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Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private LettersReading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters by Elizabeth Brown Pryor

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I have very conflicting feelings about this book.

On the one hand, I love the concept. It's a biography of Robert E. Lee where each chapter's starting point is a letter or letters (mostly written by Lee, some written to him, and a few written about him). And Pryor does a great job of using the letters as launching points to talk about the different phases and aspects of Lee's life. It doesn't feel gimmicky at all. Pryor is an excellent writer and a thorough historian, so the book is a pleasure to read.

On the other hand, while I support and admire her determination to talk about Robert E. Lee as he was, not as he was hagiographied, and while she is persistent in pointing out his flaws, I find some of her philosophy, like the idea that Lee's decision to fight for the Confederacy was a noble decision because he "followed his heart," highly questionable. A bad decision is still a bad decision, even if it's made sincerely, and as some of her other chapters make clear, Lee made that bad decision because he fully bought into his culture's beliefs about the superiority of the white race and the utter inferiority of Black people. She also thinks Lee should get big kudos for surrendering at Appomattox (rather than perpetuating a guerilla war) and persuading his soldiers to follow his example, and I'm like, yes, that was the right decision, but couldn't he have made it six months earlier? HOW many men died because Lee couldn't admit the defeat staring him in the face? And she makes statements in discussing Appomattox and the end of the war like "The dignified relinquishment of command is among the most ennobling of American traditions" (441) which I think blurs the line between relinquishment of command, like a president stepping down after his term is up (and she uses John Quincy Adams and Harry Truman as examples, so she really is thinking of presidents), and the surrender of an army. Lee's not relinquishing command; he's accepting defeat. Totally different.

Basically, I think she rejects hagiography and then circles back around to it anyway.

I think Lee is a fascinating figure. I think he had a year where he (and Stonewall Jackson) was a great general. I think Pryor does a really excellent job of showing why he made the decisions he did. I also think he was wrong, wrong, wrong, and I DON'T think you can ignore the ideology he supported when you are deciding whether he is a heroic figure or not.

So this is an excellent book, but I disagree with it a lot.




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A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil WarA World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War by Amanda Foreman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is SO GOOD.

I hoped it would be interesting, but it is both fascinating and beautifully written. Foreman discusses Britain's role from the governmental to the personal level, tracking the careers of several people, mostly diplomats and politicians British, Federal, and Confederate and British volunteers with the Union or Confederate Army---of which there were way more than you would think---but also people like Rose Greenhow and Belle Boyd. Foreman writes about diplomats and privates with the same care and focus and has done a wonderful job of ferreting out letters and memoirs, both of the people she is following and of the people they interacted with. She also does a really excellent job of guiding her readers through the Civil War. I never felt lost or confused, and my attention did not flag through the whole 800 page* book

Highly recommended and obviously five stars.

___
*not counting endnotes and the glossary which, as with so many glossaries, would have been more helpful if I'd known about it on page 1, instead of on page 917



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Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862Shiloh and the Western Campaign of 1862 by O. Edward Cunningham

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This was Dr. Cunningham's Ph.D. thesis. It is the result of a prodigious amount of research. The 2007 editors (Dr. Cunningham died in 1997) claim that the thesis is "extremely well written," and I regret to inform you that that is not true. I found him hard to follow, and especially got bogged down in the endless roll calls of troop dispositions (e.g., "The Kentucky Unionist [Crittenden] chose to attack with his Fourteenth Brigade, commanded by Colonel William Sooy Smith, a thirty-one year old West Point-trained Ohioan. Smith had the Thirteenth Ohio, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Hawkins, on the left, the Twenty-sixth Kentucky on the right, Lieutenant Colonel Cicero Maxwell, and the Eleventh Kentucky, Colonel Pierce Hawkins, in reserve. The Fourteenth Wisconsin, Colonel David Wood, was attached to the brigade, and it fought to the right of the Twenty-sixth" (353-54)---and this is a relatively small and restrained example). I get why the troop dispositions are an important part of Cunningham's thesis (so much research!), but that doesn't make them any easier to wade through. And otherwise, no, like most Ph.D. theses including my own, Shiloh is very clunkily written and I don't come away feeling like I understand the battle any better than I did before. I know more, if I can retain any of it, but I feel like I'm drowning in details (including awkwardly inserted human-interest anecdotes) and never got anything really to hang those details on.

So, yes, amazing research, kind of hard to read. It took me forever to get through it, partly because I kept putting it down to go read other things.



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General Lee's Army: From Victory to CollapseGeneral Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse by Joseph T. Glatthaar

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is, as the title suggests, a history of the Army of Northern Virginia. It is partly based on socioeconomic data analysis, so Glatthaar can, based on his sample of 600 soldiers, talk about what percentage of soldiers were slaveholders, how much wealth they had (which ranged dramatically from $0 to over $10,000), etc. He does a good job of explaining why the South thought the war started without falling into the error of defending their point of view. This is a history, not an apologia.

Talking about the Army of Northern Virginia is difficult because the soldiers suffered dreadfully---from lack of basic equipment like shoes and pants, from disease, from the awful meat grinder that was a Civil War battlefield---and they sincerely and passionately believed that they were fighting for liberty. And could not see that fighting for the liberty to own other people is the cruelest of paradoxes, just as they could not understand why their slaves fled to the Northern lines by the thousands. Maybe it's that disjunct that fascinates me.

Considered as an army, the Army of Northern Virginia accomplished amazing things, and Glaatthaar does a great job of describing what battles looked like from the South's point of view, which I found an interesting..."corrective" is not the word I want, but it's like reading about the Civil War backwards.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Battle Cry of FreedomBattle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


One volume history of the American Civil War, soup to nuts.

I did not enjoy this book as much as I enjoyed the Catton. McPherson is much drier than Catton and is not really trying for a NARRATIVE history; he has narrative chapters interleaved with thematic chapters, which enables him to cover a LOT of ground, but he does come off, just very slightly, like a textbook. (It's part of the Oxford History of the United States, so it's possible that should be considered a feature rather than a bug.)

On the other hand, if you want a comprehensive one volume history of the Civil War, McPherson is definitely your guy. He talks about just about everything, and his bibliographic note at the end points to more in-depth books. (Granted, it's thirty-five years out of date.) And although dry, he explains things well.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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Gettysburg: A Testing of CourageGettysburg: A Testing of Courage by Noah Andre Trudeau

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the third book I've read about Gettysburg (the other two being Gettysburg and Gettysburg: The Last Invasion), and in some ways the most incoherent, as Trudeau does his best to recount the battle blow by blow. (Obviously, this is an impossible dream, but the effort is impressive.) He uses primary sources from Union officers and enlisted men, Confederate officers and enlisted men, and citizens of Gettysburg, which all together provide a kind of kaleidoscopic view of July 1st through 3rd, 1863. (Yes, purely by serendipity, I was reading about the battle of Gettysburg on the 160th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg.) He isn't as good as either Sears or Guelzo at providing a framework to hang the individual vignettes on---he's more interested in what's happening to the guys on the ground than he is in what the generals thought they were doing, which is a quite justifiable prioritization of material (I certainly prefer it to histories that are only interested in what the generals think), but it does mean that his recounting, form following content, is chaotic.



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Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History (Civil War America)Lee Considered: General Robert E. Lee and Civil War History by Alan T. Nolan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Nolan has a very specific project, which is to take apart the myth of Robert E. Lee, piece by piece, using evidence from Lee's own writings and actions to show that the myth is not the truth. This is rather stiffly written, but Nolan does a great job both of disassembling the mythic Robert E. Lee and of showing why the myth became necessary to mainstream (white) America in the years after the Civil War.

In particular, I liked Nolan's emphasis on not taking what Lee himself said about his actions at face value, as most Lee biographers up to 1991 had done. Nolan demonstrates that Lee was extremely gifted at self-justification, and particularly at the bit of circular reasoning that goes "the thing I want to do is honorable because I want to do it" (which is very different from "I want to do the honorable thing"). I also liked Nolan sorting out the different levels of strategy it's possible to look at, from the general's strategy of campaign to his government's strategy of the war (subdivided into the official strategy and the true strategy). The CSA had no official strategy, which is arguably part of their problem, but their true strategy was---had to be---to outlast the North, not to defeat them. So every time Lee won a brilliant but costly victory, he was working at cross-purposes to the best strategy the CSA had. He may have been a brilliant tactical general, but his much-vaunted audacity and aggression were great only so long as the CSA had the manpower to support them. Which was not really very long.



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The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic IdeologyThe Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology by Kate Ferguson Ellis

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book, about the Gothic from Walpole to Shelley, with a great epilogue on Emily Bronte, is arguing that the Gothic is about the Fall, and about the way the Fall changes the enclosed space of the Garden (represented by the home---she also talks a lot about the ideology of separate spheres and about changing theories of child-rearing in the 18th century); it becomes either a prison you can't get out of or a refuge you can't reach, and changes from one to the other depending on where you are. (So it may start out as a refuge you can't reach, but when you overcome your trials and tribulations to reach it, it becomes a prison.) It also depends on whether you are male or female. Women are mostly imprisoned; men are mostly exiled. I found her lens extremely useful as a way of sorting out what happens in Gothic novels---and of course immediately thought of Hill House, which is the epitome of both the home post-Fall and the prison you can't get out of.

It is a theory-informed book, but it is not theory-heavy. It's a LITTLE on the dense side, but extremely readable for an academic book.

Four and a half stars, round up to five.



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The Army of the Potomac, 3 VolsThe Army of the Potomac, 3 Vols by Bruce Catton

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Vol. 1: Mr. Lincoln's Army
Vol. 2: Glory Road
Vol. 3: A Stillness at Appomattox

I liked this trilogy of books SLIGHTLY less well than the Centennial History of the Civil War, and that mostly for a reason that Catton points out himself: the story of the Army of the Potomac is really the same story told over and over again: the best efforts of the soldiers doomed by bad generalship to failure (drink once if the bad general is McClellan, drink twice if the bad general is Burnside, chug if the bad general is Hooker). And then there's Grant, who was not at all a bad general, but who had a completely different idea of how you fought a war. In the Centennial History, Catton had a much broader canvas and a wider variety of incidents to work with.

But The Army of the Potomac Trilogy is still beautifully and thoughtfully written (a quick example: "Grant had a basilisk's gaze. He could sit, whittling and smoking, looking off beyond the immediate scene, and what he was looking at was likely to come down in blood and ashes and crashing sound a little later."); Catton uses his primary sources to excellent effect, and he is incredibly good at making a coherent narrative out of something that at the time was neither, without ever losing track of how bewildering and dispiriting events were for the men who lived through them (or didn't live through them, which is its own part of the story).



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The English Civil War: A People's HistoryThe English Civil War: A People's History by Diane Purkiss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As an introduction to the English Civil War, this book is unfortunately confusing. She starts out chronological, but does not stay that way, and for the last third of the book, until the last chapter, I really wasn't sure where Charles I was or what he was doing, and I don't feel like I came away with a clear understanding of any of the sets of negotiations that went on (and failed), whether between Charles and the Scots or between the New Model Army and Parliament.

What this book DOES do extremely well is give vivid portraits of the people involved, from Charles himself (and his controversy-magnet queen) to the citizens of London and the soldiers in Parliament's army. She does a great job of showing, through primary materials, what people on both sides (or, I suppose, all three sides) thought and why they thought it. (I loved her lengthy detour into the life of John Milton; she captured both why I hate him and why he is nevertheless rightly considered a major English poet.) And she talks a lot about women: queens and prophets and chatelaines left holding the bag when their husbands rode off to war.

She also does a good job of conveying how horrible the English Civil War was, the way that both armies spent more time pillaging than fighting, the way that, as the war went on and the propaganda on all sides got worse and worse, men's ideas of what it was okay to do to the enemy got more violent and dehumanizing.

So for a grasp of chronology and how events fit together, this is not a good book. But for a sense of the people involved and the human cost of war, it is an excellent book.



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Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century EnglandReligion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England by Keith Thomas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


800 (eight hundred) pages, dripping with primary source material, about astrology, witchcraft, and magic---and religion---in early modern England. Despite the suggestion of the title, Thomas is not arguing that religion CAUSED the decline of magic, although he does talk about why magic declined and religion did not.

The book is well-written, wide-ranging, and despite being 52 years old, does not feel terribly dated. A little old-fashioned, maybe (although that's partly the swarms of footnotes)---he's not using the various lenses that later historians are so fond of (Marxism, feminism, -ism, -ism, -ism), and there aren't any rhetorical tricks. No starting with an attention-grabbing anecdote or trying to interweave arguments or anything of the sort. Do not get me wrong; I think rhetorical tricks are great, except when all they're doing is hiding the lack of actual historiography going on, and I approve of feminism and Marxism and most of the other -isms. But I ALSO note that Sir Keith (he was knighted in 1988) is writing good historiography without any of that. He's also much easier to follow than he would be if he were pursuing an -ism, and in a book of this length and density, clarity is very decidedly a virtue.



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Volume 1: The Coming Fury
Volume 2: Terrible Swift Sword
Volume 3: Never Call Retreat

This is a comprehensive overview of the American Civil War, written by a man with a gorgeous prose style who did his research. I don't agree with him everywhere---he's far more enamored of Robert E. Lee than I am, and he hasn't entirely let go of the idea that the American Civil War had a shred of romance in it, although for the most part he is very good on the terrible cost of the war on both sides---but I love his writing and I love the control he has over his material: he goes back and forth from theater to theater, and from North to South, and I don't think I was ever confused. He does a great job with Mr. Lincoln's progress from "I will never interfere with slavery in states where it is already established" through the Emancipation Proclamation to "no, really, all men are created equal, how about that Thirteenth Amendment?" tracing the change step by step. This is a military and political history written in the 60s, so it's almost all about the viewpoints of white men (he quotes Mary Boykin Chesnut a couple of times, Frederick Douglass I think once), but you know how the train is going to roll when you buy your ticket.

Given that it's sixty years old and concomitantly dated, I do think this is a good place to start if you want to know more about the American Civil War.

Five stars.
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Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall JacksonRebel Yell: The Violence, Passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S.C. Gwynne

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


So okay. This is a massive (almost 600 page) biography of Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. It is excellent. Gwynne has a lovely, easy prose style, has done his research, and is able to explain battles so they make sense (or as much sense as they can make---there are several points where he has to say, "no one knows why General X did this"). He is careful about chattel slavery, acknowledging it as a cause of the Civil War, putting it in the context of the OTHER causes of the Civil War, and trying to show the spectrum of attitudes people both North and South had about the subject---and the spectrum of other reasons Southern people were fighting. For me, chattel slavery is at the root of it, and Gwynne acknowledges that slavery was part of the way of life in the South even for people who did not own other people themselves, but many (most?) Southerners believed they were fighting for other reasons. I can think they're wrong---consider the contradiction of people announcing that they are fighting for their liberty when part of their definition of "liberty" is their right to own other people---and I do, but I can't argue that they didn't believe what they clearly PASSIONATELY believed. Both Lee and Jackson were profoundly loyal to the state of Virginia, and for them that trumped everything else (like "my country, right or wrong," which is itself a highly problematic moral/ethical stance). Jackson was anti-secession right up to the point that secession happened, and then he flipped a switch and said, "Okay, let's burn them down": Military men make short speeches, and as for myself I am no hand at talking anyhow. The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon. And when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard (p. 29). Jackson wanted, at the BEGINNING of the war, to burn down Baltimore and Philadelphia, to pursue, essentially, the strategy that Grant and Sherman and Sheridan employed at the END of the war, to make the war so costly that the other side would yield. Of course nobody listened to him.

Jackson is a strange study in contrasts. A gentle, kind, shy, devoutly religious man who loved his wife (both 1st and 2nd) deeply, who loved European art and architecture...and who was a stone cold killer. Also a tactical and strategic genius. One of the things this book made me think about was whether Lee doesn't get unfairly lionized when the magic seems to have resided in the COMBINATION of Lee and Jackson. Most of Lee's great victories came because he told Jackson, "Do this," and Jackson went and did it. (Jackson also did extremely, CRUSHINGLY well on his own, which is...less true about Lee.) I think I commented on my review of one of the books about Gettysburg that a lot of Lee's problem was his hands off style of generalship, but it makes more sense seeing that that was exactly how it worked best with Jackson.

(I'm sure I am not the first person to think this, but I haven't yet read a book that makes that argument.)

I did not end up LIKING Stonewall Jackson, but I did end up understanding him---or, maybe more accurately, understanding the fundamental knot of his personality that can't really be teased apart and understood.



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Before Antietam: The Battle for South MountainBefore Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain by John Michael Priest

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is an incredibly detailed account, using a host of primary sources (letters and diaries and memoirs and basically anything any of the people who were there ever wrote or said about it), of the ten days leading up to the battle of Antietam. Priest gives roughly equal time to both sides and as much attention to the enlisted men as to the officers. We see much less of the upper echelons (except J.E.B. Stuart being J.E.B. Stuart)---certainly much less than you would get in a more conventional historiography of South Mountain---so this is very much the worm's eye view. It is so detailed it's actually a little hard to follow what's going on, which is a very dim reflection of what it was like to be there.

The maps are equally detailed; I honestly found them all but impossible to read.



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Last in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West PointLast in Their Class: Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point by James S. Robbins

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I found this book (subtitle, "Custer, Pickett and the Goats of West Point") unsatisfying. It's partly a history of West Point, partly a set of mini-biographies of the men who finished last in their class (the Goats) at West Point, and partly, at the end, a biography of Custer in the couple of years leading up to Little Big Horn. It talks about Pickett, but does not single him out as much as the subtitle would suggest.

It does none of these things particularly well.

It teeters on the edge of the hagiographic in its mini-biographies and is much more concerned about the friendships between West Point graduates than it is about any of the causes of the Civil War. He quotes Morris Schaff saying, "My heart leaps with pride, for on that day two West Point men met, with more at stake than has ever fallen to the lot of two Americans to decide....These two West Point men knew the ideals of their old Alma Mater, they knew each other only as graduates of that institution know each other, and they met on the plane of that common knowledge....The greatest hour that has ever come in the march of our country's years was on that April day when Grant and Lee shaped the terms at Appomattox." And Robbins goes on, "And the next day as well, when the healing began, when the United States was reborn; when classmates and brothers came together reunited in purpose and friendship..." (305). Which makes it sound like the end of the Civil War was based on the old boys' network of West Point. WHICH MAY BE TRUE. But if it IS true, I would like some examination of what that means in a whole host of contexts, not just beaming pride. With this lens, the brotherhood of white men is certainly considered far more important than the emancipation of Black people. Which could be a searing indictment of white patriarchy and privilege...but is not.

I've read too many biographies of Custer (4? 5?) to be very impressed with Robbins's rehashing of the same old facts, and I'm not quite sure why Custer gets singled out, aside from the fact that he's the most famous Goat, and his last couple of years HAVE been chronicled in exhaustive detail. I would at least have liked to have seen a tally of the Goats who died in battle, because the impression I got is that it was definitely the majority. Which, again, could be an elegy to all this passion and skill lost to the U.S. in war after war after war, but is---insofar as there's any summing up at all---simply a source of pride.

The only thing Robbins get heated up about is the abolishment of the official Goat in the 1970s as counter to the ideals and purpose of West Point (unofficially, cadets continue to keep track of their class rankings, so the Goat is still celebrated). Robbins defends the Goat as "not the product of defeatism but one of esprit[....] Competing for the coveted hindmost spot required a certain audacity and courage, traits with which Custer, Pickett and the rest would be on familiar terms" (411). (He's arguing that the brinksmanship involved in doing badly enough to be last, but NOT badly enough to wash out is a marker of merit rather than shame.) And that probably is the thesis of his book: academic standing is not a predictor of success, and Goats have more audacity and courage than those with class ranks higher than theirs. Which is okay as a thesis, but not great.



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Receding Tide: Vicksburg and Gettysburg: The Campaigns That Changed the Civil War Receding Tide: Vicksburg and Gettysburg: The Campaigns That Changed the Civil War by Edwin C. Bearss

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So Edwin C. Bearss was the Chief Historian Emeritus of the National Park Service. His specialty was American Civil War battlefield history. This book is his discussion of Vicksburg and Gettysburg, which he says mark the point at which the Confederate tide of success started to recede, hence the title. It reads like someone who gave battlefield talks all their life---which is not a disparagement, that must be one of the harder possible historian jobs---with lots of specific names and little bits of anecdote. His discussion is chronological and includes a lot of the build-up to Gettysburg, so for most of the book he goes back and forth between the eastern and western theaters of the war. The book has good transitions between sites, is smoothly written and easy to follow, and provides a little bit of a play by play feel. Not that other books on these battles are not detailed and exhaustive, but they don't slip into the historical present tense as Bearss does.



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[Guildenstern picks up a piece of paper]
Guildenstern: Well, this can be recycled.
Rosencrantz: But!
Guildenstern: But what?
Rosencrantz: But it's a piece of paper WITH WRITING ON IT.
Guildenstern: ...so?
Rosencrantz: So what if it's IMPORTANT?
Guildenstern: [looks at piece of paper] I guarantee you this is not important.
Rosencrantz: [very dubiously] Well, if you're SURE.
Guildenstern: I am very, very sure. Off it goes. [puts paper in TO BE RECYCLED pile]
[Guildenstern picks up the next piece of paper]
Guildenstern: Well, this can be recycled.
Rosencrantz: But!

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
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The lovely people at Open Road Media are publishing the entire quartet in e-book. They're available for pre-order now, and will be published July 11.

I am so very happy about this. Words cannot even.
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The Making of Robert E. LeeThe 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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Raising the Hunley: The Remarkable History and Recovery of the Lost Confederate SubmarineRaising 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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