Civil War Book Reviews

Originally published November-December 2026 · pp. 67–73

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

There Is No Better Teacher than the School of Hard Knocks. Gettysburg Surgeons: Facing a Common Enemy in the Civil War’s Deadliest Battle. By Barbara Franco. Photographs, illustrations, chapter endnotes, appendix, and bibliography. 320 pp. Stackpole Books, Essex, Connecticut. 2025. Hardbound. $34.95. Reviewed by Richard J. Blumberg July 1863 marked the middle of the Civil War. Surgeons and medical staff had already experienced two years of treating battlefield injuries. However, nothing prepared either side for the aftermath of the war’s largest battle. Historians generally agree that the fighting produced more than 50,000 casualties. Independent scholar and nationally recognized museum leader Barbara Franco takes readers on a journey through the actions and reactions of Union and Confederate surgeons and medical staffs. In Gettysburg Surgeons: Facing a Common Enemy in the Civil War’s Deadliest Battle, Franco creates a microcosm of battlefield medicine by using perspectives from both Union and Confederate surgeons. Franco’s research focuses on the feelings, motivations, challenges, and triumphs each side encountered. She divides the work into three sections. Section one examines the path to becoming a surgeon and describes the medical training and patriotic enthusiasm that drew these men into service. Section two deals with the battle itself and proves that there is no better teacher than the school of hard knocks. Neither formal schooling nor prior battlefield experience fully equipped the surgeons for what they faced on July 1-3, 1863. Section three provides insights gained after the war. It offers an effective after-action review of the battle, the growth of the field, and the innovative methods that still influence battlefield medicine today. The book is neatly organized and receives a strong recommendation from this reviewer. It is meticulously researched and a good value for the price. Franco reaches a wide audience, including military and Civil War historians, medical professionals, and readers interested in how battlefield medicine functioned during the Battle of Gettysburg. Richard has published three articles in various issues of Civil War News. His current work focuses on animal service and veterinary medicine in the Civil War.

A Unionist Politician in Antebellum and Postbellum Georgia Joshua Hill of Madison: Civil War Unionist and Georgia’s First Republican Senator, 1812–1891. By Bradley R. Rice. Afterword and acknowledgments, appendix, notes on sources and bibliography, maps, lithographs, photographs, abbreviations, index, 472 pp., 2025. Mercer University Press, www.mupress.org, hardback, $45.

Reviewed by Joseph A. Derie Joshua Hill of Madison, Georgia, was a slave-owning, Know-Nothing Party Unionist congressman who opposed secession and did all within his power to keep Georgia in the Union. Following Georgia’s secession, he resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives. This distinguished him from the other congressmen and senators from Georgia, who simply left Congress with a joint letter announcing that they were no longer members of that body, reasoning that Georgia’s secession had released them from their obligations there. Following secession, Joshua Hill did not support the Confederacy beyond paying taxes and sending two sons into the Confederate army, one of whom was killed in the Atlanta Campaign and the other of whom later died from illness and injuries sustained in the war. In 1863, he was drafted to run against Governor Joe Brown on a peace platform but lost by a significant margin. Later he met with General Sherman, who asked Hill to help arrange a meeting with Brown in an effort to get Georgia out of the war before the March to the Sea. Brown refused, and the rest is history. The oft-repeated story that Hill met with Sherman and persuaded him not to burn Madison, Georgia—because it was “too pretty to burn”—is carefully examined. Most of the rest of the book deals with Reconstruction and politics in Georgia and the United States, including Hill’s service as a Republican senator-elect (1868–1872) and later as a lame-duck senator from Georgia (1872–1873). The ins and outs of this period are well documented and clearly described. Georgia would not elect another Republican senator until 1980. There are several minor nits. The volume could use more and better maps when recounting the Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and Hill’s travels to recover the body of his son, who was killed early in the Atlanta Campaign. The photo of a white-haired Alexander H. Stephens purports to be circa 1861 but was actually taken much later in life. The author also describes George Thomas chasing John Bell Hood after the Atlanta Campaign, when in fact the only chasing Thomas did came after the Battle of Nashville. Joshua Hill of Madison: Civil War Unionist and Georgia’s First Republican Senator, 1812–1891 is thoroughly researched, scholarly, and readable. It will be of special interest to those interested in Georgia history during the period, the debates in Congress before the Civil War, and Reconstruction and its aftermath in Georgia and the South. It is very highly recommended.

CAPT Joe Derie is a longtime Civil War buff with a special interest in Civil War naval history and the Civil War in the West. He is a retired USCG officer and a licensed officer of the Merchant Marine, currently self-employed as a marine surveyor and marine accident investigator in Portland, OR.

Strategic and Tactical Account of Grant’s Second Offensive Against Petersburg, Virginia Lee Besieged: Grant’s Second Petersburg Offensive, June 18-July 1, 1864. By John Horn. Maps, notes, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. 433 pp., 2025. Hardcover. $34.95.

Reviewed by Robert L. Durham Union General Ulysses S. Grant first assaulted Petersburg, Virginia, on June 15-18, 1864, but failed. Rather than settling in for a lengthy siege, he planned a second offensive for June 18-July 1, 1864. He began with a bombardment of Petersburg’s bridges to slow the movement of Confederate troops in and out of the city. He also threatened Richmond by seizing a foothold at Deep Bottom on the north bank of the James River. His hope was that this would draw Confederate forces out of Petersburg to protect Richmond. Grant sent infantry to cut the Weldon and South Side railroads, hoping this would force the Confederates to abandon both Petersburg and Richmond. He also ordered cavalry to cut the railroads below Petersburg, which would sever the city from supplies and reinforcements coming from the south and west.

Confederate General Robert E. Lee faced Grant and worked to counter his moves. He sent infantry against Grant’s infantry, and they defeated the Federals at the Battle of Jerusalem Plank Road. Lee then sent infantry and cavalry to meet Grant’s cavalry, defeating them decisively at the battles of Sappony Church and First Reams Station. Grant’s efforts failed, and his army suffered far more casualties than Lee’s. Much to the disappointment of both Grant and Lee, the situation settled into a long siege, with fighting that foreshadowed the trench warfare of World War I. It would be almost another year before Grant finally captured Petersburg and Richmond, forcing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House in April 1865. John Horn’s book is an excellent strategic and tactical study of the movements and battles in which Grant’s every major move was countered by Lee. Horn uses an abundance of maps—forty in all—to illustrate each strategic movement and battle. His notes, in addition to citing the many sources consulted, provide detailed information on losses for both sides. Lee Besieged is an excellent account of Grant’s early efforts to bring Lee to battle in the open rather than settle immediately into an extended siege. As the first full-length book to detail Grant’s second offensive against Petersburg, I recommend it highly. Robert L. Durham retired from the Defense Logistics Agency in 2004. He is now a freelance writer and has had numerous articles printed in various historical publications.

Lacking Deep Research but Does Provoke the Reader Conflict and Controversy in the Confederate High Command: Davis, Johnston, Hood and the Atlanta Campaign of 1864, by Dennis B. Conklin, II, Savas Beatie Press, El Dorado Hills, CA (2025). $32.95 Review by Prof. Richard M. McMurry, Ph.D. Probably no chapter of Civil War military history has undergone more revision in the last five or six decades than has that dealing with the Atlanta Campaign of 1864. Once settled truths about the campaign have been challenged and, in many cases, overturned. Generals’ reputations have risen and fallen. Historians have come to view the 1864 events in Georgia in ways quite different from the ways their predecessors saw them in 1965. Now Dennis B. Conklin II offers his views on the conduct of the Confederate high command during the 1864 events in Georgia. Conklin’s work began as a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Southern Mississippi some twelve or fifteen years ago. Conklin focuses on four major topics: the role of President Jefferson Davis in the Georgia operations; the importance of Davis’s relationship with Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown; the role of Lieutenant General William J. Hardee in the battles around Atlanta; and the controversial events of May 19 at Cassville, Georgia, some forty miles north of Atlanta. Several lesser themes also run through the book. Conklin compares Davis with Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln learned from experience; Davis did not); Major General Joseph Wheeler, commanding the Confederate cavalry, proved “incompetent”; General Joseph E. Johnston, who commanded the Confederates during the first part of the 1864 struggle, was an offensive-minded general; and so on. All these matters, and others raised in the book, merit study, research, and debate. (Was Johnston’s rush from the lower Shenandoah Valley to Manassas in July 1861 an offensive movement, as Conklin maintains, or a defensive reaction to meet a Union invasion of Virginia?) As Conklin’s notes and bibliography reveal, the book is not deeply researched, and it does little more than point to matters that deserve more detailed study. In fact, most of those matters have been addressed in greater detail in the years since Conklin researched and wrote the dissertation. While Conklin’s book can raise questions and provoke thought—a virtue in itself—those thinking seriously about the campaign should also consult more recent works.

Richard M. McMurry, Ph.D., is a noted Civil War historian specializing in Confederate military history and the Western Theater. He earned his doctorate at Emory University, where he studied under historian Bell I. Wiley, and later taught history at North Carolina State University. His books include John Bell Hood and the War for Southern Independence, Two Great Rebel Armies, Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy, and The Civil Wars of General Joseph E. Johnston.

How the Mexican-American War Influenced Twelve Civil War Generals The Mexican-American War Experiences of Twelve Civil War Generals. Edited by Timothy D. Johnson. Maps, notes, index, 280 pp., Oct. 2024. LSU Press, www.lsupress.org, hardcover $45.

Reviewed by C. Michael Harrington This book is a collection of essays exploring how the Civil War careers of twelve prominent generals were influenced by their experiences in the Mexican War. The editor, history professor Timothy Johnson, conceived the book and assembled an impressive lineup of a dozen Civil War scholars to bring it to publication. By Johnson’s count, 239 future Civil War generals served in Mexico: 137 Federals and 102 Confederates. From this larger group, Johnson selected six future Federal generals and six future Confederate generals for this study. All twelve subjects commanded either a corps or an army in the Civil War. The Federal generals include Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan, and George G. Meade; the Confederates include Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. All twelve generals profiled in this study were under the age of 40 when the Mexican War began in May 1846. None ranked higher than captain. All were professional soldiers who had graduated from West Point between 1829 and 1846. Each served in one or both of the two main U.S. armies in Mexico: Major General Zachary Taylor’s army in northern Mexico or Major General Winfield Scott’s army in central Mexico. Some, like Grant and James Longstreet, served in the infantry. Others, like Braxton Bragg and Jackson, served in the artillery, while still others, like Beauregard, Lee, and McClellan, were engineers and staff officers. All experienced combat for the first time, and several were wounded, Don Carlos Buell most seriously.

The twelve essays that make up this book average fewer than twenty pages each, including endnotes. Each essay stands alone, making it easy to read the book in multiple sittings without losing continuity. Some essayists’ analyses are more convincing than others, but all present a creditable argument that, to a greater or lesser degree, the future generalship of each subject was influenced by his service in Mexico, albeit not always in a positive way. For example, Ethan Rafuse’s essay on Joseph Hooker, “Playing Games,” argues that Hooker’s political gamesmanship in Washington, which helped secure him command of the Army of the Potomac, had its origin in his Mexican War experience with Democratic President Polk’s highly politicized dealings with the war’s two main generals, the Whigs Taylor and Scott. The influence of the Mexican War is more evident with some generals than with others. Thomas Cutrer’s fine essay on McClellan is replete with evidence that Mexico was indeed a learning experience for Little Mac. McClellan wrote that he attempted to “repeat the manoeuvre of Cerro Gordo” in his early battle at Rich Mountain in western Virginia. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign of 1862 bears unmistakable similarities to Scott’s 1847 Mexico City Campaign. Both armies were transported by sea to enemy territory. Both campaigns emphasized flanking the enemy out of position. Both aimed to end the war by capturing the enemy’s capital. Only the outcomes differed. Unlike Grant or Beauregard, Lee never committed his Mexican War experience to publication, making it more difficult to determine just how that experience bore on his generalship about fifteen years later. Nonetheless, Joseph Glatthaar finds considerable evidence that what Lee learned in Mexico appears in his Civil War record. Like Scott’s willingness to live off the land in Mexico, Lee cut loose from his supply lines in both the Maryland and Pennsylvania campaigns. He also successfully employed Scott-like grand flanking movements in the Seven Days and in the Second Manassas and Chancellorsville campaigns. Glatthaar argues that the greatest lesson Lee learned in Mexico concerned civil-military relations. Learning from Scott’s bitter experience with President Polk, Lee worked smoothly with President Davis. Sean Michael Chick’s Sean Michael Chick’s essay on Beauregard faults him for failing to learn in Mexico the importance of good political relationships. In his superb essay on the enigmatic Joseph E. Johnston, Craig Symonds finds “tantalizing evidence” of a similar tendency that Johnston first displayed in Mexico: namely, to “quarrel with authority … especially over questions of rank and status.” Both generals’ antagonism and irreverence toward Davis would prove detrimental to the Confederate war effort. Another emerging Civil War historian, Cecily Zander, drew the most difficult assignment of any of the essayists: determining the influence of Braxton Bragg’s Mexican War service on his Civil War generalship, a task made even more difficult by the lack of Bragg’s writings on either conflict. Despite fighting only briefly in Mexico, Bragg emerged from the war a hero due mostly to the acclaim he received from journalists over Taylor’s reported (but likely apocryphal) order at Monterrey to give the enemy “a little more grape, Mr. Bragg.” Zander concludes that Bragg’s service in Mexico did not teach him any personal lesson so much as it helped elevate the status of artillery within the U.S. armed forces. My favorite among the twelve essays is Timothy Smith’s piece on the lessons that Grant learned in Mexico and applied in the Civil War. Smith’s essay benefits from the fact that Grant wrote about his service in Mexico, asserting in his memoirs that his experience in the Mexican War “was of great advantage to me afterward.” Grant’s emulation of “Old Rough and Ready” Taylor shows up in both his plain dress and his calm demeanor on Civil War battlefields. From his later service under the flamboyant Scott, Grant first learned about joint army-navy operations and siege warfare, lessons that he would later apply in his celebrated Civil War career. This book is happily set in double-spaced, 12-point type, making it easy on older eyes. All three maps of the war in Mexico are well drawn. The writing styles of the essayists vary, of course, but overall the essays read well. Each essay concludes with copious endnotes, reflecting the detailed and painstaking research that each author clearly devoted to his or her subject. The book’s lack of photographs is forgivable, given the generals’ familiarity to readers of this magazine. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I recommend it to all readers of Civil War titles, especially those interested in what shaped the generalship of the war’s leading commanders. A graduate of Yale and Harvard Law, C. Michael Harrington is a retired lawyer residing in Houston and Galveston. The author of several published articles on South Carolina and Texas Confederates, Mike is also a past president of the Houston CWRT.

Another Commendable Mosby Book A Tour Guide and History of Col. John S. Mosby’s Combat Operations in Southern Virginia and Other States. By Donald C. Hakenson and Charles V. Mauro. Illustrated, bibliography, index, HMS Productions, Inc., 2025, 344 pp., softcover. Reviewed by Wayne Wolf This book is the sixth volume detailing the history and exploits of Colonel John S. Mosby and his Forty-third Battalion of Virginia Cavalry. It covers the counties of southern Virginia as well as Mosby’s incursions into Maryland, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. It follows Mosby’s band of a few hundred men in their quest to steal horses and mules, capture prisoners, confiscate valuable supplies, and generally harass Union troops before disappearing into the countryside. Not only did their exploits provide much-needed supplies for the Army of Northern Virginia, but they also kept large numbers of Union troops tied down guarding Washington, D.C., and thus away from General Robert E. Lee. This volume begins with a history of John S. Mosby from his birth to his college days at the University of Virginia. Included is the story of Mosby’s trial for shooting a college bully, which landed him in jail for seven months, a period he spent studying law and that eventually led to his admission to the bar in 1855. Mosby married Pauline Clark in 1857 and soon became the father of two children. But his quiet family life was put on hold when Virginia seceded—the South was Mosby’s country, and, right or wrong, he would stand by it. The next section combines Mosby’s military career with personal anecdotes. He initially joined William “Grumble” Jones’s Washington Mounted Rifles, where he served until joining General J.E.B. Stuart as an independent scout. On a courier mission for Stuart, he was captured by the Second New York Cavalry and imprisoned in Washington, D.C. After ten days, he was paroled, returned to the Confederate army, and on June 10, 1863, mustered sixty men into Company A of the Forty-third Battalion Virginia Partisan Rangers. His independent command was now a reality, and his daring exploits began in earnest. This volume then catalogs his exploits at Mercersburg and carries the reader through skirmishes at Kabletown, Rector’s Crossroads, Charles Town, Outfield’s Depot, Adamstown, the Greenback Raid, Myerstown, Kinsale, and countless other raids, skirmishes, and diversions. As the war ended, Mosby dismissed his men on April 26, 1865, and headed back to his father’s home, Idyle Wilde, in Amherst. His postwar career is then illuminated, including service as U.S. consul in Hong Kong. He was severely wounded in a carriage mishap, losing an eye; later he was injured again after being struck by a bicyclist. Recovering from both, he eventually moved in with his daughter until his death in 1916. This volume does a commendable job of weaving the personal histories of Colonel Mosby and some of his Rangers into their exploits. All the locations, travel directions, and points of interest are included so that students of the Civil War can retrace the life of the Gray Ghost. This text is recommended for anyone fascinated by the most famous guerrilla band of the Eastern Theater of the Civil War. Dr. Wayne L. Wolf is Professor Emeritus at South Suburban College and the author or coauthor of numerous Civil War books and articles, including Two Years Before the Paddlewheel, Heroes and Rogues of the Civil War (4 volumes), They Saw the Elephant, and The Last Confederate Scout. He is the past president of the Lincoln-Davis Civil War Roundtable and a frequent lecturer.