The last month was a good one for both blogging and podcasts. I particularly enjoyed the Civil War Talk Radio interview with Bryan Cheeseboro of the National Archives who is also a well-known Civil War reenactor.
By the way, if you want to listen to my own podcast on Reconstruction and the Civil War, just click below.
Blogs
At Emerging Civil War, Patrick Kelly-Fischer has an interesting piece on a Confederate plot to start a rebellion in Colorado to coincide with the 1862 Texas invasion of the New Mexico. At the same site, Tim Talbott tells the story of Pompey Cotton, an enslaved man who enlisted in the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War. In another article, Tim Talbott looks at the developing authoritarian society in late-1850s Virginia where the authorities were trying to maintain slavery by investigating the potentially abolitionist views of some whites in the region.
Ed Lowe writes about Irish Confederate general Pat Cleburne at Ringgold Gap.
Last month Emerging Civil War did a series on Civil War Medicine. You can see the list of articles here.
Jon Tracey visits the Grand Army of the Republic monument in Washington on ECW. There are dozens of Grand Army monuments around the country, but this was a central national memorial to the veterans’ organization.
David Dixon has a good piece at ECW on Nicholas Sa’id, an African immigrant who joined the Union Army. A while back I wrote about Sa’id but I still learned from Dixon’s article.
ECW’s editor Chris Mackowski wrote about a well-known figure at the Fredericksburg-area Civil War sites named Joe Lafluer, a regular reader of this blog! Lafluer donates a lot of his time caring for the historic sites in the area.
Because I love Saratoga, New York, I enjoyed an Emerging Civil War article by Sarah Kay Bierle of four letters written by Union General William Francis Bartlett during his 1864 imprisonment in Libby Prison about wanting to go to that Upstate resort. The last time I was there was in May.
Max Longley has a good piece on resistance to the showing of the brillant, racist, movie Birth of a Nation in Arizona on the ECW blog.
For those interested in the writings of Confederate generals about Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, historian Gary Gallagher has an essay discussing memoirs by Longstreet, Gordon, Ewell, and Early at the Civil War Monitor.
HistoryNet tells us that the great original version of Night of the Living Dead opens with a view of a Civil War grave of a German immigrant soldier.
HistoryNet also has a story on the life of Abraham Galloway, and enslaved man who escaped slavery and made it to Canada but reentered the United States in the late 1850s to become an outspoken Abolitionist. During the Civil War he became a Union spy and later raised United States Colored Troops regiments.
For Baby Boomers who played war games in their youths, Avalon Hill is a familiar name. HistoryNet looks at the influence of the Battle of Gettysburg on the creation of wargames.
For the traveller, HistoryNet offers a guide to Civil War medical sites in Frederick, Maryland. I did not realize there were so many, in addition to the well-known museum there.
Al Mackey continues his looks at the so-called “Confederate Heritage” industry. He reports that new polling shows that Americans support removals or changes in the displays of Confederate statues in some public locations. 10% say the statues should be destroyed, 28% say they should be removed to museums, 35% say they can be left in place with panels explaining the history of racism surrounding them, and 26% say they should be left as-is. So while 73% say something different should be done with them, there is not a clear consensus over what actually should happen.
In another post, Al looks at the Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery. The monument was erected to mainstream Confederate Memory right across the river from Washington, D.C.
Substack
Kevin Levin looks at the major conservation work going on at Gettysburg this Fall. He notes that while the National Park Service is spending a lot to preserve Confederate monuments like the very prominent Robert E. Lee statue near where Pickett’s Charge began, it has been slow to roll out interpretation markers along Confederate Avenue telling visitors the story of Lost Cause representation embodied in the displays. The Lee statue, which has reemerged as a site of White Supremacist assembly, is particularly concerning.
Another battlefield, Chickamauga, got national attention when Marjorie Taylor Green posted photos of her visit there recently. Levin gives some observations.
Levin also discusses the importance of how Reconstruction is taught in our schools. He writes:
As someone with 20+ years of teaching American history at the high school level, I believe that the history of Reconstruction is one of the most consequential periods in our nation’s history.
Few periods in American history are more challenging to learn and especially teach.
The period witnessed a concerted effort to create a bi-racial democracy unparalleled in American history up to that point as well as a violent backlash that reflected a commitment on the part of many to white supremacy.
I went to school at a time when it was barely taught at all. In schools that did teach about Reconstruction, the lesson often was that Blacks were ignorant and incompetent for citizenship.
Levin concludes with advice to history teachers on learning to teach Reconstruction.
Book Reviews
Civil War Books and Authors (CWBA) reviewed the brand new Emerging Civil War book The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi, May 14, 1863 by Chris Mackowski. CWBA says that Mackowski provides “fine new accounts of the battle itself and subsequent acts of destruction within the city…” While the book is concise, CWBA says that “Mackowski’s book nonetheless provides a solid overview of the battle that properly contextualizes the event as a major crossroads moment in the [Vicksburg] campaign.”
The same site gave an in-depth review of At War With King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War by Megan L. Bever, a book about the Temperance Movement, the taxing of booze, and popular support or the right to get drunk cheaply. The review says the book “provides us with the first comprehensive examination of alcohol consumption during the conflict. In addition to scrutinizing the production, supply, and regulation of spirits at home and on the fighting front, the study offers a detailed investigation of army drinking practices and their impact on debates surrounding discipline, patriotism, and ideal soldierly attributes and behaviors.”
Philip Hatfield’s Treason on the Cape Fear: Roots of the Civil War in North Carolina, January-April 1861 is also reviewed by Civil War Books and Authors. When unauthorized Confederate partisans captured U.S. forts on the Carolina Coast, the North Carolina governor returned them to the U.S. army. Later, when the state seceded in 1861, North Carolina forces retook the same forts. According to the review; “this slender volume’s overall narrative offers a solid account of the political and military events that unfolded in North Carolina over the months preceding the state’s own May 1861 secession. That final abandonment of North Carolina’s initial pro-Union stance, of course, led to the worst fears of January-April 1861 becoming stark reality. Indeed, the consequences of North Carolina’s actions during that period came to roost over the next twelve months, first through General Benjamin Butler’s August 1861 Hatteras Expedition and then by General Ambrose Burnside’s far more expansive North Carolina invasion that struck the coast in devastating fashion the following February.”
LSU Press’s Civil War Book Review had a review of a new book that is very interesting to me by Dann Broyld called Borderland Blacks: Two Cities in the NIAGRA REGION during the Final Decades of Slavery. The book is about escaped slaves who fled to the Niagara Peninsula in Canada in the decades before the Civil War, but it also looks at the Black communities established in Western, New York that connected with those in Ontario. Reviewer Jennifer Thompson Burns writes that while the Ontario and New York communities were in different countries, “Decades of infrastructural advancements in the frontier environment from the end of the 1790s to the mid-nineteenth century was a critical component of Black transnationalism in the Niagara region. International border-crossing became faster and easier when, in addition to the water access and the power it provided, construction of the canal and railroad systems and suspension bridges offered steady employment opportunities and transformed the travel industry…” She strongly recommends this book, writing that it is “is meticulously researched, masterfully structured, and written with such clarity it seamlessly demystifies the complex lives and agency of ordinary Black people determined to exercise autonomy and work toward social change.”
At the same site, Timothy Williams reviews Persistence through Peril: Episodes of College Life and Academic Endurance in the Civil War South a collection of essays about the disrupted college terms of the Civil War years edited by Eric Platt and Holly Foster. The book has a chapter on each of these colleges that stayed open during the war, South Carolina Military Academy (Columbia, S.C.); Wofford College (Spartanburg, S.C.); Mississippi College (Clinton, M.S.), Spring Hill College (Mobile, A.L.); Tuskegee Female College (Tuskegee, A.L.); Mercer University Wesleyan Female College (Macon, Ga.); the University of Virginia (Charlottesville, V.A.); Virginia Military Institute (Lexington, Va.); the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill, N.C.); and Trinity College (now Duke University, Durham, N.C.). Williams writes that some school made changes to their curriculum in response to the war:
This volume reveals that educators and students saw war as a time to rethink, though not dispose entirely of, the classical curriculum. While most institutions continued antebellum practices of classical learning, others began to innovate their curricula. Christian K. Anderson, for example, shows that students at the South Carolina Military Academy learned about the history of the U.S. Constitution by reading the writing of John C. Calhoun, an enslaver and proslavery politician from South Carolina. They were not alone. In another fascinating essay, R. Eric Platt and Donaven L. Johnson use the student writing at Spring Hill College—a Jesuit institution in New Orleans—to show how the college created an atmosphere for generating Confederate patriotism. Similarly, another strong essay reveals that Mercer University—a Baptist College—began to teach a class about slavery as war raged around them in Georgia.
So, the academic response to the war was to increase the Confederate ideological alignment of some of the schools. Williams clearly finds the book filled with interesting information, but he cautions that the authors never answer the central question of why any of this matters.
David Gleeson, one of the most important scholars of immigrants during the Civil War, has a review in the Civil War Book Review of Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South by Gracjan Kraszewski. While most Catholics who fought in the war served in the Union Army, there were thousands of Confederate Catholics. Unlike many Protestant denominations that split in half over the war, Catholicism remained a facially unified religion throughout the war and Reconstruction. Many Southern Catholic prelates took up the Confederate cause after Fort Sumter fell.
Gleeson faults author Gracjan Kraszewski for arguing that the actions of Catholic bishops represent the views of their congregants. Gleeson notes that many bishops were Southern born or came from the upper reaches of the immigrants who settled there. However, says Gleeson, “Most southern Catholics, outside of Louisiana, were poor immigrants or the immediate descendants of them. They did not have the deep-rooted commitment to “southern institutions” and the Confederacy.”
The Civil War Book Review looks at a pair of books on Long Island poet Walt Whitman. Song of Ourselves: Walt Whitman and the Fight for Democracy by Mark Edmundson and Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City by Kenneth Price are reviewed by Stephen Mack. The reviewer clearly prefers Whitman in Washington. He writes:
Whitman’s Civil War experiences have been well-documented for decades. But Kenneth Price’s Whitman in Washington: Becoming the National Poet in the Federal City opens up an unexpected new avenue of insight. Biographical and critical treatments of Whitman’s Washington, D.C. years (1863-73) typically stress his work as a kind of comfort nurse, daily visiting wounded soldiers (both Union and Confederate) in area hospitals to bring them small gifts, write their letters, commiserate with them, and often sit with them as they died. It was genuinely heroic, self-sacrificial work that quickly found its way into his poetry—while undoubtedly taking a toll on his health. But what rarely gets more than a passing reference is the “day job” he secured as a government clerk to support himself and his philanthropy: first briefly, in the Department of Interior, then, for nearly a decade to follow, in the Attorney General’s office. But as Price demonstrates in his study, Whitman’s work as a clerk may be less dramatic than his work as a volunteer nurse, its shaping impact on the poet’s life and literary work might have been just as profound…
Michael Green’s Lincoln and Native Americans is reviewed by Scott Berg at Civil War Book Review. This book is part of the Concise Lincoln series, books of less than 200 pages on different aspects of Lincoln’s life. Berg calls the book “a smart, no-nonsense overview of the topic…”
Robert Conner’s new book James Montgomery: Abolitionist Warrior get a good review at the Civil War Monitor. Colin Edward Woodward says that the book “is a much-needed corrective to Glory and historians who have dismissed Montgomery as a barbarian. Conner’s attention to the Combahee raid and Olustee are particularly well done. Given Montgomery’s prowess, one wonders what might have happened had the Union pitted him against Nathan Bedford Forrest or John Singleton Mosby. What is clear is that his harsh tactics toward the Confederacy foreshadowed Sherman’s destructive marches of 1864 and 1865. Conner’s book reminds us that in the cause of freedom and democracy, men like James Montgomery are sometimes needed.”
Nick Sacco at Civil War Monitor reviewed Remembering Enslavement: Reassembling the Southern Plantation Museum edited by Amy E. Potter, et al. Sacco identifies the central role of the plantation in the identity of the South:
When asked what characteristics define the regional identity of the U.S. South, many people the world over would point to its plantations. These centers of forced enslavement, brutal working conditions, and financial exploitation have endured within the popular imagination through literature, film, and heritage tourism that has often portrayed plantations as a ‘positive good’ for the South. Once centers of economic activity through the cultivation of precious cotton, rice, and sugar commodities by enslaved hands, many plantations that remain standing today continue to be centers of economic activity through tours of the big house, plantation weddings, and other entertainment activities geared for a largely white visitor base.
The plantations typically provide a distorting perspective on slavery. While most people living on the plantation grounds were enslaved Blacks, the sites typically devote most of their interpretation to the wealthy white families that owned both the land and the Black people held captive there.
Sacco strongly recommends this new collection of essays on plantations, writing:
Remembering Enslavement is a monumental contribution to the study of public history. This book will be a crucial resource for scholars and practitioners for years to come. Serving as a golden standard for conducting research at historic sites about the interpretive focus of tours, programs, and exhibits, Remembering Enslavement deserves a spot on the bookshelf of anyone who works at or cares about historic sites that interpret the history of slavery in the United States.
Podcasts
On Civil War Talk Radio, host Gerry Prokopowicz talked with William A. Blair, author of “The Record of Murders and Outrages: Racial Violence and the Fight over Truth at the Dawn of Reconstruction.” They discuss the detailed record keeping by the Freedmen’s Bureau of racist violence against newly freed African Americans. I hope Gerry does more interviews on Reconstruction.
The same podcast has an interview with M. Chris Bryan, author of “Cedar Mountain to Antietam: A Civil War Campaign History of the Union XII Corps, July – September 1862.” This is a classic battle discussion.
Gerry has another battle discussion with Jeffry D. Wert, author of “The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers Struggle for Spotsylvanias Bloody Angle.” I was at Spotsylvania for the 150th Anniversary and found the place engrossing. Wert is a good discussant.
Bryan Cheeseboro is an important person in the Civil War reenactment community, a historian of African American troops in the war, a historic site preservationist, on the staff of the National Archives, and a social media leader at the Civil War Historian’s Page on Facebook. Last week he was interviewed by Gerry Prokopowicz at Civil War Talk Radio about his work, the Civil War reenactor scene today, and who he would talk to if he could go back in time to the 1860s.
Gary Gallagher was interviewed last month by Chris Mackowski of Emerging Civil War about Bruce Catton’s iconic Army of the Potomac Trilogy. Bruce Catton was probably the most read writers on the Civil War during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A journalist by trade, and the editor of American Heritage Magazine, Catton generated a lot of the interest in the war, Lincoln, Grant, and Lee just as the Civil War Centennial was beginning. This is a great discussion with both Catton and Mackowski providing insights.
Chris Hayes of MSNBC interviewed Professor Kidada E. Williams about her new book “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction.” This is an interesting discussion of the use of terror to suppress the Black vote during Reconstruction as well as ways the Grant administration was able to protect voters using the Ku Klux Klan Act and the U.S. Army.
Gettysburg National Military Park Superintendent Steve Sims did an intriguing interview with Addressing Gettysburg about developments at the park. With Little Round Top closed for stabilization, Sims answers questions about the preservation efforts underway at the iconic site. Also lots of insights into how the Park Service sees Gettysburg.
Also on Addressing Gettysburg, Jari Villanueva, the director of the Federal City Brass Band, talks about the brass band music of the Civil War Era.
Respected guide and author Bradley Gottfried was back on Addressing Gettysburg to talk about Lincoln appearance at Gettysburg that culminated in the Gettysburg Address. A lot in here on the situation in Gettysburg in the months after the battle, the creation of the National Cemetery, and local figures in the national story.
The Civil War Regiments podcast had a friendly conversation with Dana Shoaf, the editor of Civil War Times. I first subscribed to the magazine back in the early 1970s, before most of you were born.
Video
This video shows what happens when two Black men dressed as slaves tried to go to a Civil War reenactment.
Gary Adelman and Kris White have a video on what they say are some of the most important Civil War sites in “New York City.” Honesty, they miss all the great sites outside of Manhattan, but there are some good ones in this film.
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