Civil War books and authors

After 16 books, I think I have proven that I can write and publish a decent account of a Civil War battle. I have lots of ideas for more running around my head, and probably will never run out of ideas.

At the same time, after 16 books on the Civil War, I am ready for a change of pace. I’ve long had an interest in the Revolutionary War, and for the past three or four years now, the bulk of my pleasure reading–meaning what I read that’s not related to either my legal work or my work on the Civil War–has been on the Rev War. Consequently, I think I am ready to try my hand at something Rev War-related.

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, and foremost, I like a new challenge, and I’ve never written anything substantive on the Rev War before. Second, it’s a change of pace, and I really need that.

For a long time, I toyed with the idea of doing something on Guilford Court House, which desperately needed a good modern treatment. That idea got scotched when what will probably stand as the standard reference on the battle was published earlier this year. I then shifted my thoughts toward Monmouth, which has not had a real modern treatment ever. I was headed down that road until I learned that old friend and ace New Jersey historian Joe Bilby is finishing up a manuscript on Monmouth that will be delivered to the publisher in 6-8 weeks. That brought that idea to a screeching halt.

I asked a friend what he suggested, and he suggested the 1780 Battle of Camden, SC. I looked into and liked what I saw; there’s lots of interest here, and I think I have decided to write a detailed, book-length tactical narrative on Camden. I have one more book on the Civil War under contract, which I will begin writing next month. Then would come Camden. Other than chapters in books and a one-volume compilation of primary source material, there is no book-length treatment of the battle out there, so this is blazing new territory. Camden represents a terrible defeat for Horatio Gates, who fled the battlefield and didn’t stop running for sixty miles, the death of Baron de Kalb, the presence of Tarleton and Cornwallis, and lots of implications for the future of the southern campaign, since the defeat of Gates led to his replacement with Nathanael Greene, who did a superb job.

Before I take the plunge for certain, I wanted to hear what y’all think about this idea. Am I insane? Should I undertake a challenge like this by moving into a completely different area and era? Or should I stick with what I know and what’s in my comfort zone?

Please don’t be shy. Your candid and honest opinions are what I’m looking for here, and please know that they will be a major factor in the final decision. And fear not. If I do tackle this project, it will not mean an end to my Civil War work. I doubt that anything will ever cause that to halt altogether.

Thanks, and happy holidays to one and all.

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I am pleased to unveil here the cover of my forthcoming Brandy Station book. I really like it.

What do you guys think?

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I have an update on my forthcoming book The Battle of Brandy Station: North America’s Largest Cavalry Battle for those of you who might be interested. The book is being published by The History Press of Charleston, South Carolina. Originally, I was told that the book would not be out until late May, just before Memorial Day. However, I have already signed off on the page galleys and the book is actually ready to go to the printer just as soon as the cover design work is completed.

I am one of the presenters at a conference on Civil War cavalry operations being held at Liberty University the weekend of March 26-28, 2009, and today I was advised that the book will be out in time for the conference.

So, for those of you who are interested in this book, your wait has been shortened by three months.

By the way, I am also doing another cavalry conference at Longwood University in February of next year that’s put on by my friend Patrick Schroeder. More on that as information comes available.

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The other day, I got a very nice e-mail from Ulric Dahlgren, IV. Ric, as he’s known, is the harbormaster in Annapolis, MD. He is also the great-great grandson of Ully Dahlgren’s younger full brother, Charles Bunker Dahlgren (after Ully was killed, his father, Admiral John A. Dahlgren, re-married and had a second family with his second wife, Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, which is why I made the distinction).

Ric had some very nice things to say about my biography of Ulric Dahlgren. He said, “I want to express my approval and gratitude on behalf of my family for the way you handled the entire short career of Ulric.” Thanks, Ric. I really appreciate that.

After reading my book, he also came up with a new angle on the Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid that I frankly had never even considered, and it’s something that’s well worth considering. In discussing the so-called “Dahlgren Papers”–the documents found on Ully Dahlgren’s body when he was killed in the ambush in King and Queen County–Ric wrote, “What if the slave WAS setting him up for an ambush and this was known to southern troops, and at the last Ulric also knew it? Would this have made a better opportunity for forgery? What if he wrote those papers solely as a personal act of defiance in case he was killed, to instill fear in the South?”

Ric refers to a slave/guide named Martin Robinson, whom Ulric Dahlgren had hanged the night before he and his command tried to enter the city of Richmond, largely because Robinson did not give Ulric good directions to an unattended ford where his men could cross the James River. Dahlgren mercilessly hanged the man by the side of the road.

Ric’s e-mail to me was an absolute bolt out of the blue. I have to admit that the possibility that the Dahlgren Papers were the tool of an intentional plan of spreading disinformation–what the Russians call a “maskirovka”–never, ever occurred to me. It’s certainly within the realm of possibility, as almost anything is when considering the Dahlgren Papers, and it’s worthy of further consideration. It would certainly require a brilliant strategic mind, the time and opportunity to write the documents, and a solid understanding of the Confederate high command structure and how it might respond to such a threat. It’s a fascinating possibility.

I’m going to have to gnaw on this some more, and I likewise want to invite you all to pitch in and tell me what you think about this. Remember that Ulric Dahlgren was three weeks shy of 22 when these events occurred, that he had no formal military training whatsoever, and that he had just returned to duty after nearly dying as a consequence of his Gettysburg Campaign wound. I welcome your thoughts.

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At the risk of tooting my own horn, I did want to let you know about something Civil War-related that I did during my sabbatical. Back in September, just a few days after I decided to shut it down for a while, I did an interview with Mike Noirot on my biography of Ulric Dahlgren that can be found on his excellent blog, This Mighty Scourge. If you’re interested in hearing it, click on the first link above, and hopefully you won’t get tired of hearing me prattle on for an hour.

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This is something that I should have done back in July, when the book was published. However, my funk began about that time, and I just never got around to it. I regret that a great deal.

Here’s my review of J.D. Petruzzi’s and Steve Stanley’s fabulous book, The Complete Gettysburg Guide, published by Savas-Beatie:

There have been lots of battlefield guides written for those who want to visit Gettysburg. Running the gamut from classics like the Luvaas and Nelson guide to the well-done recent guide by Mark Grimsley and Brooks Simpson, most of them cover the same ground.

What makes The Complete Gettysburg Guide unique is that it covers those actions that others don’t. Featuring the superb maps of master cartographer Steve Stanley and excellent historical essays by J. D. Petruzzi, this guide addresses things like the location of rock carvings around the battlefield, hospital sites, actions leading up to the battle, and actions that were tangential to the battle, like the Battle of Fairfield, which occurred on the afternoon of July 3, 1863 a few miles behind the Confederate lines. This book truly is THE complete guide to the Battle of Gettysburg, which should please even the most choosy and particular Gettysburg student.

The book was published in full color, and is a handsome, well-made volume. Stanley’s maps and photography go a long way toward rounding out and filling out Petruzzi’s well-researched and well-written narrative. Their combined talents make for an enjoyable read.

Simply put, there is no better battlefield guide anywhere in existence. This book has raised the bar for all future battlefield guides and sets a new standard of excellence. I wholeheartedly recommend it to both the Gettysburg novice who wants to truly learn the battlefield as well as to old hands who are looking for new angles to round out their studies. Neither could possibly go wrong in buying this book.

Enthusiastically recommended.

That’s the review that I posted on Amazon.com, and I honestly can’t say enough good things about this book. I just wish I had thought of it myself. 🙂

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Reader Jim Epperson sent me a note about his experience with Google and the reason why he is not a fan of Google’s copyright infringement scheme. After hearing Jim’s story, I asked him to prepare a guest blog post for me for inclusion in this blog. Here’s Jim’s guest blog post:

Eric asked if I would write a guest post about my Google experience. First, some background:

I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a mathematics Ph.D. in 1980, and began my academic career at the University of Georgia. I later moved to the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). While I began my career with typical dreams of setting the mathematical world on fire, by the mid-1990s I had come to terms with simply being a good but middling scholar and a fine instructor, tough but fair.

In 1997 I decided to write a textbook. This decision was made for a variety of reasons —dissatisfaction with existing books being a large one—but the prospect of additional income was certainly part of it. For two and a half years, through health crises, the birth of my son, and a career change and associated move to Ann Arbor, I worked on “my baby.” It appeared in the summer of 2001, and a Revised Edition came out in 2007.

Over the years it has brought in a non-trivial amount of money to the family coffers (not as much as I’d hoped, of course) and I am very proud of it as a piece of mathematical exposition. The expected future for the book might be another edition in a few years, then possibly a sale to a publisher like Dover which would keep the title in print at a much reduced price. Imagine my surprise when I discovered, on Friday afternoon, that Google had put my book up as part of its scanning project.

There’s a boatload of ways to react to this. The first is to honestly say that anyone who tried to use the online version of the book for a course (in lieu of purchasing the book) would be an idiot. In the first place, they only scanned in about 85% of the book; while most of the listings in the Table of Contents are active links, some are not. Even if the entire book were there, taking a course based on reading the book online would, IMO, be a recipe for disaster. But college students have tried dumb things before, so I would not doubt that someone, somewhere, will try to save the money that the book would cost, by using the online version as their text. (Given that it retails for $100, this is not surprising.) So Google is not only potentially taking money out of my pocket, they are enticing students to do educationally foolish things. Admittedly, there is an element of pride that my book was considered good enough for this project, although I could do without the ego boost in exchange for the royalties I might lose (and my understanding is they are scanning everything in the Stanford Library).

But, at the bottom, I feel more than a little violated. Almost as soon as I discovered that Google had scanned my book, I contacted my editor at John Wiley & Sons. Today I got a reply from one of her staff, explaining that Wiley had been part of the suit against Google, and so was part of the settlement. Based on her description of things, it appears possible that there might be some cash payment to me for this, although $25 million won’t go very far when split between so many books and authors. I’m not holding my breath…

I’ve got no problem with Google scanning in and uploading books that are public domain. That’s frankly a good idea, IMO. But this business of scanning in books currently under copyright, worst of all textbooks, strikes me as a gross violation of intellectual property rights. I’m surprised that Wiley and the other publishers were not able to find a good enough lawyer to beat Google in this.

I feel Jim’s pain, and I completely understand where he’s coming from. If any of you need any further reasons to oppose Google’s massive copyright infringement scheme and the proposed settlement, I hope that Jim has provided it to you.

Jim, thanks for taking the time to contribute.

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From CNET on September 2:

Amazon came out swinging Tuesday against Google’s proposed settlement with book authors and publishers.

Amazon’s opposition was made public last week when it joined the Open Book Alliance, but the company filed its own brief with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Tuesday arguing against making the proposed settlement final. In its filing (click for PDF), Amazon notes that it has also scanned books, but has not taken the controversial step that Google took in scanning out-of-print but copyright-protected books without explicit permission.

Way back in 2004, when Google began scanning books from libraries, it believed it had the right to scan the entire text of a copyright-protected book under fair-use laws so long as it only displayed a snippet of the contents. Authors groups and publishers vehemently disagreed, resulting in a class-action lawsuit and the proposed settlement at issue in this case.
Lawyers for Amazon wrote “Amazon also brings a unique perspective to this court because it has engaged in a book scanning project very similar to Google’s, with one major distinction: As to books still subject to copyright protection, Amazon has only scanned those for which it could obtain permission to do so from the copyright holder.”

The brief goes on to complain that the settlement “is unfair to authors, publishers, and others whose works would be the subject of a compulsory license for the life of the copyright in favor of Google and the newly created Book Rights Registry.” Amazon wants Congress to intervene in the dispute over fair-use provisions in copyright laws, saying the use of a class-action settlement to obtain these rights “represents an unprecedented rewriting of copyright law through judicial action.”

Amazon, of course, has a lot at stake when it comes to the future of books. One of the largest sellers of regular books in the world, Amazon has also turned its attention to the digital book market with the release of the Kindle and a digital book store of its own.

Google has supporters in its fight to get the settlement approved during an early October fairness hearing before Judge Denny Chin. Sony, the American Association for People with Disabilities, the European Commission, and several others have filed briefs of support with the court. And on Tuesday, U.K. publisher Coolerbooks agreed to join Google’s Partner Program, allowing it to offer Google’s scanned copies of public domain works not at issue in the settlement.

Updated 2:52 p.m. PDT: Google plans to hold a press conference tomorrow morning with settlement supporters from civil rights groups and advocates for people with disabilities, which we’ll cover.

And three library groups reiterated Wednesday that while they do not oppose the settlement they wish to ensure “vigorous oversight” is enforced by the court.

But judging by the court docket, the opposition is out-filing supporters. Those interested in flooding Judge Chin with additional reading material have until Friday to do so.

I really hope that the Judge does not approve this settlement. It’s bad for EVERYONE but Google.

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Recently, the newsletter of the Old Baldy Civil War Roundtable of Philadelphia published the results of an update poll as to the 50 greatest books on the Civil War of all time, and J.D.’s and my book Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg made the list! We’re in some very elite company, and it is both humbling and flattering to make a list like that. I’m also pleased to see Jim Morgan’s A Little Short of Boats: The Fights at Ball’s Bluff and Edwards Ferry make the list; we published that book at Ironclad, and I was the one who persuaded Jim to write it. Given that thousands of books have been published on the war, to make the top 50 is an incredible honor.

Here’s the list:

1. The Civil War: A Narrative – Shelby Foote
2. Battle Cry of Freedom – James McPherson
3. Killer Angels – Michael Shaara
4. Lee’s Lieutenants – Douglas Freeman
5. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend – James Robertson
6. The Gettysburg Campaign – Edwin B. Coddington
7. Co. Aytch – Sam Watkins
8. A Stillness at Appomattox – Bruce Catton
9. Confederacy’s Last Hurrah/Embrace an Angry Wind – Wiley Sword
10. Fighting for the Confederacy – E. Porter Alexander
11. Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam – Stephen W. Sears
12. Gettysburg – Stephen W. Sears
13. American Brutus – Michael Kauffman
14. Gettysburg: The Second Day – Harry W. Pfanz
15. Generals in Blue – Ezra J. Warner
16. Gettysburg: A Journey in Time – William A. Frassanito
17. Team of Rivals – Doris Kearns Goodwin
18. A Little Short Of Boats: The Fights at Ball’s Bluff and Edward’s Ferry – James A. Morgan, III
19. Centennial History of the Civil War – Bruce Catton
20. Harvard’s Civil War: The History of the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry – Richard Miller
21. Mosby’s Rangers – Jeffry D. Wert
22. The Golden Book of the Civil War – American Heritage
23. Confederates in the Attic – Tony Horwitz
24. April 1865: The Month That Saved America – Jay Winik
25. This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga – Peter Cozzens
26. Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862 – Joseph Harsh
27. Nothing but Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865 – Steven E. Woodworth
28. The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy – Bell Irvin Wiley
29. The Civil War Dictionary – Mark Boatner
30. Robert E. Lee – Douglas Southall Freeman
31. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years & the War Years – Carl Sandberg
32. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
33. The Official Records of the War of the Rebellion – Participants
34. Antietam: The Soldiers’ Battle – John Michael Priest
35. The Class of 1846: From West Point to Appomattox – John C. Waugh
36. Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor – Russell S. Bonds
37. Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West – Shea & Hess
38. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant – Ulysses S. Grant
39. Hardtack & Coffee – John Billings
40. The Guns of Gettysburg – Fairfax Downey
41. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
42. Warrior Generals – Thomas Buell
43. Generals in Gray – Ezra J. Warner
44. Battles & Leaders of the Civil War – Various
45. Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas – John Hennessy
46. The Secret War for the Union – Edwin C. Fishel
47. Three Years in the Army of the Cumberland – James Connolly
48. Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign – Kent Masterson Brown
49. Last Full Measure – Jeff Shaara
50. Plenty of Blame to Go Around: Jeb Stuart’s Controversial Ride to Gettysburg – Eric J. Wittenberg & J. David Petruzzi

I can’t fathom how a couple of these books would make such a list, such as the horrible dreck that Jeff Shaara churns out (I couldn’t even bring myself to finish that awful book), or how Gone With the Wind qualifies, but so be it. I am nevertheless greatly honored and greatly humbled all at the same time to be considered in such elite company as the rest of the list, and I thank everyone who voted for us.

Thanks to Tom Ryan of Bethany Beach, Delaware for bringing this to my attention.

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Yesterday, reader Phil LeDuc left me the following comment on my post about our ongoing library project:

The space-for-books problem is kind of like taxes (and death I guess), isn’t it? You can defer it for a while, but inexorably it gets you in the end. I’ve got the same situation.

On a related note Eric, have you catalogued your collection at all? Whether manually or using a software program or similar means?

It’s something I think I need to do for insurance and other purposes, and I’d be interested to hear from you and your readers on this subject. I’d like to find something that’s user-friendly and can produce reports that can be sorted by subject or title or author, and which then can be printed.

Thanks and good luck.

Thanks for writing Phil. The answer is that I have not catalogued my books to date. I usually operate from memory when buying books, which works reasonably well. I only buy duplicates once in a blue moon. However, your point about insurance is well-taken, and my books really should be better covered than what they are.

Susan actually came up with the idea of completely cataloguing our library, and Susan being Susan, she did a great deal of research while searching for an appropriate piece of software to use. She has a large collection of her own, so she has started with her books.

She located a piece of software called Bookpedia. Bookpedia has a lot of really useful functions. If you have a webcam attached to your computer (there’s one built into this laptop), you can use it to scan the barcode for the ISBN, and it then finds the book in its online database. It will store the book by genre, author, title–however you want it to catalogue them. She has found it very easy to use, and I commend it to you.

When she finishes her library, which will occur shortly, she has offered to start on mine. With a couple of thousand books in my library, it’s going to take a while. Also, I have a complete set of the reprints of the OR’s, all 128 volumes of them, and they obviously don’t have ISBN’s. The same goes for my first edition regimentals and some of the replica reprints that I’ve collected from Ward House Books. I’m not sure how we’re going to handle that, but we will figure it out.

Thanks for asking, Phil.

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