Chris E. Fonvielle Jr.’s Top Ten Civil War Books

Originally published November 2020 · pp. 8–10

Chris E. Fonvielle Jr.’s Top Ten Civil War Books Jack Melton’s request to list my top ten favorite Civil War books is the most challenging assignment since writing my Ph.D. dissertation at the University of South Carolina. Every historian of the conflict could easily cite 100 or more books as essential reading. My interest in the coastal war shaped my list, along with a hefty dose of nostalgia. So here goes: 1. The Golden Book of the Civil War. New York: Golden Press, 1960. A Christmas gift from my parents when I was eight years old in 1961, it is my all-time favorite Civil War book. Editors of American Heritage adapted it from the American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War for young readers. I spent hours and hours, days and days, marveling at the period photographs, lithographs, engravings, and diorama maps by David Greenspan, and perusing Bruce Catton’s excellent narrative. Little did I know that The Golden Book of the Civil War would be the first step toward my becoming a Civil War historian and professor in the Department of History at UNC Wilmington. Battle Cry of Freedom by James M. McPherson. Oxford University Press, 1988. The finest single volume of the war era by McPherson, the dean of the current generation of Civil War historians, who took home the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1989. The Civil War in North Carolina by John G. Barrett. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. The late Barrett, a long time professor in the Department of History at Virginia Military Institute, wrote what is still considered, 57 years after its publication, the best overall study of the Civil War in the Old North State. Union Combined Operations in the Civil War edited by Craig L. Symonds. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010. Symonds, the compilation of essays by leading scholars of the coastal war covers an often overlooked but key feature of the conflict. Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War by Stephen R. Wise. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. The author did an incredible amount of research both in the United States and abroad to produce an encompassing scholarly study of Confederate maritime trade with Europe that enabled the Confederacy to sustain its war effort far longer than period pundits predicted. 6. Lincoln by David H. Donald. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Arguably the top single volume on America’s greatest president, the man who saved the Union and freed four million enslaved people, by this late preeminent historian. 7. Confederate Goliath: The Battle of Fort Fisher by Rod Gragg. New York: HarperCollins, 1991. Since it would be unethical to list my own work, The Wilmington Campaign: Last Rays of Departing Hope, I will go with Gragg’s gripping account of the fight for Fort Fisher, the main guardian of Wilmington, N.C., the Confederacy’s principal seaport by 1863, and most important city by late the following year. 8. From Cape Charles to Cape Fear: The North Atlantic Blockading Squadron During the Civil War by Robert M. Browning Jr. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Sticking with my keen interest in the coastal war,

From Cape Charles to Cape Fear offers a thorough and detailed study of the challenges the U.S. Navy faced attempting to halt blockade running along the North Carolina coast, especially at Wilmington. 9. A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary by John B. Jones. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1866. Jones, a clerk in the Confederate States War Department, provided a peek behind the scenes in his tell-all two volume account of wartime Richmond and President Jefferson Davis’s administration. 10. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. An intriguing and insightful look at Americans’ views of death, dying, and mourning practices during mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Chris E. Fonvielle Jr., professor emeritus in the Department of History at UNC Wilmington, is the author of articles and books on North Carolina during the Civil War, including The Wilmington Campaign Last Rays of Departing Hope, Fort Fisher 1865: The Photographs of T.H. O’Sullivan, and To Forge a Thunderbolt: Fort Anderson and the Battle for Wilmington.