Civil Warriors

Timothy Burke, for my money one of the most thought-provoking historians in the blogosphere, has a terrific post on Easily Distracted. It begins:

I tell my students that all good research projects and analytical writing have to provide an answer to the question, “So what?”, a justification for the project or the essay. One student asked me if history as a discipline had any stock or standard answers to that question.

I started to list a few that I could think of, and then a few more. I thought I’d try out the results here, to see if readers could knock a few down or add some more.

Many historical monographs answer the question “So what?” in relationship to an established historiography first and foremost. If I publish a new interpretation of state formation in 18th Century Southern Africa before the rise of the Zulu Empire, I may justify my work largely as a response to other scholars who have written about the mfecane and the rise of Shaka’s new Zulu state. However, that historiography as a whole has many more sweeping “so whats” embedded within it, in relationship to contemporary South Africa, to models of state formation within Africa, to arguments about the relationship between environmental and political change. A historian who makes a new claim narrowly directed at a given historiography is often indirectly trying to shift arguments about the larger significance or relevance of the history under review.

Here’s the list I came up with on my first pass.

Tim then offers 16 basic ways in which historians have addressed the “so what” factor, with prominent works that illustrate each one. None are Civil War books — Tim is himself a historian of Africa — but Civil War titles to fit most categories come readily to mind. It’s particularly interesting to think of the categories represented most strongly in the literature of the conflict for, say, the past thirty years (and yes, I still plan to complete the series on the OAH round table).

I won’t steal Tim’s thunder by giving his categories here, or spoil the fun by giving you my take on the ones that dominate Civil War historiography. I’ll save that for another time. For now, have a look for yourself.

This coming weeked I’ve decided to celebrate the 186th anniversary of the birth of Ulysses S. Grant by doing a little traveling (although not to Grant’s Tomb).  On Thursday I go to Washington, DC, where on Friday I speak at the United States Capitol Historical Society’s conference on “Congress and the Crisis of the 1850s.”  I’ll be speaking on the caning of Charles Sumner, which someone rendered as follows:

Then it’s off to Massachusetts (Sumner’s home state), where on Saturday I’ll be interviewed by Dean Larry Velvel on the changing reputation of President Grant at a conference entitled ”Chasing Success or Courting Failure: an In-depth Look at the Attributes an American President Must Possess for Success” at the Massachusetts School of Law in Andover.

I’d venture that some historians used to treat Grant’s presidency much like Representative Brooks treated Senator Sumner.  They might rely upon the notions advanced by none other than Henry Adams, whom as a boy idolized Sumner, that the progression from Washington to Grant upset Darwinian notions of evolution or that a great soldier might make “a baby politician.”  In the last two decades certain Grant biographers and students of the Grant presidency have challenged those dearly-held conceptions of a bumbling idiot who presided over eight years riddled with corruption and nepotism, to say nothing of sheer executive incompetence (the only debate being whether Grant was a fool for supporting Reconstruction or a knave for abandoning it).  That said, what I have found most interesting (and perhaps disturbing) about these cries for revision is that some of the historians and biographers involved have taken it upon themselves to raise Grant’s reputation in those polls assessing presidential performance, as if scholarship on American presidents has become history’s version of the BCS to rank college football teams.  I have found somewhat less disturbing the fact that people who claim to want to know a great deal about the Civil War tend to be less concerned about the road to secession and war and the path followed by Americans, black and white, northern and southern, after the war.  That may be because I’m resigned to that result: one way for people to get around contemplating disturbing issues about the war is to pass by those areas in their haste to recount the exploits of leaders and soldiers as they retell campaign and battle narratives.  That Bleeding Kansas or the massacre at Colfax, Louisiana, are just as much battles as are Gettysburg or Antietam — and as important in shaping the course of events between the 1850s and the 1870s — seems to elude some people. 

But I accept that, however unwillingly.  What I don’t accept are scholars posing as pollsters who see their mission as improving Grant’s image with an eye to kicking him up a few notches in those exercises known as presidential performance rankings.  Forgive me for suggesting that historians are supposed to help explain and understand the past, not don cheerleaders’ outfits. 

So we’ll see how this goes.  I’ve spoken at the Massachusetts School of Law before, most memorably in October 2003.  My speaking engagement coincided with the American League Championship Series that year between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.  On the afternoon after I spoke, we adjourned to Dean Velvel’s home, where we saw this:

As you may recall, the Yankees went on to win that game, and eventually the series.

I had a talk to present the next day, and as I walked to the podium, I smiled … then I reached behind me and donned the Yankees cap I had brought with me in anticipation of its possible use.

Fortunately, I did not suffer the fates that befell either Senator Sumner or Don Zimmer.  And given that this was Andover, the home town of my prep school arch-rival Phillips Andover Academy, this may have been even more remarkable.   

And thus endth another post that brings together history, professional sports, and popular culture in always seamless fashion.

Brooks and I have already given our prepared remarks for the session (see here and here). The third panelist was Lesley Gordon of the University of Akron.

She began by noting that in the popular imagination, the dominant interpretation of the Civil War is still the one reflected in Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels (1974). The novel’s attraction for many readers — including many historians (like Lesley herself, for whom it was an important early influence) — is that it avoids troubling motivations or causes and largely downplays slavery. “Instead, what triumphs is a celebration of pure military courage, sacrifice, and historical exceptionalism.”

The Killer Angels gave new life to a metanarrative already well established in Civil War military historiography, and a great deal of books, both academic and commercial, have reinforced it. But Lesley emphasized the existence of a “counter movement” of works that did not reflect this comforting “American Iliad” perspective and, at times, directly challenged it.

Lesley went on to focus on three themes in particular: the burgeoning literature on the common soldier of the Civil War, the steady stream of community studies that directly connected the war and the home front, and the ongoing interest in the public memory of the war and how it was constructed.

At the end of the 1970s, two books dominated the literature on the Civil War common soldier: The Life of Johnny Reb (1943) and The Life of Bill Yank (1952), both published by Bell Irvin Wiley. Both are classics that remain in print today. Together they offered not just the first but seemingly the last word on the subject. Historians did not really extend his explorations until the 1980s, when numerous important works emerged in quick succession, among them Michael Barton’s Good Men (1981); Gerald F. Linderman’s Embattled Courage (1987); Reid Mitchell’s Civil War Soldiers (1988), and Joseph T. Glatthaar’s Forged in Battle (1989). The trend continued in the 1990s with the publication of The Union Soldier in Battle by Earl J. Hess (1997); Lee’s Miserables by J. Tracy Power (1998); and two studies by James M. McPherson, What They Fought For (1994) and For Cause and Comrades (1997).

Wiley had concluded that Civil War soldiers were, in Lesley’s words, “everyman, humorous, profane, dependable, and quietly heroic, who fought because they had to, but were not driven by deep and complex ideologies.” The ideological divisions of the Vietnam War error rendered less plausible the apolitical nature of the Civil War soldier, while John Keegan’s The Face of Battle (1976) influenced historians to take a closer look at the brutalizing experience of Civil War combat.

Lesley noted the emergence of a clear divide between historians of the common soldier that remains unreconciled. On the one side, historians like Gerald F. Linderman in Embattled Courage (1987), portrayed Civil War soldiers as animated by a constellation of values he called “courage,” not political awareness or commitment, and that by mid-war this ethos of courage had broken down, resulting in soldiers who became increasingly disillusioned with the war and with the civilian communities they left behind. On the other, a number of historians, notably James M. McPherson, Earl J. Hess, and Steven E. Woodworth, directly challenged Linderman’s conclusions, finding instead that Civil War soldiers were indeed politically aware and politically committed. This dialog has borne fruit in other works that have extended our understanding of Civil War soldiers as “whole and complex human beings who changed their minds and motives over time.” Lesley mentioned two in particular: Aaron Sheehan-Dean’s edited collection, The View from the Ground (2007), and Chandra Manning’s What This Cruel War Was Over (2007). Manning’s book — which won this year’s Avery O. Craven Award — “in particular presents an extremely rich and nuanced portrait, backed up by exhaustive research, where she convincingly stresses the role of race and slavery as motivators to both sides. Hers is a long awaited corrective. And yet I would still argue that there is room for more, especially in appreciating differences between soldiers of differing regions and states and armies.”

Lesley went on to note “an explosion of home front studies and a refreshing attention to how the war came home to civilians. Works by Daniel Sutherland, Stephen Ash, Michael Fellman, Jonathan Sarris, Jacqueline Glass Campbell, just to name a few, have highlighted communities and regions directly touched and often torn asunder by the war as much by the armies themselves.” Southern and ‘border’ communities have gained the greatest attention; she called for a better appreciation of how the war affected northern, and notably Midwestern communities. It did not necessarily require the passage of an enemy arm through a community to create fear, despair, and panic. Just the extended absence, let alone the death, of a male family member, could have dire and bitter ramifications, and were no less important to understanding the war’s impact.

Finally, Lesley sketched the emerging literature on Civil War memory, exemplified by David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001) but also by the work of numerous other historians, including William Blair, Gaines Foster, Carol Reardon, and Kirk Savage, who have helped us to see how the popular memory of the conflict was “deliberately created,” at first by influential participants and later by historians themselves. The most prominent example of this public memory is the one enshrined in Shaara’s The Killer Angels: a memory that removed the politics of slavery from the struggle, emphasized white valor on both sides, pushed African Americans to the background, and created “a sanitized story of a heroic war that has settled into the fabric of American culture.”

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 (coming)

At Last, a Gettysburg Redress

With Its New (but Old-Fashioned) Visitor Center and A Plan to Restore Sightlines, the Battlefield Honors Its Past

By Philip Kennicott

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 14, 2008; Page C01

GETTYSBURG, Pa. If you stand on the low rise known as Cemetery Ridge, above the killing fields of Gettysburg, you command one of the most important “what if” promontories of American history. It was here, on July 3, 1863, that the course of the famous Civil War battle might have turned. It was here that the Confederacy — or the rebellion — reached what became known as its “high-water mark.” It was here that the entire direction of the war might have changed, if Pickett’s Charge had decisively broken the Union line, if the election of 1864 had consequently gone against Lincoln, if the North, humiliated by a Confederate victory on Union soil, had sued for peace.

Generations of military men, amateur historians, little boys with dreams of glory and tourists of all stripes have stood on this site and wondered: What if? But a new set of questions and a new set of priorities have come to Gettysburg. The high-water mark, with its sweeping view of the mountains, its stone forest of memorial markers, its little copse of old trees that may, perhaps, be descendants of the original trees that once served as a focal point for the Confederate attack on Union lines, is again on the front lines of history.

Might be the theme song for Civil Warriors this month, what with Mark’s recently foray to Carlisle and my own recent trip to Virginia. During this trip I was able to combine a speaking engagement at Liberty University’s Annual Civil War Seminar with a staff ride of the 1781 Yorktown Campaign for the folks at Fort Lee. As always, I had a good time at the seminar. I gave a brief talk on Meade at Gettysburg the first night, combining themes from my book on Meade and recent essay in North and South, and made a point of leaving plenty of time for Q & A, which is the part of these presentations I always enjoy most. Speaking the first night had the virtue of allowing me to relax the rest of the seminar and just enjoy myself, although being the last speaker after a long evening of activities was somewhat tough. The fact that I got a chance to meet some really great people (including Rea Andrew Redd, who has said some nice things about some of my writings on his Civil War Librarian blog) and Steve Woodworth was on the program, with whom I had a lively debate over the virtues of Joe Hooker, certainly played a large part in making this a good time. In addition, all the talks I heard were excellent, especially Thomas A. Desjardin’s lecture on this guy named Chamberlain. I was disappointed, though, that Eric Wittenberg, through whose efforts I was invited to be on the program wasn’t there, as I hoped we could continue the dialogue on cavalry we began a few months ago. I also took advantage of the trip to explore Lynchburg a bit, especially the sites associated with the 1864 engagements that were part of Hunter’s Valley Campaign.

After the seminar, I headed up to my parents’ house near Harrisonburg for a couple days, during which I sat in on a class on Virginia history my mom is taking at James Madison University. The instructor was David Dillard, with whom I have crossed paths many times in recent years at various conferences, and it was good to catch up with him. Then, it was off to Richmond to pick up two colleagues from Fort Leavenworth who had spent the day battling the elements in Chicago and always cooperative airlines to make it to Richmond—only to find some luggage had been lost. Consequently, one of them had to do the recon on 1 April in the same clothes he had traveled in, during which we had lunch with our department chair, who happened to be in the area for a conference at Fort Monroe. Fortunately, his luggage arrived at our hotel that afternoon, sparing us a shopping trip to Williamsburg that evening.

The photo above is of Joe Fischer, our department’s Revolutionary War expert and author of A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois, July-September 1779, and myself during the staff ride. It was taken by our colleague Steve Bourque, whose books include The Road to Safwan: A Cavalry Squadron in the Persian Gulf War and Jayhawk! The VII Corps in the Persian Gulf War. Of course, the gun we are standing by is posted on the section of Cornwallis’s inner defensive line (which was torn down after the British surrender, only to be reconstructed by the Confederates eighty years later) right next to the Yorktown Battlefield Visitor Center.

Next week I am off to Ogden, Utah, for the Society for Military History’s Annual Meeting. I am presenting a paper, serving as a commentator for a panel on nation-building, and carrying out my duties as a member of the SMH Awards Committee. We’ll see if this produces anything worth discussing here.

Cross-posted from Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

Come July, I’ll be spending a year as the Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I look forward to it. Over the years I’ve been there a number of times, to speak, attend conferences, or do research at the U.S. Army Military History Institute (which is co-located). But my most memorable trip was my first, when, as an undergraduate, I attended its annual, week-long National Security Seminar.

This past weekend I was in Carlisle to look for housing. The USAWC maintains an extensive list of area homes and apartments for rent, and on Saturday I inspected eight of them. They were all in nice shape, and each had its own appeal. I also thoroughly enjoyed talking with the owners and / or tenants: that turned out to be an unexpected pleasure. In the end I selected a 3-bedroom house in downtown Carlisle, within a 30-minute walk of the AWC and only a couple of blocks from Dickinson College.

For quite a while, the prospect of being the Johnson Visiting Professor has remained rather abstract, but this weekend went a long way toward making it concrete.

Home sweet rented home

Obligatory Civil War content:  Strictly speaking, the War College is located at Carlisle Barracks, which in 1863 housed the U.S. Mounted Recruiting Service.  Stuart’s cavalry burned the place during the Gettysburg campaign.

Here’s the link to an interesting comparative exhibit on the Civil War’s best-known generals.  It’s worth your time to poke through it.  Hat tip to Kevin Levin.

Remember the electric map at the Gettysburg Visitor Center that fascinated you as a kid (well, me anyway).  It’s in danger of  going the way of the Palmetto Ranch diorama.  Sigh.

The Rosensteel family, which has contributed thousands of artifacts to the new G-burg Visitor Center, also has a forebear who created the electric map.  Understandably, they’d like to save it from destruction (or permanent storage in some Raiders of the Lost Ark federal warehouse).

(Hat tip to Joe Schweninger)

At the session last Saturday, I promised to summarize the session for this blog. But given the press of other commitments, it will be at least Monday before I can do so. In the meantime, though, I can tell you a bit about the composition of the panelists and audience.

The panelists, as you may have gathered, consisted of Brooks and myself, but also Lesley J. Gordon (University of Akron) and Elizabeth Leonard (Colby College). Lesley was a panelist like Brooks and me, and in her case touched upon three themes that saw much development between 1978 and today: soldier motivation; the continued linkages between soldiers and the home front (and perhaps even more crucially, the societies that shaped them long before they donned Union blue or Confederate gray); and the thriving literature on the public memory of the Civil War.

Elizabeth moderated the session but had two brief comments of her own: a gentle admonition for Civil War historians to do a better job of placing the conflict in an international context; and an observation that thirty years ago, a Civil War military history session would have been unlikely to have had even one female participant, much less two.

We had no idea what to expect in terms of an audience. We figured the session would be well attended, and we were right. But we worried a bit that most of the audience would be composed of Civil War specialists — which, incidentally, would have run counter to the purpose for which the OAH program committee had organized the “state of the field” round tables that liberally dotted the conference. However, with a few exceptions, the audience seemed mainly composed of non-specialists. And judging by those who identified themselves as they offered questions or comments, quite a few were secondary school teachers. All in all, it made for a good, balanced session, and we on the panel emerged from it feeling that it had gone well and had pretty much accomplished its mission.

More, alas, will have to wait until my return from a weekend trip to look at housing options in the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, area. Come July I begin my duties as the incoming Harold K. Johnson Visiting Professor at the U.S. Army War College, and camping out for a year under a highway viaduct is probably not a a good way to go.

Part 1 - Part 2 – Part 3 (coming)

Here are my opening remarks at the March 29 Organization of American Historians round table on the state of Civil War military history. Realizing we couldn’t hope to address every possible theme in the ten to twelve minutes allotted to us, we chose a specific theme that interested us and that we thought had seen important developments in the past thirty years.

My theme today is the destructiveness of the Civil War. In popular imagination — and not a few college textbooks — this destructiveness is still portrayed in very sweeping terms. Accounts of Sherman’s March to the Sea, for instance, frequently describe a swath of complete devastation 60 miles wide and 220 miles long. This sounds very much like a 19th century version of strategic bombing and indeed, it was long common to call the Civil War a total war.

Mark Neely was among the first to question this interpretation in an article that asked, “Was the Civil War a Total War?” He replied in the negative, stressing that, unlike the two world wars, the line between combatant and noncombatant remained largely intact. When the article appeared in 1991, I was completing the dissertation that became The Hard Hand of War. Neely’s article came too late to influence my work, but as so often happens, we were two historians independently but simultaneously pursuing similar lines of inquiry.

So were others, though these tended to stress the destructive aspects. Easily the best known of these is Charles Royster’s prize-winning The Destructive War (1991), which can best be read as a series of meditations on how Americans converted the rhetoric of an apocalyptic war of cleansing violence into reality.

Judging by its critical reception, the thesis of my own The Hard Hand of War, published in 1995, seems to have become widely accepted: namely that Union policy toward Southern civilians and property shows a pattern of discriminate severity and surprising restraint. The book explains how and why restraint persisted even in the midst of a highly destructive war. It pays little attention to instances in which restraint broke down. But starting in the early 1980s and accelerating in recent years, a number of studies have focused on the issue of Civil War atrocities. Phillip Shaw Paludan’s Victims (1981) dealt insightfully with a small-scale atrocity — the Shelton Laurel massacre in western North Carolina, fictionalized in Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997) — that took place in the context of a vicious “inside war” between secessionists and Southern Unionists. The term “inside war” comes from the title of Michael Fellman’s fine 1988 study of guerrilla warfare in Missouri, and other studies have examined such episodes as the Lawrence, Kansas, massacre in 1863.

(Continued)

On TOCWOC, Brett Schulte has an interesting and fair-minded review of my first book, The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865 (1995). Although it’s a very favorable assessment, both he and Drew Wagenhoffer (in a comment on Brett’s post) think that I underplayed the extent of the Union’s destructive war on Southern property, which was also an observation made at the OAH session mentioned by Brooks in his recent posts.

Drew adds, “My main beef is with how other readers and historians often treat it as a comprehensive last word, when it would better be considered an excellent general starting point from which to delve deeper.” I agree completely.

I’ll post my own comments for the OAH session shortly, and follow up with a post summarizing Lesley Gordon’s comments and the ensuing discussion with the audience.

I was both amused and bemused by this outburst that greeted a reading of my comments at the OAH at the Pinstripe Press Blog. 

Oddly enough, of course, Michael Aubrecht’s rant actually does a fine job of illustrating the anti-intellectualism that some non-academic historians display.  It also displays more than a little ignorance about the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians.  At each annual meeting there are hundreds of sessions on a multitude of topics.  It’s not a Civil War conference: it’s a conference in which people present findings and discuss scholarship.  The purpose of our session was to throw out some ideas on the state of the field, in part to bring some people who are interested in these sorts of things up to speed, and in part to poke professional historians about new directions research might take.  Somehow Mr. Aubrecht and portions of his readership find that to be offensive or condescending: why this is I don’t know, since Mr. Aubrecht, for all of his protests, reads this blog, and he wouldn’t do so unless he found something of value to it.

As for the professional/academic/amateur debate, I’ve commented on that before, and it is clear from Mr. Aubrecht’s comments that he’s ignorant of what I’ve had to say.  There are none so blind as those who will not read.  There are non-professionals and non-academics with whom I’ve worked, including Eric Wittenberg:  Mr. Aubrecht’s post (and his postscript about his nameless cheering section) seems to promote the very divide he claims to deplore.  But by linking to it, I can use the post as evidence of one of the points that I wanted to make, and so it served a useful purpose for me.  Thank goodness other folks believe differently. 

Well, at least he’s a Yankees fan.