Book Reviews

Book Reviews — May 2021

Originally published May 2021 · pp. 40–43

Civil War News book reviews provide our readers with timely analysis of the latest and most significant Civil War research and scholarship. Contact email: [email protected].

Thaddeus Stevens—Revolutionary Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary. By Bruce Levine. Photos, notes, index, bibliography, 309 pp., March 2021. New York: Simon Schuster, www.simonandschuster.com $28.00.

Reviewed by Salvatore Cilella

Thaddeus Stevens’ stern face with upturned lower lip is well known to Civil War students and scholars. In this new biography by Bruce Levine, he graces the cover of the publisher’s proof and again opposite the title page. I’m sorry, but the image conjures for this reviewer Tommy Lee Jones as Stevens in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln film of 2012. It is hard to “un-see” the scene when he climbs into bed with his black wife/mistress/housekeeper/lover, doffs his curly wig, then kissing her goodnight. Stevens’ enemies promulgated his “illicit” relationship with widow Lydia Hamilton Smith and, according to Levine, Spielberg’s movie “treats that claim as true, although no firm evidence substantiates it” (p. 90). Stevens’ hair was brown until he lost it to alopecia in his 30’s and for the rest of his life he wore a wig.

This is just one of the many anomalies, peculiarities, and unique characteristics of U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. As a witness, and indeed a major player, to history, Stevens played on the public stage from his early days as a lawyer in Gettysburg, and later in Lancaster, Penn. His political views evolved slowly. A significant early milestone was his energy in advocating free, public education for all Pennsylvanians. His political journey began in 1822 when he was elected to the borough council. Levine follows his rise to the state legislature, as a member of the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention in 1837, back to the state house, and eventually, the United States House of Representatives. Stevens took a hiatus from political life for financial reasons, returning to his more lucrative private law practice in Lancaster.

His libertarian views re-routed his political journey from the Anti-Masonic party, to the Whig Party with its “Free Soilers,” and ultimately, to the new Republican party. He was known for his “witty repartee, his scorching sarcasm, his lofty eloquence, his great profundity, and his ponderous mind” (p. 81). By 1848, after several false starts, he became a foe, not necessarily of slavery, but of slavery’s expansion into the new western territories. It was at this juncture (1856) that he found himself in line with the new Republican Party and, in 1860, its nominee, Abraham Lincoln.

As for his political life, he was an equal opportunity critic. He lashed out at the South for its peculiar institution while skewering the North’s capacious appetite for free labor feeding raw materials to northern mills and their capitalist moguls. He called northerners who profited from the slave trade “doughfaces,” people whose malleable features could be rearranged at will.

Stevens was no prophet, but he could read the political landscape better than most. After securing free public education in Pennsylvania, he advocated for women holding office and voting, immigrant’s rights, and was eventually a staunch supporter of African American rights including citizenship and the vote after abolition. He moved from opposing the extension of slavery west to abolition after John Brown’s failed raid on Harper’s Ferry. He called Brown a fool, but with his characteristic wit, he ventured that Brown underestimated how many men he needed in his quest to take Virginia, suggesting that Brown should have used “at least twenty-five” (p. 103).

Lincoln’s slow conversion to emancipation irked Stevens, but both men’s views of abolition evolved. He arrived at emancipation sooner, but when Lincoln embraced it with the proclamation, Stevens threw his full-throated support to the president.

Stevens was a man of and before his time. He indeed led the second revolution as Levine has portrayed him. If a reader is looking for a full-fledged biography on the grand scale of Hamilton or Grant, this is not it. Rather it tells briefly the early Vermont upbringing of Stevens, his maturity in Pennsylvania, and finally his ascendency to leading the civil war’s “revolution.” Most of the biography covers Stevens’ time in Congress and his dealings with allies and enemies. In that regard, in the midst of emancipation, he saw slavery as incompatible with republicanism and democracy; “They cannot live together,” he remarked in a January 1862 House speech. This meant that half-measures dealing with slavery and slave owners after the war would not suffice. Although he was rigid in his disdain for slavery, he voted for bills that didn’t contain all he wanted. Capable of compromise, he epitomized the canard that politics was the “art of the possible.” There was always another bill to introduce, defend, argue, and ultimately execute. The Confiscation Bills of 1861 and 1862 though flawed, were merely first steps toward full emancipation.

He was no supporter of the new president, Andrew Johnson. Johnson’s leniency toward the defeated South and his attempts to undermine Congress’ version of reconstruction infuriated Stevens. Nearly from the beginning, Stevens detested Johnson and was one of the earliest proponents of impeachment. Stevens did not live to see the end of reconstruction. He died in 1868, just as the 14th Amendment was ratified and two years before ratification of the 15th Amendment. White and black mourners paid their respects at his wake in the Capitol Rotunda and at the gravesite. An integrated cohort of pall bearers accompanied his body to his grave in an integrated cemetery.

Levine’s scholarship is impeccable and his narrative is smooth. Most importantly, Levine’s work is relevant and is most helpful in understanding race relations here in America in the 21st century. If anything, civil rights progress has been slow and remarkably uneven. In many respects, we are still carrying on his “revolution.” Levine’s biography goes a long way toward answering the question “Whose history is it?” The answer is “ours.”

Salvatore Cilella is retired after 43 years in the museum field. He is the author of Upton’s Regulars, University of Kansas Press, 2009, and editor of The Selected Correspondence of General Emory Upton, 2017, (2 vols). University of Tennessee Press and Till Death Do Us Part: the Letters of Emory and Emily Upton, 1868–1870. University of Oklahoma Press, 2020.Civil War News book reviews provide our readers with timely analysis of the latest and most significant Civil War research and scholarship. Contact email: [email protected].

Reviewed by Salvatore Cilella

Women Making War: Female Confederate Prisoners and Union Military Justice. By Thomas F. Curran. Gallery of Illustrations (18) & Photos, correspondence,notes,bibliography, index, 264 pp., 2020. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, www.siupress.com $26.50. Softcover.

Reviewed by Joan Wenner, J.D.

This doctorate-holding teacher, policy history journal editor, and author of another Civil Warrelated book, adds considerably to this topic covered in 10 chapters and many detailed and informative notes. The author focuses on women supporting the Confederate cause in Missouri and their treatment by Federal authorities in the St. Louis area. It soon became clear there were many roles played by women and they ran afoul of Union authority in and around this major supply distribution hub. The stage is set when Union Major General John Fremont took command of the newly designated Western Department that included the area between the Mississippi River and Rocky Mountains. From the Camp Jackson situation onward, it grew graver in this part of Missouri particularly. Shortly after his arrival Fremont decided to confront “the untoward and obstructing conduct of the people of Missouri” against Federal authority and announced he was declaring martial law in St. Louis, city and county, on August 14, 1861. He appointed Major Justus McKinstry as St. Louis’s first provost marshal. Martial law with its list of offenses came with a warning of sudden and severe punishment. To house the first civilians arrested he took over an abandoned building “well adopted to the purposes of a prison.” In St. Louis it appears that the Southern sympathizing local women’s actions evoked little concern with McKinstry and his successor John McNeil although that didn’t last. A Mrs. Burke was arrested October 20, 1861, along with several other women and taken into custody. She was said to be the first woman arrested for ‘disloyal activities’ after visiting various camps and passing information regarding them to her husband, a captain in the Confederate army. She, however, was later released having, according to the provost marshal record, no evidence of guilt in her possession. The book is arranged chronologically which is helpful in tracing the increase in women’s wartime activities; the ensuing Union response, initially mild, gave way to punishment. Disloyalty and aiding the ‘enemy’ could no longer be tolerated by provost marshals, military commissions, and the various commanders of the Department of Missouri as the war wore on. In a monthly issue of the OLD GUARD, Volume IV, 1866, writer Stuart Leigh’s article, “The South Expects Every Woman To Do Her Duty,” noted one military court’s Judge Advocate called Confederate women ‘so confoundedly impertinent’ but “I’ll do what I can to hang the men.”

There is a whole chapter on Confederate supporter Charles Thompson who at War’s start raised a company of Missouri volunteers, became a 2nd lieutenant, assisted Nathan Bedford Forrest, and more before switching sides and accomplishing many secretive missions. Charles was really alias Mary Ann Pittman, alias Mollie Hayes, who disguised herself as a man, and when she arrived at Alton Military prison was still in male attire. As a teaser I will not divulge her exploits, relationships with provost marshals, various judicial forums, and others, and will also leave the details of her ultimate compensation outcome by the Union government to the reader. This expanded narrative covers female spies; a few readers will know some but many others are likely unfamiliar. We learn of them through their diaries, frequently tinged with race and class, but in great numbers doing their bit. They were the soft linen bandage makers, the sewing experts, and knitters who contributed their best to aid the Confederacy as did the smugglers and spies who disrupted ‘enemy’ efforts. He presents detailed information from many sources including the Official Records, letters, St. Louis newspaper accounts, and more, to give a clear and convincing picture of Union military policy and prisons relating to these daring and resourceful female partisans during the turbulent times in Missouri. No longer can they be wrongfully considered as less in importance, daring, and resourcefulness than the ‘valiant’ men who fought to ‘protect’ them.

As the war ‘hardened’ and Halleck took over, there was Lieber’s Code and military commissions addressing the issue of female activity. “Whether it was military treason or war treason, Federal provost marshals and their commanding officers could now level the charge of treason, at least a version of it, at rebellious civilians through General Orders No. 100.” Women were deemed accountable for ‘treasonous’ activities, whereas prior to the Civil War no woman had been held accountable as their civic identities belonged to men, as noted by the author; even the Supreme Court had so ruled. However, with Halleck’s successor and other developments, women caught aiding the Confederacy could be banished to the South and other states in some cases, imprisoned in local jails, or house arrest in others, paroled in yet others; because they were classified as “war traitors” by the authority granted to the provost marshals. Nevertheless, and I’ll note just one 1866 court case the author correctly cites, when of course the South had already surrendered, the Supreme Court in Ex parte Milligan, determined that the use of military courts or commissions to try U.S. civilians when civil courts were available and functioning in secure areas was unconstitutional thus making a charge of ‘war treason’ obsolete. The detailed text of the book and the legal, military, and political aspects of how ‘disloyal’ women were treated in and around St. Louis and their punishment, many being banished to the South and other states, may be too detailed for some but a reader will certainly be interested in the trials and tribulations of the female Confederate-sympathizers along with their ‘crimes’ and station in life and contacts. From many of the elitist class to the lower-class arrested as the Federals grew more and more intolerant with their activities including a vast communications network, those who “sang secessionist songs,” “talked treason,” and were ‘secessionist from the top of their heads to the tip of their toes.’ These were a common refrains heard by the commanders of the Department of Missouri and the Union provost marshals and officials. All in all, this is a fascinating read for those interested in how ‘justice’ was meted out to increasing numbers of female Confederate prisoners through the war years by Union adjudicators. Available arrest records indicate great care was taken by Union authorities to investigate cases and in leveling penalties, most of the time. The author also wonders how many spies and smugglers in particular avoided detection. We’ll never know. Joan Wenner, J.D. holds a law degree and is a longtime contributor to Civil War News and published in numerous history publications. Presently residing in coastal North Carolina, her special interests are military courts of inquiry, provost marshals and naval operations. [email protected].

The Maps of the Cavalry in the Gettysburg Campaign: An Atlas of Mounted Operations from Brandy Station Through Falling Waters, June 9, 1863July 14, 1863. By Bradley M. Gottfried. Maps, appendix, endnotes, bibliography, index, 236 pp., 2020. Savas Beatie LLC, www.savasbeatie.com, $34.95, hardcover. Reviewed by Jeffry D. Wert

Cavalry operations during the Gettysburg Campaign covered hundreds of square miles from outside Fredericksburg, Va., to the outskirts of Harrisburg, Penn., and ultimately back into central Virginia. At the front, along the edges, and in the rear opposing armies’ cavalry units rode across this broad landscape. During the course of the campaign, Union and Confederate horse soldiers clashed in numerous engagements; their performancesprovedtobedecisiveand/ or controversial at times. In no other eastern campaign between the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia did their mounted units play a more vital role than in Gettysburg’s outcome. The respective cavalry commands and their notable officers have been the subject of countless articles and of books that would fill a long shelf in a library. Historians have devoted particular attention to engagements such as Brandy Station, Aldie, Middleburg, Upperville, Hanover, and Gettysburg’s East Cavalry Field. Biographies of the leading protagonists continue to appear. This new book by Dr. Bradley M. Gottfried offers a different approach to the operations of the mounted commands. Undoubtedly readers of Civil War News are familiar with the publisher’s series of atlases on the conflict’s major campaigns. This most recent book of maps is the author’s seventh and the eighth such work in Savas Beatie’s Military Atlas Series. The book’s format is uniform throughout with narrative on a left-hand page and one or two maps on a right-hand. As would be expected, the narratives and maps are arranged generally in chronological order beginning with Brandy Station on June 9, 1863, and ending with Falling Waters on July 14, 1863. In all, there are eighty-two maps with accompanying narratives. The author has written accounts and prepared maps for twenty engagements between the mounted foes. Lesser-known clashes are covered, including Hunterstown, Brinkerhoff Ridge, South Cavalry Field, Fairfield, Monterey Pass, Smithsburg, and Funkstown. The author also has maps and descriptions of Jeb Stuart’s controversial ride to Gettysburg and other wider ranging cavalry movements. Dr. Gottfried writes very well, weaving the words of the participants into the narratives. He explains that his descriptions of the movements and fighting are straightforward and not intending to delve deeply into the controversies. He does, however, render judgments at times on the performances of individuals and units. In a two-page epilogue, he offers some views on the conduct of Stuart, Alfred Pleasonton, and their key subordinates. The author and the publisher are to be commended for the publishing this and the other volumes in the series. This book is best utilized holding it and standing in the town square in Hanover, Penn., on Cress Ridge east of Gettysburg, at the east end of Smithsburg, Md., or any of the other clashes depicted in the book. At such places, it will be a welcome companion. Jeffry D. Wert is a retired high school history teacher and the author of biographies of Jeb Stuart and George Custer.

Storming Vicksburg: Grant, Pemberton, and the Battles of May 19–22, 1863. By Earl J. Hess. Photographs, maps, notes, index, 400 pp., The University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.org, $40.00. Reviewed by Paul Taylor

The Federal government’s military fortunes had changed dramatically when the sun set on the 4th of July, Independence Day, 1863. In the east, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia was limping southward through Maryland after three bloody days of fighting at Gettysburg, Penn. In the west, and perhaps with less fanfare at the time, the 28,000 gray- and butternut-clad men serving under Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton trapped inside Vicksburg, Miss., had just surrendered to Union Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Army of the Tennessee following months of maneuver, battle, siege, and near-starvation. With the loss of the Mississippi River bastion, the Union brown water navy now controlled “the father of waters,” essentially cutting the Confederacy in two. In this deeply researched new work that utilizes an immense number of archival sources, Earl Hess argues that throughout Grant’s eight month campaign to capture Vicksburg, the May 1825, 1863, timeframe is the most crucial and overlooked portion of what he considers the campaign’s six distinct phases. After marching overland south of Vicksburg during late April and positioning his forces in the rear of the city, Grant planned for a quick decisive victory by attacking from the east. Initially, matters looked bright following a major victory at Champion Hill on May 16 and then a smaller success at Big Black River, about twelve miles east of Vicksburg, on May 17. Both triumphs resulted in the battered Confederates fleeing westward into the presumed safety of Vicksburg. Those victories set the stage for the two direct assaults on Vicksburg that followed. A detailed tactical narrative and analysis of those two attacks form the core of this book. The smaller May 19 assault was essentially a probing effort by most units engaged and failed to gain any traction. In fact, only one Union division actually made any type of serious assault against the Confederate earthworks and it was bloodily repulsed. May 22 was the opposite. That day saw the Army of the Tennessee launch what became the largest, most ambitious attack in its history. The assault failed, in part, however, due to poor planning, a failure to bring its superior numbers to bear on any part of the Confederate line, and stout resistance. As is usually the case, however, an army’s enemy often has something to do with any attack’s failure. The two Union assaults of May 19 and 22 did not succeed due in large measure to wellplaced and strong Confederate earthworks manned by determined troops that, as Hess points out, were situated such that any attacking force would first have to deal with difficult terrain that included deep ravines, dense vegetation, and man-made defenses. Furthermore, improper troop coordination during the assaults by Union subordinate commanders also contributed to the attacks’ failure. Hess also determined that when they saw their attack’s futility, many Union soldiers took to the ground and refused to advance further into the teeth of a withering Confederate fire. Still, both assaults were central to the ultimate victory obtained when the Confederate army surrendered three weeks later on July 4 following Grant’s famous siege of the city. Grant later wrote that his men would not have supported a siege when an all-out assault was still possible, though Hess concludes the opposite based on an exhaustive analysis of those soldiers’ surviving letters and diaries. Though their morale was indeed high, those men who wrote of the attacks were clear that they possessed no desire to storm earthworks if other, less deadly methods were viable such as siege operations. Whereas Grant’s overall strategic plan to capture Vicksburg was superb, Hess argues that Grant’s handling of the four specific days in question was certainly less than stellar. The May 19-22 time frame has been previously examined over the decades as part of various books pertaining to the overall campaign and in essays and articles. Nevertheless, this volume represents the third book-length treatment of the May 19-22 battles and operations to appear in just the past two years. The first was a collection of scholarly essays edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear from April 2019 titled The Vicksburg Assaults, May 19-22, 1863. Following that book was Timothy Smith’s The Union Assaults at Vicksburg: Grant Attacks Pemberton, May 17–22, 1863, published in Jan. 2020. Given this recent hefty output, Hess explains in his preface how his new work differs from his predecessors. He makes the case that this book is an analytical text, rather than a descriptive one, that asks probing questions and then provides answers of the nature that a military historian would seek to know. The impact of terrain on the battles’ outcome, the precise starting points for the various units, as well as analyzing the Union’s command and control decisions are all wrapped up within Hess’s always engaging style of narrative storytelling. Admittedly, this reviewer cannot comment on the author’s assertions having not fully read the other works. Twenty-four photographs and sixteen detailed maps provide the requisite enhancements to the author’s fluid prose. This new book is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on the Vicksburg campaign and should appeal to both Civil War scholars and armchair generals alike. Paul Taylor is an award-winning author and editor of eight books pertaining to the Civil War era. His newest book is “My Dear Nelly”: The Selected Civil War Letters of General Orlando M. Poe to His Wife Eleanor which was recently published by the Kent State University Press.

A Novel Idea In the Shadow of Gold: A Tale of the Lost Confederate Treasury. By Michael Kenneth Smith. Amazon Publishing, 2020, paperback, 293 pp. ISBN 9-798684953736 Reviewed by Meg Groeling

Reviewers of history books rarely get to review a novel. Somehow novels are in bad repute, even though most of us became “hooked” on the 1860s by reading a historical novel during our callow youth. Michael Kenneth Smith, a former mechanical engineer and retired business owner, is an avid Civil War buff and meticulous researcher. He is the author of several works of historical fiction, including The Postwoman, The Thin Gray Line, Scarred, and Home Again. In the Shadow of Gold, his latest offering based on one of the legends of the hidden caches of gold, the Confederate treasury that was never found after the Civil War ended. Main character Yancy Arvindale is a young southern man from a naval family. His overbearing, impossible-to-please father pressured him into joining the Confederate Navy, although Yancy is not temperamentally cut out for the military. Besides that, he is chronically seasick. In 1865, he is glad to be off a ship and on a train when he is assigned to guard the barrels and boxes of Confederate gold shipped to an undisclosed location by the Danville Railroad. Yancy begins to wonder, if the Confederacy no longer exists, to whom does the Confederate treasury belong? He answers himself; it belongs to the people, of whom he is one. This conclusion leads to an elaborate plan to appropriate his share of the gold by sneaking underneath the train and finding a loose floorboard in one of the dilapidated boxcars. When the train stops, Yancy climbs up and into a car, removes a box of gold, and buries it between the tracks underneath the train, to be found later by following his written cipher. Of course, his luck runs out, a friend dies, and Yancy ends up in jail. After almost losing his life to a beating, he is rescued by a member of a camp of runaway slaves. These formerly enslaved people are grappling with the problems ofemancipation,unemployment, and no money. One person in particular, Ellie, helps Yancey recover. Through her kindness, Yancy grows close to her. He finally tells her about the Confederate gold. Plans are made and carried out to return to the places along the railroad tracks and retrieve the boxes of gold coins. Yancy does this alone, depositing his treasure in local banks under his name. When he returns to the slave encampment, he brings money with him. One of the first things he teaches Ellie is how to handle herself in an outdoor food market. Of course, they fall in love, and tragedy ensues. The story picks up when Yancy’s son discovers the deposit slips. He is light-skinned; this helps him retrieve his father’s fortune. He and his mother find; well, if I go on, I will give away the entire book, and part of the enjoyment of a novel is guessing the next part. Author Smith has done a considerable amount of research into the Confederate currency conundrum, and he skillfully weaves both the past and the present together. He uses the group of escaped slaves to represent the historical argument that emancipation without education, health care, or preparation for life as a free, equal citizen is just another way to enslave Black Americans, an issue America has dealt with since 1863. There are “Book Discussion” questions, for those readers so inclined, to guide both reading and thinking. In the Shadow of Gold is a good novel. It is not a challenging read, but it generates thinking and discussion. I am not sure I agree with the notion that no novel should be included in a list of books to read about history. Michael Kenneth Smith is one writer whose books make a good argument that novels have their place. Just do not include them under “Primary Sources” in the bibliography.

Meg Groeling received her Master’s degree in Military History, with a Civil War emphasis, in 2016, from American Public University. Savas Beatie published her first book, The Aftermath of Battle: The Burial of the Civil War Dead, in the fall of 2015, and she has written First Fallen:

The Life of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, which will also be published by Savas Beatie. She is a regular contributor to the blog Emerging Civil War. She and her husband live, with three cats, in a 1927 California bungalow covered with roses on the outside and books on the inside.