Civil War Bookshelf

Although the special section on the Civil War takes up more than 20 pages in the forthcoming July/August issue of Books & Culture, the books treated there make up only a small fraction of recent titles on the war, its causes, and its effects.

Informed estimates put the number of published titles on the conflict at over 60,000 and rising fast. That number translates into more than 40 books for each day of the conflict, or about one book for every 70 men who served under arms. Answers to why this river of writing exists are provided in substantial reflections like Harry Stout’s essay ” ‘Baptism in Blood,’ ” which leads off the special section, and in a number of serious books that now address this question directly. An easier task is to indicate directions of recent academic scholarship, which is attempted here after checking out the catalogues and websites of only a few university presses, and (with a couple of exceptions) only for titles published since 2000.

Military history has for a long time moved in complementary directions. Studies of individual battles, in which the hunt for firsthand sources extends always more widely, include Joanna M. McDonald, The First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), July 18-21, 1861 (Oxford, 2001); Kenneth W. Noe, Perryville: The Grand Havoc of Battle (Kentucky, 2001); and Carol Kettenburg Dubbs, Defend This Old Town: Williamsburg During the Civil War (LSU, 2002).

Of special note among books on individual battles is James M. McPherson, Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam (Oxford, 2002), reviewed in the special section by Roger Lundin, a volume that adds to McPherson’s impressive array of thoroughly researched, yet highly accessible Civil War histories. This book is important for its account of why Antietam (or Sharpsburg) was so critical for the overall war—primarily because it allowed Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and so ensured that Britain and France would not recognize the South. But it is also significant as a herald of broader trends in history writing, since it is an early contribution to an Oxford University Press series on contingent events in the past that decisively altered national or international history. (On the same theme, see Donald Yerxa’s interview with Jay Winik in the special section.) A different treatment of an individual battle has been provided by Daniel J. Hoisington, Gettysburg and the Christian Commission (Edinborough, 2002), which is especially welcome for integrating the religiously inspired work of a prominent voluntary agency into broader accounts of this much-studied battle.

Titles on the skills and failings of generals abound; the best of them also add measurably to what can be learned about much broader matters as well—for example, Gabor S. Borritt, ed., Jefferson Davis’s Generals (Oxford paper, 2000); Robert K. Krick, The Smoothbore Volley that Doomed the Confederacy: The Death of Stonewall Jackson and Other Chapters on the Army of Northern Virginia (LSU, 2002); and Frederick C. Newell, With Sheridan in the Final Campaign Against Lee, ed. E. J. Wittenberg (LSU, 2002). Another older staple is the unit history.

Those who have viewed Ron Maxwell’s films, Gettysburg and Gods and Generals, may have a special interest in Thomas A. Desjardin, Stand Firm Ye Boys from Maine: The 20th Maine and the Gettysburg Campaign (Oxford paper, 2001), since it treats the regiment that Joshua Chamberlain led.

For some decades the most innovative writing on the war has featured broader studies of what the conflict entailed for political, economic, or social development, for the home front, or for the evolving place of the United States in the world. Recent political titles include a survey noteworthy for being authored by a British scholar, Brian Holden Reid, Civil War in the United States (Oxford/Arnold, 2002); an argument noteworthy for its attention to internal divisions within the South (many earlier books had done the same for the North), William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (Oxford, 2001); and a much-cited reprint noteworthy for its contributors (including Bruce Catton and David Donald) as well as for its theme, Grady McWhiney, ed., Grant, Lee, Lincoln and the Radicals (1964; new LSU ed., 2001).

Fresh studies linking the political and the cultural are more common than before, including Robert E. Bonner, Colors and Blood: Flag Passions of the Confederate South (Princeton, 2002); and Joan E. Cashin, ed., The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War (Princeton, 2002).

Social historians continue to push profitably toward new insights about domestic, female, and local realities, for example, Stephen W. Berry II, All That Makes a Man: Love and Ambition in the Civil War South (Oxford, 2002); Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon, eds., Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (Oxford, 2001); and Catherine Clinton, ed., Southern Families at War: Loyalty and Conflict in the Civil War South (Oxford, 2000).

The extent to which the war lends significance to what might otherwise be considered esoteric topics is suggested by recent volumes on baseball and on a French artist who tried to recapture the drama of American ships battling each other off the French coast: George Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War (Princeton, 2003); and David Degener and Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet and the American Civil War: The Battle of the “Kearsarge” and the “Alabama” (Yale, 2003).

How the war played outside the United States has been a regular theme of Civil War literature, stimulated recently years by the exotic tale of an Eastern women, married to a German soldier in the Union army who exerted an influence also in Maximilian’s Mexico, David Coffey, Soldier Princess: The Life and Legend of Agnes Salm-Salm in North America, 1861-1867 (Texas A&M, 2002); and by fresh, authoritative treatment of the most important of foreign connections, R. J. M. Blackett, Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War (LSU, 2001).

The Civil War’s implications for intellectual history have not traditionally received as much attention as other subjects, yet now authors and editors are also taking up this challenge with important books like a lengthy anthology of primary sources debating slavery, Mason I. Lowance, Jr., ed., A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865 (Princeton, 2003); and a much-discussed account of what the war did to the sensibility of select Boston intellectuals by Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001).

Even moderately significant connection to the war has been sufficient excuse for biographical attention, but most biographies from academic presses try to move beyond the merely personal to larger issues, as, for example, Roy Morris, Jr., The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War (Oxford, 2000); a fine scientific-religious biography that culminates in the war years, Lester Stephens, Science, Race, and Religion in the American South: John Bachman and the Charleston Circle of Naturalists (North Carolina, 2000); and solid studies that use the protagonists to consider wider issues, including A. James Fuller, Chaplain to the Confederacy: Basil Manley and Baptist Life in the Old South (LSU, 2000); and John C. Waugh, Surviving the Confederacy: Rebellion, Ruin, and Recovery—Roger and Sue Pryor During the Civil War (Harcourt, 2002).

Biographical work on Abraham Lincoln constitutes a fountain with never-exhausted springs all of its own. But Lincoln biography has entered a new era, primarily because of recent efforts at collecting and assessing the wealth of fugitive evidence about this most singular leader. That work is exemplified best in Don E. Fehrenbacher and Virginia Fehrenbacher, Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln (Stanford, 1996); and Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, eds., Herndon’s Informants: Letters, Interviews, and Statements about Abraham Lincoln (Illinois, 1998). By employing these sources, the carefully-edited volumes of Lincoln’s Collected Writings, and an ocean of helpful secondary accounts, as well as by asking interesting that draw past and present together, authors on Lincoln have pushed to new levels of sophistication, as illustrated by Lucas E. Morel, Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self-Government (Lexington, 2000); Gabor S. Borritt, ed., The Lincoln Enigma: The Changing Faces of an American Icon (Oxford, 2001); William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (Knopf, 2002); and Stewart Winger, Lincoln, Religion, and Romantic Cultural Politics (Northern Illinois, 2003).

Finally, hints in response to the question of the war’s pervasive fascination for the American republic are being offered in carefully focused monographs, like Jim Weeks, Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine (Princeton, 2003); and Christopher A. Thomas, The Lincoln Memorial and American Life (Princeton, 2002). The same question is the subject of one of the most deeply troubling books in this recent spate, David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard, 2001). Blight’s sober thesis—North and South were able to achieve a reasonable degree of reconciliation shortly after the end of the war, but only by relegating the nation’s African Americans to a cruel second-class status—is the kind of provocative treatment of a centrally important theme that helps explain why there are so many books on this one concentrated era in American experience.

Mark Noll is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College. His review of Gods and Generals (“Getting It Half-Right: What’s worth celebrating in Gods and Generals—and what’s not”) will appear in the July/August issue of B&C.