Hearts Touched by Fire

by Harold Holzer

  That summer, Grant urged Sherman to reconsider his own refusal to participate. “I hope both you and Sheridan will contribute to the series because they are to be written, in every instance, by persons who participated in the scenes described. It is better that it should be done by persons who had the largest opportunity of witnessing all that took place.”21 Ever loyal to his old commander, Sherman signed on, and so, eventually, did Admiral David Dixon Porter, General James Longstreet, and others, though Sheridan, Benjamin Butler, Winfield Scott Hancock, and a few other notables steadfastly declined. So did the late Robert E. Lee’s son George Washington Custis Lee, a considerable setback for the plan. Similarly, Confederate general Jubal Early insisted he “could not write fairly for pay,” adding rather ponderously: “Compensation for such hireling work was … a dis-honorarium.”

  Joseph E. Johnston, too, remained immune to the magazine’s overtures—that is, until he came to the conclusion that contributing would give him an opportunity to lambaste his old nemesis, Jefferson Davis. He ultimately agreed to submit four articles.22 The editors wooed additional prey relentlessly and ingeniously: if money did not do the trick, they tugged at the heartstrings. When, for example, Confederate colonel W.C.P. Breckinridge resisted the editors’ initial overtures, a persistent Gilder implored: “Please don’t say ‘no’ to our war request! This is the time for the ‘unveiling of all hearts.’ If the North can see the heart of the South, and the South the North’s, they will love each other as never before!” Breckinridge, too, succumbed.

  So did others. The famously reluctant Union general George McClellan—his character and literary style as “Corinthian” as Grant’s was “Doric,” remembered Johnson—became “one of the most interesting of the contributors.” He was one of the most newsworthy as well: his previous five articles in the magazine had assiduously avoided the war and focused on his own world tour.23 Now McClellan agreed to tackle the subject afresh, though unlike Joe Johnston, he avoided (or was asked by the editors to avoid) criticism of his old commander in chief, Abraham Lincoln, whom he had once dismissed as a “Gorilla.”24 Even an initially gunshy P.G.T. Beauregard finally came around after Gilder asked a mutual friend—author George Washington Cable, who had previously published in The Century—to intercede.25

  These were not the only well-known writers ultimately to join the growing roster of contributors. The Century procured recollections by such Union luminaries as Ambrose E. Burnside, Oliver O. Howard, and Horace Porter, and Confederate history makers like Joseph Wheeler, D. H. Hill, and Edward Porter Alexander. Literary flair would be provided by Union general Lew Wallace, whose bestselling novel Ben-Hur had appeared in 1880.

  Grant alone would contribute four separate articles to the “Battles and Leaders” series on his most important wartime campaigns, which the editors later boasted “became the foundation of his ‘Personal Memoirs’ ”—a book that The Century fully expected to publish itself until Samuel Clemens interceded with a better offer, money always being Grant’s chief concern. But only weeks before the hero’s death from cancer in 1885, Grant’s son Fred hailed the editors as “generous,” telling them that “Father’s connection with the Century Magazine has been pleasant, and he feels gratified in having done business with men who have always acted the part of gentlemen.” In the end, Grant earned $4,000 for his contributions—a rate inexplicably double the editors’ original offer. Longstreet took in $2,715, and Johnston, $500.26

  The debut articles in the magazine series—Beauregard’s account of the Battle of Bull Run, together with a six-page enlisted man’s perspective on the same engagement by one Warren Lee Goss entitled “Recollections of a Private”—finally appeared in the November 1884 issue, a year and a half after the editors first proposed the series. Initially, it might be noted, all the accounts in the articles were to be grouped under the soporific title “Men and Events of the Civil War.” But assistant editor Buel countered that “Leaders & Battles is better,” persuasively arguing that “ ‘Battles’ is the main thing. ‘Events’ might seem as if we were going into, say, the condition & action of the freedmen—the Emancipation Proclamation—and other events not connected with battles.” Anything that implied a concentration on toxic issues like slavery and race—however crucial and unresolved—was the last thing the editors wished to suggest. Johnson took Buel’s cue, and wisely massaged the suggestion into the enduring title: “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.”

  For the three years that followed, until the edition of November 1887, the recollections and reminiscences poured forth, not a dozen or so articles in total, as originally proposed, but several new articles each month: ninety-nine altogether (plus an array of sidebars called “Memoranda of the Civil War”). The editors may have decreed that the subjects of race and politics be ignored, but they also recognized that the “literary inexperience of men of action and sometimes their inability to make interesting records” required occasional relief. Of course, the broader contents of each issue never lacked for diversionary literature and how-to advice on a myriad of other subjects: the first edition to feature “Battles and Leaders,” for example, also boasted the latest excerpt from William Dean Howells’s novel The Rise of Silas Lapham, along with such diverse pieces as “The Chinese Theater,” “Vedder’s Accompaniment to the Song of Omar Khayyam,” and “The Principles and Practice of House-Drainage.” Nonetheless the editors also procured softer war features like Mark Twain’s reminiscence “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”; Joel Chandler Harris’s “Free Joe,” a fictional story replete with cringe-making “darky” dialect; and Constance Cary Harrison’s home-front account of “A Virginia Girl in the First Year of the War.”27

  Not that the “War Series” itself lacked for bite and contentiousness. Though “endeavoring to hold the scales of justice evenly between the disputants” and thus “winning the respect of both,” editor Johnson almost boasted that “it was not long before we found ourselves knee-deep in controversy, not across Mason and Dixon’s Line, but between officers on one side or other” of particular wartime engagements. Quickly aware that every battle produced “at least four points of view”—those of the man credited with victory, the one who believes he deserves credit more, the commander blamed for defeat, and the officer blamed in turn by the losing commander—the editors commissioned, for example, varying accounts of Longstreet’s delayed arrival at Gettysburg, George G. Meade’s failure to pursue Lee after that battle, and the nature of Grant’s near defeat on the first day at Shiloh. Even if the overall product stressed “intersectional reconciliation,” its individual elements could be explosive. Once, a mere footnote criticizing “old army” General David E. Twiggs’s hasty surrender of San Antonio to Texas early in the war—the source quoted Twiggs as being willing to “surrender to an old woman with a broomstick” if authorized by the state—incited one of the late general’s surviving staff officers to challenge editor Johnson to a duel. “Some of these controversies were acrimonious,” Johnson conceded. But he insisted that “the total result … even with these differences” constituted “a unique body of mémoires pour servir, as the French call materials of history.”28

  To their credit, the editors worked diligently to “shape the form, and enliven the color of the narrative[s].” Faced with a formidable problem—contributions that simply ran too long—they took up their pencils and cut. They would not guarantee any of their authors, no matter how famous, that their contributions would appear without changes. This strict policy they maintained even when a major potential author like Jefferson Davis, eager to rebut P.G.T. Beauregard’s and Joseph E. Johnston’s unflattering accounts of his leadership, insisted as a precondition that his words appear in print exactly as written. Eager as they were to have Davis in the fold—editors offered him seven thousand words for his recollections and assured him they would never “take the liberty of publishing part of it, or of making omissions, without first having given you our reasons and having received your permissio
n”—they would not surrender editorial control. As Johnson wrote to Davis: “We think you will appreciate our reluctance to part with the editorial autocracy to the extent of engaging in advance to publish every word of an article on a controversial subject.” Davis did not. In the end, the first and only president of the Confederacy declined to provide an article.29

  Editors were determined from the first to get the details right. To guarantee scrupulous accuracy, Union general James B. Fry, who had served as Union provost-martial during the 1863 New York City draft riots, joined the project as an adviser and fact checker, always willing “to elucidate some obscure point, none the less if it involved controversy.”30 The editors turned for “special aid” to Colonel Robert N. Scott, editorial director of the office that had produced the Official Records of the war (and when he died, to his successor, Colonel H. M. Lazelle). While he lived, Scott even shared advance proofs of yet to be issued later volumes of the massive Official Records of the War of the Rebellion. Looking South as well, the editors employed General Marcus J. Wright, War Department agent for the collection of Confederate records.

  From the very first article, the series also featured as accompaniment well-chosen and astutely orchestrated illustrations. Buel was determined from the start that the articles would be “better illustrated than battles and battlefields have ever been, before”31 —beginning with accomplished sketches of a Louisiana Tiger drummer boy and a group of soldiers camped along Blackburn’s Ford, followed by a portrait of Beauregard’s Bull Run opponent, Union general Irvin McDowell. These pictures ushered in the practice of featuring ambitious pictures for each entry, for which the magazine tapped a dazzling array of photograph collections, artists, cartographer-draftsmen, and engravers to supply material.

  To serve as principal reference models, the Massachusetts Commandery of the Loyal Legion shared its complete holdings of the Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner photographic records of the Civil War. The editors assigned Alexander W. Drake and W. Lewis Fraser of the magazine’s art department to supervise the commissioning and placement of engravings, stressing “the importance of accuracy … in the preparation of the illustrations.” Reflecting this commitment, editors asked Admiral Porter himself to review the illustrations for the articles on the battles for New Orleans.32

  The art directors were quick to recruit the best artistic talent. Military painter Thure de Thulstrup, whose watercolors had inspired a famous series of Civil War battle chromolithographs by Boston’s Louis Prang & Co., enrolled in the project. He was joined by other Prang alumni, such as marine artists Julian O. Davidson and Xanthus Smith (who had actually served on ships in the Union navy). Joining the ranks were Theodore R. Davis, wartime artist-correspondent for Harper’s Weekly; battlefield artist Edwin Forbes, who had served as a staff artist for the rival Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper; landscape and history painter Edward Lamson Henry; portrait and mural artist William Morris Hunt; and prolific military specialist Henry O. Ogden. The gifted Waud brothers—Alfred and William—both of whom had worked as illustrators for the picture weeklies during the war, joined the roster of contributors, too.

  Nor were pro-Confederate painters ignored. The magazine featured the work of soldier-artist Allen C. Redwood (who also contributed an article on the Second Battle of Bull Run), along with that of William L. Sheppard, William Trego, Gilbert Gaul, James E. Taylor, and even Adalbert J. Volck, a Copperhead Marylander whose anti-Lincoln and pro-Confederate etchings, though famous today, had been suppressed in Union-held Baltimore throughout the war. Altogether, The Century engaged more than sixty engravers to produce illustrations. And the magazine spared no expense when it came to presenting maps, some of which became the first to be published of specific actions since the war itself. General Johnston himself labored over the maps of the Battle of Seven Pines, while editor Buel, “with his clairvoyant instinct for visualizing a battle,” assumed overall responsibility for “supervision” of the series’ hundreds of maps. All these illustrations more than lived up to the editors’ boast that pictures proved “a most striking and not the least important feature of the work.”33

  The recruitment of leading writers and illustrators, the magazine’s unsparing attention to editorial integrity, accuracy, and design, and perhaps, too, its bland rejection of matters of race and politics, paid off handsomely. The maiden issue of November 1883, Gilder boasted joyfully, sold “beyond anything hitherto known to us.”34 Within only six months of the series’ debut, the circulation of The Century spiked nearly 80 percent—rising from 127,000 to 225,000. The magazine would soon claim a total readership (people then shared their magazines) of some two million per issue. Reader comments poured in and soon began appearing in their own section. Though Buel had predicted in an introductory editorial that “in popular interest as well as historical importance” the articles would “deserve wider attention than any other ever undertaken by the magazine,” the editors soon admitted that they were “hardly prepared for the almost unbroken response of welcome.” Accolades arrived “in the generous notice of the press … the large number of encouraging and helpful letters,” and “most practical of all, in the extraordinary increase in the circulation of the magazine.”35

  To the delight of John Nicolay and the once skeptical John Hay, the public’s enthusiasm for wartime history remained undiminished when their own Lincoln project began its concurrent serialization in The Century in 1886. From then until late 1887, Century readers could thus rely on the magazine to devote a major portion of each and every issue to firsthand reminiscences of both the conflict and its most famous character—literally, as promised, an unparalleled account of the battles and leaders of the Civil War. What had been originally conceived as a modest series of eight to ten articles expanded exponentially into a massive outpouring of words and images.

  Understandably, the editors found it impossible to predict how long the public would remain interested in the series. Although they had launched the project believing it might continue it for one, maybe two years, by the time they detected a downturn in reader enthusiasm, they had issued multiple pieces in thirty-six consecutive monthly issues—and still had dozens of unpublished articles in reserve. But three years after it began, the serialization finally came to an end. In terms of its publishing history, however, “Battles and Leaders” was a long way from dying.

  In 1888, only a year after the serialization terminated, the Century Company came out with a four-volume edition in book form, edited by Buel and Johnson, presenting all ninety-nine original illustrated Century articles and accompanying “Memoranda” in chronological order, from a description of Washington, D.C., on the eve of the war in 1861 to the complete text of Robert E. Lee’s farewell to the Army of Northern Virginia in 1865.

  But there was more. The books’ allure—making the material seem fresh even to faithful magazine readers—was not only that it preserved the original memoirs in handsome binding, but that it included bonus articles in the bargain. Formerly reluctant contributors to the magazine like Jubal Early now consented to allow excerpts from their own books to be included in the bound volumes. Featured, too, were a number of articles that had originally appeared not in The Century but in such rival publications as the North American Review, Southern Bivouac, the Philadelphia Weekly Times, and the Philadelphia Weekly Press. Despite its titanic length (four thick volumes with a total of 3,090 pages, including a comprehensive index of some forty thousand items)36 , the new set sold an astounding seventy-five thousand copies. Ever since, it has remained a mother lode resource for historians, and a source of continued fascination—in all its subsequent reprints—for students of the Civil War.

  A decade after the books first came off the press, in 1894, the publishers continued to mine the endlessly rich subject with a one-volume “People’s Edition” they entitled The Century War Book. It was designed, according to its preface, to introduce wartime history to “a larger body of readers than has been reached even by the great circulati
ons of the completer book and of The Century Magazine.”37 Notwithstanding the ebbs and flows in reader interest over the years, the Century Company later calculated that it profited from its Battles and Leaders enterprises to the tune of a breathtaking million dollars.

  Perhaps Richard Watson Gilder was not overreaching when he gushed that “this war series is the most important thing, historically, I ever expect to live to see in this century.”38 Whether he meant by the word “century” the magazine or the epoch remains unclear. It is reasonable to think he may have imagined both.

  But after such wide circulation, and all its subsequent editions, it is fair to ask what today—125 years after the first of these articles appeared in print and 150 years after North and South unleashed the first guns of the Civil War—constitutes the “best” of Battles and Leaders? How does one appraise, select, and present the essential materials from that voluminous archive that, undimmed by time, continue to endure as essential accounts of the Civil War, just as originally advertised?

  Assembled in the belief that the archive more than deserves renewed attention, this collection attempts to make those choices for a new generation of readers. To help do so, the editor of this volume recruited a roster of distinguished scholars that almost rivals the list of famous authors who contributed to the original volumes: Civil War historians Craig L. Symonds, Stephen W. Sears, James M. McPherson, Joan Waugh, and James I. Robertson, Jr. Their extraordinary previous contributions include authoritative works on the land and sea war, from Union and Confederate perspectives alike, along with books on Lincoln’s command leadership and the careers of Generals George B. McClellan, Ulysses S. Grant, and Stonewall Jackson—to cite but a few of their award-winning contributions to the fields of military and political history. The editor invited them to join him in selecting year-by-year highlights from the original collection, divided into the five years of the war, 1861 through 1865, and also to write individual introductions that focus on the military engagements recalled in each, with an eye to appraising the interpretations offered in the original Battles and Leaders.