Civil Warriors

Today was in many ways typical of the way I tend to work. That means working on several projects at the same time. I put the finishing touches on a proposal for a book on, of all things, Gettysburg, which I hope to co-author along with Brian Melton of Liberty University. This will be a Gettysburg book with a difference. We plan to argue that Gettysburg was not decisive and had very little chance to be. Far from being the turning point of the war, it was not even a secondary turning point within the indecisive eastern theater — just another bloody and indecisive clash. We plan to use a counterfactual scenario to demonstrate how unlikely Gettysburg was to have produced decisive results, how far the battle was from being a winner-take-all proposition. This is to be a carefully crafted scenario, based on the known propensities or expressed intentions of the participants, and we’re going to set up the most dramatic Confederate victory we think was remotely likely for Gettysburg — and then show that it would have led in all probability to a surprisingly familiar end result. We’ll also discuss the ways in which the battle went from being just another battle—albeit a relatively rare defeat for Robert E. Lee — to being in the minds of many Americans the single decisive event of the war.
After that I spent most of the afternoon going over John S. D. Eisenhower’s So Far from God, taking copious summary notes. This will serve two purposes. First it will help me in preparing the Mexican War chapter of a U.S. military history textbook that I am co-authoring along with TCU colleagues Mark Gilderhus and Gene Smith. Second, it will help me to draw up a sort of broad-strokes outline of where I want to go with the Mexican War chapters of a book I recently contracted to write for Knopf. This book will look at the entanglement of the slavery issue with that of westward expansion during the 1840s, leading to the point at which slavery became the issue that swallowed up all others in American political life. At the beginning of the decade slavery could still be a secondary consideration in some political questions. By 1850, despite the cosmetic settlement created by that year’s compromise, slavery had become the one issue that outweighed all others in any dispute to which it pertained, however indirectly. With that, the final showdown was almost an inevitability (inevitability, by the way, is a concept I dislike in history).

Thinking about the issues involved in publicizing one’s own books — the overwhelming majority of books that appear each year are surprisingly undermarketed, and authors really need to learn to fend for themselves — I (Mark Grimsley) got the idea for creating (yet another) blog. This one would be a collaborative effort among several Civil War historians. The point of the blog — its drawing card — would be to focus on the craft of Civil War history. We’d talk candidly about what we were doing, why we did it, what we hoped would emerge from it.

I drew up a long list of potential “Civil Warriors” but initially consulted the two with whom I’ve had the most experience. The first was Steven E. Woodworth (Jefferson Davis and His Generals; While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers; numerous other works — the man’s a machine — culminating most recently with Nothing But Victory: The Army of the Tennessee, 1861-1865. The second was Brooks D. Simpson, also a copious producer of books, best known for his various works on Ulysses S. Grant.
The idea was that each of us would post to Civil Warriors in a somwhat round robin fashion, so that the burden of productivity would not fall heavily on any one of us. In the sidebars and on permanent pages we’d have info about what books we’d done and links to booksellers. In general I thought we might be able to craft a site that would be at least one good tool for marketing our own stuff.

So I bought the domain name CivilWarriors.Net — which, believe me — is easily and inexpensively done, and then got set to install yet another WordPress blog. Steve cautioned that he might not be able to submit his first contributions right away. By “right away,” he apparently meant the next five minutes, because the first of his promised blog posts appeared in my mailbox the next day.

So here goes with the maiden post of Civil Warriors, courtesy of Steve . . . .