C. Michael Harrington’s Top Ten Civil War Books

Originally published November 2020 · pp. 21–22

C. Michael Harrington’s Top Ten Civil War Books 1. Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War by Richard Taylor. D. Appleton & Company, 1879. Richard Taylor’s war memoirs are my favorite Civil War title for several reasons. First, Taylor the soldier intrigues me. Despite a lack of military education and experience, Taylor steadily advanced from colonel to lieutenant general, making him the Confederacy’s highest ranking officer with no West Point training. I also admire Taylor’s lively writing style, one devoid of the turgid prose so common among Civil War memoirists. Douglas Southall Freeman considered

Taylor the only member of the Confederate high command with “real literary ability.” Taylor’s characterization of the laconic Stonewall Jackson is a good example of his gift for language: “If silence be golden, he was a ‘bonanza.’” Taylor’s opinionated candor also makes his book thought provoking. As one example, Taylor alleges that, had his superior officer, General Kirby Smith, acceded to Taylor’s urging in the Red River Campaign to pursue with his full force General Nathaniel Banks’ retreating Federal army, Taylor would have bagged Banks and then marched south to liberate lightly defended New Orleans, changing the course of the war in the West. 2. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War edited by C. Vann Woodward. Yale University Press, 1981. By birth and marriage, Mary Chesnut belonged to South Carolina’s antebellum plantation aristocracy. She kept a diary throughout the war, and I am one of those who regard her diary as the most important Civil War writing by a Southerner. Mrs. Chesnut seems to have been everywhere of importance during the war. At the outset, she witnessed the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Later, she was in Montgomery, Ala., when the Confederate government was formed. Much of the war she was in Richmond, where her husband was an aide to President Davis. Disqualified by gender from government or military service, Mrs. Chesnut was a frequent guest in the salons and drawing rooms of upper-class Southern society where she came to know so many principal figures of the Confederate government and it’s military. The insights into these men that she confided to her diary make for good reading. A critic of slavery, Mrs. Chesnut also expressed views on the role of women in society that are surprisingly modern. In no particular order, here’s the rest of my Top 10 list: 3. Rebel Private Front and Rear by William Andrew Fletcher. Beaumont, Press of the Greer Print, 1908. This slender book is a refreshingly honest account of the Civil War service of an ordinary private, William Fletcher of Beaumont, Texas. Fletcher served first as an infantryman in Hood’s Texas Brigade, and later, after suffering a leg wound at Chickamauga, he rode with Terry’s Texas Rangers, making him the only Texan to have served in these two acclaimed Confederate units. What makes Fletcher’s memoir especially attractive to me is his abstention from puffery and brag. For example, Fletcher describes how on the third day at Gettysburg he was overcome by a “bad case of cowardly horror” when confronted with the prospect of participating in a frontal assault on Union lines. He confesses: “I tried to force manhood to the front, but fright would drive it back with a shudder.” 4. Battle on the Bay: The Civil War Struggle for Galveston by Edward T. Cotham Jr. University of Texas Press, 1998. Part of my fondness for Edward Cotham’s concise but thorough history of the land-and-sea battle fought at Galveston on New Year’s Day 1863 is that I maintain a second home on the island. My esteem for Battle on the Bay transcends, however, my fondness for the place where the battle unfolded. Specifically, I regard Cotham’s book as the definitive account of an otherwise obscure battle that, together with the Battle of Sabine Pass, ranks as the most improbable, almost outrageously unlikely, Confederate victory of the war. Galveston also represents the worst defeat of the U.S. Navy during the war, one that Admiral Farragut aptly termed a “disgraceful affair.” 5. Sabine Pass: The Confederacy’s Thermopylae by Edward T. Cotham Jr. University of Texas Press, 2004. In this relatively short but detailed battle study, Cotham relates how a single Texas Confederate artillery company prevented a Federal armada carrying 5,000 infantrymen from landing at Sabine Pass, the launching point for a planned invasion of Texas. Besides taking out two Yankee gunboats, the 40-odd Texans captured nearly ten times their number of Federals without losing a man. If anything, the Confederates’ victory at Sabine Pass was even more improbable than their victory at Galveston nine months earlier. Sabine Pass was also the most one-sided Confederate victory of the war.

6. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend by James I. Robertson Jr. Macmillan, 1997. I need say little about Bud Robertson’s magnum opus, one of the bestselling Civil War books of our generation. Robertson debunks some myths that had attached themselves to Jackson’s persona like barnacles over the years, such as his supposed penchant for sucking lemons. The research Robertson put into his book awes me. The book’s endnotes and bibliography consume 162 pages. 7. Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson by S.C. Gwynne. Scribner, 2014. Until I read this book, I thought that Robertson’s biography was absolutely the last word on Jackson. Reading Gwynne’s biography changed my mind. I see the essential difference between the two books as Gwynne’s greater emphasis upon Jackson’s religious faith as a guide to understanding his life and generalship. 8. Lee: The Last Years by Charles Bracelen Flood. Houghton Mifflin, 1981. I have read many books about Lee, but Flood’s is the only one devoted to the forgotten chapter of Lee’s life, the five years following Appomattox when he was president of a small Virginia college that today bears his name, Washington & Lee University. To my liking, Flood argues that these final years were Lee’s finest, a time when he did more than any other Southerner to heal the wounds between North and South. 9. Jefferson Davis, American by William J. Cooper Jr. Alfred A. Knopf, 2000. Among the several biographies of Jeff Davis I have read, I prefer this one. William Cooper, a LSU history professor, wrote the book with a general readership in mind. The portrait of Davis that emerged is sympathetic but objective. The book also answers the question often asked about Davis: How could a patriotic American come to lead a mighty struggle to dismember the U.S.? 10. Carrying the Flag: The Story of Private Charles Whilden, the Confederacy’s Most Unlikely Hero. Basic Books, 2004. True confession: I put Gordon Rhea, an authority on the Overland Campaign, onto the story of Charles Whilden.

What Rhea did with the story is strictly to his credit, however. Passed over for service until the spring of 1864, aging Charles Whilden enlisted as a private in a South Carolina infantry regiment serving in Virginia. In short order, this epileptic clerk found himself plunged into bloody combat. In an amazing act of courage, Whilden wrapped the Rebel flag around his body and led a charge at Spotsylvania that won crucial ground for the Confederates, changing the course of one of the war’s most significant battles. C. Michael Harrington is a retired lawyer, resident in Houston and Galveston. He’s authored several published articles on South Carolina soldiers, and he’s lectured to Civil War organizations in Houston on multiple topics, including Yale’s Confederate alumni and South Carolinians in the war. He’s president of the Houston CWRT.