Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (99 page)

The Peninsula brought Robert E. Lee to the forefront of the Civil War, and the four volumes of Douglas Southall Freeman’s
R. E. Lee
(New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1936) and Emory Thomas’s
Robert E. Lee: A Biography
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995) remain the place to begin with the great Virginia general, although readers with a taste for iconoclasm should not miss Thomas L. Connelly’s
The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society
(New York: Knopf, 1977), Michael Fellman’s
The Making of Robert E. Lee
(New York: Random House, 2000) or Alan Nolan’s
Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). A more unusual approach to Lee’s life can be found through his letters in Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s
Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters
(New York: Viking, 2008). John Hennessy’s
Return to Bull Run: The Campaign and Battle of Second Manassas
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993) offers a particularly good account of this long-neglected battle, while the literature on Antietam is particularly rich in having for its chroniclers James V. Murfin in
The Gleam of Bayonets: The Battle of Antietam and Robert E. Lee’s Maryland Campaign, September, 1862
(New York: T. Yoseloff, 1965) and Benjamin F. Cooling in
Counter-Thrust: From the Peninsula to the Antietam
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), as well as an unusual reference work in Joseph L. Harsh’s
Sounding the Shallows: A Confederate Companion for the Maryland Campaign of 1862
(Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000).

The final object of the battles came back to the question of slavery and its future, and for understanding the agonizing position of blacks who wanted the war for the Union to become a war for freedom. The most comprehensive survey undertaken of emancipation and its consequences is that of the Freedom and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland, and especially in the three volumes of the first series of
Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861–1867—The Destruction of Slavery
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985),
The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Lower South
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), and
The Wartime Genesis of Free Labor: The Upper South
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), and in a general anthology,
Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War
(New York: New Press, 1992). The controversial question of Lincoln’s motives and intentions in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation have been handled from numerous angles by Don D. Fehrenbacher, “Only His Stepchildren: Lincoln and the Negro,” in
Civil War History
20 (December 1974), George M. Fredrickson, “A Man but Not a Brother: Abraham Lincoln and Racial Equality,” in the
Journal of Southern History
61 (February 1975), and Paul Finkelman, “Lincoln and the Preconditions for Emancipation” in
Lincoln’s Proclamation: Emancipation Reconsidered
, ed. W. A. Blair and K. F. Younger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). LaWanda Cox’s
Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985) offers a sympathetic portrayal of Lincoln and race; at entirely the other end is Lerone Bennett’s forceful but erratic
Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream
(Chicago: Johnson, 2000). Burrus Carnahan’s
Act of Justice: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2007) unties the legal knots surrounding emancipation and the Proclamation.

The intricate story of the political compromises that kept Kentucky and Missouri from joining the Confederacy has been told in several venerable but still important studies, E. Merton Coulter’s
The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), Edward C. Smith,
The Borderland in the Civil War
(New York: Macmillan, 1927), William H. Townsend,
Lincoln and the Bluegrass: Slavery and Civil War in Kentucky
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1955), William E. Parrish,
Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865
(Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1963). More recently, provocative new work on the Border States has emerged in Michael Fellman,
Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Lowell H. Harrison,
Lincoln of Kentucky
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), Louis S. Gerteis,
Civil War St. Louis
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001), and William C. Harris’s
Lincoln and the Border States in the Civil War
(2011). The most important figure in
the subsequent campaigning across Kentucky and Tennessee in early 1862 is Ulysses S. Grant, whose
Personal Memoirs
are among the mainstays of Civil War literature (the edition used here is from the Library of America volume of Grant’s
Memoirs and Selected Letters
, but the
Memoirs
have been reprinted numerous times over the century since they first appeared). Almost as fascinating a literary monument to Grant is the three-volume biography of Grant begun by Lloyd Lewis in
Captain Sam Grant
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1950) and finished by Bruce Catton in
Grant Moves South
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1960) and
Grant Takes Command
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1968). Grant’s most recent biographers have included the highly critical William S. McFeely, in
Grant: A Biography
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), a polar opposite in Brooks Simpson in
Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), Simpson’s
Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), Jean Edward Smith,
Grant
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), Edward H. Bonekemper,
A Victor, Not a Butcher: Ulysses S. Grant’s Overlooked Military Genius
(Lanham, MD: Regnery, 2004), Joan Waugh,
U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), and Michael Ballard,
U. S. Grant: The Making of a General, 1861–1863
(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Grant’s personal and official papers and letters have been made available through the late John Y. Simon’s immense project,
The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967–).

Among the best books on the early western military campaigns is the first volume to offer a comprehensive account of them, Manning Ferguson Force’s
From Fort Henry to Corinth
(New York: Scribner’s, 1881), which was written as part of the Scribner’s campaigns series in the 1880s. Among the more recent accounts of the operations on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers are James Hamilton,
The Battle of Fort Donelson
(South Brunswick, NJ: T. Yoseloff, 1968) and Benjamin F. Cooling,
Forts Henry and Donelson
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988). The Confederate commanders who struggled to shore up the crumbling edges of the Confederacy’s western lines have enjoyed a surprising number of useful and durable biographies, beginning with William Preston Johnston’s biography of his father,
The Life of Albert Sidney Johnston
(New York: D. Appleton, 1879). The most significant of these biographies is Grady McWhiney’s
Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat
, vol. 1:
Field Command
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), although McWhiney eventually left it to another biographer, Judith Hallock, to finish the narrative of Bragg’s ill-starred career. The overall shape of Confederate decision making in the western part of the country in 1862–63 is covered in Archer Jones,
Confederate Strategy from Shiloh to Vicksburg
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1961), while Thomas L. Connelly offered a collective biography of the Confederacy’s western army in
Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), and joined with Archer Jones to write
The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973). The first great western battle that resulted from those decisions has been covered with marvelous narrative skill by Wiley Sword in
Shiloh: Bloody April
(New York: Morrow, 1974) and by James Lee McDonough in
Shiloh—In Hell Before Night
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1977). The lengthy and varied operations that finally resulted in the capture of the great Confederate outpost on the Mississippi are narrated in Earl Schenck Miers,
The Web of Victory: Grant at Vicksburg
(New York: Knopf, 1955), in James R. Arnold,
Grant Wins the War: Decision at Vicksburg
(New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1997), and in Michael Ballard,
Vicksburg: The Campaign that Opened the Mississippi
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

A number of published papers and diaries of Lincoln’s cabinet secretaries offer critical glimpses into the operation of wartime politics at the highest levels in the North, beginning with
The Diary of Gideon Welles
, ed. John T. Morse (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911),
The Diary of Edward Bates 1859–1866
, ed. Howard K. Beale (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1930), and David Donald’s edition of Salmon Chase’s wartime diaries,
Inside Lincoln’s Cabinet: The Civil War Diaries of Salmon P. Chase
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1954). The diaries and papers of Lincoln’s wartime
secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, have been exhaustively edited by Michael Burlingame as
Inside Lincoln’s White House: The Complete Civil War Diary of John Hay
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997),
At Lincoln’s Side: John Hay’s Civil War Correspondence and Selected Writings
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and
With Lincoln in the White House: Letters, Memoranda, and Other Writings of John G. Nicolay, 1860–1865
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). The best surveys of the Republican domestic policy agenda during the war are Heather Cox Richardson’s
The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Michael Green’s
Freedom, Union and Power: Lincoln and His Party in the Civil War
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Salmon Chase’s decision to invite Jay Cooke to act as the Treasury’s wartime agent was of greater significance to the long-term Union victory than a number of battles, and is described in detail by Ellis Oberholtzer in
Jay Cooke: Financier of the Civil War
, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: G. W. Jacobs, 1907). The war involved not only economic and political difficulties but also legal and constitutional problems for the Union, most of which are surveyed in J. G. Randall,
Constitutional Problems Under Lincoln
(New York: D. Appleton, 1926), Harold Hyman,
A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution
(New York: Knopf, 1973), Brian McGinty,
Lincoln and the Court
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), Robert Bruce Murray,
Legal Cases of the Civil War
(Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2003) and Stephen C. Neff,
Justice in Blue and Gray: A Legal History of the Civil War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The particular problems posed by the blockade have been searchingly analyzed by Ludwell H. Johnson, “The Confederacy: What Was It? A View from the Federal Courts,” in
Civil War History
32 (March 1986), and Johnson’s article on the
Prize Cases
, “Abraham Lincoln and the Development of Presidential War-Making Powers: Prize Cases (1863) Revisited,” in
Civil War History
35 (September 1989).

The fires set in the rear of the Union cause by Democratic and Copperhead dissent have been the particular object of the late Frank L. Klement’s attention in a series of volumes,
The Copperheads in the Middle West
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960),
The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1970), and
Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984). Klement entered a strong skepticism about the legitimacy of Lincoln’s concerns; by contrast, Mark Neely’s Pulitzer Prize–winning
The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) offers a comprehensive rebuttal to wartime charges that Lincoln wantonly disregarded the civil rights of dissenters and Democrats and imposed a quasi-dictatorship on the North, while Jennifer L. Weber’s
Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) is a spirited defense of Lincoln’s worries about Copperhead dissent.

In 1886, the onetime Federal artilleryman Frank Wilkeson was growing disgusted with the flood of Civil War memoirs flowing from the pens of former generals who sought chiefly “to belittle the work of others, or to falsify or obscure it.” He sat down to write his own recollections of service in the Army of the Potomac in 1864 and 1865 to give a voice to “the private soldiers who won the battles, when they were given a fair chance to win them,” and who “have scarcely begun to write the history from their point of view.” Wilkeson himself may have done some self-embroidery of his service in the 11th New York Artillery, but his preference for writing the Civil War from the bottom up has been pursued in a seemingly unending flood of regimental histories (some of which appeared even before the war was over), published diaries, and collections of private letters edited by descendants and scholars of the Civil War soldier. The richness of these sources is due largely to the conjunction of two events: one is the mass movement of American males into the war, and the
other is the rising tide of literacy in the American population in the nineteenth century. Americans were clearly confronted with a public event of crisis proportions in their national life, and for the first time in the history of the republic, an overwhelming number of those Americans were literate enough to record their thoughts and descriptions of it.