Critic's Corner

A Conversation with Grady McWhiney

By Stephen Davis · Originally published January 2018 · pp. 32–33

For many in the Civil War community, Grady McWhiney is a familiar name. Longtime university professor, author of numerous books and articles, Dr. McWhiney had established himself as one of the nation’s preeminent Civil War historians by the time of his death in 2006. Recently, quite by chance, I came upon a newsletter of the Houston Civil War Round Table from the summer of 1993. Its feature article, written by Joyce Claypool (Round Table Secretary at the time), is “A Conversation with Grady McWhiney.” Reading it is like being able to talk with the late, great historian, sitting across the breakfast table, as Joyce was able to do a quartercentury ago. I thank the Houston CWRT for allowing me to reprint portions of this newsletter article on the McWhiney-Claypool interview.

But first, some background on the man himself. Born in Shreveport, La., in 1928, McWhiney graduated from Centenary College there and then took his master’s degree from LSU, studying under the renowned Francis Butler Simkins. Professor Simkins both recognized and encouraged young McWhiney’s skills as historian. The mentor and student collaborated on a scholarly article on the Ku Klux Klan which was published in the Negro History Bulletin in 1951. McWhiney was 23. Then it was off to New York, where McWhiney pursued the doctorate at Columbia under David Donald. It may have been Professor Donald who helped the young scholar land a plum assignment: writing the Foreword to a new edition (1957) of Lee’s Dispatches, which had first appeared in 1915 as edited by Douglas Southall Freeman. Three years later he earned his Ph.D., writing his dissertation on Confederate General Braxton Bragg. This work turned into Braxton Bragg and Confederate Defeat— Volume I: Field Command, which traced Bragg’s life to the spring of 1863. At the time of its publication in 1969, the author was teaching at the University of British Columbia. The volume’s dust cover promised that “Volume II of this work will consider Bragg’s later career.” There would prove to be no Volume II. Instead, McWhiney collected some of his published articles and added new ones for Southerners and Other Americans (1973). By then he was teaching at Wayne State University; he and his wife Sue were making the academic circuit, as many historians do. For a lot of us, it was Attack and Die (1982) which brought Grady McWhiney to our attention. Co-written with Perry Jamieson, the book argues that “Confederates bled themselves nearly to death in the first three years of the war by making costly attacks more often than did the Federals.” They never caught on to the defensive power of the rifled musket because they were “imprisoned in a culture that rejected careful calculation and patience.” Southerners’ penchant for headlong charges, the authors argued, was part of their Celtic heritage. McWhiney developed this idea further in Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (1988). While the Northern American colonies were principally settled by migrants from the southeastern half of Britain, McWhiney asserts, the American South drew “migrants from the Celtic regions of the British Isles—Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall.” From these upland areas the new Americans brought their cultural customs to the large area stretching from Virginia to Georgia. Southerners and Northerners at the time of the Civil War considered themselves as somehow different peoples. The charm of Cracker Culture is how McWhiney argues that the folk of the antebellum North and South really were different peoples.

…Which brings us up to 1993, and Joyce Claypool’s interview with McWhiney. Joyce wanted to know how he got started in his career as a historian. M: I wanted to do graduate work at LSU, but I didn’t know if I was going to be admitted. A friend of mine who had been offered a job coaching football as Lampasas, Texas, offered me a job as a backfield coach. I said I would take the job if I hadn’t heard anything from the history department at LSU within the next week. A couple of days later, I heard that I’d been admitted, so I didn’t become an assistant football coach at Lampasas, Texas! So I went to graduate school at LSU and met a most exciting man, and it wasn’t Harry Williams. Harry was there; I took his course and I liked him and his course, but the man that fascinated me and directed my Master’s thesis was a South Carolinian named Francis Butler Simkins. He was a great eccentric, so much so that he couldn’t make his colleagues happy. He was marvelous with graduate students and he gave me my first real lessons in how to write. He became a kind of role model, I suppose. C: I was going to ask you if you had a mentor. M: Oh, yes. He was my mentor, and I acknowledged him as such. He left LSU after the year that I spent there. I would have stayed with him had he stayed at LSU, but there was no one that I was that committed to, and he urged me to go—as he had gone years before—to the big city, New York, and go to Columbia. When I got there, it was suggested that I stay with David Donald, a new faculty member, a Mississippian. He had studied with J.G. Randall at Illinois. I was taken in by Donald’s Mississippi charm, and got in his seminar. I was very happy to become one of his students. He would write more in the margins and on the back of your paper than you had written, and he frightened us to death. One of the first students to turn in a paper and be criticized didn’t come back—he transferred to the University of Indiana and got a degree there. He wasn’t up to Donald’s standards, and that just frightened us—we didn’t want to turn in a paper, because we were afraid of what was going to happen. But his bark was a little worse than his bite. C: What do you like to do best? Teach, do research, write, or is it a combination of all three? M: It’s a combination. There’s nothing that excites me more than writing a good paragraph or page, or a few pages, but it’s also the hardest work, I think, in the world. I’m too lazy, too Celtic, too Southern to want to do that all the time. It’s exhausting, it wears me out. I like to mix other things with it. I like research. The most exciting research I’ve ever done in my life was when Forrest McDonald and I, before we left Wayne State, had written an article on the livestock industry in the antebellum South, and we tied that in with the Celtic heritage. There were more things we didn’t know about that thesis than we knew at the time, but we decided to pursue it. C: Of the books that you’ve done, do you have a favorite? M: Yeah, Cracker Culture is my favorite, because I tried to write that for “crackers” as much—if not more—than for academics. And I think the crackers have appreciated it more and understood it. I have gotten so many letters and so many people have called me about that book, more than anything I’ve ever done. I felt it was a chance for me to talk about my heritage, and I didn’t care whether the academics would appreciate it or not. C: Is there any single book that you find yourself going back to re-read? M: Let me talk about people. I think more about Lee than I used to, and I think less of Grant. I’m probably more sympathetic, more understanding of Braxton Bragg than I used to be. I think one of the reasons I gave up on Bragg after one volume was that I didn’t feel he was worth spending another five or six years on. I now think he was, and I think Judith Hallock, who finished the biography, demonstrated that. She can take credit for understanding Bragg in a way that I probably could not have. I have lost some of my regard for Joe Johnston. On the other hand, my admiration for Forrest has increased. C: How has your mind moved on Jackson? M: I’m still slightly negative on Jackson. I realize the man’s strengths, but I guess I’ve gained some sympathy for his critics. He could use up men so quickly, and I think he should have been more conscious of the fact that this was the South’s Achilles heel—they had a limited number of men, and it was the loss of so many that destroyed the South. I feel there was just so much reckless loss of men by Jackson. C: Who do you think were the South’s best generals? M: Lee, clearly, But Lee’s perfect. After that it becomes individualized…Forrest is certainly unbelievably able, but whether he could have commanded a large army…. C: Who do you like in the Union generals? M: Well, I like Sherman, personally, but I think he was lucky as well as good. I like Thomas reasonably well; I think he was a tough, stubborn nut. I think John Reynolds was an able man, and I think that Hancock was a professional in the strict sense. Ms. Claypool closed her interview by telling the Houston Round Table readers, “We’ll keep you posted on Grady’s projects.” McWhiney’s projects were varied, and always interesting. Teaching: toward the end of his career he taught at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, and at McMurry University in Abilene. And lecturing: he gave a talk at Southeastern Louisiana University at its Plain Folk of the South Symposium in spring 1996. Promoting history: he established the Grady McWhiney Foundation to foster work in Southern and Civil War history. The foundation had its own press, which produced a paperback series, “Civil War Campaigns and Commanders,” edited by Dr. McWhiney himself. (For it he wrote Battle in the Wilderness: Grant Meets Lee [1995]). And writing: The Civil War: A Concise Account by a Noted Southern Historian was published in 2005. …the year before his death in Abilene, April 18, 2006, at age 77. One of the last questions Joyce Claypool asked Grady

McWhiney across their breakfast table in Houston, May 1993, had to do with publishing. “I believe there is a large number of people who want more on the Civil War,” he answered. Now, a quarter-century later, we are heartened to believe that what the great historian thought then is what we can still think now: “there is a large number of people who want more on the Civil War.” Steve Davis of Atlanta is a regular contributor to Civil War News and is the Book Review Editor. His book, A Long and Bloody Task: The Atlanta Campaign from Dalton through Kennesaw Mountain to the Chattahoochee River May 5-July 18, 1864, was published as part of Savas Beatie’s Emerging Civil War paperback series. The companion volume, All The Fighting They Want: The Atlanta Campaign From Peachtree Creek To The City’s Surrender, July 18-September 2, 1864, was published Spring 2017.