Harold Holzer’s Top Ten Civil War Books

Originally published November 2020 · pp. 17–18

Harold Holzer’s Top Ten Civil War Books 1. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson. Oxford University Press, 1988. Judicious, authoritative, both sweeping and detailed, objective yet opinionated, and plenty “woke,” too, it masterfully addresses military history and civilian politics, the battlefield and home front, plus the horrors of slavery. This tour de force is the first book I turn to, both for fact-checking and sheer pleasure. It’s hard to believe that it was published as the sixth in an Oxford series on American history, with the first of its 300 pages devoted to the antebellum period: the longest prologue in Civil War literature. 2. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant edited by John F. Marszalek. Originally published by Charles L. Webster, 1885; annotated reprint from Harvard University Press, 2018. Still the best first-hand Civil War autobiography: both reasoned and reasonable, and pugnacious without an iota of grudge. This masterwork is now available in a fine new annotated edition by John Marszalek, the editor who completed the multi-volume Grant Papers. It’s still impossible to separate this book from the heart-wrenching story of its creation: Grant heroically completed it in his dying days, just before succumbing to a painful cancer, and its triumphant success provided financial security for his impoverished family. One only wishes the old general had lived to write a sequel about his presidency. 3. American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War by Bruce Catton. American Heritage and Doubleday, 1960. This is the book that stirred my lifelong interest in Lincoln and Civil War photography, art, and iconography, and I am always amazed, yet in another sense, unsurprised, to discover how many other historians got hold of this book as youngsters and stayed emotionally attached to the subject of the Civil War forever after. Beautifully designed and produced, sharply written, overflowing with color images (a rarity in 1960), and boasting the first Civil War maps I ever understood, this work made an enormous, indelible, almost tactile impression, and I still treasure both the memory and the book. 4. The Civil War Day by Day: An Almanac, 1861–1865 by E.B. Long. Doubleday, 1971. Perhaps the most breathtaking feat of Civil War research and synthesis ever published, no one can possibly write about the conflict without having this almanac within easy reach. It not only authoritatively captures, in a nutshell, simultaneous events in both the East and West, Washington and Richmond, it concludes with a thick appendix of statistics worth their weight in gold. I still wonder how “Pete” Long did it, but I do know I’ve gone through three copies during my 45-year career, reducing the first pair to tatters through constant use. A true classic. 5. Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War edited by Patricia L. Faust. HarperCollins, 1991. Brimming with swell-written, informed, highly individualized entries by terrific scholars, this volume is thick enough to incorporate all the key characters and events, but compact enough to be lifted from the shelves without risking spinal injury: neither too big nor too small, it’s just right. I also use David and Jeanne Heidler’s doorstopper Encyclopedia of the American Civil War, and Richard Current’s Encyclopedia of the Confederacy (to which I contributed), but Faust’s remains the most accessible, the easiest to use, and the most pleasurable to read. Her early death was a great loss to the field. 6. Lincoln and His Generals by T. Harry Williams. Knopf, 1952 and Lincoln and His Admirals by Craig L. Symonds. Oxford, 2008. OK, this is an unapologetic twofer, and the only Lincoln books I’ve put on my list (because that subject requires a separate top-ten, Mr. Melton!). These works fully illuminate Lincoln’s growth as a military strategist and manager, on land and sea alike, perhaps his most remarkable achievement of self-education, and one that helped save a nation. James McPherson’s 2008 Tried by War came to supplant Williams, but I read the latter when I was a teenager, and it left a big impression. For his part, Symonds opened a new window, or a porthole, onto the long-neglected subject of the naval war, bringing it, and the admiral-in-chief, vividly to life. Lincoln once said he knew little about ships, but this caught on. 7. George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon, Ticknor & Fields, 1988, and The Civil War Papers of George B. McClellan both by Stephen Sears. Houghton Mifflin, 1989. These books cover all there is to know, and lament, about the Union’s most promising but infuriating general. The biography and the letters, together, unflinchingly reveal an over-confident, over-cautious, perpetually jealous, yet undeniably gifted McClellan. Recent revisionism aside, Little Mac will likely never escape the reputational abyss to which Sears so “searingly” condemned him. McClellan may have suffered, as Lincoln put it, from “the slows,” but these books move with lightning speed. Great reads. 8. Mary Chesnut’s Civil War edited by C. Vann Woodward. Yale University Press, 1981. I have stressed interpretive history and biography on my list, but how can one skip over Grant’s memoirs, or the greatest wartime diary of them all: Mrs. Chesnut’s? Woodward not only rescued this treasure trove from oblivion, but packaged it brilliantly. No one can begin to understand privileged white Southern “womanhood,” complacent white supremacy, the tone-deaf arrogance of the Confederate elite, or the blithe acceptance of perpetually cruel enslavement without confronting these riveting entries. 9. The Coming Fury, Doubleday, 1961, and A Stillness at Appomattox, Doubleday, 1952, by Bruce Catton. Yes, another twofer (actually half a dozen in all, for each of these volumes is part of a trilogy), but how to craft a top-ten list without hosannas to Bruce Catton? Not possible. These books thrilled me as a kid: the vivid story of disunion, its publication timed to the centennial of secession, and saga of war’s end issued a decade earlier. Catton was just the right historian-craftsman to bring the Civil War to life for its hundredth anniversary, particularly for younger readers gripped by history. And he was just a beautiful writer. Does his work hold up? Who cares? 10. The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara David McKay, 1974. I also left fiction off my list, though I was a big MacKinlay Cantor fan as a youngster, and was enthralled as well by The Red Badge of Courage and (he admitted sheepishly) GWTW. But Shaara wrote characters, battles, scenery, even angina attacks, with such truth and panache that this novel more than deserves a place among the classics. Reading this masterpiece, one could almost believe the discarded theory that the war began and ended at Gettysburg. An influential book? Well, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlin, for one, surely owes Shaara his current status as one of the great Union heroes. That’s no small feat for a novel. Harold Holzer, Chairman of the Lincoln Forum, is the author, coauthor, or editor of 54 books. He earned a 2008 National Humanities Medal and a 2015 Lincoln Prize for Lincoln and the Power of the Press.