Technical Difficulties

Battle 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 (Granted, it's thirty-five years out of date.)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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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 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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Religion 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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Rebel 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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Last 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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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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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.

---
*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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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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A World of Darkness: Cotton Mather and the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials by David W Price

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book was very disappointing. It's about Cotton Mather and the Salem witchcraft crisis, which is a very interesting juxtaposition of person and historical event, since Cotton Mather has become a byword for Puritanism and bigotry and ignorance largely because of his part in what happened in Salem, and yet when you go and look, his part in what happened in Salem is actually quite small. He attended one hanging and he wrote a hot mess of a book trying to defend the judges. At no point was he out there hunting down witches himself; at no point was he the one condemning people to death. (And when you read about Cotton Mather, as for example Kenneth Silverman's excellent biography, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, you discover that in fact he was about as UNbigoted and UNignorant as anybody in colonial New England.)

So what Price is trying to do is to demonstrate that (1) Mather's participation in the Salem witchcraft crisis is commensurate and consistent with his other writings on witchcraft, both before and after, and (2) Mather's participation in the Salem witchcraft crisis was limited and ambiguous, his book The Wonders of the Invisible World being largely written in what Silverman calls "Matherese," which is a textual mode of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. It is also a mode of sometimes astonishing passive-aggressiveness, in which Mather habitually indicates what he wants by pretending he has no interest in it.

A World of Darkness started as a Ph.D. thesis and it seriously still reads like one, meaning that it is clunky clunky clunky. All the gears are showing. (The only person I have ever read who could get away with this is James West Davidson, whose book The Logic of Millenial Thought makes a brilliant virtue of its defects.) And Price doesn't have the writing chops to get away from the thesis-evidence-analysis-link paragraph structure that, while it gets the job done, is so very awkward.

That's not the disappointing part, though. The disappointing part is two-fold. (1) that Price says nothing new and (2) that Price is a sloppy historian. (1) is probably a measure of how much reading I've done about Salem (and, I suppose, about Cotton Mather). (2) is what truly irritated me. Price gets things weirdly wrong, like saying that the first two afflicted girls were both Samuel Parris's daughters when one of them was Parris's niece (I know this seems trivial, but it's right there in their names. Betty Parris is the daughter of Samuel Parris. Abigail Williams...is not.) He also doesn't discriminate between "affliction" and "possession," although they were considered different problems and if you've read John Demos, who is in Price's bibliography, you know that. The afflicted girls (and women and men) in Salem were NOT possessed---affliction was inflicted on you by a witch, possession you brought upon yourself by trying to be a witch. One is an innocent victim, one is not.) In one place he elides Mary Sibley from the story, saying that the counter-magic urine cake (you bake the afflicted girls' urine into a rye cake and feed it to the dog) was Tituba's idea, while in another place he recognizes that Tituba was doing what Mary Sibley told her to do. He says for some reason that Giles Corey's death (pressed to death) was unintentional, which I have never seen anyone else claim and which is clearly false if you read the contemporary account of it. And he conflates brothers Samuel Sewell (trial judge) and Stephen Sewell (trial clerk). Again, I recognize this is a relatively minor detail, but it's also easy to get right. (Also, yes, I obviously have done a lot of reading about Salem, but not more than someone ought to who wrote their Ph.D. dissertation on it.)

So, yeah. If this book has a right audience, I am not it.

Two and a half stars, round up (grudgingly) to three.



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