INTRODUCTION

This book grew out of an invitation in the summer of 2008 to contribute brief essays to Civil War Times. Dana Shoaf, recently named editor, promised me the freedom to choose my own topics but said I would have to abide by a limit of one thousand words. The idea immediately appealed to me. I knew that Civil War Times had been established in 1962 and reached the largest popular audience in the field. In fact, it had been part of my life since I subscribed, in 1965, as a fourteen-year-old in Colorado captivated by the Civil War. The magazine published my first article, on Abraham Lincoln and black colonization, in 1980, and I subsequently contributed several more pieces. Many prominent historians had written for the magazine—including academics such as Bell I. Wiley, Mary Elizabeth Massey, and T. Harry Williams, as well as authors whose books reached a large popular audience, such as Bruce Catton, Glenn Tucker, and Stephen W. Sears. I accepted Dana’s invitation, and the first essay appeared in April 2009. More than seventy others have followed.1

Walt Whitman comes to mind as I look back on the experience of writing six short essays annually. In Specimen Days, the poet famously predicted, “The real war will never get into the books.” By that, Whitman meant the real story of the common soldiers, the “actual soldier of 1862–’65, North and South,” as he explained. “The seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, . . .” he suggested, “will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be.” Indeed, the conflict’s “interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiae of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested.”2 Whitman’s observations inspire writers who search for a novel way to enter a crowded and popular field and strive to illuminate what they consider neglected or ignored elements of the war.

I approached writing the essays convinced that a great deal of the real war has gotten into the books. Gifted historians have produced a corpus of scholarship on the Civil War era that, together with the mass of testimony bequeathed by participants ranging from Abraham Lincoln to men in the ranks, from Freedmen’s Bureau workers to nurses and countless others, provides readers with bountiful options. For many decades, historians primarily dealt with causation, high politics, and conventional military operations—three topics essential to a basic familiarity with the whole subject. Over the past half century, however, the literature has become much richer and more expansive. We know far more than previously about Whitman’s common soldiers, about women in the United States and the Confederacy, about African Americans and the process of emancipation, about white unionists and other dissenters in the Confederacy, about guerrilla operations, about the conflict in a global context, and, increasingly, about the American West as part of the war’s overall mosaic. Scholars also have accorded considerable attention to the so-called dark side of the conflict—to its brutality, atrocities, cowardice, vicious activity by irregular bands, and physical and psychological wounds that left some veterans profoundly damaged.3

As the field of Civil War–era history has become increasingly complex, there has been an understandable tendency to place a new subject as close as possible to the center of the entire story and to question many long-accepted analytical frameworks. The traditional juxtapositions of North and South, slaveholders and nonslaveholders, United States and Confederacy have come into question, as has the four-year time frame that typically delineates the subject in the popular imagination. Many scholars insist that the war must be brought together with post-Appomattox events, including Reconstruction, with the West and Native Americans, and with world history to create a “long Civil War” far more inclusive and geographically varied than the one dominated by events that transpired east of the Mississippi River, and especially in Virginia, from 1861 to 1865.4

From the beginning, I wanted my essays for Civil War Times to expose tensions among parts of the recent literature that cover peripheral or secondary dimensions of the conflict and what I would call four foundational elements of the “real war” (to continue with Whitman’s phrasing, if not his narrow meaning regarding common soldiers). Some new writings, however useful and praiseworthy, obscure realities that stand out clearly in the evidence and should be as apparent to us as they were to the wartime generation: The real war erupted over slavery-related political issues between North and South and retained that internal focus. Conventional armies decided its outcome, fielding millions of citizen-soldiers who waged some of the most famous and costly campaigns in American history. It ended in the early summer of 1865, having settled the issue of secession’s constitutionality and destroyed the institution of slavery but leaving the question of equal rights for freedpeople unresolved. The twelve years of Reconstruction functioned as a long coda to the war itself, again centered on a clear central issue—how ten former Confederate states would return to the reconstituted Union (Tennessee was exempted from most of Reconstruction) and how that process would affect African American political rights and economic circumstances. Anyone who grasps these four things has made a very good start toward gaining a general understanding of the real war.

Writing the essays allowed me to place our contemporary understanding of the Civil War, both academic and popular, in conversation with testimony from people in the United States and the Confederacy who experienced and described it. Put another way, I could investigate how mid-nineteenth-century perceptions align with, or deviate from, some of those we now hold regarding the origins, conduct, and aftermath of the war. I hasten to make clear that our perspective and access to a plethora of sources can reveal patterns and produce insights not apparent to the wartime generation. Still, the essays presented a chance to discuss how a predilection for reading the past through the prism of our own experience often slights central themes that emerge clearly from the historical record. Too often, in my view, some of the new work also makes atypical experiences seem normative.

I readily concede that there is nothing novel about bringing contemporary political, cultural, and intellectual baggage to bear on historical analysis. The urge to find a fresh and usable past always has been and remains compelling and irresistible. Earlier generations of Civil War scholars certainly manifested this tendency—whether the “blundering generation” or “needless war” schools that drew on reactions to World War I, the “consensus school” that flowered in the wake of World War II, or the “ignore the military side of the Civil War altogether” social history approach of the post-Vietnam era. In all these instances, scholarship often revealed almost as much about the time in which it appeared as about the events and personalities it explored.5

Above all, the essays afforded an opportunity to bridge the gap between the academic and popular worlds of Civil War interest. I believe historians should find ways to share the insights of current scholarship with an interested lay audience. Nonprofessional readers gravitate toward the war’s celebrated battles and generals, something those who lived through the conflict would understand. Abraham Lincoln spoke to this point in his second inaugural address, affirming that “The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all.” Harper’s Weekly, the leading illustrated newspaper in the loyal states, similarly reinforced the centrality of military affairs by devoting approximately 80 percent of its front pages between April 1861 and April 1865 to battles, officers, and other martial subjects. Academic historians, now as in the past, much prefer to write about nonmilitary aspects of the conflict. I see no inherent tension between pursuing conventional military topics and appreciating the political, social, and memorial contexts of battles and campaigns. Indeed, any approach that fails to highlight the myriad ways in which the military and nonmilitary spheres intersected and affected one another promotes a deeply flawed understanding of the whole war.6

Yet my experiences over more than forty years have underscored the obvious degree to which the popular and academic worlds remain largely insulated from one another. Lay readers typically avoid jargon-filled academic studies that appeal to a limited professional audience, while academics often deplore the kind of military narratives and biographies that achieve commercial success and garner reviews in major newspapers and other outlets. Attitudes toward interpreting battlefields illuminate divisions in the field. As someone engaged in historic preservation at Civil War sites since the late 1980s, I have spoken with an array of people about whether such places deserve protection. In the 1990s, I applauded a cooperative effort by the Organization of American Historians and the National Park Service to assess interpretive emphases at battlefields. I served, between 1996 and 2000, on three-scholar teams that looked at Antietam National Battlefield, Richmond National Battlefield Park, and Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. Shortly after the last of the OAH/NPS projects, I joined Gabor S. Boritt, Eric Foner, Thavolia Glymph, James M. McPherson, and Nina Silber on the advisory board for a new visitor center and museum at Gettysburg National Military Park. That multiyear endeavor culminated in 2008 and highlighted the difficulty, when professional historians engage with NPS personnel and museum specialists, of agreeing about the type of exhibits best suited to serve the park’s annual throng of visitors. For example, how should military action on July 1–3, 1863, be balanced by larger political framing? And should tourists be shown how memory of the battle has played out over the years?7

These activities left no doubt that Civil War buffs—a dismissive term in academic circles—typically visit battlefields to follow the movements of troops and ponder questions about leadership in the crucible of combat. At Gettysburg, for example, they congregate in large numbers at Little Round Top to see where Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and the Twentieth Maine deployed on July 2, 1863, or at “the angle” on Cemetery Ridge, where fragments of George E. Pickett’s brigades struck units in Winfield Scott Hancock’s Second Corps the next day. Such activities confirm the value of examining terrain to appreciate tactical ebb and flow and also can serve as a bridge that somehow links our world to that of the Civil War generation. But most scholars would argue that, rather than immersing themselves in on-the-ground details, visitors to Gettysburg should focus on the political forces that sundered the Union and brought two armies of citizen-soldiers to Adams County in the summer of 1863, on how military events there and elsewhere affected issues such as emancipation and the rhythms of civilian life, and on how Americans later developed disparate memories of the battle. Some skeptical academics, and they are not uncommon, doubt the value of preserving battlefields at all, seeing them as sites that glorify war and cater to a militaristic streak in American society.8

My effort to address controversial relationships between scholarly and popular concerns yielded essays for Civil War Times that cluster in several categories. As a longtime bibliophile drawn to books as both researching tools and collectible objects, I enjoy writing about notable titles and authors. Some essays feature essential published primary accounts, both Union and Confederate, military and civilian, famous and lesser known. Others assess historians who, though their names have receded with the passage of time, produced works that remain pertinent in terms of analysis or information. I also relish revisiting conventional interpretations of events and personalities, many of them almost universally accepted among nonspecialists. A number of essays thus challenge, among other things, commonly held notions about Gettysburg and Vicksburg as decisive turning points, Ulysses S. Grant as a general who profligately wasted Union manpower, the Gettysburg Address as a watershed that turned the war from a fight for Union into one for Union and emancipation, and Robert E. Lee as an old-fashioned general ill-suited to waging a modern mid-nineteenth-century war.

As I noted, recent scholarly trends invite similar scrutiny. For brief essays alerting a nonacademic readership to the evolving nature of the field, possible topics came quickly to mind. Has a fascination with famous armies and generals obscured the importance of guerrilla operations? Did the conflict end in 1865 or continue through Reconstruction and beyond? How did the West—especially the area beyond the 100th meridian—figure in Union and Confederate planning and allocation of resources? Did emancipation join Union as an equivalent or even more important war aim for the mass of loyal soldiers and civilians in the United States? Should clashes between Indians and the U.S. Army and territorial units be considered part of the Civil War or elements of a much longer historical drama that unfolded between the late eighteenth century and the last third of the nineteenth century? Has the Eastern Theater unfairly dominated the literature on the war? And has the “dark side” of the war been slighted?

Cultural manifestations of the war’s continuing resonance figure in another group of essays. Hollywood’s influence, always important, remains significant in shaping popular perceptions through films such as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Timur Bekmambetov’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, both released in 2012. Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War, initially aired in 1990 and digitally restored for its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2015, still reaches viewers during PBS fund-raising efforts and on Netflix. Clashes over Confederate symbols periodically capture national headlines—to a striking degree after nine congregants died in a shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015, and violence attending a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, claimed another life.

Some debates about the war have unfolded primarily on blogs and social media and only secondarily in print, perhaps most obviously the give-and-take about whether thousands of black men “served” in the Confederate army. The issue of black Confederates reminds us of just how far from scholarship’s conclusions, and historical facts, some popular notions can stray. No reputable historian believes that more than an infinitesimal number of black men shouldered arms in the Confederacy, yet claims of fifty thousand or more, based on a profoundly misinformed use of “evidence,” appear regularly.9

The tension between history and memory forms a leitmotif throughout the essays. All my classes and public presentations combine attention to both history and historical memory. I stress the importance of what actually happened, while also showing that successive generations remember historical events and personalities in starkly different ways. Popular memory often trumps reality, I emphasize, because people almost always act on what they perceive to be the truth, however far that perception might stray from historical reality.

Many essays touch on the shifting cultural and literary importance of four memory traditions created by the wartime generation. Two of the four sprang from the winning side. The Union Cause celebrated, above all else, the saving of the republic created by the founding generation, while the Emancipation Cause pronounced the end of slavery the war’s greatest achievement. Former Confederates offered their version of the war’s origins and history in what came to be called the Lost Cause. Finally, the Reconciliation Cause united some Americans, North and South, in lauding the valor of white troops on both sides, muting the question of who was right and who was wrong and cheering a united nation positioned, by 1900, to take its place among the world’s leading powers. An ability to detect the presence or absence of the four traditions assists any effort to chart the changing relationship between different groups of Americans and the Civil War. Films provide a rich target to identify memory traditions. The impact of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Gone with the Wind (1939) in advancing the Lost Cause, or of Glory (1989) and Lincoln in reminding filmgoers of the Emancipation Cause, cannot be overemphasized.10

Part of my motivation in accepting Dana Shoaf’s invitation to write for Civil War Times, beyond what I already have mentioned, lay in using the essays to sharpen my thinking about questions and issues I have dealt with in several books. Careful readers will find evidence of this process in The Confederate War (1997), Causes Won, Lost, and Forgotten: How Hollywood and Popular Art Shape What We Know about the Civil War (2008), The Union War (2011), Becoming Confederates: Paths to a New National Loyalty (2013), and The American War: A History of the Civil War Era (2015; revised edition 2019). I hoped the essays would elicit considerable reaction from readers of Civil War Times and thus allow me to hone some of my arguments. That in fact happened. Dana published a sample of positive and negative responses in the magazine and shared others with me. Both lay readers and scholars weighed in.

My essay about Shelby Foote prompted divergent reactions. “I don’t think I ever read such a mess before in my life,” read one letter to the editor, which added, “I don’t know who Gallagher is, nor do I care.” The same essay inspired a positive reaction from another reader: “I think it’s great when academic historians step back from their own work long enough to address the ‘peanut gallery’ of critics who take issue with professional approaches to history.” Two essays dealing with the war in the far western territories triggered a heated exchange among scholars and others (to which I did not contribute), which began on Twitter and migrated to other social media. E-mails and letters sent directly to me by readers, many of them quite stridently approving or disapproving of what I had written, further indicated that many of the essays had touched sensitive nerves.11

Writing the essays allowed me to share my enthusiasm for studying the war with an audience I knew held similar interests. It supplemented other opportunities to examine the subject—with thousands of undergraduate students at Penn State University and the University of Virginia, more than 1,500 middle and high school teachers from across the country in summer seminars, thousands of adults who have attended conferences and lectures over the years, and people who watched a video course on the Civil War I offered for The Teaching Company (now called The Great Courses).

My lifelong interest in the Civil War era stems from its profusion of dramatic events, compelling personalities, unlikely political and social twists and turns, and engrossing military action. As a society and a people, Americans of the period grappled with elemental questions that continue to demand attention today. Would the Union forged by the Revolutionary generation be scuttled because part of the electorate did not like the outcome of the presidential election of 1860? Would the institution of slavery, which had mocked the soaring language of the nation’s founding documents, be eliminated? Would the relative power of the central government and the states and localities be reoriented in a fundamental way? Would conflicts over reconstructing the Union undercut efforts to establish genuine social and political equality for black people? And by far most important within an international context, would the nation emerge intact and become an economic and military powerhouse? Confederate victory in the war, something surely possible, though few Americans appreciate that fact now, would have altered the trajectory of twentieth-century world history.

In my essays, as in other venues, I argue that only by coming to terms with the Civil War, as well as with how people have remembered and used it in politics and popular culture, can anyone understand the broader arc of United States history. The war functioned as both an end and a beginning. It resolved huge issues left unresolved by the generation that won independence and wrote the Constitution, providing closure for long-term wrangling about slavery and the permanence of the Union. United States victory in turn set the stage for economic and territorial expansion. Postwar Reconstruction, however, failed to prevent political and social strife relating to race, to the relationship between the central government and the states and localities, and to meanings of U.S. citizenship.

Ongoing controversies over the Confederate memorial landscape constitute just one element in the Civil War’s long-standing power to affect the nation and its citizens. Sadly, some school administrators, both public and private, support avoiding the Civil War because discussions about slavery, massive bloodshed, and controversial memorial landscapes can cause discomfort among students and their parents. But a free society should confront its past, warts and all. The many sharp edges and troubling dimensions of the Civil War must be set against uplifting and empowering elements that helped create a better version of the founders’ republic.12

Joan Waugh, my coauthor for The American War and collaborator in innumerable ways on other Civil War–related endeavors, first suggested that my essays might work as a book. Our ensuing conversations led me to consider how, taken as a group, the essays reflect my belief that narrative, chronology, and biography are essential to forging a true understanding of the past. These are unfashionable tools in some academic quarters today, where many people dismiss chronological frameworks as too simplistic or even contrived, too prone to favor narrative over analysis, and too likely to bring individual personalities into play. But I have seen the confusion among my students and the general public that too often results from purely thematic or theoretical approaches to history—most notably those devoid of human beings. Far too many students, even very bright ones, arrive at college with a hopeless muddle of information about American history and no real sense of how eras, movements, and events fit together. They need to learn that chronology not only matters but also provides an essential point of departure toward the goal of historical literacy. The bombardment of Fort Sumter followed the secession of the lower South, which had occurred as a result of Abraham Lincoln’s election. These episodes did not happen in that order by chance—each proceeded from the earlier one. A large number of students over many years expressed appreciation for my attention to chronology, often adding that it helped them see, for the first time, how and why events unfolded and connected with one another.

The essays, usually obliquely, also get at the relationship between political ideology and historical analysis. I will mention students again on this point. Most undergraduates enroll in classes to learn something about a subject, and they typically resent being held hostage to harangues regarding contemporary politics. I find this very encouraging. All historians have political views, but we should strive to check them at the classroom door. For example, my voting choices have nothing to do with how I explain why men from New Hampshire or Wisconsin or Iowa, who faced absolutely no threat to their property and families from Confederate military forces, voluntarily donned blue uniforms and risked their lives to save the Union. If students could not account for such enlistments by the end of my class on the Civil War, I would have failed miserably. Injecting my own political views into the process would only get in the way. At the close of almost every semester, a few students remarked they had not been able to tell whether I am a Democrat or a Republican. “Now that the semester is over,” they asked, “will you tell us?” I always said no—because my politics had nothing to do with the class or my relationship with the students.

Political ideology and passion too often dictate how historians and the public deal with certain elements of the past—and even how they determine what parts of the past ought be studied. It often encourages a simplistic division of dead historical actors into “good” and “bad” people who should be treated accordingly. Nothing is easier than feeling superior to long-dead individuals, almost none of whom satisfy our current ideas regarding race and other issues. But the past is never simple. In fact, my forty years of studying the Civil War has yielded one unequivocal truth; namely, however complicated I imagined some episode or character, further research unmasked far greater complexity. Vexing shades of gray, rather than stark tones of black and white, usually await anyone who ventures honestly into the thickets of historical investigation. Letting ideology fuel an interpretation recalls Lost Cause writers who used selective evidence, airbrushed slavery and other negative elements of the southern rebellion, and came up with a shiny version of the Confederacy. Ideology can lead to pretending slavery-related issues were not central to the coming of the war, or, conversely, to suggesting that the Union war effort had little or no meaning beyond its eventual embrace of emancipation.13

My essays in Civil War Times often angered readers who deplored what they considered my transgressions against their ideological preferences. Neo-Confederates scorned my placing slavery-related issues at the heart of secession and establishment of the Confederacy or my refusal to concede that Nathan Bedford Forrest belongs alongside Lincoln as one of Shelby Foote’s “two authentic geniuses” of the Civil War. To these people, I represent a typical “Marxist/communist” professor, as several have put it, who hates the South. In contrast, my suggestion that Robert E. Lee possessed considerable military skill and wrestled painfully with multiple loyalties during the era of sectional controversy brought accusations of conservative special pleading on behalf of a slaveholder and traitor who deserved to be hanged. I have two files in my study where I preserve such sentiments—the first labeled “Hate Mail from Neo-Confederates” (one correspondent hoped I would develop a “virulent form of pancreatic cancer”) and the second “Hate Mail Calling me a Neo-Confederate.”14 All such messages reminded me of advice from my graduate adviser that has guided much of my career. When I complained that recent research had forced me to change prospective conclusions, Barnes F. Lathrop curtly replied, “God damn it, Gallagher, just go where the evidence leads, and you’ll be all right.”15

All of the essays in Civil War Times reflect my attempt to honor Lathrop’s advice, whatever the fallout when my observations diverged from prevailing orthodoxies. Because of the thousand-word limit, they are suggestive rather than exhaustive. I hope readers will find them useful, provocative, and enjoyable. Because I followed no master blueprint in writing them, I have arranged the essays in six groupings, without attention to date of original publication. Some pieces might work just as well in a different grouping. I slightly revised a few of the essays, included significantly expanded versions of two, and added two short pieces that first appeared in the Civil War Monitor. The original essays had no citations for quoted material. I have added endnotes, which are less detailed than would be the case in a monograph, supplied references for direct quotations, pointed readers to other pertinent material, and otherwise provided analytical context. I have changed many of the titles, usually substituting my originals for those the magazine used. A concise introductory text opens each of the book’s six sections, and an appendix records the publication sequence and original titles for all the essays.

The first grouping, “Framing the War,” comprises eleven pieces that deal with chronology, history and memory, and some of the new revisionist literature. Fifteen essays devoted to “Generals and Battles” come next, with particular attention to Grant, Lee, and other major figures. The third grouping, “Controversies,” offers twelve essays on such topics as turning points, counterfactuals, apportioning credit for emancipation, and when the war ended. The thirteen entries in the fourth grouping, “Historians and Books,” together with the thirteen in the fifth, “Testimony from Participants,” evaluate important published primary and secondary accounts. The volume closes with “Places and Public Culture,” the seven essays in which I examine films, preservation of battlefields, the memorial landscape, and related topics. The book lends itself to sampling, and readers might start in any of the groupings and go where their interests take them. If successful, the essays will impart a sense of how rewarding I have found my lifelong relationship with the Civil War. What better subject could a teacher or scholar investigate and try to explain?