Civil War Battle Research Articles

The Devil’s outriders: a LiDAR and KOCOA investigation of the battle of Buckhead Creek, 1864

ABSTRACT Funded by an American Battlefield Protection Program grant, LiDAR and KOCOA, guided a systematic metal detector survey to identify, and evaluate levels of preservation and battle pattern signatures from the Battle of Buckhead Creek, the largest American Civil War battle site in Southeast Georgia untouched by development. In November 1864, during Sherman’s March to the Sea, Confederate and Union cavalry forces waged a running battle across Jenkins and Burke County, Georgia. These actions were ephemeral events in an archaeological sense, in time-depth and their impact on the archaeological record. However, this paper demonstrates that the application of conflict archaeology methodologies can identify and evaluate these sites, despite their wide-ranging geographical context, short-time spans, and the impacts of illicit metal detecting on the battle site.

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta by Earl J. Hess (review)

Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Erin Krutko Devlin (bio) Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 264. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $27.95.) As Jill Ogline Titus reminds readers in Gettysburg 1963, newspaper coverage of the Civil War centennial was distributed alongside stories about the burgeoning Black freedom struggle and debates about Cold War politics and policies. Gettysburg 1963 strives to help readers understand how these threads of American cultural and political life converged on the Gettysburg battlefield, illuminating a contested landscape in which commemorative rhetoric was shaped by a desire to forge a memory of 1863 that could be mobilized in service of a wide range of social and political aims one hundred years later. Titus notes that formal commemorative bodies, such as the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, often sought to mobilize a reconciliation-ist vision of the war that emphasized military valor, technological progress, and reunification, which served the broader purpose of reanimating American patriotism and encouraging heritage tourism in the midst of the Cold War. Yet Titus also notes that this narrative was never unchallenged in the commemorative activity surrounding the centennial. She illustrates how an emancipatory memory of the war as a “new birth of freedom” sought to frame the conflict through the lens of racial justice during the civil rights movement, while Lost Cause rhetoric was mobilized to recast resistance to desegregation as the preservation of states’ rights. As Titus demonstrates, both of these alternative strands of memory also sought to tether their memorial claims to the politics of the Cold War, with those promoting an emancipationist vision arguing that the failure to address racial injustice undercut the nation’s position as a beacon of democracy, and those promoting the Lost Cause narrative contending that opposition to civil rights legislation served as a bulwark against government overreach and totalitarianism. Titus argues that these divergent and diverse approaches to memorializing Gettysburg meant that commemorative activities at the battlefield in 1963 “were employed simultaneously to champion racial equality, legitimize midcentury anti-government sentiments and activities, and strengthen the U.S. position internationally” (5). Gettysburg 1963 is focused on official commemorative activity— speeches, pageants, exhibits, and battlefield reenactments—but Titus evocatively notes that participants and visitors exposed to these divergent [End Page 274] interpretations of the war were not passive spectators. “Participants,” she writes, “did not simply absorb the commemoration’s messaging wholesale, but rather made decisions about where and how to participate (and what ideas to embrace) that ensured a variety of different takeaways about the connections between 1863 and 1963” (84). Indeed, Titus concludes that the divergent commemorative narratives presented during the centennial substantially disrupted the reconciliationist rhetoric promoted by the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission and Gettysburg National Military Park in 1963, with both emancipationist and Lost Cause narratives rising in prominence in the years that followed. Titus explores public reception of these competing strands of memory most directly in her discussion of audience attendance at or reaction to various pageants, roundtables, and public addresses. She is particularly attentive to local participation in commemorative activities on the battlefield’s national stage. Indeed, Gettysburg 1963 examines how national debate about the meaning and memory of the Civil War battle played out locally in the community of Gettysburg itself and nearby Gettysburg College, where Titus currently serves as associate director of the Civil War Institute. Titus notes that local residents had a particular stake in the way the centennial was positioned in relation to heritage tourism and were invested in debates about the appropriate balance between commercialization and battlefield preservation as they sought to harness the economic potential of the centennial. Titus also demonstrates how the borough struggled with its own history of racial segregation and discrimination. The international attention focused on Gettysburg in 1963 provided the local Black community with the leverage needed to push white business owners toward the meaningful desegregation of public accommodations. Gettysburg 1963 will resonate most powerfully for...

Disappearing Mermaids: Staging White Women's Mobility through Aquatic Performance at the New York Hippodrome

The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1). Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High divers plunged into the tank; in shows with an “ice ballet,” its water was frozen into a skating rink; for a production of HMS Pinafore, a replica ship floated in its water with Brooklyn Navy Yard sailors in the rigging. Yet one tank act repeated and was recalled more than any of the others: a phalanx of women in martial costumes who marched solemnly, row after row, into the water and disappeared.

Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War by Lawrence Lee Hewitt

Reviewed by: Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War by Lawrence Lee Hewitt Carol Degrasse (bio) Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War. Lawrence Lee Hewitt. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. ISBN 978-1621904830. xi, 352 pp. $49.95. The photographic history of the American Civil War—although extensive—has only recently begun to receive the meticulous attention it deserves, particularly in terms of engaging with the historical and geographical context of extant images. Although broad photographic collections of the “decisive” Civil War battles have been compiled, few have undergone the type of comprehensive examination that Lawrence Lee Hewitt accomplishes in Port Hudson: The Most Significant Battlefield Photographs of the Civil War. Hewitt not only provides an expansive visual record of the Battle of Port Hudson, he also decisively corrects the many inconsistencies and inaccuracies associated with these photographs. Hewitt’s book—the product of four decades of research and collecting—takes on greater historical significance when one considers that military occupation and natural erosion have markedly changed the terrain, further complicating the visual record of the battlefield and surrounding landscape. This notable distinction sets the book apart from earlier collections that examine Civil War battle-fields in which the landscapes have been accurately preserved or restored. Here, Hewitt makes a concerted effort to correct topographical inaccuracies by supplying revised maps that depict the photographs’ proper orientations. Perhaps more importantly, he also painstakingly strives to provide proper attribution of the photographs, amend erroneous captions, and include photographs omitted from earlier collections, including those of Black troops and some of the first known “action shots” of any Civil War battle. The book contains 173 of the most representative photographs of Hewitt’s massive collection, covering a diverse range of subjects that include military and civilian spaces taken both during and after the siege. The photographs—some published for the first time—are arranged in chronological order to depict the topographical changes that occurred during battle as well as after its conclusion. Hewitt’s first two chapters provide historical context for those that follow— first, foregrounding Civil War photography both as an art and a business venture and second, providing a brief but thorough historical context for the Port Hudson battles. The other chapters are arranged chronologically, each focusing on one or more of the seven photographers whose works this volume includes. Each chapter contains biographical information on the artists, along with accounts of the photographic techniques they used at Port Hudson. William D. McPherson and his partner, A. J. Oliver, are given two chapters, with the duo’s [End Page 326] photographs of Port Hudson during and after the siege appearing separately. Apart from its sheer abundance, McPherson and Oliver’s work merits a second chapter for its uniqueness. For example, the pair’s work demonstrates some of the earliest attempts to produce combination printing as well as night-time and time-lapse photographs. Hewitt even suggests that some of McPherson and Oliver’s photographs are the first to show troops “engaged” in battle, although to do so, he extends the meaning of engaged to include photographs simply taken while the siege was under way. One of Port Hudson’s defining characteristics is that Hewitt does not simply present the photographs with a historical and geographical emphasis. Instead, he skillfully weaves the historical and geographical information into a narrative that also delves into photographic history and technology, battlefield archaeology, and cartography. The Port Hudson collection will likely never attain the level of recognition of photos of other battle sites; however, this type of in-depth visual study will provoke new scholarship on other Civil War battles and on Civil War photography as a whole. Carol Degrasse Southern Methodist University Carol Degrasse CAROL DEGRASSE is a PhD candidate at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and a 2021 NEH Summer Scholar. She has published on Rebecca Harding Davis, Emily Dickenson, Henry David Thoreau, and effective pedagogical practices. Her dissertation, “Visualizing Identity: Photography and Social Performances of Race in the American Nineteenth Century,” challenges widely accepted theories of race, visual culture, and performance by examining the roles played by aesthetics in framing social identities of...

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson

Reviewed by: A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation by John Matteson Kathleen Logothetis Thompson A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation. John Matteson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021. ISBN: 978-0-393-24707-7. 528 pp., cloth, $35.00. When first reading the title of this work, I expected a new critical analysis and military history of the Battle of Fredericksburg and its effects on the war's military and political trajectory. What awaited me within the pages of John Matteson's book was an example of deft storytelling that draws readers into the very complex and human story of the Civil War. In A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation, Matteson weaves together the lives of five people to tell the story of Fredericksburg and the Civil War as a whole. First was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., born to a prominent family, who served as a captain in the Twentieth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, was wounded several times and survived the war. He later served on the US Supreme Court, forever changed by his wartime experiences. Second was John Pelham, on the verge of graduating from West Point when called home to fight for the Confederacy. Pelham rose to fame skillfully commanding J. E. B. Stuart's Horse Artillery and died a Southern martyr at Kelly's Ford in March 1863. Third was Reverend Arthur B. Fuller, [End Page 215] who had faced constant tragedy in the years before the Civil War and longed to do something significant for his nation. Fuller went to war as a chaplain in the Sixteenth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and struggled with the physical toll campaigning took on his health. He poured his enthusiasm into the spiritual health of his soldiers, until he picked up a gun at the Battle of Fredericksburg. Fourth was Louisa May Alcott, known for her literary work before and after the war but decidedly affected physically and emotionally by her work in a Union hospital in the months surrounding Fredericksburg in the winter of 1862–63. Finally was Walt Whitman, a poet who struggled with his reputation prior to the war and whose rise to fame was built off his experiences in the Civil War. Using the stories of these five individuals and the people immediately connected to them, Matteson leads the reader through Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the aftermath of the two campaigns of late 1862. The military history of both battles, as well as others, such as Ball's Bluff and Kelly's Ford, is present, and the reader will certainly understand the broad synopsis of each engagement. However, by focusing on the story of five military and civilian figures, Matteson brings the reader from the battlefield to the aftermath. In viewing family members' efforts to find their wounded or captured soldiers, he illuminates how the events on the field of battle rippled out into the civilian communities of the North. As he introduces each of the five subjects, he analyzes the individual motivations for entering service or the world of the war. Using Whitman and Alcott's nursing work in various Union hospitals, the reader views not only the action of the field but the aftermath and its toll on the bodies and minds of both soldiers and nurses. Matteson's continuation of the story into the postwar years allows the reader to see how war experiences affected Whitman, Alcott, and Holmes and directed their very public work in their later lives. At first, the title of this work seemed misleading; it was not the targeted analysis of Fredericksburg and its consequences that I had expected. However, as the book reached its conclusion it was clear that Matteson had demonstrated how the campaigns of 1862 had changed the nation. By weaving the lives of five main subjects together, all meeting in some way at Fredericksburg, and demonstrating how the experiences affected these individual people, Matteson illustrates how the Civil War shaped the very people of the United States, deeply and profoundly. The war altered not just the path of the military campaigns...

Spectacles of American Nationalism: The Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama Painting and The Birth of a Nation

The late nineteenth-century cyclorama painting of the Civil War Battle of Atlanta served as a technological, thematic, and commercial forerunner to D. W. Griffith's landmark 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Both visual spectacles provided immersive experiences for mass audiences and popularized a celebratory account of history that paid tribute to white male warriors on both sides. These cycloramic and cinematic narratives propagated a militarized and racialized nationalism.

Physical and elemental analysis of Middle East sands from recent combat zones

Objective: The lungs are uniquely exposed to the external environment. Sand and dust exposures in desert regions are common among deployed soldiers. A significant number of Veterans deployed to the Middle East report development of respiratory disorders and diseases.Materials and methods: Sand collected from Fallujah, Iraq and Kandahar, Afghanistan combat zones was analyzed and compared to a sand sample collected from an historic United States (U.S.) battle region (Fort Johnson, James Island, SC, Civil War battle site). Sand samples were analyzed to determine the physical and elemental characteristics that may have the potential to contribute to development of respiratory disease.Results: Using complementary scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging and analysis, and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS), it was determined that Iraq sand contained elevated levels of calcium and first row transition metals versus Afghanistan and U.S. sand. Iraq sand particle texture was smooth and round, and particles were considerably smaller than Afghanistan sand. Afghanistan sand was elevated in rare earth metals versus Iraq or U.S. sands and had sharp edge features and larger particle size than Iraq sand.Conclusions: These data demonstrate significant differences in Iraq and Afghanistan sand particle size and characteristics. Middle East sands contained elevated levels of elements that have been associated with respiratory disease versus control site sand, suggesting the potential of sand/dust storm exposure to promote adverse respiratory symptoms. Data also demonstrate the potential for variation based on geographical region or site of exposure. The data generated provide baseline information that will be valuable in designing future exposure studies.

Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease by Gail Jarrow

Reviewed by: Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease by Gail Jarrow Elizabeth Bush Jarrow, Gail Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease. Calkins Creek, 2020 [176p] illus. with photographs Trade ed. ISBN 9781684371761 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-8 Of the more than 600,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, around 400,000 succumbed to disease, and here Jarrow relates the mind-boggling number of paths to the grave. Lax enlistment exams, a nursing profession in its often disdained infancy, hasty recruitment of poorly trained doctors, and a prevailing theory on disease that focused on "miasma" rather than microbes set the grim stage for this particular conflict, and battlefield conditions—crowding, poor sanitation, malnutrition, slow transport of the wounded—were stock players. Jarrow focuses primarily on Union soldiers, since the bulk of Confederate medical records were destroyed in a Richmond fire, but she often redresses the gap with doctors' case notes (and their accompanying photo illustrations) of Southern soldiers. Although the overall medical tale is necessarily appalling, she also indicates areas in which medical knowledge and practice advanced, from improved and expanded ambulance service and nursing, to enhanced hospital ventilation which, although introduced to clear mythical "miasma," often helped stop the spread of disease. Clearly captioned period photos give human faces to the statistics and helpfully comment on the circumstances in which the photos were taken. A timeline, glossary, author's note, lists of resources and citations, bibliography, and index are included. [End Page 88] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Hearing Early Modern Battles: Soundscape Audio as a Way of Recreating the Past

This article provides a model of analysis for examining museum exhibitions that specifically incorporate soundscapes for early modern battle histories: one is a local museum at Radway, England, that commemorated the Civil War Battle of Edgehill (1642), and the other is the National Museum of Scotland’s exhibition Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites’ that includes the 1745 rising that culminated in the Battle of Culloden (1746). Using film music diegesis, the article analyses the ways in which emotions are generated, performed and produced through soundscapes created for early modern battlefields in museums, demonstrating how gendered representations of the past can be overturned and democratized by soundscapes.

The Culture of Fear in World War One

The Culture of Fear in World War One Mark Whalan (bio) W. Scott Poole. Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2018. 304pp. Notes. $26. Zachary Smith. Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity During World War I. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xi + 233pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $59.95. In 1917 the pioneering American film director D.W. Griffith visited the Belgian town of Ypres on the Western Front to conduct research for his movie Hearts of the World after being given exceptional access to the lines by British authorities eager to harness his skills for propaganda purposes. Despite receiving license to film whatever he wished, what he found was perplexing. The battlefield was "too colossal to be dramatic," he later complained, its human figures "hidden away in ditches" leaving "literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness." "You might as well try to describe the ocean or the Milky Way," he lamented.1 Despite being the most famous and innovative creator of war movies in the era—a reputation staked on the Civil War battle scenes in The Birth of a Nation—Griffith admitted defeat and recreated his own more camera-friendly version of the trenches on Salisbury Plain instead. Griffith is a marginal figure in the two books discussed here, but his response to the war was indicative of a broader cultural impasse. The industrial, technological, and tactical innovations of World War One posed unprecedented challenges not just for the politicians, military commanders, and populations that prosecuted it, but also for the cultural apparatus the West had available for representing and understanding war. Few events in history have been seen as having such an immediate and wide-ranging impact on cultural imaginaries across media and genre; there is a huge body of scholarship examining the war's impact on the modernist movement, for example, or how it transformed memorial architecture and commemorative practice. Yet the authors of these two books have traced the war's relation to another less-acknowledged twentieth-century cultural legacy, to a phenomenon often simultaneously psychological, political, and aesthetic—fear. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole suggests the Great War gave birth [End Page 613] to modern traditions of horror, a genre that flourished after 1918 across the West in much visual and literary media; it catered to populations reeling from the events of 1914–18 through developing a set of classic iconographies and dramatic situations that powerfully evoked and channeled the embodied and psychological experiences of the conflict. Zachary Smith's more historically focused Age of Fear examines how fear of a German racial and/or religious other in the United States saturated the political rhetoric, religious ideology, and popular culture of the war, a discourse that framed conflict with Germany less as a selfless and idealist battle to make the world safe for democracy and more as an existential struggle to stave off racial annihilation. Both authors locate the extensive twentieth-century legacies of the politics of fear that developed in World War One; and while they are clear that fear does not inevitably tend in one political direction, both are forthright about its hospitability to absolutist, authoritarian governance and its centrality to some of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' darkest moments. For Poole, what World War One munitions did to the human body (and bodies) was the source of much of the horror genre that flourished in its aftermath, especially in German expressionist cinema in the 1920s and early 30s and then in the "Universal Horror" classics of Hollywood in the 1930s. Revenant armies of the dead, monsters stitched together from multiple corpses, the animation of puppets or dolls, and monsters invading peaceable countries became widely used and popular conventions in films made or designed by men who often had first-hand experience of combat in the war. Poole assesses a diverse range of cultural material to build his argument, drawing from different national and generic traditions and across media. Anglophone poetic modernism is represented here by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; the latter's long poem "The Waste Land" (full of rattling bones, sprouting corpses, and unreal burning...

Black Towns and the Civil War: Touring Battles of Race, Nation, and Place

This article focuses on the inclusion of a Civil War battle site, Honey Springs, in two bus tours of Oklahoma’s historic Black towns. I explore why tours devoted to Black communities visit the site of a historic military event, and how each tour does so differently. Looking at a conventional state-sponsored tour narrative of the battle site and an alternative tour narrative, I argue that the two are distinct in how they position the relationship of blackness to America. The conventional narrative focuses on the details of the battle, placing Black participation and relevance to the war story on the sidelines. Ultimately, I argue that the two tours demonstrate public struggles over the place of blackness in the nation’s history.

Combat at the Keys: Women and Battle Pieces for the Piano during the American Civil War

During the American Civil War, women in the parlor imagined life at the front through music, playing pieces and singing songs on topics related to the conflict. Among the genres that they performed were battle pieces for the piano, episodic works that depict incidents of battle and their outcome in victory. These pieces constituted a genre that had long been a favorite of female amateur performers, their lineage beginning with Frantisek Kotzwara's 1788 Battle of Prague, which remained steadily popular throughout the nineteenth century. This article examines Civil War battle pieces by tracing their roots to Kotzwara's famous piece. By constructing a reception history of that work as it appears in nineteenth-century literary sources, the article retrieves some alternatives to the abundant satirical readings of the Battle of Prague in period fiction. It suggests that Civil War battle music played several important roles in the lives of its players. The music invited women to imagine and embody the conflicts on the battlefield, to challenge society's expectations of women as both pianists and as contributors to the war effort in public capacities, and to reflect on the costs of the war. The article goes on to examine a battle piece by a female composer and to consider amateur women's performances of battle repertoire during the war years. Finally, drawing inspiration from the accounts in fiction of Kotzwara's Battle of Prague, it concludes by imagining a woman's performance of a battle piece on the heels of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Epyllion as idyll or enigma? Thessaly as a mythico-literary landscape of war in Catullus 64 and in Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos

Catullus’ poem 64 is a highly complex text, the interpretation of which has long divided scholarship. In the present paper I look at possible political resonances of the epyllion in its historical context. First, I propose an intertextual reading of two passages from Catullus 64 (the catalogues of mortal and divine guests that attend the wedding at Pharsalus) in the light of Callimachus’ Hymn to Delos. I argue that Catullus uses the Thessalian section of the hymn with the struggle between the river Peneios and the war-god Ares not only as a source for learned mythological and geographical details, but also as a substantial subtext for his dark vision of Thessaly as a landscape foreboding war and civil war. In a second reading, I then look back at Catullus 64 from the perspective of two later Roman poets, Virgil and Lucan, who historicize Catullus’ mythical Thessaly even more specifically in the light of the civil wars. As examples I take the epilogue to the first book of the Georgics and especially Lucan’s Thessalian excursus in the sixth book of his Bellum civile, where he reworks Catullus as well as Callimachus in order to characterize his Thessaly as a literary landscape predestined for the horrors of the civil war battle at Pharsalus.

Unwriting the Freedom Narrative: A Review Essay

In the fifty years spanning the centennial and sesquicentennial anniversaries of the Civil War, much has changed in the way historians think about that cataclysmic event. Indeed, many no longer think of the Civil War as a single event but rather as a series of wars fought on a number of fronts. Not only does the western theater now compete with the eastern theater for historians' attention, but scholars of the war in the West also assert that the nature of warfare in the lower Mississippi Valley, not to mention in Texas and New Mexico, differed considerably from warfare in Virginia, so much so as to perhaps qualify as a different war altogether. Historians today recognize the importance of the home front--both Union and Confederate--where, some argue, what happened in kitchens and bedrooms was just as important as what transpired on battlefields. As a result, the definition of combatants has expanded to include not only partisans and guerrillas but also women, children, and slaves. Perhaps most important, professional historians today generally agree that the political divide over slavery caused the war, even as segments of the larger public still cling to a myth that the institution was a tangential issue at most. Despite these sweeping changes in historians' understanding of why the war was fought, where it was fought, and who fought it, the master narrative of the Civil War in the last fifty years has been remarkably static. The standard syntheses of the period repeat more or less the same refrain: by late 1862, what initially began as a war to preserve the Union with slavery intact became a war for freedom. Although historians continue to disagree about the extent to which emancipation reflected a calculated military necessity or a principled commitment to liberal ideals, if not to flesh-and-blood people who were enslaved, freedom has become the sine qua non of Civil War history. Whether it came gradually and begrudgingly or, as James Oakes has recently argued, perpetually and willfully, freedom was both the Civil War's battle cry and its unfinished revolution. (1) Recent events, however, suggest that the freedom narrative may be ready for a twenty-first-century reboot. In the wake of the June 2015 murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, debates about the Confederate flag converged with the larger #blacklivesmatter movement to push national conversations about race in new directions. By exposing how the legacy of chattel slavery continues to infuse the American political economy and culture, activists marked the end of the Civil War sesquicentennial not by celebrating the emergence of a nebulous condition that succeeded legal bondage but by indicting the very notion that such a succession was either clear or complete. Their focus was not on the incremental accrual of civil or political rights but rather on the accrual of dead bodies. The continuum of violence against black people, stretching from the antebellum plantation to twenty-first-century cities and suburbs, and carried out by law enforcement and private citizens alike, raises troubling questions about how historians narrate the Civil War and its aftermath. As Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance--no matter how improved--as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. (2) This recent grassroots revision of the nation's historical consciousness coincides with a scholarly movement to reframe our understanding of the Civil War and emancipation. For nearly two decades, historians have been grappling with the inadequacies of the freedom narrative for analyzing American history, but their efforts so far have not produced a new, synthetic alternative to the Whiggish march toward greater and more perfect freedom. Nevertheless, significant revisions to the way we interpret the multifaceted changes wrought by the destruction of chattel bondage and the institution of new regimes of labor and political organization suggest that we will not wait much longer for a more comprehensive unwriting of the freedom narrative. …

The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta by Earl J. Hess

Reviewed by: The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta by Earl J. Hess Mark Barloon The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta. By Earl J. Hess. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. [xvi], 272. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-2241-5.) Earl J. Hess is an expert on Civil War combat tactics and the Atlanta campaign. He combines both of these subfields of Civil War history in this work, the first book-length study of the battle of Ezra Church—a five-hour engagement that took place west of Atlanta, Georgia, on July 28, 1864, in which 9,144 Federals repelled assaults by about 11,000 Confederates, inflicting 3,000 casualties on the southerners while sustaining only 632 losses. In recounting the events of this overlooked battle, Hess answers two fundamental questions: why were the Federals victorious, and how near to defeat did they come? Both questions are important because Ezra Church is widely considered the last opportunity that the Confederates had to save Atlanta. Hess received his doctorate from Purdue University and has taught at Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, since 1989. He is recognized as a leading scholar in the field of Civil War military history, with nearly twenty books and 120 articles and reviews to his credit. In preparing this book, Hess searched libraries and archives across the nation, surveyed the battlefield and created his own maps, and discovered numerous photographs and sketches pertinent to the story. When combined with his skill as a writer, the result is a clear, concise monograph. In explaining why the Federals were victorious, Hess delves into Civil War combat analysis—his expertise. He convincingly argues that the Federals won because they were veteran soldiers, with high morale and a willingness to cooperate, fighting as either skirmishers between the lines or infantrymen behind breastworks located on high ground. It was the combination of experience, leadership, morale, tactics, and topography that best explains the Federals’ success. It is worth noting that throughout his analysis of the fighting, Hess doubts the tactical importance of rifle muskets. He repeatedly offers evidence that many soldiers did not fire at ranges greater than a hundred yards. Hess’s refutation of the “rifle revolution” thesis should come as no surprise. He established his opposition to it in his book The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth (Lawrence, Kans., 2008), and he continues that opposition here. Less convincing is Hess’s second argument: that the Federals almost lost the battle of Ezra Church. This interpretation brings Hess into direct conflict with General William T. Sherman and most scholars of the Atlanta campaign. [End Page 687] To prove Sherman and the others wrong, Hess presents numerous quotations from soldiers who fought in the battle, which confirm that the fighting was desperate and devastating. In other words, the Federals involved in the battle felt fortunate to have survived the Confederate onslaught. Military history is replete with accounts of combat in which, from the soldier’s perspective, the fighting was fierce and frenzied. At the grand tactical level, however, such contests often appeared less dramatic—the shifting of several reserve units serving to stymie the assaulting force. That was the case at Ezra Church. Thus though this reading risks clinging to the traditional interpretation of Ezra Church, the disparity in casualties (632 Federals versus 3,000 Confederates) suggests that the fight was bloody but not close. Overall, this book is a powerful history of a neglected battle in the Atlanta campaign. Hess’s research, analysis, and writing are strong. His photographs, sketches, and maps are clear. Though he may overreach with some of his conclusions, Hess has brought to light a Civil War battle that has been overgeneralized by historians and overgrown by the city of Atlanta. Mark Barloon Central College Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Finding Captain Dickson: The Archivist as a Researcher

Item-level description is a luxury few archivists can afford to indulge in as processing has adopted the MPLP model and eliminating backlogs has become a clarion call. But there are instances when only research done by the archivist will allow the significance of a document to be recognized and no longer hidden in a collection. An account of an incident before the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga written by Mississippi soldier Captain Thomas Hyde Dickson is one example of why there is still a place for item-level description and how the role of archivist as researcher is critical to making collections more accessible. Article Processing manuscript collections calls upon a number of skills of the archivist, such as organization, description, cataloging and research. In this era of “more product, less process,” archivists are not encouraged to dig too deeply into collections to understand them better, or to spend time identifying items of potential importance. But, occasionally, a document catches our attention, perhaps serendipitously, or because its content makes it shine like a gold nugget in a prospector’s pan, encouraging the archivist to find out a little more in order to bring the subject or creator to life, or simply to explain its presence in the collection. One example is an account of an incident which occurred days before the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga in early September 1863 witnessed by Captain Thomas Dickson of the 9 Mississippi Infantry Regiment, which was discovered while working in Special Collections at Mississippi State University Libraries. Written in pencil with corrections in ink on nine crumbling sheets of paper, Dickson’s account was found in the papers of Brodie S. Crump, a columnist for the Delta Democrat-Times newspaper in Greenville from 1946 to 1980. Clearly Crump thought it important enough to save but there was no information on who Dickson was or how Crump obtained it. The piece is striking because it relates what happened to the regiment as Confederate General Braxton Bragg maneuvered his Army of Tennessee in northern Georgia after its withdrawal from Chattanooga as Union General William Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland moved east. Rosecrans divided his forces and one division crossed Lookout Mountain and was nearly trapped in McLemore’s Cove on September 11 by the brigade which included Dickson’s regiment. Unfortunately, Confederate caution and miscommunication among the commanders let the opportunity slip away and the exhausted Confederate forces in the cove crossed Pigeon Mountain that night to regroup at La Fayette. A week later the two sides would meet at Chickamauga. The following is a transcription of Dickson’s account and the first page of the document can be seen in Figure 2 below. 1 MSS.654. Brodie S. Crump family papers, Box 3, Folder 9. 2 The causes of the lost opportunity at McLemore’s Cove have been extensively debated by historians. See Woodworth, Steven E. (1999), No Band of Brothers: Problems in the Rebel High Command, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, chapter 6; Woodworth, Stephen E. (ed.) (2010), The Chickamauga Campaign, Carbondale, Il.: Southern Illinois University Press, chapters 2 & 3; Robertson, William G. (Spring 2007), “The Chickamauga Campaign: McLemore’s Cove: Rosecrans’ Gamble, Bragg’s Lost Opportunity”, Blue & Gray Magazine, 23:6, 6-26, 42-50; Cozzens, Peter (1992), This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 74-75; Martin, Samuel J. (2011), General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A., Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 475. The Primary Source, Vol. 34, Issue 1 1