A Reading List for the War of 1861
You Know Which Story You Want From Me...
Note: This is from about four years ago, but I’ve been asked for it again, so here it is.
Asking Ole’ Sandbatch for a reading list is a dicey proposition. I almost never give people what they feel like they want, but if someone takes my suggestions seriously, and works their way through them, they will usually find their question is answered, or that, at the very least, the “broad vista” of the topic is illuminated in a way that satisfies them.
I’ve been requested to make a reading list about the War of 1861. When the kaleidoscopic images stopped swimming across my vision, I decided to do it. But let’s talk about methodology, and what exactly I am trying to accomplish for a bit first.
I have not attempted to list books that give a play-by-play of the War’s campaigns. The American Battlefield Trust has an animated map that it produced before it became a totally captured institution that accomplishes this task satisfactorily. You may find it here.
Nor have I attempted, at all, to make this war more inclusive. I am not concerned about black soldiers, woman soldiers, small battalions of ethnic minority soldiers, or slaves. Three-quarters of a million Americans died in this war— the vast majority of them were White men of British ancestry, whose fathers fought the Mexican and Indian Wars, and whose grandparents won American independence in the Revolution and the War of 1812.
Additionally, I have privileged sources that speak from the side of the South, or at the very least in a harmonically neutral way, wherever possible. A quick Googling of “best civil war books” will yield a treasure trove of titles, both classic and recent, that tell the tale from the side of the Union. You do not need me for that.
Alright, let’s do it.
We Have The War Upon Us
William J. Cooper
“Causes of the American Civil War” is a whole other, far more controversial reading list. It is not fair to include those here by and large. Nonetheless, William J. Cooper’s account of the most proximal cause of the War— the failure of the 36th Congress to avert it, must go into the list. It is a scholarly history, but it reads like a suspense novel. The reader knows that the 36th Congress will fail to reach a compromise, yet as 1860 ticks away over 272 pages, it is impossible not to feel the tension rising. Southern delegations withdraw from Washington one by one, as pressure from home and increasing solidarity among Northern legislators make further efforts seem fruitless. The crescendo comes when the senior senator from Mississippi rises to address the body with the words:
“when you deny to us the right to withdraw from a Government which thus perverted threatens to be destructive of our rights, we but tread in the path of our fathers when we proclaim our independence and take the hazard.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest And His Critter Company
Andrew Nelson Lytle
Nathan Bedford Forrest is the most enigmatic, and among the most controversial general officers on either side during the war. He is also the best of them, and it isn’t even close. His rise from a family of poor farmers in Tennessee to a self-made millionaire to the most feared cavalry commander of the war is covered in this text with a literary flair bestowable only by one of the great writers of the Southern Renaissance, Andrew Lytle. Marking Bedford Forrest as among the last warrior heroes of the western world, as the jaws of modernity snap shut on us all— he tells us a little about heroes when he tells us:
“the hero saves not only by his prowess, the hero saves with the divinity within himself.”
This study of, perhaps, the most studied commanding officer on either side of the War of 1861, remains the finest biography of one of its principal actors.
Bloody Angle: Hancock's Assault On The Mule Shoe Salient, May 12, 1864
John Canaan
On May 12, 1864, near the height of the bloodiest month in American history, Union and Confederate soldiers fought over a tiny stretch of their front line for 18 hours straight. The fighting was brutal, endless, and close quarters. For this portion of the “tour,” we take our only close-up look at a battle. Trench warfare and arguably “modern war” itself came into the world here. The tiredness and the tragedy really come through, the battle fatigue, the hopelessness, and the fraternal hatred that characterized the Overland Campaign take center stage.
At the battle itself, Winfield Scott Hancock’s Union corps makes an early morning attack on soggy earthworks outside of Spotsylvania Court House in Virginia, but throughout the day Confederate reinforcements arrive and plug the growing gap in their line. Robert E. Lee was in personal command of the Confederate relief, and at the turning point of the fighting, he attempts to advance into the combat zone with his soldiers, who take up the cry “Lee to the rear” and refuse to advance until he retires.
Why Confederates Fought: Family & Nation in Civil War Virginia
Aaron Sheehan-Dean
We know from our own research that only about 4% (in the most generous sense) of the Southern population were “planters.” One of the enduring mysteries of academe is why 90% of the southern white male population ultimately served in some capacity with the Confederate military. The vast majority of those men were ultimately acting against what appeared to be their own material interests. What do?
Dr. Aaron Sheehan-Dean, a professor at LSU, has done something incredible— by existing in the contemporary academy and also giving the Confederate Army a fair hearing. In a tightly written, beautiful monograph, he pushes past the unsatisfactory thesis of The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy, which argued that the Confederate soldier was just a “po’ boy who didn’t know no bettah,” and situates them broadly in the political context of their own time. They understood the political ramifications of secession, he argues, but they supported the Confederate nation because it offered protection for their recently won political liberties [universal white suffrage] and economic success that was grounded in a slave-based economy.
This is the right answer, and his supporting evidence is glittering.
The Unvanquished
William Faulkner
Not all histories are non-fiction, and it would be hard to not include Faulkner’s short story cycle named for The Unvanquished, who are the Confederate dead that never had to surrender. Faulkner has acquired an “anti-Southern” veneer in some quarters over the last several decades, but this is nonsense. This collection of seven short stories told from the perspective of a young boy in Mississippi during the last year of the war paints the legend of Confederate Götterdämmerung in living color. The main character’s uncle appears repeatedly, in his central Mississippi hometown, to raise companies of irregular cavalry to oppose the inexorable march of Sherman’s troops across the Southern heartland.
Faulkner himself was not alive when the events of his text transpired, but his life was lived in the presence of Confederate ghosts, and this is his ultimate homage to the titans that flash across the dreams of Southern men— the legends of the fall:
Then I began to smell it again, like each time he returned, like the day back in the spring when I rode up on the drive standing in one of his stirrups - that odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which I believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion which is not even kin to that optimism which believes that that which is about to happen to us can possibly be the worst which we can suffer.
So there it is. You get five books! Five that you’ve likely never heard of, and five which do not include Shelby Foote’s monstrous text titled The Civil War: A Narrative. Of course, I cannot recommend that one enough. It has been hailed as the American Iliad by people far more studious and far more eloquent than me. But in this list of five books, a reader can seize on various elements of the Battlefield Trust video that deserve special consideration, and help illumine the central event in American history in a way that might help them not say stupid things on Twitter.