Civil War books and authors

So, here’s the bottom line…I am presently suffering from a horrific case of severe motivational deficit. Since Susan blew out her knee on October 19, I just don’t have any motivation to get anything productive done. Blogging has been about the most productive thing I’ve been able to force myself to do. Beyond that, with having to watch the dogs, handling much of the household stuff, my workload at the office, and everything else that’s been going on in my life, I just don’t much feel like doing anything productive in the Civil War arena.

I SHOULD be working on my article on William H. Boyd in the Gettysburg Campaign, but there’s no motivation to be productive. I continue to tweak the Dahlgren manuscript in my ongoing effort to get it wrapped up, but that seems to be the limit of what I feel like doing. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been extremely productive all year and I need a break. Maybe it’s the holiday doldrums. Maybe it’s a combination of both. Who knows.

The point is that I’m having serious issues with getting anything productive accomplished. I should be bothered by it, but I’m not. I guess that’s a pretty good indicator that I need a break. I’m hoping that I will be able to get myself cranked back up after the first of the year. Stay tuned.

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In 1994, I decided to gather material on the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry, also known as Rush’s Lancers. I wasn’t sure that I was going to do a regimental history, but I was intrigued by this regiment, which was armed with a strange and cumbersome weapon. As I started learning more about the unit, I realized that it really deserved a modern regimental history. The original regimental history, based on the war-time diary of the regimental chaplain, was published in 1868. I decided to gather material and see if I could come up with enough to write a regimental history about a year later.

I spent more than twelve years researching and writing about this regiment. Along the way, one volume of soldier letters was published, and I have identified a second set that I expect will be published by the University of Tennessee Press as part of its Voices of the Civil War Series.

About 1998, I learned that Ed Longacre was also planning to do a history of the Lancers, and that he had signed a contract with the now-defunct Combined Books to publish the book. I knew that there would not be sufficient demand to warrant two different histories of the same regiment, so I contacted Ed. He agreed to make it a collaboration, and so did the publisher. I was to do the first half–up to and including the Battle of Brandy Station–and Ed was going to do the rest. I got busy writing and got my half done in about a year. I then sat and waited and waited and waited.

About two years later, Ed informed me that he wasn’t going to be able to participate. So, I took the project on myself. In the meantime, Combined had been sold to Da Capo, and I had no interest in having my book published by them. The last thing I wanted was for my book to be remaindered 90 days after being published, so I arranged to terminate the contract, paid back the paltry $250 advance, and was free.

I then had to write the second half of the book, which proved much harder than I ever imagined. To my great surprise, there was much more and much better primary source material available for the first half of the war than the second. It was much more difficult piecing the second half of the story together than was the first part. I finally found an appropriate publisher, Westholme Publishing of suburban Philadelphia. Bruce Franklin, the publisher, does high-quality scholarly books, and he’s also demonstrated a gift for getting attention for his books from major media outlets, so it was perfect. I signed a contract early this year.

One of my conditions was that Bruce use all of the nearly 90 illustrations that I had accumulated, as well as my maps, and he agreed. If you count the maps as illustrations, the book has about 110 illustrations.

Then, as I thought I had wrapped the thing up, I found another set of letters at the University of Pennsylvania. Bruce was kind enough to push back my delivery date for the manuscript to permit me to incorporate them, and I did. Then, after I had turned it in to Bruce to begin the production process, a second set–this time, in private hands and none of them ever before published–surfaced. They were far too good not to include, so we had another delay while I hurried to incorporate the good stuff. All of this meant that the book, which was supposed to be published in October, was pushed back.

If I might be so bold as to toot my own horn for just a moment, I’m proud to announce that, at long last, more than twelve years after beginning the project, my new regimental history of the Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War, has been published and is now available for purchase.

This is my thirteenth book. I probably have more of an emotional attachment to this one than any other, as I have so much of myself invested in it. I’m thrilled to finally see this in print. I can only hope that I have done the boys justice.

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J. D. Petruzzi has been working his way through the draft of the Dahlgren manuscript for me. I got another three chapters from him the other day, which means that he’s gotten through 9 of the 13 chapters for me. Scott Patchan’s also returning the favor (I read and edited his Shenandoah Valley in 1864 manuscript for him earlier this year) by reading it for me. When they’re done, it will then go out to four folks to read and review: Horace Mewborn, Bob O’Neill, Ken Noe, and Ethan Rafuse. Teej Smith, who read the very rough first drafts of each chapter as they were completed, also wants to take another run at it now that it’s been polished a bit. When I get their feedback, it’s done.

My problem is that I keep finding new tidbits of coming up with new little twists that need to be included, or which change my thoughts. Here are a couple of random examples of what I mean here:

1. The most recent issue of Blue & Gray includes a letter from the magnificent collection of historian Wiley Sword. This letter, written by Judson Kilpatrick in the fall of 1862, seeks the intervention of President Lincoln to get him released from Washington, D. C.’s notorious Old Capitol Prison, where Kil was being held on unspecified charges. Lincoln intervened and arranged for Kilpatrick to be released. That letter raised the possibility that perhaps Kilpatrick was thereafter beholden to Lincoln, and that perhaps the payback for this intervention was the mission to kidnap and assassinate Jefferson Davis and his cabinet in the winter of 1864. That was a real eye-opener for me, so I added an entire paragraph to the conclusion chapter to address this possibility. Fascinating stuff.

2. Just for fun, the other day, while watching over Susan’s recuperation, I did a Google search on Ulric Dahlgren and found something I had missed, which was a discussion of Dahlgren’s woundng at Hagerstown on July 6, 1863. It raised the possibility of identifying the individual who fired the shot that ultimately cost Dahlgren his leg. However, the source could not be corroborated, and I added discussion in an endnote to that effect.

The upshot of all of this is that even though the book is done in the main, the process of tweaking and fine-tuning continues unabated until we reach the point when it is literally too late–too far into the publication process–to make any further changes. The research process also continues until the moment when it is literally too late, and even then, it sometimes doesn’t stop. It just reaches a point where it’s too late for me to use what I find. That doesn’t mean, though, that my search for material ever ends.

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About a month ago, Erik Calonius contacted me to see whether I’d be interested in getting a review copy of his new book, The Wanderer: The Last American Slave Ship and the Conspiracy That Set Its Sails. I hadn’t heard of either Mr. Calonius or his book, so I looked it up on Amazon. After doing so, I said sure, I’d love to have a look at it.

Let me begin by saying that this is not a book that I would normally have any interest in reading. As a general rule, the topic of slavery is of almost no interest to me, and I tend to avoid the subject due to lack of interest. However, this particular book sounded like it might be interesting, so I decided to read it. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I’ve been engaging in an e-mail dialogue with Mr. Calonius after receiving the book, and have enjoyed my interaction with him.

Erik Calonius is a career journalist who has had some plum assignments in his journalistic career. The Wanderer is his first book, and he should be very proud of it. The topic got his interest on a visit to Jekyll Island, outside Savannah, Georgia, when he saw an exhibit to the Wanderer. Intrigued, he started looking into it, and decided to tackle a modern telling of the story.

The slave trade was made illegal in the United States in 1820. However, some of the Southern firebrands who were pushing for secession also strongly favored reinstating the slave trade. Charles Lamar, a relative of L.Q.C. Lamar and of the second president of the Texas Republic, led the conspiracy. Lamar and his co-conspirators purchased the Wanderer, a magnificent yacht, and took her to Africa to bring back a load of slaves in 1858. His crew managed to evade the British and American naval vessels patrolling the coast of Africa and safely made it back to the United States.

Even though their purpose was a very poorly kept secret, Lamar and his co-conspirators managed to evade justice through a combination of corruption and bullying. They made witnesses disappear, tampered with evidence, and made it impossible for the government to convict them of piracy (the crime of importing slaves was designated an act of piracy, and carried the death penalty). In three separate trials in 1859, Lamar and his co-conspirators were all acquitted and escaped justice, in spite of the best efforts of the Buchanan administration to convict and execute them.

There was poetic justice: Lamar was killed in action during the Civil War, and the Wanderer, which was seized and sold by the government, ended up in Union service during the war.

The book is well-researched and very well-written, which I would expect of a senior journalist of Mr. Calonius’ credentials. He has brought a topic which would normally not interest me to life with an engaging writing style that almost reads like a novel. The book does have one of my pet peeves: instead of providing specific end note references, they’re lumped together at the end by page, which drives me crazy. If one were interested in further research, or reading the primary sources for oneself, this style of footnoting makes it virtually impossible to do so. I absolutely despise that footnoting style. I suspect that was the publisher’s call–and not Mr. Calonius’–so I can’t necessarily fault him for it.

What I liked best about this book was how it so accurately and amply used the microcosm of this single incident to demonstrate how the agenda of the fire eaters directly caused the Civil War, and how they paid the ultimate price for their calumny. It also demonstrates how the inertia and passivity of the Buchanan administration allowed events to come to a crisis situation. The inactivity of the administration permitted a few fire breathers to flaunt the law for their own purposes, and their actions in doing so directly triggered the Civil War. Ironically, the prosecution of Lamar and his co-conspirators was left in the hands of Buchanan’s attorney general, Thomas Howell Cobb of Georgia, who later became a Confederate general.

I was pleasantly surprised by this book, and can highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the causes of the Civil War.

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Regarding the plethora of new biographies by historian Ed Longacre, Kevin Levin wrote: “I will say, however, that I tend to stay away from historians who pump out books at a high rate, especially in the area of biography. You can easily distinguish between those biographies that are the result of a careful reading of both the primary and relevant secondary sources. More importantly, you can easily pick out the studies whose authors spent the necessary time thinking about their subject and trying to generate the right questions to ask. When I pick up a biography I want to read a preface that reflects both a careful research and writing process and that involves interaction with fellow historians. In short, I want to read a story of how the historian came to know his/her subject and this takes time.” He concluded by saying, “Perhaps I could have simply said that I am not a fan of production-line history.”

In general, I won’t comment on Ed’s work. I can tell you, however, that Ed’s new biography of Joe Wheeler has been in the works for several years, and that he and I spent a fair amount of time discussing it. In particular, I gave him some material on Wheeler that has never been used in any modern biographical treatment of Wheeler (other than a couple of paragraphs in the epilogue of my book on the Battle of Monroe’s Crossroads). At least with respect to the Wheeler bio, I think that Ed has put in his time.

Rather, I want to focus on what I do. I’ve always been a big believer in receiving input from other historians. I’ve always sent my work out for review by people whose opinions I respect. There was a time when I wrote NOTHING that wasn’t read and approved by Brian Pohanka. Today, old friends and cavalry guys J. D. Petruzzi, Bob O’Neill, Horace Mewborn, and Teej Smith read pretty much everything that I write and give me the sort of feedback and fact checking that I need.

In addition, and now that Brian is no longer with us, I try to find experts on particular areas to read things for me, and to give me input. As an example, there are three chapters of my Dahlgren biography which address events between October 1862 and May 1863. Consequently, I was sure to have Frank O’Reilly read the drafts of those chapters for me to make sure that I had the facts correct. John Hennessy currently has the Second Bull Run chapter of the Dahlgren bio. Scott Patchan, another historian whose work I respect, read and commented on an early draft of the Second Bull Run chapter, and is now reviewing the entire manuscript for me.

Finally, as the Dahlgren manuscript marks my first attempt at writing a full length biography, and as there are so many interesting and important issues associated with these events, just today, I decided to ask Ethan Rafuse and Ken Noe if they would be willing to read the manuscript for me and give me some feedback. I’m hoping that they will have time do so, but I understand academic schedules and time constraints, and I’ve told both of them that I will understand if they don’t have time to read the manuscript.

My point is that while I am prolific, I am cautious. The last thing that I would ever want would be to be accused of is cranking out production line history. I never, ever pump stuff out without investing the time into making sure that the work is something I will be proud to have my name on. Because I only write on topics that are of great personal interest to me, I am always willing to invest the effort into making sure that each and every project I tackle is the best product I can produce. The new history of the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry, which is due out next week, represents twelve years of research and writing on this regiment. I’ve literally looked at thousands and thousands of pages of material in culling out the information that I felt was worthy of inclusion in the book.

In fact, I can’t think of a single book I’ve ever written that had less than five years of work on it (other than the Avery manuscript, which I simply edited and annotated). Everything has represented years of research, walking the battlefields, and trying to figure these things out for myself before committing pen to paper. I wouldn’t have it any other way. And I think that the receptions for my last couple of projects demonstrates that. The day that ceases to be the case is the day that I close the book on my writing career.

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Ephrata, Pennsylvania lawyer Larry B. Maier wrote Gateway to Gettysburg: The Second Battle of Winchester, published by Burd Street Press in 2002.

Burd Street is an imprint of White Mane Publishing. For those unfamiliar with White Mane, it’s far from my favorite publisher. For every good book they publish, there are ten really awful ones that had no business being published in the first place. This company is known for using crappy materials (thin, poor quality paper), indifferent production values, and no editing. My biggest complaint about it is that they do nothing to ensure that there is no plagiarism or copyright infringement. I am aware of at least two instances where authors who are friends of mine had their maps stolen and reprinted in White Mane books without their permission and without being paid royalties for the use of the maps. If that’s not bad enough, the management at White Mane takes the position that, by the time that someone finds out about the infringement and does something about it, they don’t care–they will already have made their money from the book. I sent a letter to the publisher on behalf of one of those authors complaining about the theft of my client’s maps, and didn’t even get the courtesy of a response. To me, that sort of attitude–a complete lack of business ethics and a total disregard for the law–speaks volumes for why this company has such an atrocious reputation. I’ve often said–and meant it–that if faced with the choice of never publishing another word again or having White Mane publish one of my books, I would choose never publishing another word again. I’ve heard rumors that White Mane is swirling around the drain, and I can only hope it’s true.

So, we begin with the proposition that Mr. Maier’s book has two strikes against it right out of the box. That’s a shame, but it is what it is.

Prior to the publication of this book, there was one other monograph dedicated to the Second Battle of Winchester. Charles Grunder and Prof. Brandon Beck published a short book on the battle as part of the H. E. Howard Virginia Battles and Leaders Series. Their book is decent, but it lacks depth. With only 85 pages of text, it simply cannot go into a great deal of detail. The best thing about their book is the walking/driving tour at the end of it.

The book itself is disappointing. While the coverage of the battle is reasonably thorough, the scope and depth of the research is disappointing. A review of the footnotes indicates that many of them cite to secondary sources, which indicates that Maier did not do the sort of research that he could have done in order to cover the topic completely. Many of those footnotes cite to the book by Grunder and Beck mentioned above, and not to the primary sources. Conversely, on the flip side, there are footnotes and not endnotes, something that I much prefer.

It also spends too much time discussing Maj. Gen. Robert H. Milroy. While Milroy is the central player in the drama, the book does not get to the topic of the Second Battle of Winchester for about 100 pages. Given that it’s a 330 page book, it means that about 1/3 of the book is devoted to stuff that doesn’t go to the heart of the subject. I actually blew off much of that stuff.

There are plenty of maps and illustrations, much to the author’s credit. He draws some solid conclusions, but the book fails to give the depth that serious historians crave. In short, this book left me wanting more, and also left me wondering how good it might have been if a real publisher with a competent editorial staff had brought it out, and not the incompetents at White Mane.

As stated in a previous post, the Second Battle of Winchester still has not had a definitive treatment, and continues to cry out for one.

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Fellow blogger Kevin Levin has a lengthy post on his blog today that spells out, in great detail, the plagiarism scandal that has hit the realm of Civil War academia. Prof. R. Fred Ruhlman, who teaches Civil War history at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, apparently plagiarized most of his new book on Capt. Henry Wirz and the Andersonville prison camp from the work of Prof. William Marvel.

From the excerpts posted on Kevin’s blog, it’s quite obvious that Ruhlman simply re-packaged Marvel’s work and published it under his own name. In short, it is plagiarism of the worst variety.

As Peter Carmichael points out in a comment to Kevin’s post, the process of peer review employed by university presses usually catches this sort of thing, but this one got through. Ruhlman is, of course, responsible for his own actions, but the fact that this book got through the vetting process at the University of Tennessee Press, which is a very well-respected university press, doesn’t speak well for the Press.

At the same time, I am willing to defer to Pete Carmichael on this one. Pete is the series editor for a series being published by the UT Press, and he’s quite knowledgeable about how things are done there, what the objective is for certain books, and the steps it takes to ensure that work is original and not plagiarized.

I can only hope that Ruhlman is fired immediately, and that his work is repudiated by all as a consequence of his flagrant plagiarism. I also hope that the UT Press gets over its black eye, but that it tightens things up a bit to ensure that this sort of flagrant rip-off doesn’t happen again.

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I know that I have discussed this here in the past, but my work on William H. Boyd in the Gettysburg Campaign has pointed out yet another gaping hole in the coverage of the Civil War.

One of the most important aspects of the Gettysburg Campaign was the capture of Winchester by troops of Lt. Gen. Richard S. Ewell’s Second Corps on June 14, 1863. Ewell captured most of Maj. Gen. Robert H. Milroy’s division, and took possession of the important town in only a single day. His well-designed and well-executed plan resembled the handiwork of the late Stonewall Jackson, and suggested that Ewell would be a worthy successor to the lamented Jackson. Ewell took only a few hundred casualties in capturing Winchester.

Unfortunately, there is a huge, gaping hole in the body of literature regarding Second Winchester. There have only been two monographs published that address the Second Battle of Winchester, and both were published by companies with reputations for publishing spotty work. The first, published in 1989, is Charles S. Grunder and Brandon H. Beck, The Second Battle of Winchester, June 12-15, 1863, published by the H. E. Howard Company of Lynchburg, Virginia. The second, Larry B. Maier’s Gateway to Gettysburg: The Second Battle of Winchester was published by White Mane’s imprint Burd Street Press in 2002.

The Howard company published two series of books. One was a series of histories–primarily rosters–of all Virginia units, and the other was its Virginia Civil War Battles and Leaders Series. These books are of extremely uneven quality. None of the regimental histories has a single footnote, which limits their value for the researcher. The books in the Battles and Leaders Series are especially hit and miss. Some of them are quite good. Some are simply atrocious. The book on Second Winchester is solid, but its battle narrative is only about 85 pages long, meaning that there’s not a great deal of depth there.

The Maier book is a classic White Mane book: no editing to speak of, poor production values, poor quality materials, and apparently no peer review. I have often said that if faced with the option of never publishing another word, or being published by White Mane, I would choose to never publish another word. I intend to do a detailed review of this book later this week, so I will limit my comments for now.

Suffice it to say that neither of these books provides the level of detail that this action deserves. With all of the books published on the Gettysburg Campaign, the Second Battle of Winchester remains a vast, gaping hole in the coverage of the Civil War and of the Gettysburg Campaign in particular.

This is just one of a number of similar gaping holes in the coverage of the war, but it provides an excellent illustration of the problem faced. Instead of yet another book on Pickett’s Charge, I would really prefer to see a talented historian tackle this action and give it the definitive treatment that it deserves. We would all benefit from such a study.

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I’ve had a couple of dozen articles on the Civil War and four scholarly articles on the law published over the course of my writing career. Writing articles is actually how I got started. When I started law school, I had already finished all of the course work for my master’s degree in international affairs (it was a four-year, dual degree program). During my second year of law school, I wrote my master’s thesis on a piece of legislation, the Arms Export Control Act of 1976. I was able to use my thesis to satisfy my law school scholarly writing requirement. My thesis ended up being published in a law review, and that got me started with doing serious writing for publication.

I graduated from law school in 1987. By 1991, I’d had four scholarly pieces on the law published in various law reviews. At that point, I said, “Been there, done that, got the t-shirt” and realized that I was bored with writing about the law. Feeling the need to write in order to keep my incredibly restless–probably ADD-afflicted–mind busy, I decided to try my hand at writing something on the Civil War, with which I had a life-long fascination and a voracious appetite. Other than the legal writing that I do for my job, I’ve never written another scholarly piece on the law since then, at least in part because I can’t find something that interests me enough to invest the amount of time and effort required.

Hence, in 1989, I wrote an absolutely dreadful article about Joshua L. Chamberlain that was published in the long-defunct Civil War magazine. It was actually published in June 1992, the same week that Susan and I got married. Candidly, I’m not sure how it got published, because it’s not good, and I had not learned about how to go about doing primary source research.

The next one was on the Battle of Monocacy. In the spring of 1992, I made my first visit to the Monocacy National Battlefield, which had just become a national park. In fact, at that time, it was part of the Antietam unit and had not yet become its own park. There was absolutely no interpretation whatsoever available other than the handful of monuments put up by the vets. I knew next to nothing about the fight there, and decided to try to educate myself. I bought a couple of books and learned what I could, but it left me wanting more.

I learn by teaching myself. I teach myself by researching and writing; the process of immersing myself into a project forces me to learn the substance of the material. So, that’s how I learned the Battle of Monocacy. And my second article was then published.

And so on.

I had about a dozen articles published in various magazines before my first book was published in 1998. By then, I’d learned the ins and outs of doing primary source research, and was growing familiar with what worked and what didn’t work. I find that writing is like anything else–the more of it one does, the better one gets at it. For me, it was a matter of finding my legs and learning how to write history and not the boring legal arguments that have paid the household bills for the last 19 years. As I read my current stuff and compare it to that first article on Joshua Chamberlain, it’s shocking to see just how far my writing has come.

I’ve been very focused on writing books for a long time now. Those of you who either know me or who read this blog regularly know of my Gettysburg love-hate relationship. Try as I might, I continue to be drawn to this battle, and no matter what, I always return to it. I’ve always enjoyed writing stuff for Gettysburg Magazine, but for seven or eight years, I refused to do it due to conflict that I had with the former owner of the magazine that prompted me to declare that I would never write anything for it again for so long as he continued to own it. I actually had one article written on John Buford’s withdrawal from Gettysburg on July 2, 1863 that never got submitted for that reason. I wrote it specifically for that magazine, and then sat on it for years.

Since the former owner died earlier this year and the magazine has been sold to Andy Turner, the long-time editor of the magazine, things have changed dramatically. There’s no longer any reason for me not to write for Gettysburg Magazine. J. D. and I did an article for Andy on Corbit’s Charge at Westminster, Maryland that will appear in the next issue, and I have submitted that article on Buford’s withdrawal from Gettysburg that I’ve been sitting on for years. It also unloosed the series of article ideas that I’ve been sitting on for years. When I asked the new publisher about them, he liked all of my ideas.

So, I’m taking a little break from book writing to work on some of these articles that have been cluttering up my brain for too long. I will feel MUCH better once I’ve finally scratched those particular itches. I’m working on the first one, on the role of William H. Boyd and his Company C of the First New York (Lincoln) Cavalry during the Gettysburg Campaign. This is one of those projects that I’ve kicked around for years–and invested a lot of time and effort into researching–but which had no other viable outlet for publication other than Gettysburg Magazine. I’m enjoying finally indulging a story I’ve wanted to tell–and which has fascinated me–for years.

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JD and I have two articles appearing in major Civil War magazines in the next couple of months. Both articles were written as adjuncts to our Stuart’s Ride book, and both were specifically intended to provide us with another means of promoting the book.

The first one to appear will be an even more detailed treatment of the charge of the 1st Delaware Cavalry, also known as Corbit’s Charge, at Westminster, MD than what appears in the book. That will appear in the next issue of Gettysburg Magazine. JD and I signed off on the maps that will appear with the article today, and they’re quite good. After the book was completely finished, I found a couple of additional sources, including an extremely detailed account by a trooper of one of Corbit’s men, who managed to avoid capture that proably would not have been used in the book, had we known of it then. The emphasis in the book is on Stuart’s Ride, and hence on the Confederates, and this account is very much a Union account. The nice thing about the article, therefore, is that it permitted us to add to the chapter in our book.

The other is a piece that will appear in the February issue of Civil War Times Illustrated. That will be a cover/feature article, and focuses on the desperate and heroic charges of the 11th New York Cavalry (also known as Scott’s 900) at Fairfax Court House and Corbit’s Charge at Westminster. Each of these episodes, which were nearly identical in size and effect, cost Stuart fully half a day, meaning that the combination of both set him back a full day, which, in turn, meant that he was unable to link up with Jubal Early’s division. This article was written specifically to promote the book, and the fact that it’s going to be a cover story makes it all the better. That’s the sort of publicity that’s extremely hard to beat.

I find that promoting my work in this fashion is extremely effective and that it is a great way to spread the word. Hopefully, the combination of these two articles will spike sales yet again.

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