KNOWLT HOHEIMER ran away to the war
The day before Curl Trenary
Swore out a warrant through Justice Arnett
For stealing hogs.
But that’s not the reason he turned a soldier.
He caught me running with Lucius Atherton.
We quarreled and I told him never again
To cross my path.
Then he stole the hogs and went to the war -—
Back of every soldier is a woman.
– Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1916)
I’ve read with interest recent commentary on Civil War Round Tables, and I feel drawn in multiple directions, in large part because I have had a rather diverse experience with CWRTs over the years, and so I would not want to offer overall generalizations about them.
Let me begin by saying that I have had some very good experiences with CWRTs. Usually I have not received a cent for these appearances, although one CWRT (in Fort Worth) gave some money. Among the CWRTs I have visited where I’ve been treated rather well are the ones in New Orleans, Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Cincinnati; I appreciate the help of the St. Louis Round Table in helping to fund a presentation at the Ulysses S. Grant NHS outside St. Louis, and over the years I’ve spoken at local CWRTs, where, like Mark, I believe a matter of local service is involved.
I believe I’ve been spared some of the experiences of my peers precisely because of where I’m located, because, frankly, it’s too expensive for some CWRTs to have me speak due to travel costs. The same goes for tour groups who visit battlefields or do other things: it’s just too much for them to fly me in and sometimes have to pay for an extra night in a hotel. Both the Mosby Heritage Society and the Central Virginia Battlefield Trust have been very, very kind to me, and I appreciate how they have treated me: they have been marvelous hosts, and they have compensated me for my time and effort. So have Gettysburg College and the Civil War Institute.
As a teacher, one of my experiences has been that when speaking in front of a significant number of students, my attention is drawn to the occasional student who’s reading the newspaper, checking a cell phone, whispering, or even recovering from a long night out. Needless to say, I have interesting ways to deal with such behavior, and there are few repeat offenses (or offenders) in a class. However, it took me some time to understand that sometimes the behavior of a few people tended to make me jaded about the class as a whole. That was unfair to the other students, especially those who were responding as best they could to the challenges presented in my class (I’ve always been known as “tough but fair”). I think that the same reaction colors my response in some speaking engagements: there are a few people who for one reason or another annoy me, and that can turn one sour in a hurry if you aren’t aware of it.
So let me explain some ground rules and expectations that I carry into these encounters.
Q & A at the Athens County Civil War Round Table after my talk on “The Collapse of the Confederacy”
The other day, Kevin M. Levin at Civil War Memory posted A Farewell to Civil War Round Tables. His reasons for dissatisfaction with CWRTs differed somewhat from mine, but overall, the post resonated with me. Even so, I would urge him not to bid farewell just yet. Instead, he might do well to say hello to at least one CWRT: the Athens County Civil War Round Table.
More on the Athens County CWRT in a bit. It’s the moral of my story, but first I want to tell the story itself.
I have been surprised over the years by the rather cavalier way Civil War Round Tables tend to treat historians who address their groups. Many CWRTs take pride in not paying an honorarium, even though one look at the audience and you see doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants. They say, “Bring your books to sell,” without realizing how awkward that is from a logistical stabdpoint, and how it would benefit the author much more if they forged a relationship with a local bookstore, so that sales generated thereby would have a ripple effect as other stores in the chain noticed the uptick in sales and decided to order a couple of extra copies of a given title(s). They usually manage, when introducing you, to mangle the titles of your books and other basic information about you. I have also heard — and seen some evidence to support this — that they have an unexamined assumption that historians are snobbish and stuck up.
I WAS the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge.
When I felt the bullet enter my heart
I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail
For stealing the hogs of Curl Trenary,
Instead of running away and joining the army.
Rather a thousand times the country jail
Than to lie under this marble figure with wings,
And this granite pedestal
Bearing the words, ”Pro Patria.”
What do they mean, anyway?
– Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (1916)
Artist Keith Rocco’s depiction of the Surrender at Appomattox
Some readers were none too happy with my characterization of Lee’s General Order No. 9 as an early (pardon the pun) expression of a certain explanation of Confederate defeat attributing that outcome to the “overwhelming numbers and resources” of the Union, to use Lee’s phrasing (although aide Charles Marshall composed the draft document).
However, just 72 hours before, Lee had informed Grant that he did not share Grant’s view about “the hopelessness of further resistance on the part of the Army of Northern Virginia”; the next day, he told Grant, “I do not think the emergency has arisen to call for the surrender of this army.” It was not until April 9 that Lee changed his mind (or dropped his false bravado) and responded to the reality of the situation. The order that followed was characteristic of a new line of explanation: that of being overwhelmed. On April 12, Lee informed Jefferson Davis that he had only 7892 infantry carrying arms; he did not explain why that was the case, or why the number of Confederates who surrendered was more in the neighborhood of 25,000 (we have to revise our notion of stacking arms at Surrender Triangle if only a third of the soldiers were armed).
Back in August, when I delivered my initial plaint about the poor sales of And Keep Moving On, my beloved and critically well-received account of the Virginia campaign of May-June 1864, I decided I’d have to educate myself about marketing books. My first step was to read up on the subject. My second was to acquire the “markgrimsley.com” domain and start building it into a platform to support my various publications.
I soon noticed that it was very difficult to drive traffic to markgrimsley.com. By contrast, it was no problem at all to generate hits to Blog Them Out of the Stone Age — partly because it was already established, but mainly because it had value-added content and was part of a dynamic blogging community. Consequently, I began plotting to create Civil Warriors, though I bet it would still be on the drawing board if Steve Woodworth hadn’t jumped in with the first posts and Brooks Simpson hadn’t followed up so energetically.
In its seven-week existence, Civil Warriors has racked up almost 3,300 hits and averages over a hundred visits each day, most of them “quality” visits by readers who come here by choice. By contrast, markgrimsley.com has received a mere 561 visits since August. That ain’t breaking my heart. I note that even the web site of my friend Catherine Clinton, who is prolific and a far better known Civil War historian than I, has garnered but 2,448 hits. But it does raise a question: With Blog Them Out of the Stone Age thriving and Civil Warriors coming on strong, what possible use can I find for this other domain?
One obvious solution is to use markgrimsley.com as a collection point for all my publications (not just those related to the Civil War). But a better answer is to use it as a clearinghouse for announcements re forthcoming speaking engagements and author events. So that’s what I’ve done. Check out the result and let me know if it looks serviceable. After all, if I don’t sell lots of books, the terrorists will have won. 
Erica Corwin, the very helpful Electronic Sales Coordinator at the University of Nebraska Press, has added a sample stop to the PDF file for Shiloh: A Battlefield Guide. Our two previous guides (Gettysburg and Chickamauga) were published to long ago for PDF stops to be conveniently made available, but the Shiloh example gives you a good model of the format we have followed in all our guides. Have a look, and enjoy.
Publication of the inexpensive paperback edition of And Keep Moving On has apparently spurred a new round of reviews. Brian Holden Reid of Kings College London offers a favorable appraisal in War in History vol. 12, no. 3 (2005):
“Grimsley has produced a first-rate campaign study that gives appropriate attention to the wide range of peripheral operations that came under Grant’s and Lee’s purview away from the main front. His book is clearly, sometimes graphically, written, and his views for the most part are scholarly and balanced; he also enjoys the benefit of clear maps that are easy to follow.”
Another new review appears in H-War, this one by Kyle S. Sinisi of the Citadel. Sinisi notes that the book “was critically well received” when originally published in 2002. He has a nice blend of praise and thoughtful critique, but my favorite part comes at the end:
Grimsley has crafted a well written and thoughtful book. Given the low cost of the paperback edition, its brevity, and its synthesis of the most recent research, the book would be a very worthy supplementary text for all undergraduate and graduate courses on the war.
Please be sure to convey that observation to every instructor you know who teaches a course in the Civil War, particularly those with large enrollments!
Eventually it will find its way into the permanent H-Net Review section and a stable URL will be assigned. For the present, you can, with any luck, locate it by following this link.
A few days ago, Brooks mentioned The Collapse of the Confederacy, a volume of essays that he and I edited and to which Steve, Brooks, and myself all contributed. You can now read the book’s table of contents and introduction online. Just go to this permanent page. (The intro is in PDF format, so you’ll need the free Adobe Reader to access it.)
Cross-posted from Radical Civility
That’s a question Christians ought to ask themselves a little more often. Not about everything, but certainly when it comes to the power relations that exist between people. By power relations I basically mean politics in the broadest sense.
As a Civil War historian, I’ve read my share of defenses of slavery, which, prior to the 19th century, most Christians regarded as a God-ordained institution. Some of them are really quite compelling — well grounded in Scripture and logically argued, often with a measured tone that suggests the author’s calm confidence that he had discerned and explained the divine necessity and ultimate benevolence of slavery. Right now my work has me reading the biography of a prominent Confederate general, Leonidas Polk, who before the war was an Episcopalian bishop, a founder of the University of the South, and — oh yes — a wealthy planter who owned hundreds of human beings. He was killed in action during the Atlanta campaign in June 1864. I doubt he wondered a minute of his life if he was wrong about the moral justice of slavery or wrong about the moral rectitude of the government for which he fought.
Nell Irvin Painter, a prominent historian of the African American experience, offers a vivid portrayal of the human impact of the system General Polk took for granted all his life and for which he finally sacrificed that life. If evangelical Christianity has any truth to it, then a split second after his death, the soul of General Polk would have entered the presence of the Holy: scaldingly hot, blindingly bright, intolerant of the least blemish; and all that would have protected him was the grace of Jesus Christ, who must, I suppose, have forgiven the general for enslaving Him. I wonder what Leonidas Polk would have thought then.
As several Civil War bloggers noted yesterday, April 9 marks the day when Robert E. Lee agreed to Ulysses S. Grant’s terms for the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Wilmer McLean’s home in Appomattox Court House, Virginia. I want to spend some time reflecting on the events of that month, because I think that to do so challenges us to confront the traditional bifurcation of war and peace, or civil war and reconstruction, as well as to highlight the gulf between some students of the Civil War and some students of Reconstruction. Mark and I coedited a volume addressing some of these very questions when we examined war termination in The Collapse of the Confederacy (University of Nebraska Press, 2001); it’s interesting to wrap together the essays Mark, Steve, and I did in that volume and see how they play off each other.
Among the reflections I came across yesterday, one particularly moved me to respond. In “Rantings of a Civil War Historian,” Eric Wittenberg writes:
“Abraham Lincoln had intended to let the South up easy, and had Lincoln not been assassinated, the face of Reconstruction would have been very different indeed. The fact that Lincoln was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer gave the Radical Republicans an excuse to impose harsh terms upon the South instead of following Lincoln’s plan.”
I often agree with Eric, and there are other parts of his posts where I am in vigorous agreement, including his assessment of Jay Winik’s April 1865, which offers little new that had not been argued before and omits much that could be of some help. Here I dissent.
As highlighted in several recent entries, there’s been a discussion on big versus little, obscure versus well-known, and military operational and tactical studies versus studies that establish social, cultural, and political contexts. Or so the dichotomies look to me.
So, let me make a confession: I love Gettysburg. Yes, I do. I’m not ashamed to admit it. But it’s a particular kind of love that’s worth explaining, in part because even as I proclaim my love of Gettysburgs, there are several Gettysburgs I love, and just because I love them doesn’t mean any of the other Gettysburgs (or other battlefields, or other topics) need to become jealous.
First, as to the event of July 1-3: I don’t love every detail of the battle. I don’t buy every book. I’m impressed after a fashion with what people know about the battle, and, as demonstrated by the battlefield guide that Mark and I did, I can get down and dirty with the best of them. For example, Mark and I spent some time trying to locate exactly where the famed traverse of Greene’s line on Culp’s Hill was located. I don’t think we completely satisfied either ourselves or each other with our answer, although for the moment it’s good enough.
For me, however, it’s all about Little Round Top, and it always has been, even before I heard the name Joshua L. Chamberlain. Indeed, I’m a rather severely qualified Chamberlain fan, and I agree with the battlefield guides who complain that Little Round Top has turned into Joshua Top. But I have been up, down, and around Little Round Top, on the east face as well as the west face, as well as approaching it from the south (and having made my way to Big Round Top as well). I take the stories, compare them, think carefully about them (what of Warren’s tale about the glint of bayonets? Did he actually have Smith’s battery fire a shot, when there’s no other record of that; what of the action in the area subsequent to the repulse of the Confederates on the south face?). Where were the 44th New York and the 83rd Pennsylvania deployed (it’s hard to tell from the current terrain, which was marred when they cut the park road in the area). I love the little castle, the Warren monument, the clearing that allowed me to explore the rest of where Weed’s brigade deployed (it was not always the case). And the thrill of going there never leaves me.
History Carnival #28 is up and running at Patahistory. Going through the featured posts, I ran across Jon Swift’s review of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. Swift posted the review on Amazon.com. Woods, incensed, had Amazon.com remove it. Swift reprints it — and a riposte from Woods — on his blog. You gotta see this!
