Civil War books and authors

I had one of those Eureka moments that occasionally hit me this evening. As I may have mentioned previously, we decided to add a brief epilogue to the retreat book that covers the period between Lee’s crossing of the Potomac (July 13-14) and the return of the armies to the banks of the Rappahannock River at the end of July. I wrote about four pages on this time frame. It has very little in the way of detail, but it fills the gap in the story and brings the story of the Gettysburg Campaign full circle.

While writing this piece, I remembered that, among the many hurdles that George Gordon Meade had to face during the retreat from Gettysburg, he also had to deal with the fallout of the New York City Draft Riots. The first draft lottery in the history of the United States occurred on July 11, and two days later, five days of bloody mayhem broke out in the streets of New York. As the rioting broke out on July 13, Meade was preparing to launch an all-out attack on Lee’s lines that was scheduled to occur at dawn the next morning. Lee’s crossing of the Potomac on the night of July 13-14 was the only thing the prevented that all-out attack.

Meade’s army was depleted by several thousand of its best combat troops when those troops were sent to New York to help quell the riots. By July 16, martial law had been declared in New York City, and thousands of Federal troops filled the city streets, hoping to restore order.

So, among the many hurdles faced by George Gordon Meade as he tried to bring Lee’s army to bay, he also had to deal with the loss of several thousand veteran combat troops who were sent to New York to deal with the crisis there. I don’t know that any other treatment of the retreat from Gettysburg has addressed this issue, and I don’t know what the precise consequences of these events were for the pursuit of Lee. However, given the many obstacles facing Meade, it’s no real surprise that he chose not to attack Lee’s army at Williamsport until he believed he was truly ready to do so.

I think it bears some additional thought, and I expect to tinker with the epilogue further in order to flesh those thoughts out some more.

This is why I love the Civil War.

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Earlier today, I posted the following on the forum boards at Armchair General:

I have heard the bad news about Chris Lewis leaving. Having worked with Chris on my lead article this past winter, I know that he is a capable, talented professional who cares a great deal about the magazine and about maintaining its quality and integrity. Hence, while I was disappointed to hear of his leaving, I know it’s in keeping with his character. I respect a man who’s willing to go to bat for his principles.

Eric

To his credit, Eric Weider responded to me. Here’s his response:

Eric I appreciate your feedback.

In any event…I always welcome feedback. It is sincerely appreciated.

I have nothing further to say about this, other than to say that I hope that Eric is right. And in any event, I wish Chris Lewis nothing but the best.

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I’ve made my opposition to Google’s plan to scan materials that are still covered by copyright and make them available on the Internet well known. I’ve ranted about it extensively here at length and won’t beat that poor dead horse any more.

At the same time, each time I’ve addressed this question, I’ve said that I think that the scanning of public domain works is not only appropriate but an admirable and worthy project that I wholeheartedly support, largely because nobody’s copyright rights are being trampled. After the past couple of weeks, I feel even more strongly about the subject.

When we decided to beef up our study of the retreat from Gettysburg to make it a more scholarly work than its original incarnation was, I spent a lot of time on the on-line book archive sites, searching for Union and Confederate regimental histories and published memoirs and the like. I own copies of virtually every published cavalry regimental history, but only a handful of infantry regimentals. Consequently, I hit the on-line archive sites hard.

I ended up downloading nearly 40 full books in the public domain in PDF form, burning them to a CD-ROM, and then bringing them into the office so I could print out the pertinent portions of them for use in the book. Wow….talk about some finds. Some of the material that I got that way is really remarkable stuff, in very rare regimental histories. I’m nearly done plugging this material into the manuscript, and let me tell you, it’s made a huge difference in the overall tactical detail and overall quality of the book. When it comes to the public domain materials, I am a true believer.

There are three different sites where one can find a lot of this good material in PDF form. First, of course, is the Google book search site. Enter your search command, and when the results come up, be sure to click on “full view”, which will provide access to the complete text of these public domain works.

I also made very extensive use of the Internet Archive site, which is really a portal that collects these scanned materials and provides access to them. The selection of available public domain materials on this site is much more extensive than Google’s. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about it until I was well into the process. I ended up using the Internet Archive more than any other resource.

The third major resource is the one I used the least. It’s in part because, as a Mac user, I have a pathological hatred of all things Microsoft, which I view as the Evil Empire. Given a choice between using a Microsoft product and ANYTHING else, I will almost always use the alternative (I use Eudora for e-mail at work because I hate Outlook, and I’m a long-time Firefox user, as just two examples). It’s also because the site is buggy and doesn’t always work smoothly, and it won’t work at all on a Mac. However, the Microsoft live book search site is a useful tool (if you can get it to work), as it provides a portal to pretty much all of the digitized material available in various repositories around the Internet. It was my last resort, used to make certain I hadn’t missed anything on the other sites.

There are some other sites with much smaller databases, but you can pretty much access them by using these three sites. Having access to all of those public domain regimental histories and memoirs in one place that was relatively easy to use made the task of accumulating and incorporating this material into the manuscript quickly and painlessly possible. Thus, while I remain intransigent in my opposition to Google’s attacks on my copyright rights, I remain a true believer in the value of making public domain materials readily available for use by the consuming public that might not otherwise have access to those materials.

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The new issue of Blue & Gray magazine arrived today. There’s an article by J.D. and me on Stuart’s shelling of Carlisle in the issue, as well as an extremely truncated version of our response to Andrea Custer. Dave Roth, the publisher, only allowed us 2,000 words, with 1,000 words as to why she was wrong and 1,000 words as to why we’re right. Our original response was 5,500 words long, so what was published is nothing remotely close to what we originally wrote.

J. D. is going to be putting a rebuttal to her response on his blog, so keep an eye out for that if this topic is of interest to you. Frankly, I thought her response was long on patting herself on the back and very short on substance, but that’s just my opinion.

Consequently, we decided that once the issue was out, we would publish the full 5,500 word version here. I’ve added it as a page and not as a post. It can be found here.

Enjoy.

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In working on completing the retreat manuscript, I spent much of the afternoon looking at newspaper coverage of the pertinent time frame. Many of the articles came from The New York Times, but several also came from other papers, such as the Baltimore Daily Gazette. Since there was nothing like e-mail or the Internet in those days, most articles had to be mailed in or delivered by courier; some shorter articles could be transmitted by telegraph. Either way, it usually took at least several days for a piece to appear in the newspaper, and by the time that they did, events had already demonstrated that many of the reports were inaccurate.

Also due to the difficulty in communicating, virtually any rumor that was even remotely credible got published. Thus, one must parse through the newspaper coverage very carefully and with a fine-toothed comb, as these newspaper accounts are just filled with inaccurate information. As historians, we have the responsibility to see that the true facts are presented, so I take the responsibility of parsing out this material quite seriously.

Another phenomenon interests me. Often, the newspapers simply ran stories from other papers verbatim, with attribution to the other paper. As just one example, there were a number of stories from the Philadelphia Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer repeated in the Baltimore newspaper without comment or any indication that anything had been done to determine the validity or accuracy of the stories being recounted. It’s a very interesting phenomenon, and it means that the job of parsing often goes two levels deep.

Many papers had dedicated correspondents that traveled with specific commands. A correspondent of the New York Times named E. A. Paul often traveled with the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps, and spent most of the retreat attached to the Michigan Cavalry Brigade of Kilpatrick’s Third Division. It’s akin to what the modern media calls “imbedded journalists” today. While there’s a great bit of detail reported by Paul, the scope is narrow. It’s a real trade-off. Finding complete coverage is, therefore, a challenge. Some Union officers, such as John Buford, Wesley Merritt, and David Gregg, were not fond at all of the media and forbade reporters from accompanying their commands in the field. Therefore, officers such as Judson Kilpatrick used the media to promote himself and advance his own career. It’s somewhat comforting to know that some things never change…..

The final issue is reading microfilm and photocopies. I’ve always despised microfilm–reading it gives me hellacious headaches–so I tend to print stuff out. The problem is that the print-outs are small, and for old eyes like mine, there’s no way I can even think about trying to read this stuff without reading glasses any more.

In spite of it all, newspapers are some of my favorite sources. Some of the very best and most valuable material that we found for Plenty of Blame to Go Around came from newspapers, and including that material really helped to put a lot of very valuable flesh on the bones of the story. I would never feel like my job of researching a project is complete without having thoroughly combing the newspaper sources. I guess I will just have to invest in more powerful reading glasses……

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At the beginning of June 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia held the southern bank of the Rappahannock River, while the Army of the Potomac held the northern bank. The armies stared at each other across the river.

Most historians say that the Gettysburg Campaign began on June 9, 1863, when 12,000 horsemen of the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps splashed across the Rappahannock and pitched into the Confederate cavalry near Brandy Station. It was a fourteen hour slugging match that accomplished little; it delayed the beginning of Robert E. Lee’s movement north by a single day.

Most histories of the Gettysburg Campaign state that the campaign ended with the Confederate crossings of the Potomac on July 14, since that marks the date that the Army of Northern Virginia returned to the safety of the Old Dominion. However, it took another two weeks for the armies to return to their starting points; on August 1, there was another large-scale cavalry fight at Brandy Station, and the two armies sat staring at each other across the Rappahannock River after some more hard marching and some heavy fighting as they marched back down the Loudoun Valley. In short, sixty days later, the armies were right back where they started from.

What’s particularly interesting is that most of the official reports of the campaign go all the way to the return to the banks of the Rappahannock. In other words, the participants believed that the campaign did not end until the armies had returned to their starting points.

Our original draft of the retreat book ended like all the others, with Lee crossing the Potomac. JD pointed out to me that cutting it off abruptly there leaves the reader hanging, and he’s right. Hence, we’ve decided to add a brief epilogue that provides an overview of those two weeks and the return of the armies to the Rappahannock. Our detailed tactical discussion will end with the crossing of the Potomac, but we felt that in order to finish the story correctly and provide some balance to the story of the campaign, we needed to bring the armies back to their starting points. We’re going to cover those two weeks in only three or four pages, but will at least address this two-week period.

So, the question remains: when did the Gettysburg Campaign really end?

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I have been working on the Dahlgren manuscript for more than 18 months now. For most of the last seven months, it’s been more off than on, but I have periodically worked on it. I was fortunate enough to get some good feedback and editorial suggestions from friends like Scott Patchan, and much of the last few months entailed edits based on suggestions from folks like Scott.

In part, I’ve been a little afraid to pull the trigger on this thing, largely because it’s not placed with a publisher. While I find the story terribly compelling (I had better find it compelling to have invested so much time, money and effort in it, right?), I recognize that the market for biography of a young man who died 34 days before his 22nd birthday will be limited. A limited market means that the commercial publishing houses are not interested in it. Therefore, I have two options: McFarland or a university press. At this point, I’m inclined to go with a university press, and a couple of them have expressed some interest in the project. If I can place it with the University of North Carolina Press or LSU, I think that would be an ideal placement for it.

Today, I finally decided that the time has come to pull the trigger on this thing and put it to bed. I asked old friend Ted Savas to read the manuscript and give me some feedback on it today, and Ted agreed. I will send it along tonight, and when I make any final revisions that Ted might suggest, the thing will then be finished.

At this point, I believe that I have given it my best shot. I’ve looked at several hundred sources and literally hundreds of pages of letters and diary entries written in Ully Dahlgren’s own hand. I’m confident that I have exhausted what’s available to find–with one notable exception, a newspaper article written by Dahlgren and published under the pseudonym “Truth”. I’ve looked at every issue of about a dozen different newspapers but have, to my eternal frustration, been unable to locate it anywhere. I genuinely don’t know where else to look for that article and have given up on finding it. Beyond that, though, I believe that I have exhausted what’s available to me.

It’s time to put it to bed. We shall see how things play out, but I feel good about the final result. I will keep everyone posted as to the progress of the the thing.

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I’ve been suffering from a severe case of motivational deficit for months now. I just haven’t felt like writing all year so far this year. So far this year, I’ve written about 15 pages worth of new material all year. We’ve had so much disruption in our lives that I just haven’t had the motivation to write. I’d come home from work with the best of intentions, and then, when it came time to pull the trigger and try to be productive, I just haven’t been able to do it. I’ve been content to post here, read a bit, and then just hang out.

Making a deal with Ted Savas for the publication of our retreat book finally got me motivated to start working again. The original version of the retreat manuscript was written three or four years ago, and since that time, J. D. and I have both acquired a great deal of new primary source material over those years. I plugged most of my stuff into the manuscript over several nights last week, and now J. D.’s doing the same. I located some more stuff after I sent the manuscript to J. D., so I still have some more material to plug in once J. D. finishes.

For the first time in ages, I feel like writing and being productive again. When we finish up with the retreat and send it off to Ted, I will then finally get going on the Boyd article in earnest and will finally finish the thing after setting it aside for months.

It feels good to be productive again.

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It’s no secret that I’ve long been fascinated by the Gettysburg Campaign. It’s my first love in the Civil War, but I have a love/hate relationship with it. Sometimes, I grow frustrated with the fixation on it, including my own, and sometimes, I just can’t get enough. It’s like any relationship, I suppose.

A subset of that first love has always been a love of the more obscure aspects of the campaign. I’ve always been absolutely fascinated by the most obscure events of the campaign, and I tend to gravitate toward them and away from things grand events like Pickett’s Charge. From my perspective, often times, the more obscure the event, the better.

Until Kent Brown’s excellent Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign was published in 2005, the retreat had long received short shrift. Naturally, my interests gravitated toward that subject. My old friend Ted Alexander, who grew up on the Confederate retreat route in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, has long been the guru of what he refers to as the “retreatistas”, and I enthusiastically joined that esteemed band years ago. Consequently, I spent years studying the retreat, learning the battlefields associated with the retreat, and in examining the decision-making on the Union side.

Several years ago, my friends J.D. Petruzzi and Mike Nugent and I decided to tackle the retreat. The book was originally intended to be part of Ironclad Publishing’s Discovering Civil War America Series. It has a very detailed tactical treatment of the many engagements that occurred during the retreat, and it also includes two different detailed driving tours. One traces the route of the Confederate Wagon Train of Wounded, and the other follows the fighting that took place during the retreat.

We got to thinking about things and decided that the volume is better suited as a companion volume to Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg. If it can be suggested that Stuart somehow failed Robert E. Lee on the way to Gettysburg, it can also be stated plainly that Stuart more than redeemed himself during the retreat, when his performance was nothing short of magnificent. The two books are really almost bookends, and they should go together. Consequently, we have made a deal with Ted Savas for Savas-Beatie, LLC to publish this book as well. We’re confident that it will have the same high quality production values as the Stuart’s Ride book and that it will make the sort of companion volume we anticipate.

Why another book on the retreat from Gettysburg, you ask? It’s a valid question.

Kent Brown’s book is a tour-de-force. Of that, there can be no doubt. However, Kent’s book has a definite focus, which is on the logistical side of the retreat. His primary focus is the logistics of Lee’s retreat, and there is little focus on the Union side. Likewise, the combat that occurred along the way is not given a detailed tactical focus. Finally, the book does not focus on the decision-making process that plagued George Meade’s attempts to bring Robert E. Lee’s army to bay.

Our work is actually intended to complement Kent’s book, and I hope that it does so. We focus mainly on the tactics and leave the vast majority of the logistics to Kent’s masterful study, with the notable exception of our treatment of the Wagon Train of Wounded. Also, since Kent’s book has such a strong Southern focus and emphasis, we intentionally took a more Union approach so as to balance the presentation. Like the conclusion to the Stuart’s Ride book, we have an extended conclusion chapter that focuses on the decision-making processes and also focuses on some of the controversy that sprung up in the wake of Lee’s escape across the Potomac River at Williamsport and Falling Waters. We also have the two detailed driving tours (those who have read Plenty of Blame will find these quite familiar in format and presentation) that include GPS coordinates and lots of modern-day photographs of the sites.

We believe that if our work is combined with Kent’s book, the reader will truly have the complete picture of the retreat from Gettysburg. Thus, we believe that there is a place for our study, and that it will be favorably compared to Kent’s as a companion volume to it.

If all goes according to plan, the book will be released by the anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg next year. We have some new material that has surfaced since we originally wrote the thing to add to the narrative, and I intend to start doing that this evening. Stay tuned. Details will follow as they become available.

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I just finished A. J. Langguth’s Union 1812: The Americans Who Fought the Second War of Independence. This is the sequel to Langguth’s excellent 1991 Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution, and is written in the same style. Instead of being a solid historical narrative, it instead focuses on individuals and their contributions to the subject. In this instance, it addresses the American politicians and soldiers who brought about and fought the War of 1812. While this is an interesting and novel approach, it means that there are large gaps in the coverage of the conflict, and the narrative jumps around quite a bit. As just one example, there is no coverage of some of the important land battles such as Lundy’s Lane. Langguth focuses on the great Indian leader Tecumseh, who played a critical role in the War of 1812, and was killed in battle while fighting alongside the British. Tecumseh was a born and charismatic leader who earned the respect of friend and foe, including his arch enemy, William Henry Harrison. While I’ve read a few books on the War of 1812 over the years, I’ve never seen one that addresses it from the perspective of the political and military leaders of the United States. The focus on Tecumseh, who was definitely an American legend, is particularly interesting because it focuses on the role that the Indians played, and the fact that they entered into a marriage of convenience with the British in the hope of regaining the lands that they lost to the white settlers.

Langguth is a journalist by training, and he’s a terrific writer. The book is very well written, with an easy, flowing style. At the same time, it does jump around quite a bit, which can be frustrating and a bit disconcerting. In addition, the book suffers from a paucity of maps, and, as pointed out above, there are some significant gaps in the coverage of the war itself. Having said that, it’s a novel and unique approach to a forgotten conflict, and Langguth does a good job of building his case that the War of 1812 was really just an extension of the American Revolution.

Langguth has a really interesting theory. He lays out the theory that not only was the War of 1812 a continuation of the American Revolution, but that it also was one of the direct causes of the Civil War. He argues–persuasively, I think–that the War of 1812 directly triggered the Civil War. Specifically, he claims that the tensions that arose over the War of 1812 between the War Hawks and those who did not support the war, and those who supported slavery and states’ rights and those who adhered to the Federalist ideal, really had their roots in the War of 1812. To me, that’s a novel theory, and not one I’ve ever seen before.

Certainly, the argument that the Civil War became inevitable due to the conflict between states’ rights and Federalism is nothing new, and has been around for decades. However, most place it in the context of the Revolution and the founding of the Republic. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen it played out as a consequence of the War of 1812. I know that some of the New England states, which violently opposed the war, and that they briefly considered secession, meaning that there was some precedent for the secession crisis of 1861.

I wonder what folks think about this theory….

Irrespective of the merits of Langguth’s theory, this was an enjoyable and worthwhile read, and one I recommend undertaking. It’s a worthy addition to any War of 1812 library.

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