Gould Hagler’s Top Ten Civil War Books

Originally published November 2020 · p. 15

Gould Hagler’s Top Ten Civil War Books Some 100,000 books have been written on the much-studied American Civil War. My top ten? How can I decide, even from the tiny fraction I have read? I can’t and I won’t try. So let’s just call this exercise “Ten Books, Pulled from my Bookshelves, on Various Aspects of the War, that I Find Interesting and Useful.” I won’t assign numbers to the list. That could be taken to imply a ranking, which I can’t do even from the small sample I have at hand. No numbers are necessary. The reader can count the entries to make sure they total ten. So here they are, in no particular order, starting with two reference works. In 1979 I received, as a gift, The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac 1861–1865 by E.B. Long with Barbara Long. Doubleday & Co., 1971. After nearly four decades of use this hardback finally fell apart. I replaced it with the Da Capo edition, which is already beginning to show signs of wear. This work synopsizes events from Nov. 6, 1860 to Aug. 20, 1866. The book also contains a “Special Studies” section with useful data of various kinds and a very thorough index. The second reference work, Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War edited by Patricia L. Faust. Harper and Row, 1986, paperback edition 1991, has entries on people, battles, places, ships, military units, military terms, and various other things too numerous to mention. Let’s move to a different genre, biography, with one classic work and one more recent. R.E. Lee by Douglas Southall Freeman. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945 is obviously the classic, a four-volume masterpiece. I own this, plus Freeman’s other multi-volume works, Lee’s Lieutenants and George Washington. A total of 15 volumes, all the more remarkable in that Freeman wrote these in his spare time, so to speak. His day job was editor of the Richmond News Leader. Stonewall Jackson: The Man, the Soldier, the Legend by James I. Robertson Jr., MacMillan Publishing USA, 1997, is a fine, comprehensive work on one of the war’s most interesting characters. Make Me a Map of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson’s Topographer (Jedediah Hotchkiss, edited by Archie P. McDonald, Southern Methodist University Press, 1973) is the first primary source I will include. A New Yorker by birth and a Virginian by choice, Hotchkiss made the maps that allowed Jackson to maneuver and fight with a sound understanding of the terrain. Two things stand out in my mind from reading the book years ago. One is Hotchkiss’s wonderful vignette describing his Calvinist leader at prayer; the second is the interesting fact that Jackson ordered up some maps of Pennsylvania in February 1863, four months before the beginning of the Gettysburg Campaign. Next are the works by E. Porter Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate: A Critical Narrative, Da Capo Press, 1993, first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907, and Fighting for the Confederacy edited by Gary W. Gallagher, The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Alexander was a highly competent military professional, a superb writer and an insightful analyst. I encourage CWN readers to read ‘em both. The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Library of America, 1990, first published by Charles L. Webster & Company, two volumes, 1885 and 1886) and Joseph E. Johnston’s Narrative of Operations During the Civil War (Da Capo Press, 1959, first published by D. Appleton & Co., 1874) are two of the many accounts written by top-level commanders. These are always of interest to students of the war. It’s hard to believe, but works of this nature can have a self-serving component. It is sometimes fascinating to compare the commanders’ accounts with information from other sources. Last we come to A Campaign of Giants: The Battle for Petersburg,

Volume 1, From the Crossing of the James to the Crater by A. Wilson Greene. The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. This is the first of three volumes on the Petersburg Campaign. The award-winning work takes us from the initial movement across the James River to the famous effort to blast the Confederate defensive line from underneath. Greene’s work is an all-inclusive, well-structured and insightful history of the Federals’ mammoth effort to break Lee’s army, and of the Confederates’ resolute defense. I am looking forward to reading the next two volumes. Gould Hagler is a retired lobbyist living in Dunwoody, Ga. He is a past president of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table and the author of Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation, published by Mercer University Press in 2014. Hagler speaks frequently on this topic and others related to different aspects of the Civil War and has been a regular contributor to CWN since 2016. He can be reached at [email protected].