Because it was the Holiday Season, December was a little lighter on social media than other months, but there was still plenty of interesting new material posted by a variety of sources.
By the way, if you want to listen to my own podcast on Reconstruction and the Civil War, just click here.
Blogs
The Civil War Monitor has a look at how Christmas was depicted in illustrations during the Civil War.
At Emerging Civil War, historian Dave Powell has been telling stories based on his research for his new book on the 1864 Atlanta Campaign of General Sherman. It makes sense that his first blog of the Holiday Season looks at how Union soldiers wrote about their commander. Powell also has a story of Union brigades divided by fighting near Rome, Georgia.
The always interesting researcher Tim Talbott tells the story of 1st Sgt. William Henry Hazzard, a Black soldier who was mortally wounded at New Market Heights. He has another tragic story of the United States Colored Troops focusing on the loss of a white officer by a Black regiment. Both articles are in Emerging Civil War.
Sheritta Bitikofer at Emerging Civil War gives us a look at the life of Nellie M. Chase, a woman who nursed the ill in camp and the wounded on the battlefield. Heath Anderson has a long two-part article on the Nashville Petition of 1865, issued by African Americans hoping to insure the protection of their newfound freedom. Here is Part 1 and here is Part 2.
I was happy to see one of my favorite bloggers back after a long silence. Keith Harris. He has a new article in Emerging Civil War on how “Loyal Union Citizens” were thinking about the Civil War in the Summer of 1864.
Carol VanOrnum continues her writing to try to help the often foundering Civil War Round Tables stay afloat. After her most recent article, she got a comment from someone who had tried to join a Round Table and had been treated as an outsider. This new article offers some advice in dealing with newcomers.
Al Mackey at Student of the American Civil War has his commentary on the move at West Point to place some memorials of graduates in Confederate uniforms into storage. He also looks at efforts in California and New York to provide reparations for slavery.
Damien Shiels at his new site Civil War Bluejackets on naval personnel has a new article looking at Finnish mariners during the war. You may know that the Irish Shiels moved to Finland in 2022 and he wants to add some coverage of Finns in the war, an immigrant group covered nowhere else on the net! There were not a heck of a lot of Finnlanders in the U.S. at the start of the war, only 165. yet Shiels has found records of 152 Finns who served in the U.S. Navy. Damien does a great job with what he has found out about this long-neglected group, providing detailed maps showing where enlistees were from, and intriguing data tables. He also has photos of Finnish enlistees and many quotes from them.
Another interesting Bluejackets story concerns Michael Ryan, a sailor who was “born at sea.”
Finally, Civil War Books & Authors announced its Best Books of 2022.
Substack
Kevin Levin’s Substack continued to turnout good articles in December. Early in the month he wrote about the Confederate government’s depiction of slavery in its paper money, showing the centrality of enslavement to the economy of the white South. This was a slavery portrayed as being without force or compulsion in which Blacks voluntarily participated in production without pay!
Levin also wrote about the persistent myth that the slave states fought the Civil War to protect “States Rights” and restrict the activity of the Federal government. As Levin points out, the slave states had advocated the Fugitive Slave Law to compel Northern Free States to arrest and return enslaved Blacks who escaped North. They also agitated for massive Federal action by urging on both the War of `1812 and the Mexican American War. Levin gives other examples as well of “States Rights” demagogues urging the expansion of Federal powers in the service of slavery.
Three years after the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery became illegal everywhere in the United States with the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Levin posted an essay he wrote for the Daily Beast on how this achievement almost was sidetracked in 1865.
It can seem incredible to someone today to realize that before the 21st Century Civil War battlefield sites often made no mention at all of slavery. Levin writes an interesting post on that transition in interpretation and what it portends for battlefield presentations in the future.
Levin finishes out the year with reflections on what should be done with the fairly weird Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery. He also looks at the “erasure” of the memory of an important piece of Southern history in the decades after the Civil War-the fact that hundreds of thousands of Southerners supported the Union cause and opposed the Confederacy. Monuments went up all over the South during the Jim Crow Era memorializing slave-owners and Confederate soldiers, but, until the 21st Century, almost none of the pro-United States men and women of that era were memorialized.
Book Reviews
The Gospel of Freedom: Black Evangelicals and the Underground Railroad by Alicestyne Turley is reviewed in Civil War Monitor by Caleb Southern. Alicestyne Turley’s new book examines “slave complicity in and active construction of a southern freedom network, which resulted in the formation of black communities and religious, economic, political, and social institutions.” According to the review, the book “upends our understanding of the “Underground Railroad” and the powerful role that independent Black churches played throughout the South in undermining the peculiar institution. Combining traditional history with engaging oral histories, Turley helps to reconstruct how enslaved persons used their Christianity and religious institutions to create freedom networks previous historians have not seen.” The reviewer critiques the absence of some canonical works from Turley’s book, but says: “The Gospel of Freedom is a recommended and valuable contribution to our understanding of the Underground Railroad, Black Evangelicalism, and abolition.”
Josh Waddell reviews A Fire Bell in the Past: The Missouri Crisis at 200, Volume I: Western Slavery, National Impasse edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley and John Craig Hammond, the first volume in a multivolume history of the founding of Missouri. Waddell says this book is “a combination of social and political history which acknowledges the centrality of race while also studying how these social realities interact with political events.”
A new “popular history” book, Hidden History of Civil War Florida, by Robert Redd is reviewed by Angela Zombek for Civil War Monitor. Florida’s Civil War history is less written about than any other Southern state’s. Professor Zombek says that “Redd’s book concisely highlights the depth of Florida’s Civil War history and, as he notes, it is likely that the state will garner more scholarly attention as focus continues to shift to the war’s non-military aspects.”
Aaron David Hyams reviews C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian by James C. Cobb. Historian C. Vann Woodward remains prominent in interpreting the Civil War and Reconstruction South, even though he has been dead for more than two decades. Woodward helped bring down the Dunning School of Reconstruction’s distortion and he challenged the Lost Cause revision of history. As Hyams writes, “Woodward emerged after World War II as the single most consequential historian of the U.S. South—and perhaps the most important American historian of his generation.” By the late-1960s Woodward began to worry that the development of Black Studies programs threatened to atomize the historical profession. Hyams writes that this makes “Cobb’s biography a welcome and timely addition to the literature in this moment. It provides unique insights into the power and production of history and the generational conflicts that shape the discipline’s debates. The profession forever evolves and pushes new boundaries—sometimes even beyond the capacities of its most gifted practitioners.”
The newly released “If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania”: The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac March to Gettysburg, Volume 1: June 3-21, 1863 by Scott L. Mingus, Sr., and Eric J. Wittenberg has been getting some good reviews over the last month. The co-authors are very well-regarded military historians. Codie Eash, who works at the Seminary Ridge Museum in Gettysburg, reviews the book for Civil War Monitor. He says that while there are hundreds of books on the three-day battle, there are very few books on “the movements of the massive United States and Confederate armies as they maneuvered into Pennsylvania that summer.” He calls the new book “a fresh and useful, 400-plus page treatment of the first three weeks of the Gettysburg Campaign. Stalwart Civil War historians and longtime Savas Beatie authors Scott L. Mingus Sr., and Eric J. Wittenberg present here an engaging and comprehensive retelling of the critical period that preceded the conflict’s bloodiest encounter.” Eash says that the book “is sure to become a modern classic in Gettysburg Campaign literature.” Eash says that while it is great as a narrative history read straight through, many Civil War students will use it “as a reference work, picking it up piecemeal during research to understand events on specific dates, or toting it along on an excursion as they follow in the footsteps of the armies.”
Doug Crenshaw at Emerging Civil War also reviewed the much anticipated If We Are Striking for Pennsylvania: The Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac March to Gettysburg. Vol. 1: June 3-21, 1863 by Scott L. Mingus Sr. and Eric J. Wittenberg. According to the very positive review: “Scott Mingus and Eric Wittenberg are excellent, noted historians and writers. I have always enjoyed their work and this volume certainly did not disappoint….Mingus and Wittenberg have dug deeply into primary resources, and through lively prose have crafted a very engaging work.”
Louisiana State University’s (LSU) Civil War Book Review has a very positive review by R. Boyd Murphee of The Man Who Started the Civil War: James Chesnut, Honor, and Emotion in the American South by Anna Koivusalo. Most readers are a lot more familiar with Mary Chesnut than with her husband James. He was a non-fire breathing South Carolina Senator who converted to full-on secessionist in the late-1850s. Chesnut delivered the order for Confederate forces to open fire on Fort Sumter in 1861 and he served in both military and civil posts in the Confederacy. After the war, he was the rare conservative who spoke out against violence against Blacks. According to Murphee: “Koivusalo, a historian with Finland’s University of Helsinki, brings Chesnut’s lost world to life. Her work is academic in the best sense of the word: analytic, revelatory, and innovative. However, readers not familiar with the historiography of the history of emotions may find her effort to gauge Chesnut’s emotions through each stage of his life tough going. The book requires a careful and deliberate approach. Although a short biography, The Man Who Started the Civil War is, like its subject, a complex work that demands serious attention…”
The LSU journal also has a review by Chris Rein of The Chicago Board of Trade Battery in the Civil War by Dennis Belcher. Rein says that while this book is in many ways a traditional Civil War unit history, it “sheds new light on artillery units, a topic of recent interest among military historians of the war…” The Board of Trade unit was the first “horse artillery” battery in the Western Theater of the Civil War.
Meg Groeling at Emerging Civil War reviews the much-anticipated The Families’ Civil War: Black Soldiers and the Fight for Racial Justice by Holly A. Pinheiro, Jr. The book is a study of 185 men enlisted in the United States Colored Troops and their families. Groeling says this book is a “compelling narrative,” concluding that “this book becomes a lens through which readers can view everyday patterns, values, and ideas of 185 free, urban African Americans and their families. The methods of micro-historical case studies are extremely well suited for studying American history, especially issues related to minorities, ethnicity, race, and gender. Pinheiro’s book takes its place as one of the first.”
Yours Affectionately, Osgood Edited by Sarah Tracy Burrows and Ryan W. Keating was reviewed at the same site by Meg Groeling, who seems to be reading a lot this last month. This book is a collection of letters by New York officer Osgood Tracy. According to Groeling, “One of the first things to strike this reader is the affectionate nature of Colonel Osgood Vose Tracy. He was, simply, a nice fellow. It would be hard to find someone with whom a reader would care to share time and maybe a drink more than with Tracy.”
Vicksburg by Donald L. Miller gets a good review from Bert Dunkerly. According to the review “Miller’s real contribution to Vicksburg campaign scholarship, highlighting the experiences and contributions of African Americans as the campaign unfolded. The army struggled to find ways to use and treat the free slaves, and Lincoln’s insistence on addressing the issue resulted in improved conditions, and eventually the enlistment of men and creation of U.S. Colored Troops.”
According to the review at Civil War Books & Authors, Hampton Newsome’s Gettysburg’s Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond “not only fully documents for the first time a little-known facet of the 1863 Gettysburg Campaign, the scale of which might surprise even well-informed students of that defining moment of the eastern theater’s middle year, but it also definitively refutes the common notion that the Virginia Peninsula was a quiet front over the two years between the conclusion of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign and the return of Union armies to the outskirts of Richmond in 1864.” CWBA thought this was one of the best books of the year and put it in an even more elevated context: “With 2013’s Richmond Must Fall: The Richmond-Petersburg Campaign, October 1864, 2019’s The Fight for the Old North State: The Civil War in North Carolina, January-May 1864, and now Gettysburg’s Southern Front: Opportunity and Failure at Richmond, Hampton Newsome has completed a trio of military studies the quality of which would make any Civil War writer envious.”
James Morgan’s Six Miles from Charleston, Five Minutes to Hell: The Battle of Secessionville, June 16, 1862 from the Emerging Civil War series also gets a CWBA review. The Emerging Civil War books are short volumes with good maps and a fair number of illustrations, making them popular with many readers. CWBA says that the book “is one of the strongest entries” in the Emerging Civil War series. The review concludes that “This volume is both a great way to introduce new readers to a Charleston campaign still overshadowed by events of the following year and a refresher course of the highest quality for those who haven’t revisited Brennan’s enduring standard history of Secessionville since its late 1990s debut.”
Movie Review
At Civil War Monitor, Anthony J. Cade II reviews the new Will Smith film Emancipation. He says that it “could be one of this century’s great movies about self-emancipation. Not because of its fragile historical accuracy, or because it stars Will Smith, but because it lives up to its title: portraying what it took for some enslaved people to obtain freedom.”
Podcasts
Gerald Prokopowicz has some interesting episodes of Civil War Talk Radio. His discussion of Bradley Gottfried’s new book “Lee Invades the North: A Comparison of the Antietam and Gettysburg Campaigns” is great for anyone interested in two of the most written about battles of the war.
Donna McCreary talked with Gerry about her new book “Mary Lincoln Demystified.”
The final Civil War Talk Radio episode of the year is Gerry talking to himself about what makes a Civil War book bad! Since he reads dozens of books every year on the war, who would know better than Gerry?
Historian Jill Ogline Titus has a great book out on how Gettysburg marked the 100th Anniversary of the greatest battle of the Civil War in 1963 and Chris Mackowski does a great job interviewing her on his Emerging Civil War podcast.
Emerging Civil War also had a good duo of episodes on the final Confederate offensive campaign in Tennessee. First up was an interview with Greg Wade of the Franklin Civil War Roundtable John Bell Hood’s Army of Tennessee fight at the Battle of Franklin in 1864.
Author Sean Michael Chick discusses the December 1864 Battle of Nashville which wrecked the Confederate Army of Tennessee in December of 1864.
Tim Smith of the Adam’s County (where Gettysburg is) Historical Society was on the Addressing Gettysburg Podcast three times in December with three good programs. The first examines the harrowing journey of Robert Milroy’s union wagon train that escaping from Virginia during Lee’s invasion of Pennsylvania in 1864.
Smith’s second talk is on babies born around Gettysburg in 1863, some of whom were still alive in the second half of the 20th Century.
The third talk by Smith looks at what the two armies left behind after the Battle of Gettysburg. Some of it was valuable and some of it was gruesome.
Untold Civil War has an interview with Alexander Rose on his book The Lion and the Fox which concerns Union and Confederate “spies” involved in the is the clandestine mission to build (or thwart the building of) a Confederate Navy.
The same podcast has an interview with Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guides on how they got into the niche profession and what the work is like.
Our friends at the Battle of Gettysburg Podcast go the route of “Bad History” of the Battle of Gettysburg. This is both informative and funny. I hope they keep the podcast going in 2023.
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