Review: Klein, Days of Defiance (1997)

Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War by Maury Klein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about the fall of Fort Sumter and therefore about the beginning of the American Civil War. Klein does a very good job of weaving together the various strands: the men in the fort who can't get a straight answer out of Washington, the white people of Charleston who are frankly drunk with rebellion, Abraham Lincoln trying to put his Cabinet together. It is not quite as sensitive as I would like to the viewpoint of the enslaved people of Charleston---we see them only through the eyes of the white Charlestonians and, while that may be a simple matter of what the historical record has left us, Klein makes little to no effort to read against the text. He is unnecessarily catty about Harriet Beecher Stowe, and it's very hard to tell from here whether Mary Todd Lincoln was as awful as he makes her out to be, or if there are wheels within wheels. So I guess perhaps there's a little less nuance than would be ideal.

It's also a little uncomfortable reading a book written in 1997 that assumes that, no, of course America could never possibly do anything of the sort again, and I think about four years of Trump and the January 6th insurrection, and it's not as far away as Klein thinks it is.



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Review: Lankford, Richmond Burning (2002)

Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital by Nelson D. Lankford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book about the fall of Richmond. It's frankly better than I thought it was going to be after the first few pages. Lankford writes about the fire (the Burning in Richmond Burning) both clearly and vividly, so that I understand both WHAT happened and as much as I can of what it meant to the people it happened to.

Lankford has combed exhaustively through the primary sources, and he's interested in EVERYONE's point of view: women, men, white, Black, North, South, officers, enlisted---and he's alert to the differences between the Unionist residents of Richmond and the Confederates. Not everybody saw the entry of the Union troops into the city as a good thing, and "good" was itself very much up for grabs. The Yankees restored order and fought the fire (set by Confederate soldiers) that was destroying Richmond's business district, and some Confederates recognized that as "good" and some couldn't recognize ANYTHING the Yankees did as "good." And Lankford is keenly aware of the ways in which the Civil War didn't end with the fall of Richmond, or with Appomattox, and the ways in which the (incredibly toxic) relationship between white Southerners and Black Southerners was destroyed by the Emancipation Proclamation without having anything to put in its place. (This is not saying slavery was a good relationship to have, only that it was familiar, and that its destruction, while morally and ethically necessary, merely tore things apart without reconfiguring them into a new pattern. This, of course, is one of the places where Reconstruction should have happened and didn't.) It is very frustrating to watch white Richmonders fail to have any theory of mind or any ability to see the conflict in anything but starkest Manichean dichotomies (with themselves, of course, always as the "good" people). It's almost equally frustrating (though of course, not quite, because I don't think they're as manifestly wrong as the white people who can't understand why the enslaved people of Richmond are so happy not to be enslaved anymore) to watch the Northerners do the same thing, to fail to live up to Lincoln's Second Inaugural. (One of the amazing things that occurs in Richmond Burning is the visit of President Lincoln to Richmond, which is so surreal it's hard to believe it happened.)

Lankford is also very much aware of the potential unreliability of his sources, of how much, for example, Northerners wanted to see the white people of Richmond as either resigned to their defeat or actually relieved, when in fact, while that was true in some cases, it was not true in all or even most. White Richmonders, like white Southerners across the South, were not resigned to their defeat at all. So Lankford, while writing only five years after Klein (Days of Defiance), is much more alive to the schisms that the Civil War manifested---or caused---but could not mend.



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Review: Furguson, Not War But Murder (2000)

Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864 by Ernest B. Furgurson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about Cold Harbor, blow by terrible blow. Furguson (and, yes, it really is spelled with two u's, although if you want to find him on Amazon, you have to spell it Ferguson) is an excellent writer, very thoughtful and interested in reconstructing, as much as is possible, the psychology of the people involved, especially Meade and Grant, to figure out WHY Cold Harbor happened the way it did. Neither Meade nor Grant comes out of it looking terribly good, Meade for letting his wounded amour propre get in the way of doing his job, Grant for NOT PAYING ATTENTION to the effects of his orders.

Grant and Lee both have a certain amount of trouble---Lee not so much here, where all the Confederates were doing was holding a defensive line, but definitely at Gettysburg---wherein they want their generals to do their jobs without being told HOW. They want to be able to say, "Do this," and have their subordinates figure out how to make it happen. Sometimes this works out great (e.g., Lee and Jackson), and then sometimes it really really doesn't, as with Grant and Meade and their major generals at Cold Harbor, where the major generals desperately need someone who can see the big picture to be telling them, not so much what to do, as when to do it. They had no good way of coordinating attacks among themselves, and so they went haphazardly and without supporting each other, and the result of THAT was inevitable defeat.



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Review: Burton, The Siege of Charleston (1970)

The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865 by E. Milby Burton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So, yes, this book has the flaws you would expect from a history of the siege of Charleston originally published in 1970. He goes on about "honor" and "gallantry" and the magnificent spirit of Southern women and evinces no real recognition of Black people as having subject positions of their own.* Also, the writing lacks something which we might possibly call panache. It's clear and easy to follow (99% of the time), but there's no life in it.

On the other hand, if you ever want to write a story set during the siege of Charleston (I don't think I do, but you never know), E. Milby Burton is the guy who has figured out who were the officers, both Union and Confederate, involved in every piece of the siege (not, of course, the enlisted men). So if it's a matter of who was where when or what happened to a particular general, he's great.

Also, he told me about the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley, by which I was of course fascinated in the uneasy way I am always fascinated by submarines and submarine disasters. The career of the H. L. Hunley did not make me less uneasy.

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*Burton is not entirely wrong about the gallantry. There WAS distinct camaraderie between Union and Confederate soldiers. This WAS a war in which officers on both sides were expected to behave like gentlemen. And I don't want to sound like I don't know that the North was racist; many men were willing to fight to preserve the Union while being actively hostile to Black people. What I object to---well, one of the many things I object to---is the myth of Southern superiority. Southern women are more womanly and more spirited, Southern officers are more gallant (I hate the word "gallant"), the South is somehow the injured party in the Civil War---this being a pose Southern politicians had been perfecting for thirty years. I think this myth, like its concomitant myths of white superiority and the Lost Cause and so on and so forth, has done and is still doing tremendous amounts of damage.

So I believe that most white Southerners believed their own rhetoric implicitly; they weren't conscious hypocrites (well, at least, most of them). I just don't think we should talk about them without pointing out that their refined, civilized, GALLANT way of life was predicated on chattel slavery, and that that needs to be unpacked with a recognition of the equal humanity of the enslaved people.



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Review: Hicks & Kropf, Raising the Hunley (2002)

Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate Submarine by Brian Hicks

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book is by the reporters who covered the raising of the Hunley, and let me say first of all that they have done their homework. They have combed through the primary sources and laid out all the contradictions---which are legion: how many times did the Hunley sink before she was lost? 2? 3? 6?---and made their choices about which source to believe, and they have put together a quite readable story. The second part, about the raising of the Hunley, is based on their own reporting, and is likewise careful and in depth (so to speak). And it is not badly written.

I applaud the achievement of the people who raised the Hunley. But I also notice that Raising the Hunley very carefully frames the Civil War as States' Rights and agrarian vs. industrialized economies and does not talk about chattel slavery as a cause of the war at all. And that is both profoundly disingenuous and bad faith history.





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Review: Fellman, The Making of Robert E. Lee (2000)

The Making of Robert E. Lee by Michael Fellman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is really great. Fellman uses Robert E. Lee's letters and other writings to prove that he was (a) racist, so you can forget all those heartwarming stories about Lee being anything other than a bigot (b) kind of a jerk, honestly, and (c) not all that great a general. Fellman analyzes Lee's whole career, putting what Fellman calls the annus mirabilis in context, and it shows very clearly that the usual Robert E. Lee was NOT audacious, NOT a risk taker, NOT aggressive. Fellman spends a lot of time talking about the ideal of manhood that Lee was attempting to live up to, both Stoic and Christian, so lots of repression and self-control and passive acceptance of whatever befell you. It's just that for some reason, Lee had this one year where he was on fire.

(He doesn't say, but I think it may be important, that Lee was a brilliant general against McClellan (whose psychology he understood perfectly and also how to leverage it), Pope, and Hooker, all of whom made, objectively, enormous mistakes against him. It's easy to look good when your opponent is tripping over his own shoelaces. There was an enormous Union mistake at Gettysburg, too (his name was Dan Sickles), and Meade only barely kept from capsizing on Day 2, but Day 3 was just bad generalship on Lee's part.

(Grant made mistakes---Cold Harbor, anyone?---it's just that he didn't fall back because of them. Grant used the Union's superior numbers to brute force his ultimate success, not any kind of tactical genius.)

Anyway, this book is well-written and well-argued and gives a vivid portrait of Robert E. Lee.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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