Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (102 page)

The overall disruption of Southern communities has been the focus of some of the best social histories of the Civil War, beginning with Stephen V. Ash,
Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), Wayne K. Durrill,
War of Another Kind: A Southern Community in the Great Rebellion
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) on Washington County, North Carolina, and Daniel Sutherland on Culpeper County, Virginia, in
Seasons of War: The Ordeal of a Confederate Community, 1861–1865
(New York: Free Press, 1995). More recently, Anne Bailey has given us
Invisible Southerners: Ethnicity in the Civil War
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006), a study of ethnic diversity and conflict in a Southern state that was supposed to have neither, while A. Wilson Greene has focused on one city in Virginia in
Civil War Petersburg
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). For the Appalachians, there is Brian D. McKnight’s
Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006) and Jonathan Dean Sarris’s
A Separate Civil War: Conflict and Community in the North Georgia Mountains
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006).

American culture in the Civil War era and afterward has been surveyed in Anne C. Rose,
Victorian America and the Civil War
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Louise A. Stevenson,
The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Cultures, 1860–1880
(Boston: Twayne, 1991), although Stevenson devotes most of her book to the post–Civil War decades. The intellectual life of mid-nineteenth-century America can be best understood through Bruce Kuklick’s
Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). D. H. Meyer’s
The Instructed Conscience: The Shaping of the American National Ethic
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972) offers a vital anatomy of the central concern of nineteenth-century American philosophy. George M. Fredrickson’s
The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union
(New York: Harper and Row, 1965) is still the prevailing interpretation of Northern intellectuals in interpreting the Civil War, but because he focuses exclusively on the secular intellectuals and the Romantic religionists, the record that emerges from his book is quite a dismal one, with Northern intellectuals being long on fears for social control and remarkably short on intellectual substance. James Moorhead’s
American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War, 1860–1869
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978) helps to correct the sense of imbalance induced by Fredrickson’s book, but even so, Moorhead is more concerned with millenialism than with the larger picture of evangelical Protestants in the Civil War. Confederate intellectual life has, by contrast, enjoyed an overflow of outstanding studies, starting with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese’s
The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ Worldview
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Michael O’Brien’s twovolume opus,
Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Michael Bernath’s
Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), and three shorter books, by E. Brooks Holifield,
The Gentleman Theologians: American Theology in Southern Culture, 1795–1860
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1978), Drew Gilpin Faust,
The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), and Eugene Genovese,
A Consuming Fire: The Fall of the Confederacy in the Mind of the White Christian South
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). Two ambitious surveys of religion in the Civil War North and South are Harry S. Stout’s
Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War
(New York: Viking, 2006) and George C. Rable’s
God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). But the most incisive and rewarding analysis of religious thought during and about the war is Mark A. Noll’s
The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Louis A. Warren’s
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Declaration: “A New Birth of Freedom”
(Fort Wayne, IN: Lincoln National Life Foundation, 1964) offers a conventional but detailed history of the writing of the Address and its subsequent reputation.

The arrival of Ulysses S. Grant to assume practical control of the war in Virginia marked a critical turning point in the military history of the Civil War. The long and bloody Overland Campaign that Grant waged against Lee has found its ablest chronicler in Gordon Rhea’s four volumes on the Overland Campaign:
The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5–6, 1864
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994),
The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7–12, 1864
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997),
To the North Anna River: Grant and Lee, May 13–25, 1864
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), and
Cold Harbor: Grant and Lee, May 26–June 3, 1864
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002). Hard on Rhea’s heels, however, are Noah A. Trudeau with
Bloody Roads South: The Wilderness to Cold Harbor,
May–June 1864
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1989) and Mark Grimsley with
And Keep Moving On: The Virginia Campaign, May-June 1864
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), plus the individual battle studies by Robert Garth Scott,
Into the Wilderness with the Army of the Potomac
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), William Matter,
If It Takes All Summer: The Battle of Spotsylvania
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), and Ernest Furgurson,
Not War but Murder: Cold Harbor, 1864
(New York: Knopf, 2002). The siege that Grant was forced to begin at Petersburg has also picked up a number of new admirers, beginning with Noah Trudeau in
The Last Citadel: Petersburg, Virginia, June 1864–April 1865
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1991); several books concentrate on particular parts of the Petersburg siege, such as Michael Cavanaugh and William Marvel, “
The Horrid Pit”: The Battle of the Crater
(Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1989) and A. Wilson Greene’s
The Final Battles of the Petersburg Campaign: Breaking the Backbone of the Rebellion
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2008). A valuable adjunct to these books is William Frassanito’s photographic history of the Overland Campaign,
Grant and Lee: The Virginia Campaigns, 1864–1865
(New York: Scribner, 1983), which complements his earlier two photographic “then-and-now” books on Gettysburg and Antietam.

Grant’s operations in Virginia were only one part of his overall strategic plan for 1864, and he depended heavily on the successes won in Georgia by William Tecumseh Sherman. Lloyd Lewis’
Sherman: Fighting Prophet
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932) is a rare masterpiece of literary craft and remains an outstanding Sherman biography, although it is marred in discussing Sherman’s racial prejudices by Lewis’ own disparaging comments on black soldiers. Charles Royster’s
The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans
(New York: Knopf, 1991) is a peculiar and (to quote one reviewer) “paradoxical” essay on Sherman and the military theme of destruction in war most often associated with Sherman. But it has forced biographers of Sherman to deal with the problem of endemic violence in American culture, and especially in Michael Fellman,
Citizen Sherman: A Life of William Tecumseh Sherman
(New York: Random House, 1997) and Stanley P. Hirshson,
The White Tecumseh: A Biography of General William T. Sherman
(New York: J. Wiley, 1997). Johnston’s decision to settle into a siege around Atlanta was his undoing, and the siege itself has been marvelously spoken for in Albert Castel’s
Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), Richard M. McMurry,
Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), Marc Wortman’s
The Bonfire: The Siege and Burning of Atlanta
(New York: Public Affairs, 2009), Russell S. Bonds’
War Like the Thunderbolt: The Battle and Burning of Atlanta
(Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2009), and Gary Ecelbarger’s
The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Franklin was a particular exercise in tactical folly, and has attracted the notice of Wiley Sword in
Embrace an Angry Wind: The Confederacy’s Last Hurrah: Spring Hill, Franklin and Nashville
(New York: Harper Collins, 1992) and James McDonough and Thomas Connelly in
Five Tragic Hours: The Battle of Franklin
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983).

Lincoln’s difficulties with the Radicals of his own party have been the subject of ongoing debate since Lincoln’s death. On the one hand, Hans L. Trefousse’s
The Radical Republicans: Lincoln’s Vanguard for Racial Justice
(New York: Knopf, 1968) makes a passionate plea for interpreting the Radicals as Lincoln’s secret agents for promoting policies Lincoln could not afford to openly endorse. On the other hand, T. Harry Williams’s
Lincoln and the Radicals
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1941) just as passionately argues that Lincoln was a moderate who struggled in vain to keep the Radicals from turning the war into a political vendetta against the South. Individual biographies of the Radicals are not hard to come by, beginning with Hans L. Trefousse’s
Thaddeus Stevens: Nineteenth-Century Egalitarian
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), David Donald’s
Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man
(New York: Knopf, 1970), and Richard Sewall’s
John P. Hale and the Politics of Abolition
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). A clearer view of just who the Radicals were as a
group emerges from Allan G. Bogue’s
The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), which used mathematical analyses of roll call votes to identify the core of Radical leadership in the Senate.

Some of the most controversial legislation written by the Congressional Radicals concerned conscription. James Geary’s
We Need Men: The Union Draft in the Civil War
(DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1991) is a clear, precise, and highly illuminating analysis of conscription in the North, and carefully distinguishes the various drafts and draft calls, who was most likely to be conscripted, and how many draftees actually wound up in the Federal armies. The most notorious response to the draft in the North was the New York City draft riot. Iver C. Bernstein’s
The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990) skillfully sets the riots against the background of New York labor and racial unrest during the war, while Adrian Cook’s
The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974) and Barnet Schecter’s
The Devil’s Own Work: The Civil War Draft Riots and the Fight to Reconstruct America
(New York: Walker, 2005) provide the best overall narratives of the New York rioting. New York, however, can only lay claim to the most terrible outbreak of anti-draft violence: Grace Palladino’s
Another Civil War: Labor, Capitol, and the State in the Anthracite Regions of Pennsylvania, 1840–1868
(Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990), Robert Sandow’s
Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), and Arnold M. Shankman’s
The Pennsylvania Antiwar Movement, 1861–1865
(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980) trace the major outbreaks of anti-draft resistance in Pennsylvania.

Specialized studies of the last six months of the war are rarer than for almost any other period of the Civil War. But certainly noteworthy among these for recounting the death agonies of the Army of Northern Virginia are William Marvel’s
A Place Called Appomattox
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and
Lee’s Last Retreat: The Flight to Appomattox
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), along with Chris Calkins’s
The Appomattox Campaign, March 29–April 9, 1865
(Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1997),
The Battles of Appomattox Station and Appomattox Court House, April 8–9, 1865
(Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1987), and
The Final Bivouac: The Surrender Parade at Appomattox and the Disbanding of the Armies
(Lynchburg, VA: H. E. Howard, 1988). The assassination of Lincoln is quite another story, although much of the assassination literature is sensationalized storytelling. The standard account is still George S. Bryan’s
The Great American Myth: The True Story of Lincoln’s Murder
(Chicago: Americana House, 1990 [1940]), but Bryan has been considerably expanded by William Hanchett in
The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) and Edward Steers in
Blood on the Moon: The Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001). Looking at the assassination from the assassin’s point of view requires Michael W. Kauffman’s
American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies
(New York: Random House, 2005).