Critic's Corner

Ralph G. Newman’s Union Book Shelf

By Stephen Davis · Originally published December 2016 · p. 33

In our last column, we related how Douglas Southall Freeman’s “Confederate Book Shelf,” published in 1939, led Ralph G. Newman of the Abraham Lincoln Book Shop to propose a Union counterpart. Newman talked about the project with Sherman biographer and fellow Chicagoan Lloyd Lewis, who was interested. But Lewis’ death in 1949 shelved… er, postponed it. So Newman on his own compiled what he hoped would be “an acceptable list of books relating to the Northern participation in the war of the sixties.” It was published in the very first three issues (March, June and September 1955) of Civil War History, the quarterly academic journal being produced then by the State University of Iowa. Newman’s listing is much longer than Freeman’s. Indeed, the compiler quickly acknowledged that he had included almost as many titles in just one category (“Personal Narratives, Diaries and Letters,” fifty) as had Dr. Freeman in his entire compilation (fifty-eight).

The Union Bookshelf: A Selected Civil War Bibliography. By Mullins & Reed. The complete “Union Book Shelf” includes more than 175 volumes. Newman broke most of them into a few categories (e.g., “Reference Works,” “Notable Biographies”), but almost a third, published in September 1955, were lumped together: everything from war causes to naval topics to women’s roles to newspaper reporters. The eclecticism itself is stimulating. Like Freeman, Newman offered no evaluative comment on his entries, allowing them to stand on their own. Exception is his comment on books about Ulysses S. Grant. “No Union list of personal narratives could possibly begin without the story of the victorious general,” Newman wrote. Indeed, he claimed that Grant’s two-volume Personal Memoirs (1885) “belong in any list of 100 great American books.” Newman considered his book shelf as preliminary, a work-inprogress. “The reader is reminded,” he wrote in June 1955, “that these listings are by no means final or definitive.” He encouraged comments and recommendations from Civil War History readers. In subsequent issues of the journal, however, one does not see a mailbag of responses leading to an updating or lengthening of “The Union Book Shelf.” Sort of as an addendum, though, Newman in December 1955 published a listing of his favorites in the category of “Civil War Fiction” (yes, Gone With the Wind is among his six “best,” as is The Red Badge of Courage). Once more, he asked Civil War History readers to send him their lists of six best novels of the war. But again, he got no responses worthy of publishing, at least as I see in the first several years of the journal. Its issue of June 1957 carried Newman’s “Basic Lincolniana,” best books on the president, but after that, the Chicago bibliophile ceased his columns altogether. So Newman’s “Union Book Shelf” stands as it was published in mid1955. A mere perusal will confirm how, more than a half-century later, the books he thought important before the Civil War Centennial in many cases still are. Example is Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac: Mr. Lincoln’s Army (1951), Glory Road (1952) and A Stillness at Appomattox (1953). Some entries remind us of how the Union won the Civil War in the first place, e.g., George E. Turner’s Victory Rode the Rails (1953). At the same time, Newman’s listing from the 1950s attests to just how far the military history of the war has progressed. Earl Schenck Miers’ The Web of Victory: Grant at Vicksburg (1955) is the only title treating one of the most decisive campaigns of the Civil War. Nowadays, with the accomplished work of Michael Ballard, Terrence Winschel and others, no purposeful student would even think of going to Miers’ entertaining but dated volume. A generation later, we might note, Michael Mullins and Rowena Reed compiled The Union Bookshelf: A Selected Civil War Bibliography (Wendell, N.C.: Broadfoot’s Bookmark, 1982). It lists nearly 250 books, including such expected classics as Sherman’s and Sheridan’s memoirs, but also magna opera like John J. Pullen’s The Twentieth Maine: A Volunteer Regiment in the Civil War (1957), which the compilers rate as “the best unit history of the Civil War.” Such glowing commendations, of course, risk being engulfed by the tides of time. For me, the fact that bibliophiles can still speak of

Confederate and Union Book Shelves as separate entities reminds one of the old saw that the victors write the history.* Either way, the literature of winning and losing in our American Civil War will continue to fascinate us for a long time to come.

*I like the variant offered by the Irish folk proverb: “Those in power write the history, those who suffer write the songs.” Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor. His new book, A Long and Bloody Task:

The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, has just been published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series. The companion volume, carrying the Atlanta Campaign to the city’s surrender on September 2, 1864, will be published early next year.