Civil Warriors

Due to a lack of interest, the elective on the Civil War I teach at the Command and General Staff College has been cancelled the last two or three times it has been offered. Consequently, I have begun reworking it into a course on “Unconventional Violence in the Era of the Sectional Conflict” and plan to offer it the next time students are signing up for electives.

We are pretty restricted on what we can assign our students. Being army officers, they expect to get just about everything associated with their job—be it a rifle or book—issued to them, so there is strong pressure not to assign many readings they will have to spend their own money on. Also, we are very, very strongly discouraged from giving them more than 50 pages of reading for each of their twelve class meetings. Working within these restraints, I have put together the following set of readings and figured I would post it here and solicit (beg for) suggestions for how this can be improved. In addition to the readings, I am also putting together a staff ride to Lawrence and other Border War sites as part of the course block on the Missouri-Kansas border war.

I am especially interested in seeing if anyone knows of any real good, short readings on Reconstruction that might be useful. The only one I could fit in within the parameters imposed from above, was the all-too-short few pages from Birtle’s book. I found in a recent meeting of one of my core course classes that when I started talking about Reconstruction (not being part of the formal curriculum, there were no assigned readings on the subject, so I basically gave a lecture), the majors were fascinated and made comments along the lines of “This is what we should be studying!” Must have been all that stuff about dead-enders from the old regime (disenfranchisement of white Southerners=de-Baathification!, Chemical Ali-”Bah-bi” Lee), the employment of terror and guerrilla tactics (Klan, sectarian militia—what’s the difference?), good intentioned outsiders trying to fix a broken society, and, of course, deep-seated ethnic tensions in which a previously oppressed class is suddenly enfranchised.

Anyway, here is where my head is in terms of class structure and what I am looking at in terms of readings:

COURSE SCHEDULE

LSN 1 – Conventional and unconventional war in the American Experience, 1607-1860

Robert R. Mackey, The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South, 1861-1865 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 3-23; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, edited by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984 ed.), 75-78, 87-89, 479-83; Declaration of Independence

LSN 2 – The Conventional War and Northern Strategies for the Unconventional

Herman Hattaway and Ethan Rafuse, “Military and Diplomatic Course of the Civil War,” in The Oxford Companion to American Military History, edited by John W. Chambers II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 128-34; Andrew Birtle, US Army Counterinsurgency & Contingency Operations Doctrine: 1860-1941, (Washington: Center of Military History, 1998), 23-53; General Orders No. 100 (“Lieber Code”), OR, ser. 3, vol. 3: 148-64.

LSN 3, 4, 5 – People in friction: Yankees and Rebels

Stephen V. Ash, When the Yankees Came: Conflict and Chaos in the Occupied South, 1861-1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1-130

LSN 6 – Case Study: The Unconventional War in Missouri

Don R. Bowen, “Guerilla War in Western Missouri, 1862-1865: Historical Extensions of the Relative Deprivation Hypothesis.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 19 (January 1977): 30-51; Albert Castel. “Quantrill’s Bushwhackers: a Case Study in Partisan Warfare.” Civil War History 13 (March 1967): 40-50.

LSN 7 – Staff Ride Prep: No class meeting

LSN 8, 9 – Bleeding Kansas Staff Ride

Thomas Goodrich, Bloody Dawn: The Story of the Lawrence Massacre (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1992)

LSN 10 – Case Study: People’s War in Arkansas

Mackey, The Uncivil War, 24-71

LSN 11 – Case Study: Mosby’s Partisans

Mackey, The Uncivil War, 72-122

LSN 12 – Unconventional Warfare and Confederate Defeat

William B. Feis, “Jefferson Davis and the ‘Guerrilla Option’” The Collapse of the Confederacy, ed. Mark Grimsley and Brooks Simpson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 104-28; Daniel E. Sutherland, “Guerrilla Warfare, Democracy, and the Fate of the Confederacy,” The Journal of Southern History 48 (May 2002), 259-92; Birtle, Counterinsurgency & Contingency Operations, 55-58.

Please do not hesitate to send me suggestions for improvement (within, of course, the parameters with which I have to work laid out above)!

Here is the long overdue next posting of excerpts from the original Meade letters at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania that were cut out of the 2 vol. Life and Letters of George Gordon Meade. Enjoy.

23 May 1864 – . . . if there was any honorable way of retiring from my present false position I should understandably adopt it, but there is none & all I can do is to patiently submit and bear with resignation the humiliation which for some good purpose it has pleased God to inflict on me…

24 May 1864 – …Yesterday Warren & Hancock both had engagements with them & were successful. We undoubtedly have the morale over them…

5 June 1864 – …I am quietly going my way endeavoring to do my duty, & trying not to think of the unjust manner in which I have been treated & the false position I am placed in. I think the army realizes and appreciate it, but outside the army it appears to be unknown. Perhaps in time truth & justice will prevail. I feel a satisfaction in knowing that my mind is clear, and the results of this campaign are the clearest indications I could wish, of my sound judgment both at Williamsport & Mine Run….I see very few papers & avoid reading those that come in my way. I have such an utter contempt for the public press of all parties without exception….

6 June 1864 – …I have written you so much & so often about my position, that I think it almost useless to refer any more to it. Duty & honor require me to remain quiescent for the present. What may or can be done in the future the future alone can develop…

9 June 1864 – …[Grant] has greatly disappointed me and since the campaign I really begin to think I am something of a General, upon which point I have heretofore had my doubts. There is one thing Grant has disappointed me in more than anything else, and that is his lack of delicacy of feeling & sensibility. I know he thinks a great deal of me & is most friendly, and would do anything for my benefit that should be suggested. I feel confident he would not intentionally do me injustice, and yet I don’t suppose he has the slightest appreciation of the position he has placed me in & probably is not conscious, that in all his despatches of the operations of t his army which he knows has been handled by me he has only once and then accidentally mentioned my name & so that the future historian when collecting official documents to compile a truthful read, would absolutely not know from any evidence Grant’s despatches contain that I was even present with the army. Now I feel sure if I was to tell this to Grant he would be amazed himself….[reference to “Libeler of the Press” incident] this malicious falsehood had been circulated all over the country, and that in Washington it was attributed to a Mr. Washburne member of Congress, a great friend of Grant’s who was present at the time of the reported occurrence. This I can hardly believe, but I have friends investigating the matter, and if I can only get evidence to sustain the charge, I shall show Mr. Washburne no quarter, and will make him very uneasy….

21 June …. in Mr. Stanton’s official dispatch, he quotes Genl. Grant’s account & my name is not even mentioned. I think this is too hard & my patience & forbearance is being dreadfully taxed. I can not imagine why I am thus ignored and sometimes feel inclined to give up & openly express my indignation & sense of injustice…On the 18^th we found the enemy had retired to an inner line which I had reason to believe was not strongly fortified….

I apologize for my absence recently from these pages, but in addition to being paper grading time at the staff college for those of us teaching the history course during the February-December academic year, I spent a few days out of town helping the CGSC folks at Fort Lee execute another Wilderness-Spotsylvania staff ride. More on the latter (perhaps) later. Anyway, I figured I would belatedly finish up my quasi-journal on the Antietam seminar, so here goes:

Saturday, 28 July, opened with me looking forward to a no stress day in which I could just enjoy the seminar activities. I knew that of the tours offered that day, I wanted to do the “Taking Burnside Bridge” tour Dennis Frye was leading in the afternoon, but had a hard time choosing which of the others I wanted to do that morning. I finally decided to take the “Antietam Staff Ride” being led by Harold Nelson and Keith Snyder, as it is always interesting to see how other people do these and what ideas I can steal from them. This had the added attraction of being led by General Nelson who, of course, along with Jay Luvaas, did the Antietam volume in the Army War College series, and Keith Snyder. Unfortunately, our bus was the last to pick us up from the Philadelphia Brigade Park, which meant the tour had to be considerably abbreviated. Still, I had a good time, especially watching Keith demonstrate how he used ropes and model bridges to provide a visual sense of the various geographic features that shaped the battle. In the past, I have drawn diagrams in the dirt and, while at West Point, began bringing along a white board and markers on staff rides to support discussions of the terrain and troop movements. For some reason, even though it was effective—probably because since I have been leading rides in collaboration with members of the Combat Studies Institute the past few years and they always bring along big map boards and I just did not want something extra to carry—I stopped using the white board. Maybe I need to start doing so again.

After this tour ended and a box lunch back at the Philadelphia Brigade Park, I boarded the bus for Dennis’s Burnside Bridge tour. I expected this to be real good, and was not disappointed. Instead of starting at the bridge, Dennis had the bus drop us off at the parking area for the camp located on the east side of the creek near where modern Burnside Bridge Road crosses it. We then got on the Sherrick Farm Trail and then ascended the high ground east of the bridge and walked over there to the 11^th Connecticut monument, then to and across the bridge. As I documented in an earlier post, I had walked over this terrain earlier this year with Tom Clemens, but Dennis had us stand at some different points on the field that really gave a good appreciation of how difficult a task Burnside in fact faced–something Mark has commented on elsewhere. (The photo below by Hal Jespersen is of another seminar participant, myself, and Dennis near Burnside Bridge.) We did not wade the creek, something I have done on a couple of occasions on staff rides, although I was sorely tempted to do so given the heat.

Also answered for the first time satisfactorily in my mind in the course of this tour was the mystery of why Orlando Willcox’s division was so far back when the bridge was captured that he was not in place to attack Sharpsburg until 1500. Dennis placed a lot of emphasis throughout his presentation on the fact that Burnside’s job on September 17 was as much to cover the Union left flank as to attack the bridge. But, you say, there was no threat to the Union left at Antietam? Well, you may know that and I may know that, but this was far from clear on the morning of September 17. After all, less than three weeks earlier at Second Manassas a Federal commander had assumed there was no threat to his left flank and we all know how that turned out. Thus, it made sense for Burnside to post Willcox’s division at a point where it could respond to a threat from the south or reinforce the effort to attack the Confederates south of Sharpsburg; unfortunately, doing this had the effect of producing the aforementioned delay in Willcox’s crossing the Antietam during the afternoon.

After returning to Hagerstown from the tours, we were given a couple of hours to relax before reboarding the buses for a trip back to the Antietam battlefield for dinner at the Mumma Farm. Making the evening especially neat was the fact that a storm was passing by to the north and lit up the sky as we ate. It also made for a pretty cool subsequent candle light program at the Roulette Farm. This was followed with an “Insomniac’s Session” back at the hotel in Hagerstown in which Bobby Horton performed “Songs of Johnny Reb and Bill Yank.” Horton opened the next morning’s program with “Songs of Faith” from the Civil War and was followed by talks on the National Cemetery, numbers and losses at Antietam, and a panel discussion with some of the park rangers at Antietam about what’s going on at the battlefield.

All in all, it was a great show and, in addition to having a great time, I learned a lot as well and hope the other participants got as much out of it as I did.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070813/ap_on_re_us/lopsided_lincoln

 I can’t wait to see the discussion.

I finally got around to looking through the new issue of The Civil War News yesterday and see its report on A. Wilson Greene’s winning the 2007 Laney Prize from the Austin (TX) Civil War Round Table for his book Civil War Petersburg:Confederate City in the Crucible of War . It is hard to think of a better choice for this honor. The main reason, of course, is the quality of his book, which I reviewed for Civil War News.

In addition to being an accomplished scholar and public historian, Will is also one of the really nice guys in the Civil War field. When a West Point colleague and I were putting together a staff ride of the Petersburg Campaign for USMA in 2002, Will could not have been more supportive of our efforts. He went out of his way to meet with us for several hours, in the course of which he provided us with a wealth of advice and suggestions.

Then, when we did the staff rides in 2002 (above, left) and 2003 (above, right), Will took time out of his schedule to personally lead us around the various exhibits and sites at Pamplin Park and went well beyond the original designated time to answer questions the cadets and faculty had about the park and the war.

Steve Woodworth is about to send volume 2 of Grant’s Lieutenants to University Press of Kansas. When I read the manuscript for the press last year I noted two weaknesses: the essay on the Grant-Butler relationship seemed perfunctory and an essay on the Grant-Halleck relationship was missing entirely. I volunteered to re-do the former essay. As for the latter, Steve told me that he’d approached a number of potential authors and all had declined. That’s the thing about edited volumes: You can’t always get the authors you want, and that sometimes means not getting all the coverage you want.

Anyway, Steve gave me a lot of time to do the Grant-Butler essay and I only sent it to him last week. I still thought the dearth of anything on the Grant-Halleck relationship was too problematic, so I suggested that perhaps if we teamed up we could knock out an essay by August 10 (the drop-deadline for submission of the manuscript).

So for about a week now I’ve been revisiting Halleck, general-in-chief of the Union armies from July 1862 until March 1864, when Grant assumed the post — Halleck then became his chief of staff. The experience has reminded of just how entrenched our view of many Civil War figures can become.

Halleck fares poorly in the annals of the conflict. Casual Civil War buffs may know nothing about him at all. The rest almost universally accept the image of a stuffy paper-pusher who held the post of general in chief but was too timid and indecisive to really command the Union armies.

Probably nothing has done more to shape Halleck’s historical image than the diaries of John Hay, which have been called “the most intimate record we have or ever will have of Abraham Lincoln in the White House.” As Lincoln’s personal secretary, he encountered just about every Northern luminary you can think of, and of course he had almost daily access to the president, who had a fatherly affection for him.

Hay relished recording witty remarks made by others, particularly if spiced with a bit of venom, and most of his diary entries contain one or more of these. Needless to say, a lot of them come from Lincoln’s mouth. As such, they have had an enormous impact on our image of the people Lincoln had to deal with. In some cases, they have pretty much etched the image in stone.

Hay records a number of Lincoln’s observations about Halleck. They are not flattering. For example:

March 24, 1864: Grant the Prest. says is Commander in Chief & Halleck is now nothing but a staff officer. In fact says the President ‘when McClellan seemed incompetent to the work of handling an army & we sent for Halleck to take command he stipulated that it should be with the full power and responsibility of Commander in Chief. He ran it on that basis until Pope’s defeat: but ever since that event, He has shrunk from responsibility whenever it was possible.

April 28, 1864: [quoting Lincoln:] “When it was proposed to station Halleck here in general command, he [Halleck] insisted to use his own language[,] on the appt. of a General-in-Chief who shd. be held responsible for results. We appointed him & all went well enough until after Pope’s defeat when he broke down — nerve and pluck all gone — and has ever since evaded all possible responsibility — little more then than a first-rate clerk.”

From T. Harry Williams to Bruce Catton to John Marszalek in his recent Halleck biography, that’s the standard portrait. Maybe I’m just contrarian, but I resist uncritically accepting it. When it comes to the Civil War, the heroes are recalled as a bit too heroic (just ask Eric Wittenberg about Sheridan) and the lesser lights are usually regarded as anything from mediocre to outright fools.

And there’s another thing: It’s amazing how often our perception of historical figures (or for that matter people in general) is shaped by our impression of their motives. Lincoln portrays Halleck’s style of command as emanating from timidity. As I’ll explore in my next post, it might just as well have emanated from principle. In which case the picture of Halleck that emerges becomes a good deal different.

Part 1 – Part 2 (coming)

NOTE: An excellent report on the seminar has also been posted, with some photos included, by participant Hal Jespersen here.

Ted very smartly organized the second full day of the Antietam seminar along the lines of an academic conference, with nine sessions of three presentations each, giving participants an opportunity to recuperate physically from the heat and exertion of the previous day’s tours. The morning opened with a general session that started with an absolutely fantastic presentation by Keith Snyder entitled, “Antietam: A Photographic Journey in Time.” Keith showed a variety of historic and contemporary images of the battlefield that provided a great sense of the evolution of Antietam battlefield from the 1860s to the present. This was followed by a panel discussion of “Lincoln, Antietam, and the Emancipation Proclamation” moderated by Dennis Frye in which the participants were Ed Bearss, myself, and Edna Medford of Howard University. In my opening statement I made an effort to draw connections between the Civil War and the contemporary operating environment around the question of how one strikes a balance between respecting and attacking an enemy’s culture in wartime. No one in the audience or on the panel rose to my bait, though, and the session mainly ended up discussing the importance of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the diplomatic contest and the debate over the importance of the proclamation vs. what was already occurring on the ground in regards to the erosion of slavery as a consequence of the war.

(Continued)

Left Kansas City last Wednesday (25 July) bound for Hagerstown, Maryland, where Ted Alexander was putting on the seminar to end all seminars on Antietam. I have to confess that I was feeling a bit burnt when I took off from KCI, having gotten back only a little over a week earlier from a two-week trip with my daughter to Virginia to see family, do research, and lead a Chancellorsville staff ride (more on those in forthcoming posts). However, I quickly regained energy after arriving in Maryland, thanks to the excellent program Ted put together and the great people I got to interact with while in Hagerstown.

The first stop after my arrival on Wednesday was Keedysville, where I linked up with my good friend Dr. Tom Clemens (since he came out Grant on the test and I came out Sherman, I guess that makes sense) to go over the itinerary for the “Lee at Sharpsburg” bus tour Ted had scheduled for Tom and I to lead on Thursday. After a recon of the various stops we intended to take the tour participants to and discussing how we were going to sequence them and developing a good idea of what we wanted to talk at each one, Tom and I then split up, with him returning to home for dinner and my heading up to the hotel where the seminar was being held to check in and eat. That night, Ted had a dessert reception, with a preview of the seminar and talks by John Howard, Antietam park superintendent, and others.

The next morning, the buses left the hotel at 0545 (for my Central time body clock, 0445!!) for breakfast at Philadelphia Brigade Park before Tom and I gathered our first tour group. We then took them back to Keedysville and, after passing through the town, made stops alongside the Boonsboro Pike east of the Antietam and on Cemetery Hill to discuss Lee’s movements and actions of 15 September 1862. We transitioned to the events of the 16^th at Cemetery Hill before proceeding to the Grove House in Sharpsburg. We began discussing the 17^th at the Grove House before returning to Cemetery Hill and then drove along the Sunken Road and up Mondell Road to see the Reel Farm and discuss the Cox Farm expedition of the afternoon of September 17. The tour finally ended back at Lee’s HQ west of Sharpsburg with the council of war of the evening of September 17. After a hearty lunch we repeated this sequence with another group, although with a bit more celerity due to a cut in the time we had available and the unwillingness of the bus driver to test whether his bus could get over the railroad crossing on Mondell Road unscathed a second time. Both groups were terrific and asked a lot of good insightful questions and I ended the tour hoping that I had managed to not take too much time from Tom. I have said it before and will say it again, if you see a seminar advertised with Tom as a battlefield guide, sign up, for his presentation alone will be worth whatever the cost of the program might be.

Me and Tom at the National Cemetery

That evening, I was invited by Ted to participate in a panel discussing “Antietam Commanders: The Best and the Worst” with Ed Bearss (needless to say I was NOT the main attraction), Pat Falci, and John Michael Priest, with Scott Anderson moderating. This was preceded by a talk by Keven Walker on Early’s role in the fighting in the West Woods that confirmed the take on this matter that I have in the Antietam guide I am writing for Mark’s, Brooks’s, and Steve’s series at Nebraska, and offered some really fascinating information on the work the park staff was doing to rediscover the roads as they were in September 1862. In the panel discussion that followed, I opened by expressing concern that we be careful in assessing commanders at Antietam so that we don’t indulge too much in retrospective judgment at the expense of analysis and understanding before making my usual persuasive case for McClellan’s performance and offering praise to A.S. Williams for being able to get a handle on the Twelfth Corps after Mansfield’s wounding and D.R. Jones. Sumner did not come across so well, although one of the seminar participants, Dr. Vince Armstrong, has book coming out next year with the University of Alabama Press on the Second Corps during the Maryland Campaign that offers a new and different view of Sumner and his command in September 1862. The evening closed with Pat Falci giving his trademark presentation on A.P. Hill and an “insomniac’s session” with Ed Bearss on Antietam counterfactuals.

Spent most of July back east (hence my limited contributions to this blog over the last few weeks, other than to pat myself in the back — something I always have time to do — and comment on the results of some of your results in the “Which Civil War general would you be?” test), getting in some research, seeing family, and doing some battlefields. Will take the next few posts to recount my recent Civil War adventures. I will start with the most recent (since they are most fresh) and work backward over the next few posts. If they give an impression of mercurial thinking . . . I did come out of the test as Sherman.

I regret to announce that historian Phil Paludan just passed away. I knew Phil for over fifteen years. He was one of the smartest historians it has ever been my good fortune to meet, and his work was simply brilliant and thought provoking. Two of his books remain among my favorites: A People’s Contest, which offered an insightful overview of the North at war, and The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln, which won the Lincoln Prize and raised the bar for Lincoln presidential studies. He will be greatly missed, and I will be among those who will miss him greatly.

You just never know.