Union Army Research Articles

Contending with the Elements: The Role of Weather in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House

Contending with the ElementsThe Role of Weather in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House Cameron M. Boutin (bio) More than two decades after the conclusion of the American Civil War, Union assistant adjutant general Francis Walker recollected that the climax of the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House was the "closest and fiercest" fighting of the entire conflict, when "for the distance of nearly a mile, amid a cold, drenching rain, the combatants were literally struggling across the breastworks."1 Between May 8 and 19, 1864, the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia battled at the small Virginia crossroads of Spotsylvania Court House in a clash that proved to be one of the bloodiest of the war. As the costliest engagement of the Overland Campaign, the fighting at Spotsylvania has received widespread attention from scholars since the war ended.2 Despite the extensive studies of Spotsylvania, one aspect of the battle has often been overlooked: the role of weather. Similar to most conflicts, especially before the era of mechanized warfare, a main facet of the Civil War was that armies lived, marched, and fought in natural [End Page 200] landscapes while exposed to the vagaries of the weather.3 The interaction between soldiers and weather was unavoidable, intimate, and continuous. The Civil War, like history in general, encompassed the dynamic interplay between humans and nature, and the weather was an active force in the conflict, with a direct impact on human affairs.4 While not hard and fast determinants of events, the weather and other aspects of the natural world affect the course of history through their interaction with human beings. As historians Lisa Brady and Timothy Silver declare, "the natural world moves to its own peculiar rhythms and frequently shapes historical events in ways that humans cannot anticipate."5 Humans react to nature, nature reacts to human actions, and weather is no exception. Weather is experienced all the time by humans, especially soldiers in the midst of war, but in no way can it be controlled, and in the nineteenth century during the Civil War, it could not even be accurately predicted. The cursory discussion of the meteorological conditions at Spotsylvania Court House in most scholarship on the battle may make it seem that weather was simply a passive backdrop to the clash, but it was actually an interactive agent that influenced the course of events.6 During the nearly two-week span of the Battle of Spotsylvania, the weather was frequently extreme, particularly in the first nine days. Scorching, dry heat at the beginning of the battle changed to days of heavy fog and torrential rains that transformed the landscape around Spotsylvania into [End Page 201] "a sea of mud," in the words of one contemporary.7 Only in the final days of the fighting did milder weather occur and become a more minor factor influencing the course of the battle. At the same time that the Federal and Confederate soldiers were engaged in combat operations at Spotsylvania, they were forced to continually struggle against the often severe meteorological conditions. As the weather was omnipresent, the troops needed to contend with its vagaries more regularly than the actual enemy forces. The intense weather significantly affected the physical and mental health, and therefore capabilities, of the Union and Confederate troops. The soldiers themselves recognized its influence over their well-being.8 While the weather was not the overall determinant of the battle's outcome, its direct and at times dramatic impact on the soldiers meant that it was central to the combatants' experience within the engagement. As the progress of the Battle of Spotsylvania as a whole, like all the military events of the Civil War, was determined by the Union and Confederate troops' experiences, the course of the clash was frequently shaped by the extreme weather conditions. For the soldiers battling at Spotsylvania Court House, the weather was a changeable variable, but one that could prove decisive. While the weather sometimes was an ally, helping the armies implement their plans and fulfill their objectives, at other times it was an enemy, causing difficulties for the soldiers and hindering their operations. The role...

Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley

Reviewed by: Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation by Michael S. Frawley Robert A. Taylor Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South: A Reevaluation. Michael S. Frawley. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7068-7. 256 pp., hardcover, $45.00. After 1865, many observers and soon historians considered the question of why the South failed to win its independence during the Civil War. One plausible reason was the region's lack of industry as compared to that of the states remaining in the Union. While near miracles of production spurred Confederate creation of the sinews of war on the home front, in the end they proved too little to fend off final defeat. The Cotton Kingdom, built on land and slave labor, simply could not provide for the wartime Confederacy. Numerous studies based on the 1860 US Census returns seemed to buttress this argument. Now Michael S. Frawley's Industrial Development and Manufacturing in the Antebellum Gulf South fires a [End Page 240] new salvo in the debate by suggesting that census data failed to fully document all Southern manufacturing activities. Frawley defines the Gulf South as the states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas (inexplicitly omitting Louisiana and Florida from consideration). His data collection goes beyond the 1860 Census to include R. G. Dunn Company credit reports as well as newspapers and local histories. Using Geographic Information System software, the author discerns types and concentrations of industrial activity heretofore unexamined. Included are analyses of the three state's transportation systems, available labor and capital, and resources and raw materials. He ultimately concludes that the census undercounted almost 20 percent of industrial/manufacturing companies in Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, or didn't count them at all. Frawley contends that "the Gulf South was not as agrarian as its residents believed and historians have argued. The people and industries of these states were also not as dependent on imported goods as southerners feared" (128). This thesis boldly challenges the bulk of Southern historians' views on the nature of the region's prewar economic life and potential, from U. B. Phillips to modern scholars like Fred Bateman and Thomas J. Weiss. In the end, however, is a 20 percent increase in the Southern industrial base in the three states studied truly significant? Ultimately, the Confederate States of America was composed of eleven former Southern states. Is it surprising that landless Southern whites might be tempted to take wage-paying jobs in factories or workshops? A number of manufacturing operations had already answered the question of whether slaves might become industrial workers across the South, despite the possible dangers of a less-controlled slave work force in towns and cities. Frawley also address the question of whether Southern investors placed money in industry or manufacturing before 1860. He proposes that a line of strong capital investment ran though both Mississippi and Alabama in areas with major cotton growth and large numbers of agricultural slaves. In his view, planters were a significant source of investment capital for new enterprises, supporting the work of other scholars like William Scarborough in his Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth Century South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). Railroads were particularly appealing, as they efficiently moved the yearly cotton crop to market. But during the late 1850s, with the golden age of the Cotton Kingdom and its soaring production and profits, planters must have struggled to consider diversifying beyond cotton production. In the end much of the South's industry, as well as the institution of slavery, faced destruction with the coming of the Union armies during the Civil War. Frawley's is a solid and innovative work of cliometric research, which proves that historical scholarship continues to benefit from the computer age. While a [End Page 241] daunting challenge, an expansion of the scope of this methodology to cover a larger part of the Old South would be a major tool for future students of the region. A minor quibble is that the index does not cover all that is mentioned in the text of the book. For example Florida is...

Before the Accommodation Principle: Disability and Employment Among Union Army Veterans.

Purpose This article examines the impact on veteran employment of the U.S. government's pension benefit provisions for Union soldiers following the Civil War. Methods To do so, it draws on both Union army pension records and U.S. census returns as well as information derived from the Union army samples designed by the Center for Population Economics at the University of Chicago ("CPE") and census samples from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series ("IPUMS"). Results We find that, although twentieth-century Progressive reformers contended otherwise, these nineteenth-century Americans wanted what their twenty-first-century counterparts want-work at a meaningful occupation. Conclusions Our findings evidence the complex and contradictory impact on occupational rehabilitation and employment resulting from the public-private partnerships established for Union army veterans. These partnerships were based on substantially different notions of disability needs and rights than those underlying the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and its central accommodation principle.

Poe in Richmond: Conserving Poe's Papers

Poe in Richmond: Conserving Poe's Papers

Marshall H. Twitchell: Selected Financial Records of a Vermont Carpetbagger in Louisiana

ABSTRACTFarmer, teacher, law student, Union Army soldier and captain, Freedmen's Bureau agent, plantation owner, entrepreneur, state senator, and U.S. consul were among the many positions held by Marshall Harvey Twitchell. This paper draws from an archive to illustrate some of the business dealings of a successful Vermonter in postbellum Louisiana.

An Unguaranteed Victory: Military Challenges in the Union Army and Lincoln’s Call for a Militia

An Unguaranteed Victory: Military Challenges in the Union Army and Lincoln’s Call for a Militia

Discrimination in public accommodations

AbstractDespite widespread belief in the efficacy of statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations, including protections for the use of privately provided yet publicly available services such as transportation, hotels, and restaurants, we lack causal estimates of the impacts of these statutes on the well-being of those they are designed to protect. We leverage the US Supreme Court's 1883 strike of the public accommodations provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, along with variation in state-level statutes, to identify the impact of the Act's public accommodations provisions. Using a panel of repeated geo-located medical exams of US Colored Troops (USCT) and white Union Army veterans, and a series of difference-in-differences, geographic regression discontinuity, and placebo designs, estimates consistently suggest that the Court's ruling led to meaningful weight losses for USCT veterans in states without state-level public accommodations statutes. These findings suggest that statutes prohibiting discrimination in public accommodations can have significant positive impacts on the well-being of those they are designed to protect.

Why they fought: the initial motivations of German American soldiers who fought for the Union in the American Civil War

ABSTRACTGerman immigrants who came to the American North prior to 1861 volunteered en masse once the Civil War began, and they became the largest group of foreign fighters in the Union Army during the war. The initial motivations of German immigrant soldiers in the Union Army have been misunderstood by many historians who look at Germans as Hessian mercenaries in the Union ranks – who fought purely for money –and historians who focus too heavily on the failed 1848 German Revolution as the basis of German immigrant involvement in the war. Both answers are correct to some degree, but neither fully explains the initial motivations of 190,000 German immigrants and 56,000 German Americans who volunteered to fight for the Union. This paper asks the question: what were the initial motivations of German immigrants who fought for the Union? The answer is much more complex than any one historian has presented prior, and only by exploring the full range of their initial motivations can we understand their sustained motivations for remaining in the Union Army.To demonstrate its argument, the paper utilizes sources ranging from English- and translated German to English-language newspapers, personal letters, soldiers’ memoir s and manuscripts in American archives. The paper traces German soldiers in the army from 1861 through the entirety of the war, and it explores the significance of their reenlistment in 1864. It concludes that German immigrant soldiers’ commitment to the Union was rooted in numerous intertwined situations that existed in the years prior to and during the American Civil War, especially their desire for liberty and a new home.

STATUS PRAWNY AFROAMERYKANÓW I OCHRONA PRAWNA ŻOŁNIERZY KOLOROWYCH W CZASIE WOJNY SECESYJNEJ (1861-1865)

Legal status of African Americans certainly was one of the factors that influenced the treatment of USCT soldiers. Even though free blacks had some limited rights already in the colonial times, nevertheless just after the War of Independence they had been consecutively pushed out of American society. This policy was confirmed i.e. in the Naturalization Act of 1790 or in Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott case, which sanctioned inability of African Americans to obtain US citizenship. Similarly looked the issue of the service of blacks in the army. Restrictions introduced after the War of Independence practically eliminated blacks from the U.S. Army, formally till 1863. Interestingly, already during the first phase of the Civil War (1861-1862) Union army started to use fugitive slaves and “contraband of war”, also first units were raised. Mass enlistment to the colored troops, that occurred after enforcement of Emancipation Proclamation, forced Union authorities to make a stand on the issue of legal protection of black soldiers. In theory, from the very beginning, it should be the same as in case of whites. In practice, it occurred that such assertions were insufficient, and that the only reaction to the mistreatment of POW’s from USCT was halting of prisoners exchange. From the Confederate perspective the biggest issue in creating coherent policy toward African Americans was their different status (slaves from the Confederate territory; slaves from the Union territory; free blacks; volunteers; draftees, etc.). That in turn implied another difficulty – how to deal with captives? Treat them as regular POW’s? As criminals? Or maybe avoid the dilemma, and kill them instantly? All these problems caused, that Confederate policy on this issue was incoherent and chaotic.

Decreasing human body temperature in the United States since the industrial revolution.

In the US, the normal, oral temperature of adults is, on average, lower than the canonical 37°C established in the 19th century. We postulated that body temperature has decreased over time. Using measurements from three cohorts--the Union Army Veterans of the Civil War (N = 23,710; measurement years 1860-1940), the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey I (N = 15,301; 1971-1975), and the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (N = 150,280; 2007-2017)--we determined that mean body temperature in men and women, after adjusting for age, height, weight and, in some models date and time of day, has decreased monotonically by 0.03°C per birth decade. A similar decline within the Union Army cohort as between cohorts, makes measurement error an unlikely explanation. This substantive and continuing shift in body temperature-a marker for metabolic rate-provides a framework for understanding changes in human health and longevity over 157 years.

Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters

Reviewed by: Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters Andrew S. Bledsoe Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War. Kristopher A. Teters. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-4696-3886-7. 240 pp., cloth, $32.95. Kristopher Teters’s Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War sets out to examine how western theater commanders in the Federal armies “carried out emancipation in the field” through focusing on “the general patterns and characteristics of this policy” (2). Teters’s decision to center his analysis on the western theater and the Lower South states it encompassed is a sensible one; as he points out, the majority of slaves lived in those states, and the Union army interaction with the institution unfolded across a variety of armies with high stakes and significant consequences. Teters repeatedly emphasizes the practicality and pragmatism of his subjects’ emancipation policy. The morality of slavery took a backseat to the tangible military effect of emancipation, and winning the war was always more important to these officers than undoing the moral damage of slavery. The picture that emerges is one of an officer corps largely uninterested in, even hostile to, the idea of abolition, and the racial views of the Union’s western armies reflect the prevailing positions of nineteenth-century American society as a whole. Teters’s narrative also correctly charts the haphazard and occasionally incoherent policy of the US government toward slaves and contraband through 1862, noting that any true guidance from the War Department and from Congress did not actually come until the Second Confiscation Act. Before then, officers improvised their approach to slaves and slavery, with erratic results. [End Page 85] Teters’s examination of the interactions between white officers and black servants is enlightening. He finds that while employment of black servants, mostly former slaves, by Union officers was a common practice, overall it did not seem to change the officers’ prejudicial racial attitudes. The war “represented no moment of enlightenment or transformative experience. On the whole, officers continued to view black people as inferior, incapable, and even subhuman” (104). Teters may overstate the significance of this finding, however, in claiming that “this persistent racial prejudice of Union officers helps explain why the North eventually retreated from Reconstruction and acquiesced in segregation and disfranchisement” (105). Nevertheless, the image of the Union officer corps as leaders of a reluctant army of liberation, far more interested in the downfall of the Confederate government than the overthrow of slavery, is inescapable and persuasive. Perhaps the most valuable contribution of Practical Liberators is Teters’s compelling case for the central importance of the Union army in the process of emancipation. As he succinctly puts it, “the army became the key instrument for bringing freedom to Southern slaves” (154). Emancipation, born of practical concerns about depriving the Confederacy of a critical resource, became a critical tool for the Union army. In turn, the Union army served as emancipation’s primary agent. “Most slaves did not have to be told and understood very well that the arrival of the Union army meant freedom” (122). It is difficult to imagine emancipation unfolding in a similar way, if at all, without the Union army to execute it. Well-argued and succinct, Teters’s study is a useful contribution to our understanding of Union officers and the evolution of emancipation policy and ought to inspire future examinations of military emancipation and army racial attitudes in the East, in the Trans-Mississippi, during Reconstruction, and beyond. Andrew S. Bledsoe Lee University Copyright © 2020 The Kent State University Press

Michigan’s Civil War Citizen-General: Alpheus S. Williams

Dempsey points out, as have others, that Williams deserved promotion to the rank of major general, given his good reputation and record in war. But the fact Williams was not a West Pointer worked against him, and it appears he did not cultivate the political support or seek the publicity he needed. Thus, he held his major general’s post with only brevet, or honorary rank, while proving himself a popular and respected general in the Union army’s Second, Twelfth and Twentieth Corps, with his soldiers giving him the nickname “Pap” (though pronouncing this “Pop”.)

Marching On: Rereading Little Women and Louisa May Alcott

Marching On: Rereading Little Women and Louisa May Alcott Stephanie Carpenter (bio) The Afterlife of Little Women by Beverly Lyon Clark. Johns Hopkins Press, 2015, 288 pp., $44.95 (hardcover). Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters by Anne Boyd Rioux. W. W. Norton, 2018, 288 pp., $16.95 (paper). March Sisters: On Life, Death, and Little Women by Kate Bolick, Jenny Zhang, Carmen Maria Machado, and Jane Smiley. Library of America, 2019, 196 pp., $21.95 (hardcover). Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother by Eve LaPlante. Simon and Schuster, 2012, 384 pp., $18.00 (paper). Little Women directed by Greta Gerwig, Columbia Pictures, 2019. Little Women directed by Vanessa Caswill, BBC Television, 2017. ________ You likely know the plot of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868–1869 novel, Little Women. Whether you’ve read the book or seen one of its adaptations for film or screen, you probably have some recollection of the four March sisters’ comings-of-age in New England during and just after the Civil War. Poor but resourceful, the sisters are Meg, who dreams of wealth and fame as an actress but finds fulfillment in marriage and motherhood; Jo, the strong-willed writer, who helps support the family by publishing potboilers, then sets aside her literary aspirations to launch [End Page 191] a boys’ school with her husband, Professor Bhaer; Beth, gentle and musical, who succumbs to scarlet fever; and Amy, the artistic and urbane youngest, who ultimately marries their rich neighbor, Laurie. The girls’ mother, Marmee, shepherds them through the tumult of adolescence with support from Hannah, their housekeeper, and limited counsel from Mr. March, who is away as a chaplain in the Union Army for half the book and absorbed in his own ministerial and philosophical pursuits for the rest. I read Little Women for the first time in elementary school. My mother had already introduced me to the Marches when my school acquired a complete set of Alcott’s children’s books—Under the Lilacs, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom—in matching green-and-gold bindings. I was then, as I am now, fascinated by the manners and material culture of the nineteenth century, but the books’ stories of growing up with and despite one’s loved ones also captivated me. Simultaneously serious and playful, Alcott’s books seemed more provocative—or provocative of more interesting questions—than did the sordid Sweet Valley High novels shelved nearby. Even now, Little Women, Little Men, and Jo’s Boys are among the few books I keep in my bedside table. They’ve remained close at hand not just because of my early identification with Jo, the restless writer, but also because of my later interest in Alcott herself, whose life and career I studied in graduate school. Before Little Women, Alcott aspired to write serious novels for adults—novels of ideas, such as her first foray, Moods, a female bildungs-roman. Having had a modest success with Hospital Sketches, a lightly fictionalized account of her experiences as a Civil War nurse, she was persuaded by her publisher to try a book for children. The success of that attempt set the course for her career. Little Women earned enough to clear the Alcott family’s persistent debts; what could Louisa do but write more like it—write to the point of exhaustion and beyond? Alcott’s death at age fifty-five in a convalescent home reflects the physical toll of her chronic illness (long identified as mercury poisoning from the calomel she was treated with during her Union Army service, though more recently understood as an autoimmune disorder) and of the financial responsibilities she bore throughout her life. At the time of her death in 1888, the unmarried Alcott was raising her eight-year-old niece, Lulu, whose mother, May Alcott Nieriker, had died in Paris shortly after childbirth. She was also supporting her widowed older sister, Anna, and [End Page 192] her widowed eighty-eight-year-old father, Bronson, who predeceased her by less than forty-eight hours. Alcott had legally adopted Anna’s younger son, John Sewell...

Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. Michael P. Gray

Reviewed by: Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered ed. Michael P. Gray Brian D. McKnight (bio) Crossing the Deadlines: Civil War Prisons Reconsidered. Edited by Michael P. Gray. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2018. Pp. 232. Cloth, $45.00.) Over the course of the past two decades, Michael Gray has established himself as a leading scholar of the Civil War prison experience. His first book, The Business of Captivity: Elmira and Its Civil War Prison (2001), broke new ground, and this current offering does the same. Often anthologies fail to live up to their potential because of the inability of their essays to bring cohesion to the topic or the failure of the essays to capitalize on the power of scholarly innovation. This book avoids both of these issues [End Page 127] and effectively brings the study of Civil War prisons into the twenty-first century. Gray, a professor of history at East Stroudsburg University, has gathered an exceptional collection of scholars offering new and interesting treatments of the Civil War captivity experience. In his introduction, Gray does an excellent job of taking the reader through the historiography of Civil War prison and prisoner studies. His examination of the major figures and works is bolstered by his solid appreciation for the impact of our contemporary concerns on the writing of history. In this case, he uses the centennial celebration in 1961 as a touchstone in the development of a mature study of Civil War prisons and shows how that development has continued up to the present day. Scholars lamenting our field's loss of focus on historiography will be pleased with the quality and content of Gray's introduction. Divided into three sections, the book does less studying the prisons and prisoners and more deconstructing the integral elements of captivity. Evan Kutzler's essay on the environmental aspects of captivity reminds readers that the common louse could wreak havoc on the morale of prisoners. Kutzler uses the louse to call for a greater focus on environmental concerns during the Civil War by reminding readers that "how prisoners gave meaning to the sounds of birds or the feeling of lice says much about both the experiences of captivity as well as the imaginations, presumptions, and standards they brought with them into war and captivity" (17–18). Gray's offering examines the tourism industry that popped up around prison camps and brought citizens to the stockades to view the captured enemy. He concludes that despite the Union army's proud adoption of Francis Lieber's code, it clearly looked the other way when it came to violating General Orders No. 100, section III, articles 56 and 75, which explicitly protect prisoners from "intentional suffering or disgrace" and any intentional "indignity" (43). Angela Zombek explores the importance of religion to the prisoners through her examination of the wartime activism of Catholic priests. Although these three essays do not hold together as well as essays in subsequent sections, they are excellent, innovative treatments. The second section focuses on the suffering of prisoners and opens with Lorien Foote's discussion of retaliation against prisoners of war. From using prisoners as human shields to the Confederacy's permitting state courts to charge and prosecute Federal prisoners during wartime, the Confederacy walked a dangerous line in regard to the rules of warfare. Christopher Barr's essay examines race and slavery within the prison environment and finds the power that race had over captivity, with a healthy [End Page 128] dose of historical memory. Tellingly, Barr writes, "If the politics of slavery and emancipation could affect how white prisoners understood their captivity, it defined how black prisoners experienced it" (117). Kelly Mezurek treats the ironic phenomenon of Confederate prisoners being held by black Union guards. For the Union army, using African American prison guards permitted black participation, but in a more menial role than that of front-line soldier. It gave the army a place to assign black troops outside the limelight of combat operations and had the added psychological benefit of turning the racial tables on white southerners fighting for the cause of racial superiority. Perhaps the most innovative section of the book is its...

Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters

Reviewed by: Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War by Kristopher A. Teters Matthew E. Stanley Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War. By Kristopher A. Teters. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 240 pp. $32.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-3886-7. W. E. B. Du Bois was crystal clear about which strategic and racial attitudes prevailed among northern whites at the beginning of the Civil War. “The North went to war without the slightest idea of freeing the slave,” he explained in his landmark 1935 book, Black Reconstruction (New York). “The great majority of Northerners from Lincoln down pledged themselves to protect slavery, and they hated and harried Abolitionists.” Recent historians such as Chandra Manning and James Oakes have challenged Du Bois’ point, positing a collective emancipationist impetus within the Union Army and among the northern population and charging “neo-Revisionists” with overemphasis on dissent and initiating a “dark turn” in Civil War scholarship. Gary Gallagher, among others, has reminded us that the overriding objective of most Union soldiers was the restoration of nation. Most of these historians, on both sides of the debate, ignore the critical dynamic of region within their broader conclusions about northern soldiers and politicians. Kristopher A. Teters’ Practical Liberators: Union Officers in the Western Theater during the Civil War accents the critical convergence of emancipation politics and regionalism. Rather than Republicans successfully infusing the war with a liberationist purpose from its outset, Teters argues that practical considerations, and not morality, motivated western officers to support emancipation. However transformational emancipation and black enlistment were to the war (and they were supremely transformational), western officers only slowly accepted radical change and viewed the conflict not as a revolutionary experience, but as a conservative and restorative one. Their approaches to emancipation and even black enlistment tended to evolve, but their racial attitudes largely did not. They drew a hard line between accepting or even advocating for the destruction of slavery and support for racial equality. [End Page 177] Teters finds definite patterns in western officers’ negotiations about emancipation on the ground that evolved from reluctance to pragmatic acceptance. During the first fifteen months of the war, when the necessity of slavery’s destruction was far from evident, western officers proved inconsistent in their policies toward slaves, the vast majority falling on some spectrum of conservatism. John C. Frémont, who as a department commander in Missouri ordered slaves freed in August 1861 (requiring Lincoln to countermand his edict), was the clear exception. William T. Sherman, Henry W. Halleck, Don Carlos Buell, and others, whose personal beliefs and obedience to the law guided their limited war aims and who initially refused fugitive slaves in their lines, were more characteristic. If the driving force for emancipation was military necessity, western federal armies had little incentive to expand the war aims; unlike their eastern counterparts, their armies saw little but victory. Uneven policy characterized these officers’ efforts, but challenges from below disrupted cohesion within the ranks. Conflict often arose between conservative high-ranking officers and junior officers and enlisted men who sensed the utility of emancipation and were more likely to defy exclusion policies toward runaway slaves. After the Second Confiscation Act and the Emancipation Proclamation, western officers adopted more consistent emancipationist policies. In the Lower Mississippi Valley, Benjamin F. Butler and Ulysses S. Grant proved especially receptive to new liberalizing war measures, and they shifted their command postures and even personal attitudes. While conflicts over emancipation policy persisted in border slave states like Kentucky and Missouri, by 1863 the Union armies driving deep into the Western Confederacy were powerful agents of liberation. Because few western soldiers had enlisted to free slaves, emancipation and especially black enlistment remained subjects of intense debate. Teters contends that officers eschewed moral considerations as they carried out military emancipations for the army’s operational and strategic benefit—freeing slaves for use as laborers, servants, and, more controversially, soldiers. Teters thus [End Page 178] echoes the conclusions of James M. McPherson, Mark Grimsley, and others that freedom advanced with the army as officers accepted able-bodied slaves who possessed “military value...

The Fighting Infantryman: The Story of Albert D. J. Cashier, Transgender Civil War Soldier by Rob Sanders

Reviewed by: The Fighting Infantryman: The Story of Albert D. J. Cashier, Transgender Civil War Soldier by Rob Sanders Deborah Stevenson, Editor Sanders, Rob The Fighting Infantryman: The Story of Albert D. J. Cashier, Transgender Civil War Soldier; illus. by Nabi H. Ali. Little Bee, 2020 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781499809367 $18.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 2-4 Born Jennie Hodgers in nineteenth century Ireland, our subject favored boys’ clothes even in early youth. After immigrating to America and moving to Illinois he became Albert D. J. Cashier, and that’s how he enlisted in the Union Army in 1862. Passing the cursory physical exam proved easy, so he served and fought for the duration of the war; after the end of the war, he worked hard at various jobs and collected his military pension. When an injury landed him in the hospital, his female traits were discovered, which endangered the pension and veteran’s status he had earned; his comrades from his battalion, however, fought successfully for his right to continue to collect and for his service to be honored, and when he died a few years later he received a full military funeral. This picture-book biography focuses on somebody usually treated as a historical oddity and puts him in significant contemporary context, and the emphasis on the respect and support of his comrades in arms makes the simply told account genuinely heart-warming. The digital art is less successful, veering between the cartoonish and the blurry, but scenes of Cashier’s final days and funeral are gently moody. Notes explain the uncertainty about Cashier’s life story, feature some of his comrades’ comments on him, and provide information about his motivation and transgender people; a glossary is included as is a list of extensive sources and a couple of mutely resonant photographs. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel

Reviewed by: Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America by W. Caleb McDaniel Angela Boswell Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America. By W. Caleb McDaniel. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 340. Illustrations, notes, index.) Sweet Taste of Liberty, which won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2020, is a brilliant melding of meticulous research with engaging storytelling. The book follows the lives of the freedwoman Harriet Wood and enslaver and businessman Zebulon Ward, as well as the story of the research McDaniel conducted to reveal these accounts. [End Page 214] Harriet Wood was born into slavery on a northern Kentucky farm and then, like so many other enslaved children, she was sold away from her family before reaching her teens. She lived in both Louisville and New Orleans as the property of the Cirode family. Jane Cirode moved to Cincinnati in the free state of Ohio and later brought Wood there as well, granting her freedom. In 1853, Zebulon Ward, who eventually made fortunes by leasing state prisons in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas and exploiting and abusing prison laborers, conspired with members of the Cirode family to kidnap Harriet Wood and sell her back into slavery. Appeals to her jailors fell on one sympathetic ear, leading to a legal hearing, but the court refused to recognize Wood's freedom. She was transported south and sold to the owner of a Mississippi cotton plantation, where she remained for over a decade more (including two years in Texas during the Civil War). Several years after emancipation, Wood finally returned to Cincinnati, where she filed suit against Ward, demanding compensation for the time and potential wages she lost while she was enslaved after the kidnapping. She was awarded only $2,500, which was far less than the $20,000 she demanded, but is still a larger restitution than any other formerly enslaved person received in a U.S. court. W. Caleb McDaniel's research began when he found two newspaper interviews with Wood published in the 1870s, which ultimately inspired him to visit archives in nine states. He weaves together the pieces of Wood's and Ward's stories, carefully claiming only what can be proven through primary sources, but he supplements this with the rich background of historical context. As a result, the reader not only follows the fascinating narrative of a woman who lost her freedom, but also learns of the intricacies of slavery in a border state like Kentucky, the pain of separation from loved ones, and the ordeals of being sold "down the river," surviving on a large cotton plantation, and being an enslaved refugee in Texas during the Civil War. Although the portion about Texas is brief, it is an enlightening account from the point of view of an enslaved woman about the arduous trip—and the subsequent years—that many enslaved people were forced to endure by their masters to avoid their being liberated by Union armies. Overall, Wood's story and court case are intrinsically fascinating and deserve wider historical recognition. McDaniel, though, has turned these into a captivating account of this period, revealing how the legal and economic aspects of the institution of slavery interacted in very personal and human ways with those who were kept enslaved. [End Page 215] Angela Boswell Henderson State University Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association

Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy by Donald L. Miller

Reviewed by: Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy by Donald L. Miller Stephen D. Engle Vicksburg: Grant's Campaign That Broke the Confederacy. By Donald L. Miller. (New York and other cities: Simon and Schuster, 2019. Pp. xx, 663. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4516-4137-0.) Approaching the Civil War's centennial, Bruce Catton wrote that as much as the northern people looked anxiously in early July 1863 toward Pennsylvania where the "threads of fate" pulled Robert E. Lee into the titanic three-day battle [End Page 921] at Gettysburg, "the real pull of fate was at Vicksburg. . . . down here by the great river" (Catton, U. S. Grant and the American Military Tradition [Boston, 1954], p. 104). More than sixty-five years later, Donald L. Miller reminds us of that truth, even while scholars continue to write Gettysburg onto center stage. Although Vicksburg, Mississippi, was the most important strategic point in the Confederacy, the prosperous river city did not need a civil war to emphasize its importance. One needs only to look at a map to understand why. That scholars continue to chronicle the Union's victorious forty-seven-day siege confirms its centrality to understanding why the North won and why the Confederacy lost the Civil War. In Ulysses S. Grant's own words, "The fate of the Confederacy was sealed when Vicksburg fell" (Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Vol. 1 [New York, 1885], p. 567). He was right to affirm that Vicksburg was the Civil War's transformative campaign, in that his army's conquest of the Mississippi River's Gibraltar opened the Father of Waters to Union commerce, split the Confederacy, and isolated the western slave states of Arkansas and Texas and part of Louisiana. More than that, the campaign showcased Grant's mastery of maneuver and adaptation in a hostile environment, while also handling the battles and raids on his way to the final assault. Miller argues that Grant's brilliance was more than just organizing an extraordinary amphibious assault on the Confederate citadel; it also gave evidence of a superior commander determining by thought, action, and deed the politics of war. Handling Abraham Lincoln's, Henry W. Halleck's, and the public's impatience, while managing troublesome political generals such as John A. McClernand, proved to be an equally significant accomplishment. If his unorthodox decisions went against his superior's accepted theories of war, Grant handled the complexities of leadership, strategy, administration, public affairs, logistics, and politics in ways that prepared for what was to come. The commander moved with great skill, and his long-range planning and persistence in a hostile environment not only won the battle of combatants but also transformed that environment by turning slave soil into free soil. His campaign's significance dwarfed anything undertaken in the eastern theater largely because it unleashed a social revolution that culminated in the liberation of nearly 100,000 slaves and brought some 26,000 slaves into the Union army. In the end, Grant's improvisational genius comes alive in this portrait because Miller illuminates the river warrior in ways that humanize the Union commander's strategic ebbs and flows in the heartland's hostile landscape. It is the story of not only the war's great military turning point, but also how America's greatest soldier evolved into an insightful commander and a military emancipator of the quarter million slaves living in the lower Mississippi River Valley. To be sure, several scholars have told this same story, but Miller has found a way to weave both military and emancipation history together that captures the drama and the essence of what it means to wage war while humanizing ordinary men doing extraordinary things. It takes such a book to remind us of why the war is always present. [End Page 922] Stephen D. Engle Florida Atlantic University Copyright © 2020 Southern Historical Association

River of Death: The Chickamauga Campaign, Volume One: The Fall of Chattanooga by William Glenn Robertson

Reviewed by: River of Death: The Chickamauga Campaign, Volume One: The Fall of Chattanooga by William Glenn Robertson Thomas M Grace (bio) River of Death: The Chickamauga Campaign, Volume One: The Fall of Chattanooga. By William Glenn Robertson. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 680. $45.00 cloth; $29.99 ebook) In a book on the Battle of Chickamauga preceding the one under review, This Terrible Sound (1992), Peter Cozzens quotes a staff officer to Army of the Cumberland commander, William Rosecrans. That man, Union Lieutenant Henry Cist, asserted decades after the sanguinary clash at Chickamauga and with the capture of Chattanooga in mind that "Brilliant campaigns without battles, do not accomplish the destruction of an army" (p. 21). River of Death is an operational study of the midsummer campaign in 1863 that wrested from Confederate control the city that held the key to Georgia and that preceded the destructive two-day fight along Chickamauga Creek. In the first of two volumes, William Glenn Robertson has crafted a book worthy of the brilliant campaign. His account is one of maneuver in which neither the Confederate or Union army suffered destruction. The movements of the armies that Robertson narrates were covered, albeit more briefly, in the Cozzens book as well as in the extraordinary trilogy by David Powell, The [End Page 353] Chickamauga Campaign (2015, 2017). After years of neglect in the last century, the campaign and battle are finally getting their full due. Having read the volumes by Cozzens and Powell, I wondered if Robertson could add to what these other authors already provide. The answer is an unqualified, yes. In a masterful analysis, his well-ordered narrative is a clear explication of a complex and often confusing campaign. And when judgments are offered, readers will find themselves trusting Robertson's verdicts. This is a long book. Not every reader will care for the level of detail as some will find the minutiae of campaigns and battles wearisome. But there will be an audience for this one. When I toured the surrounding area and battlefield with Powell's Chickamauga study group, avid readers among the fifty-member party snapped up every copy of Robertson's treatise in the park's bookstore. Although it might seem elementary, Robertson, respecting contingency in war, insists that the performance of the respective commanders, both Rosecrans and the Confederate Army of Tennessee commander, Braxton Bragg, be evaluated on the basis of "what each commander knew at any given time" and "how they reacted" to what they knew (p. xiv). Many who write about the Western Theater recognized the resourceful generalship of Rosecrans, although Bragg is regularly dismissed as a benighted commander, blundering from one failure to the next. This study will help diminish such notions, for the challenges Bragg faced with the mountains that screened the Union advance, combined with the failure of his cavalry to keep headquarters advised of the movement of Rosecrans's army corps, will enable readers to comprehend why the loss of Chattanooga may have been unavoidable. Robertson's book rises above the prosaic allowing readers to learn how the war looked and felt. In so doing, he has mastered the contours of the rugged terrain that made the campaign as difficult as any waged during the Civil War. He brings important insight to technology and logistics, which, at long last, are receiving the attention of scholars. What exactly does Robertson show his readers? If professionals do, indeed, study logistics, Civil War bibliophiles discover how engineers [End Page 354] bridged rivers and the ways in which cavalry crossed deep watery divides without pontoons. We learn how infantry did likewise with makeshift watercrafts and how reluctant cattle were made to traverse waterways on improvised flatboats. Those who have driven the modern roads over Walden Ridge or I–24 down the length of Battle Creek in Tennessee, discover in these pages how men moved matériel and artillery up and down the same, once seemingly impassable mountainous terrain and along narrow valleys. A Minnesota drummer boy described this country as "beautiful" but "far out of the world" (p. 347). So, too, Robertson provides a sense of the gruelingly...

Soldiers of the Cross, The Authoritative Text: The Heroism of Catholic Chaplains and Sisters in the American Civil War by David Power Conyngham

Reviewed by: Soldiers of the Cross, The Authoritative Text: The Heroism of Catholic Chaplains and Sisters in the American Civil War by David Power Conyngham William John Shepherd Soldiers of the Cross, The Authoritative Text: The Heroism of Catholic Chaplains and Sisters in the American Civil War. By David Power Conyngham. Notre Dame, IN.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. 535 pp. $35.00. Having been preserved for over a century in the University of Notre Dame Archives, Soldiers of the Cross is the long-delayed publication of a remarkable unfinished manuscript. The author, David Power Conyngham, was an Irish Catholic immigrant, journalist, and Union Civil War veteran who served in the celebrated Irish Brigade. The wartime service of priest chaplains and sister nurses was widely [End Page 84] considered the most important Catholic contribution to nineteenth-century American society. In Conyngham's words: "true Christian charity knows no sectarianism, religious or political, and that the Catholic chaplain was the soldier of the cross, and not of the sword" (15). After the war, Conyngham interviewed these priests and nuns, or those who had information about them, in order to compile a record of their selfless deeds. Thankfully, Notre Dame preserved his unfinished work after Conyngham's untimely death in 1883. Recognizing that it combines both history and hagiography, editors David Endres and William Kurtz consider it the most comprehensive record of Catholic participation in the Civil War written in the nineteenth century. There have been several excellent studies of Catholics in the Civil War. One of the best and most recent is editor Kurtz's Excommunicated from the Union (2015). This, along with the classic George Barton's Angels of the Battlefield (1897) and Ellen Ryan Jolly's Nuns of the Battlefield (1927), should be read in conjunction with Soldiers of the Cross. Commonly known as "Holy Joes," there were nearly 4,000 wartime chaplains from all denominations on both sides during the war. Of these, Catholic priests, usually Irish or French immigrants, contributed approximately 50 commissioned chaplains to the Union army and 30 on the Confederate side. Additionally, with numbers reaching nearly 700 from 20 religious communities, Roman Catholic sisters or nuns made up about 20 percent of all nurses. As arranged by the editors, Conyngham's work was transcribed with grammatical corrections made as needed. They also wrote short introductory and concluding paragraphs for each chapter, as well as explanatory endnotes. There are 18 chapters on 12 Union chaplains, including the famous William Corby, who was one of seven Holy Cross priests from the University of Notre Dame, and the only chaplain at the Battle of Gettysburg. He notably gave absolution to soldiers on the second day of the battle, an act later commemorated with an iconic statue. Another Union chaplain of note, at least to me personally, was R. C. Cristy of the 78th Pennsylvania Volunteers, a protégé of Prince Gallitzin, who was the renowned Apostle of the Alleghenies. Cristy almost certainly ministered to my relative, William McCombs, a soldier [End Page 85] of the 78th who died in late 1861 along the Green River in Kentucky. A testament to Cristy's quality is the fact that he was elected chaplain in a regiment where only 50 of its nearly 1,000 men were Catholic (125). While Soldiers of the Cross has seven chapters devoted to three Confederate chaplains, this section focuses mostly on the well-known diary of Redemptorist priest James Sheerin, who was present in several major battles throughout the war. Finally, there are nine chapters on the various orders of nuns, including the Sisters of the Holy Cross and the Sisters of Mercy. Strangely, though, the Daughters of Charity, who contributed by far the most nurses with some three hundred serving, were not included. The most famous of these nuns was probably Mother Angela Gillespie, a Holy Cross sister and kin to William Tecumsah Sherman. The editors are to be congratulated for rescuing Conyngham's research from relative obscurity. Even though the overall quality of the chapters is uneven, it was a true labor of love. Some interesting chapters are comprised of Conyngham's recycled articles, excerpts from diaries, and testimonial letters from...