The Wall Street Journal has a review by Allen Guelzo of a new book on the last year of the Civil War, HYMNS OF THE REPUBLIC by S.C. Gwynne. From the review:
It’s a favorite question among lovers of Civil War history: What was the turning point of the war? Often the answers are “Gettysburg” or “Vicksburg” or “Antietam” or some other great battle. With a hint of snarkiness, one might suggest: “Appomattox.” Not just because, for all practical purposes, the Civil War ended there in April 1865 with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant. But also because the Civil War remained very much an undecided affair right through its final year, almost to its final months. No one can afford to take the results as inevitable.
S.C. Gwynne certainly doesn’t. A former editor at Texas Monthly, Mr. Gwynne made his debut as a history writer in 2010 with “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches” (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), then turned to the Civil War in 2014 with “Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson.” Now we have “Hymns of the Republic,” a portrait of the last, agonized year of the Civil War, beginning in the winter of early 1864 and moving to the momentous conclusion, not only at Appomattox with Grant but also in North Carolina with William Tecumseh Sherman.
Of course, these months have received close attention before. Among much else, there is Gordon Rhea’s monumental series on the Overland Campaign of 1864 and A. Wilson Greene’s equally monumental series (not yet completed) on the Siege of Petersburg, both concerning the fighting in Virginia. And we’ve had landmark treatments of Appomattox—of the surrender itself and the events surrounding it—from Caroline Janney, Elizabeth Varon and William Marvel. Rather than offer a comprehensive narrative, as these works do, Mr. Gwynne creates a series of chapter-by-chapter vignettes from the war’s final year: Grant’s tenacity in the Battle of the Wilderness; the Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest at Fort Pillow, in Tennessee; Clara Barton at Andersonville; Lee’s last roll of the dice at Fort Stedman, the endpoint of the Petersburg siege.
The difficulty with vignettes is that, while Mr. Gwynne is a vivid miniaturist whose chapters could easily stand alone as their own short stories, it is easy to lose a sense of the overall arc of that desperate last war year and to miss the logic of dwelling on one thing and not another.
From the conclusion:
Mr. Gwynne is at his most unpersuasive when he repeats the canard—beloved of both early 20th-century Progressives and modern neo-Confederates—that the war saw “the rapid growth of a large, industrialized Northern nation” and the creation of “a highly centralized federal government.” In truth, the Civil War pitted not an agrarian against an industrial society but two agricultural societies against each other, one of them based on plantation slave-labor and the other on the small-scale family farm. In 1860, the United States, as a whole and not just the South, was an overwhelmingly agricultural nation; 72% of the North’s congressmen represented farm districts. And far from creating a highly centralized federal government, the Lincoln administration managed its war with a White House staff of just five people and a budget—a wartime budget—that amounted to only 1.8% of GDP.
Read as a rollicking series of short essays, “Hymns of the Republic” is both sympathetic and evocative. But good history requires more than that, including a deep dive into the sources, an immersion in the thought patterns of the past, and a sense of balance between the need for comprehensiveness and the sharp point of a story. Despite its literary virtues, “Hymns of the Republic” has none of these.
