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.
TEN. STALEMATE AND TRIUMPH
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.
ELEVEN. A DIM SHORE AHEAD
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 Ame
rican 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).
Reconstruction also enjoys a substantial and surprisingly colorful bibliographical history. William A. Dunning, in Reconstruction, Political and Economic, 1865–1877 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1907), portrayed Reconstruction as a fanatical and utopian coup, launched by the Radical Republicans in violation of Lincoln’s intentions and carried out by a hungry swarm of political vultures known as carpetbaggers and their incompetent black allies. Dunning never lacked for critics among black historians, especially W. E. B. Du Bois and John Hope Franklin. But it was the publication of Kenneth Stampp’s The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877 (New York: Knopf, 1965) that decisively turned the “Dunning School” on its head. Stampp, influenced by the civil rights movement of the 1950s, sharply revised the reputation of Radicals and the carpetbaggers and placed the entire Reconstruction effort on the same high moral ground occupied by Martin Luther King Jr. Thirty years later, Stampp’s terse and comparatively short book is still in many ways the best introduction to Reconstruction. Stampp has enjoyed many followers, but none has towered so greatly above the rest as Eric Foner, whose Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988) expands Stampp’s focus to include wartime Reconstruction and other political and economic national developments. Yet a third departure from both Dunning and Stampp lies in Heather Cox Richardson’s treatment of Reconstruction as a conflict in political economy in The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post–Civil War North, 1865–1901 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001) and in her expansion of the scope of Reconstruction policies, in West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), to the western territories, which were, after all, the flash point of the controversies which provoked the War.
Andrew Johnson has attracted little favorable press, but he has enjoyed a number of able biographies. Albert Castel’s The Presidency of Andrew Johnson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1979) and Eric L. McKitrick’s highly critical Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960) both offer useful surveys of Johnson’s presidential policies, while Hans L. Trefousse’s Andrew Johnson: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989) sets him clearly in the ideological world of the Democratic Party. Michael Les Benedict in The Impeachment and Trial of Andrew Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973) and David O. Stewart in Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009) offer detailed accounts of the first presidential impeachment. The subsequent fate of Reconstruction in individual states has been treated in a growing list of local studies, including Joe Gray Taylor’s Louisiana Reconstructed, 1863–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), C. Peter Ripley’s Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), Joseph G. Dawson’s Army Generals and Reconstruction: Louisiana, 1862–1877 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), Stephen V. Ash’s Middle Tennessee Society Transformed, 1860–1870: War and Peace in the Upper South (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988) and When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), Richard Zuczek’s State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996), Margaret M. Storey’s Loyalty and Loss: Alabama’s Unionists in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004), and Mark L. Bradley’s Bluecoats and Tar Heels: Soldiers and Civilians in Reconstruction North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009).
A number of the participants in Reconstruction have earned their own biographies. Richard N. Current offers an elegant and determinedly revisionist collective biography of the major Southern Republicans in Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sarah Woolfolk Wiggins in The Scalawag in Alabama Politics, 1865–1881 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1977), and James A. Baggett in The Scalawags: Southern Dissenters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003) do likewise for the scalawags. The Southern opposition to Reconstruction has also had its students and its books, especially Nicholas Lemann in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009) and Michael Perman in Reunion Without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865–1868 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) and The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), where Perman (as opposed to C. Vann Woodward) stresses the continuities between the prewar planter class and the agrarian-based opposition to Reconstruction. Individual leaders of Southern resistance have earned biographical attention from Edward G. Longacre in Gentleman and Soldier: A Biography of Wade Hampton III (Nashville, TN: Rutledge Hill Press, 2009) and Ralph Lowell Eckert in John Brown Gordon: Soldier, Southerner, American (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Racial violence in Southern resistance to Reconstruction is handled in George C. Rable, But There Was No Peace: The Role of Violence in the Politics of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984) and LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre: The Untold Story of Black Power, White Terror, and the Death of Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
The various roles carved out by the freedpeople in the Reconstruction South are examined in Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979), Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), and Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction, 1861–1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965).
INDEX
Abaco Reef, Bahamas, 280
abolition of slavery, 42–48, 158, 174, 177, 235, 379, 384–85, 452, 453, 471, 524
and colonization, 50, 181–82, 375
and West Indian emancipation, 174
Adams, Charles Francis, 285, 287, 294, 298
Adams, Henry, 287, 289, 522, 530
Adams, John Quincy, 18, 284, 522
African Americans, 158, 172, 185, 232–33, 235, 236, 244, 245, 265, 356, 371, 374, 375–86, 395, 398, 400–401, 486–87, 489–90, 492–93, 494, 503–4, 505, 507, 509, 524, 526–27, 531
and “black laws,” 386
and civil rights, 382–86
and “contrabands,” 176, 440
and “Hannibal Guards,” 183
“Jim Crow” laws, 511
Aiken, Warren, 363
Alabama, 129, 130, 131, 190, 195, 308, 318, 319, 326, 346, 353, 357, 363, 396, 421, 490, 497, 516
and Winston County, 367
Alamo, the, 60
Albany, New York, 459
Alcott, Louisa May, 393, 395, 402
Alexander, E. Porter, 469
Alexandria, Louisiana, 243
Alton, Illinois, 49
Amelia Court House, Virginia, 476–77
American Anti-slavery Society, 47, 48, 50, 140
American Equal Rights Association, 403
American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, 398, 535
American Revolution, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 16, 23, 24, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 53, 59, 147, 164, 165, 187, 268, 289, 390
and “Ethiopian Regiment,” 43
Ames, Adelbert, 506–7, 513
Ammen, Jacob, 246
Anderson, Robert,
135–37, 140, 481
Andrew, John, 316, 419, 420
Andrews, Fanny, 33
Annapolis, Maryland, 144
Anthony, Susan B., 403, 404
Antietam, battle of (1862), 170, 179, 270, 276, 295, 299, 328, 338, 339, 365, 397
Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Page 78
