offered Black families new legal safeguards and social respectability, but to Joyner and other members of what Emberton calls the “charter generation of freedom” (p. xix) who lived the difficult transition from slavery to freedom, emancipation meant the ability to form the loving ties that slaveholders had long tried to prevent. In short, a key contribution of this book is to underscore that the political and legal milestones that dominate history books were not the only—or even the primary—yardsticks by which freedpeople measured their freedom on a day-to-day basis.
Wingart concludes that this “is an elegantly written book that grapples with the lingering traumas of slavery while also exploring what it was like to experience the small joys of freedom.”
Also at the Civil War Monitor, Brian Matthew Jordan reviews In The Houses of Their Dead: The Lincolns, The Booths, and The Spirits by Terry Alford. The Booth family and the Lincoln family both were among the more than a million Americans who entertained the belief that it was possible to communicate with the dead through the practices of Spiritualism. Alford’s book gets a strong recommendation from a respected reviewer who says that the volume “will linger with a diverse lot of readers long after they finish the book.”
Over at Emerging Civil War, A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House by Jonathan W. White is reviewed by Max Longley. This new work has been getting some strong recommendations. In spite of his ethical and political opposition to slavery, Lincoln was strongly influenced by the racism of his day. It was only after he decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation that Lincoln began to meet with Blacks. According to Longley, The book…shows Lincoln[‘s] evolution from a colonizationist – who wanted to free the slaves and then send them outside the country- into someone willing to have blacks and whites live together in the United States, on terms seemingly evolving toward equality.”
At the same web site, Lincoln and Native Americans by Michael S. Green gets a mixed review from Derek D. Maxfield. According to the review:
That this work is decidedly unsympathetic to Lincoln is apparent. In the conclusion of the book, Green argues that “any examination of Lincoln and Native Americans reveals much that should disturb his fans.” “He approved a mass execution, said nothing about massacres, had no conversations with Indigenous peoples that rivaled the respect he demonstrated for African Americans…” And the list goes on. A page later, Green weakly walks it back a little. “But a litany of condemnation is unfair to Lincoln. To expect him to live outside of his time would be ahistorical.”
Also at Emerging Civil War, historian Brian Matthew Jordan reviews Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest A. Dollar, Jr. Brian Matthew Jordan writes that “this book supplies a vivid, well-written, and entirely memorable account of the war’s final days in North Carolina,” but he also says that “the author’s premise” that trauma set the stage for post-war North Carolina “is not entirely persuasive.”
Meg Groeling reviews Gene Eric Salecker’s Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana: The Worst Maritime Disaster in American History at Emerging Civil War. She says the book “is a combination of modern and historical who-done-it writing. It is as good as it gets! …Eric Salecker, currently the historical consultant for the Sultana Disaster Museum in Marion, AK, knows how to write history. That he also knows how to construct a mystery becomes apparent as well.” Groeling says that the book combines 157 year old eyewitness testimony with modern science to explain the tragic explosion that killed hundreds of Union soldiers who were newly released from Confederate captivity.
At the same site, Zachery A. Fry reviews a new biography General John A. Rawlins: No Ordinary Man
by Allen J. Ottens. Rawlins was a top aide to Ulysses S. Grant who fostered his military and political career. While he is hardly a familiar figure to all but the most devoted Civil War student, Fry makes a case for the study of this staff officer. According to Fry, this is a great book to learn about an important builder of Grant’s career. He writes “Ottens succeeds brilliantly in fixing our gaze on the engaging figure of John Rawlins while still giving fresh insights into Grant, the Union Army, and the broader Civil War era. No Ordinary Man merits the highest recommendation.”
Podcasts
The Addressing Gettysburg Podcast did a sobering episode on the medical care provided to soldiers wounded during the July 1-3, 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.
Damian Shiels, a great colleague in the study of Irish immigrants in the Civil War, has a nice interview on his work in this podcast. He also discusses why Irish immigrants served in the Union army and navy. Damian is really good in interviews.
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