This guide to books about the Civil War and its causes includes only a fraction of the studies cited in the footnotes, which in turn constitute but a portion of the sources consulted in the research for this book. And that research merely sampled the huge qorpus of literature on the Civil War era, which totals more than 50,000 books and pamphlets on the war years alone—not to mention a boundless number of articles, doctoral dissertations, and manuscript collections. Indeed, there are said to be more works in English on Abraham Lincoln than on any other persons except Jesus of Nazareth and William Shakespeare.
The best introduction to this era can be found in two multi-volume studies, published a half-century apart, which have become classics in American historiography: James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Restoration of Home Rule at the South, 7 vols. (New York, 1892–1906); and Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union, 4 vols., and The War for the Union, 4 vols. (New York, 1947–71). These magisterial volumes present a strong nationalist interpretation of the crisis of the Union, as do nearly all biographies of Lincoln, of which the fullest are John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), by the wartime president's private secretaries; and James G. Randall, Lincoln the President, 4 vols. (New York, 1945–55; Vol. IV completed by Richard N. Current), a scholarly tour de force marred only by Randall's attempt to squeeze Lincoln into a conservative mold that he did not quite fit. For an ov-ercorrection of that viewpoint, consult the most readable one-volume biography, Stephen B. Gates, With Malice Toward None: The Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1977). Reflecting a southern viewpoint toward this divisive era is Hudson Strode's biography Jefferson Davis, 3 vols. (New York, 1955–64). The papers of these two leading actors in the ordeal of American and Confederate nationalism have been published in Roy P. Easier, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, 1953–55) an The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln —Supplement, 1832–1865 (New Brunswick, 1974); and Dunbar Rowland, ed., Jefferson Davis, Constitutionalist: His Letters, Papers, and Speeches, 10 vols. (Jackson, Miss., 1923). Rowland's edition has been superseded for the years through 1855 by Haskell M. Monroe, Jr., James T. Mclntosh, Lynda L. Crist, and Mary S. Dix, eds., The Papers of Jefferson Davis, 5 vols. to date (Baton Rouge, 1971–85). Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia (New York, 1982) contains an extraordinary amount of useful information about the sectional conflict and war; as does David C. Roller and Robert W. Twy-man, eds., The Encyclopedia of Southern History (Baton Rouge, 1979). Two other reference works, while focusing mainly on military events and personnel, also include some political developments of the antebellum as well as war years: Mark M. Boatner III, The Civil War Dictionary (New York, 1959); and Patricia L. Faust, ed., Historical Times Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Civil War (New York, 1986).
A study of antebellum economic developments that has achieved the status of a classic well worth reading is George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1951). A more recent study by the dean of American economic historians, Thomas C. Cochran, Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America (New York, 1981), also focuses on the antebellum era. The rise of the "American System of Manufactures" is chronicled in Nathan Rosenberg, ed., The American System of Manufactures (Edinburgh, 1969); and Otto Mayr and Robert C. Post, eds., Yankee Enterprise: The Rise of the American System of Manufactures (Washington, 1981). Paul Wallace Gates, The Farmers' Age: Agriculture 1815–1860 (New York, 1962), chronicles changes in agriculture during this era; while Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South (New York, 1978), and Harold D. Woodman, King Cotton and His Retainers (Lexington, 1968), analyze the production and marketing of the South's leading crop. Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience (New York, 1965), provides fascinating vignettes on how Americans in all walks of life interacted with each other and with their environment.
The most succinct and sensible study of education during this era is Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: Common Schooling and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York, 1983), which synthesizes a large body of scholarship in a readable, informative fashion. On immigration and nativism, three classic studies are still the best places to begin: Marcus Lee Hansen, The Atlantic Migration 1607–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1940); Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants 1790-1880: A Study in Acculturation (rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1959); and Ray Allen Billing-ton, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860 (New York, 1938). The image of Irish-Americans is analyzed in Dale T. Knobel, Paddy and the Republic: Ethnicity and Nationality in Antebellum America (Middletown, Conn., 1986). For the antebellum temperance movement, see Ian R. Tyrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America 1800–1860 (Westport, Conn., 1979); and Jed Dannenbaum, Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Wash-ingtonian Revival to the WCTU (Urbana, 1984). Perhaps the best introductions to the large literature on the abolitionist movement are James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York, 1976); and Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore, 1976).
The impact of the antebellum economic transformation on the American working class has been the subject of numerous excellent studies in recent years, including: Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826—1860 (New York, 1979); Jonathan Prude, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810–1860 (Cambridge, 1983); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York, 1984); and Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788–1890 (New York, 1985). Changes in the roles of women and the family during this era have also generated a rich and growing body of literature, including: Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977); Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1981); Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman's World in the Old South (New York, 1982); and Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America 1848–1869 (Ithaca, 1978).
The "Second Party System" of Jacksonian Democrats and Clay Whigs that formed around economic issues associated with banking, the transportation revolution, and industrialization in the 1830s is analyzed in Richard P. McCormick, The Second American Party System: Party Formation in the Jacksonian Era (Chapel Hill, 1966); Arthur M. Schles-inger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945); Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, 1983); Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, 1979); John Ashworth, "Agrarians & Aristocrats": Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837–1846 (London, 1983); Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1957); James Roger Sharp, The Jacksonians versus the Banks: Politics in the States after the Panic of 1837 (New York, 1970); and William G. Shade, Banks or No Banks: The Money Issue in Western Politics, 1832–1865 (Detroit, 1972). The strongest advocates of an "ethnocultural" interpretation of northern politics are: Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961); and Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971). The shape of the relationship between economy, society, and political culture in the South, with particular emphasis on non-slaveholding whites, is outlined by: J. Mills Thornton III, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge, 1978); Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York, 1983); Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina 1836–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1983); Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second American Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge, 1981); Paul D. Escort, Many Excellent People: Power and Privilege in North Carolina, 1850–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1985); and J. William Harris, Plain Folk and Gentry in a Slave Society: White Liberty and Black Slavery in Augusta's Hinterlands (Middletown, Conn., 1986).
No aspect of southern history—indeed, of American history—has attracted more attention than slavery. Among the scores of challenging and important books on slaves and masters, the following constitute a starting point for understanding the peculiar institution: Ulrich B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery ([1918]; reissued edition with Foreword by Eugene Genovese, Baton Rouge, 1966); Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in The Ante-Bellum South (New York, 1956); Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1st ed., 1959; 3rd ed., rev., Chicago, 1976); Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery (New York, 1965) and Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1st ed., 1972, rev. and enlarged ed., New York, 1979); Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston, 1974); an anthology of some of the numerous criticisms and challenges of this work is Reckoning with Slavery: A Critical Study in the Quantitative History of American Negro Slavery by Paul A. David and others (New York, 1976); also see Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York, 1976); Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom (New York, 1982); and James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York, 1982). The unhappy lot of free blacks in both North and South has been chronicled by Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States (Chicago, 1961); and Ira Berlin, Slaves without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974). For the success story of a free black family that owned slaves, see Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York, 1984).
Only a tiny sampling of the rich literature on the frontier and the westward movement can be listed here. Malcolm J. Rohrbaugh's The Trans-Appalachian Frontier (New York, 1978) narrates the settlement of the inland empire between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, while Ray Allen Billington's The Far Western Frontier 1830–1860 (New York, 1956) does the same for the vast region west of the Mississippi. The expansionism of the Polk administration that led to war with Mexico is treated in: Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History (New York, 1963); Norman A. Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in Continental Expansion (New York, 1955); and David Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Annexation: Texas, Mexico, and the Mexican War (Columbia, Mo., 1973). The popular enthusiasm generated by the victorious war of conquest is documented by Robert W. Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The War with Mexico in the American Imagination (New York, 1985); but for the strong opposition to the war among Whigs and antislavery people, see John H. Schroeder, Mr. Folk's War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848 (Madison, 1973).
The fateful consequences of the controversy over expansion of slavery into the territories acquired from Mexico are the starting point for the best single book on the sectional conflict leading to Civil War, David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848–1861 (New York, 1976). A briefer study that emphasizes the breakdown of the second party system as a causal factor of secession rather than as a result of sectional conflict is Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978). The emergence of the Free Soil party is discussed in: Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York, 1976); Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, Ky., 1970); and Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics 1848–1854 (Urbana, 1973). The most concise account of the complex process that produced the Compromise of 1850 is Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington, Ky., 1964).
The hostility and violence generated by the fugitive slave law can be followed in: Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law 1850–1860 (Chapel Hill, 1970); and Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North 1780–1861 (Baltimore, 1974). The South's failed quest for economic independence in the 1850s is the subject of: Robert Royal Russel, Economic Aspects of Southern Sectionalism, 1840–1861 (Urbana, 1923); Herbert Wender, Southern Commercial Conventions 1837–1859 (Baltimore, 1930); and Fred Bateman and Thomas Weiss, A Deplorable Scarcity: The Failure of Industrialization in the Slave Economy (Chapel Hill, 1981). For southern efforts to acquire new slave territory by both legal and illegal means, see Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1862 (Baton Rouge, 1973); Charles H. Brown, Agentsof Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill, 1980); and William O. Scroggs, Filibusters and Financiers: TheStory of William Walker and His Associates (New York, 1916). Southern support for reopening the slave trade is documented in Ronald T. Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the Slave Trade (New York, 1971). All these developments and other manifestations of southern nationalism are discussed in John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation . . . 1830–1860 (New York, 1979). The preoccupation of southern politicians with the defense of slavery is the theme of William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978); while Clement Eaton, The Freedom-of-Thought Struggle in the Old South (rev. and enlarged ed., New York, 1964), discusses the southern closing of ranks against outside criticism; Avery Craven's The Coming of the Civil War (rev. ed., Chicago, 1957) and The Growth of Southern Nationalism 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953) tend to justify southern sectionalism as a natural response to northern aggression. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982), analyzes that quality in southern culture that made southrons so touchy about affronts to their "rights."
The best introduction to the free-labor ideology of the Republican party that underlay its opposition to the expansion of slavery is Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970); while the fullest account of the matrix of politics, ideology, and nativism out of which the party was born is William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York, 1987). For the tangled web of Democratic politics that produced the Kansas-Nebraska Act, consult George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (Boston, 1934); and Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973). For a sensitive rendering of the response by Lincoln in the context of the emerging Republican opposition, see Don E. Fehren-bacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the 1850's (Stanford, 1962). For the consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Kansas as well as Washington, see James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1969); and Alice Nichols, Bleeding Kansas (New York, 1954). The transformation of politics in two important states is analyzed by Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856 (Kent, 1983); and Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill, 1984).
The development of a sectional schism in the Democratic party during the Buchanan administration is the subject of Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of the American Democracy (New York, 1948). Every conceivable facet of the Dred Scott case is examined by Don E. Fehren-bacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978). The most systematic analysis of the Lincoln-Douglas debates is Harry V. Jaffa, An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (New York, 1959). Of the large literature on John Brown and the Harper's Ferry raid, the most detailed study is Oswald Garrison Villard, John Brown, 1800–1859 (Boston, 1910); and the most recent biography is Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York, 1970). Some new information and insights can be found in Jeffery S. Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, the Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia, 1982). Four older monographs on the election of 1860 that emphasize the emergence of Lincoln and the South's behavior in light of his probable election are still of value: Emerson D. Fite, The Presidential Campaign of 1860 (New York, 1911); William E. Baringer, Lincoln's Rise to Power (Boston, 1937); Reinhard H. Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign (Cambridge, Mass., 1944); and Ollinger Crenshaw, The Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860 (Baltimore, 1945)
An older monograph on the secession movement is also still of value: Dwight L. Dumond, The Secession Movement 1860–1861 (New York, 1931). Ralph Wooster, The Secession Conventions of the South (Princeton, 1962), presents basic factual data on the conventions and their delegates; while Donald E. Reynolds, Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis (Nashville, 1970), documents the important role of the press in whipping up sentiment for secession. Among the best and most recent studies of the lower-South states that went out first are: Steven A. Channing, A Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York, 1970); William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974); and Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1977). Several older studies chronicle the initial unionism and post-Sumter secession of the upper South: Henry T. Shanks, The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847–1861 (Richmond, 1934); J. Carlyle Sitterson, The Secession Movement in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1939); and Mary E. R. Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseans toward the Union (New York, 1961). For the border states, see William J. Evitts, A Matter of Allegiances: Maryland from 1850 to 1861 (Baltimore, 1974); E. Merton Coulter, The Civil War and Readjustment in Kentucky (Chapel Hill, 1926); and William E. Parrish, Turbulent Partnership: Missouri and the Union, 1861–1865 (Columbia, Mo., 1963). Among several one-volume histories of the Confederacy, the most detailed and the most recent both contain good accounts of secession and the establishment of a new Confederate government: E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America 1861–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1950); and Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861–1865 (New York, 1979)
Essential for understanding the response of the North and especially of Republicans to southern secession are books by two of the foremost historians of this era: David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven, 1942, reissued with new preface, 1962); and Kenneth M. Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–61 (Baton Rouge, 1950). For the failure of the Washington peace conference to resolve the secession crisis, see Robert G. Gunderson, Old Gentleman's Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison, 1961). The issues and the action at Fort Sumter are dramatically laid out by Richard N. Current, Lincoln and the First Shot (Philadelphia, 1963); and William A. Swanberg, First Blood: The Story of Fort Sumter (New York, 1957).
The military campaigns of the Civil War have evoked some of the most vivid writing in American historical literature, only a tiny sample of which can be included here. The most graphic epic, nearly three thousand pages by a novelist who is also a fine historian, is Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative, 3 vols. (New York, 1958–74), which leans slightly South in its sympathies. Leaning slightly the other way and written in a similarly readable style is Bruce Catton, The Centennial History of the Civil War: Vol. I: The Coming Fury; Vol. II: Terrible Swift Sword; Vol. III: Never Call Retreat (Garden City, 1961–65). Another trilogy by a prolific historian of the Civil War is in progress, with two volumes having thus far appeared: William C. Davis, The Imperiled Union: 1861–1865: Vol. I: The Deep Waters of the Proud and Vol. II: Stand in the Day of Battle (Garden City, N.Y. 1982–83). Two marvelous volumes on Civil War soldiers, by one of the giants of Civil War historiography, are based on research in hundreds of collections of letters, diaries, and memoirs, published and unpublished: Bell Irvin Wiley's The Life of Johnny Reb (Indianapolis, 1943) and The Life of Billy Yank (Indianapolis, 1952). Ella Lonn, Desertion During the Civil War (New York, 1928), provides data on that melancholy subject. For the war at sea and on the rivers, see especially Virgil Carrington Jones, The Civil War at Sea, 3 vols. (New York, 1960–62).
Retrospective accounts of campaigns and battles by participants, first published in Scribner's Magazine two decades after the war and then gathered in four large volumes (available today in an inexpensive reprint edition) are Clarence C. Buel and Robert U. Johnson, eds., Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (New York, 1888, reprint ed. Secaucus, N.J., 1982). The official records of military operations, published a generation or more after the war by the U.S. government, are also accessible today in libraries, second-hand bookstores, and reprint editions: War of the Rebellion . . . Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 128 vols. (Washington, 1880–1901) and Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion, 30 vols. (Washington, 1894–1922). The Civil War took place at the dawn of the age of photography, and many thousand wet-plate photographs of soldiers, battlefields, political leaders, and other images of the war have survived and can be viewed in modern publications, most of which also include a fine narrative text to accompany the pictures. See especially Francis T. Miller, ed., The Photographic History of the Civil War, 10 vols. (New York, 1911, reprint ed., 1957); and William C. Davis, ed., The Image of War 1861–1865, 6 vols. (Garden City, N.Y., 1981–84). Another visual aid to understanding Civil War campaigns and battles is maps; the best, with accompanying text, can be found in Vol. I of Vincent J. Esposito, ed., The West Point Atlas of American Wars (New York, 1959). An indispensable reference guide to military operations is E. B. Long, The Civil War Day by Day. An Almanac 1861–1865 (Garden City, N.Y., 1971). Two essential compilations of the strength, organization, and casualties of Civil War armies are: William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War, 1861–1865 (Albany, 1880); and Thomas L. Livermore, Numbers and Losses in the Civil War in America, 1861–1865 (Boston, 1901).
Of the many hundreds of excellent narratives of campaigns and battles, biographies of generals and of other military leaders, and studies of particular armies, space allows a listing here of only a few outstanding titles in the latter two categories. Brief biographies of all generals on both sides can be found in Ezra J. Warner, Generals in Gray (Baton Rouge, 1959) and Generals in Blue (Baton Rouge, 1964). One of the true classics of Civil War literature is Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York, 1934–35) which, along with Freeman's Lee's Lieutenants: A Study in Command, 3 vols. (New York, 1942–44), constitute an exhaustive history of the Army of Northern Virginia. Historian Thomas L. Connelly has been the chief critic of Lee for the limitation of his strategic vision to the Virginia theater and the chief chronicler of the Confederacy's principal western army; see Connelly's The Marble Man: Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society (New York, 1977), Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861–1862 (Baton Rouge, 1967), Autumn of Glory: The Army of Tennessee, 1862–1865 (Baton Rouge, 1971), and, with Archer Jones, The Politics of Command: Factions and Ideas in Confederate Strategy (Baton Rouge, 1973). A British army officer and historian, G. F. R. Henderson, has contributed an appreciative biography of Stonewall Jackson that is also a fine analysis of Confederate operations in Virginia until Jackson's death: Stonewall Jackson and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1898).
On the Union side both T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and His Generals (New York, 1952), and Kenneth P. Williams, Lincoln Finds a General: A Military Study of the Civil War, 5 vols. (New York, 1949–59), are critical of McClellan and appreciative of Grant as strategic leaders. Bruce Catton's superb trilogy on the Army of the Potomac, Mr. Lincoln's Army; Glory Road; and A Stillness at Appomattox (Garden City, N.Y., 1951–53), demonstrates the resilience of these Yankee soldiers despite incompetent leadership and defeat. Two books by a British military expert and historian also offer important insights on Grant's strategic prowess: J. F. C. Fuller, The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant (London, 1929), and Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship (London, 1923). The best military biography of Grant is Bruce Catton's two volumes: Grant Moves South (Boston, 1960) and Grant Takes Command (Boston, 1969). William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981), is less enlightening on Grant's Civil War leadership. The general's activities can be followed in his own words in his superb Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, 2 vols. (New York, 1885); and in John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, 14 vols. (Carbondale, Ill., 1967–85). For important insights on Sherman, the best place to start is Basil H. Liddell Hart, Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American (New York, 1929), a shrewd analysis by a British army officer; and Sherman's own Memoirs ofW. T. Sherman, 2 vols. (2nd ed., New York, 1887). For a fascinating modern analysis of Sherman's philosophy and practice of total war, see James Reston, Jr., Sherman and Vietnam (New York, 1985). Other memoirs by Civil War generals of interest for their intrinsic literary merits or their stance on controversial issues include: George B. McClellan, McClellan's Own Story (New York, 1886); Philip H. Sheridan, Personal Memoirs of P. H. Sheridan, 2 vols. (New York, 1888); Joseph E. Johnston, Narrative of Military Operations . . . during the Late War between the States (New York, 1874); James Long-street, From Manassas to Appomattox: Memoirs of the Civil War in America (rev. ed., 1903); and Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (New York, 1879).
Numerous historians have implicitly or explicitly addressed the question of why the North won the war—or alternatively, why the South lost. Five different answers were forthcoming in an anthology edited by David Donald, Why the North Won the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1960). Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones cite superior northern management of logistical and other resources to explain in How the North Won (Urbana, Ill., 1983); a thesis anticipated by Benjamin P. Thomas and Harold M. Hyman, Stanton: The Life and Times of Lincoln's Secretary of War (New York, 1962). Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University, Ala., 1982), attribute the South's offensive tactics, which bled Confederate armies to death, to cultural factors, while Michael C. C. Adams, Our Masters the Rebels: A Speculation on Union Military Failure in the East, 1861–1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), cites cultural factors to explain why Union armies almost lost the war in the Virginia theater before importing successful western commanders to apply their strategy in the East. Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, and William N. Still, Jr., Why the South Lost the Civil War (Athens, Ga., 1986), are the most recent exponents of the loss of will thesis to explain Confederate defeat.
Although the existing scholarship on conscription in both South and North is not adequate, good places to begin to study this subject are: Albert B. Moore, Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy (New York, 1924); and Eugene C. Murdock, One Million Men: The Civil War Draft in the North (Madison, 1971). There is a large literature on black soldiers in the war. The pioneering work is Dudley T. Cornish, The Sable Arm: Negro Troops in the Union Army (New York, 1956). Mary Frances Berry, Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy: Black Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861–1868 (Port Washington, N.Y., 1977), measures the impact of black military service on the enactment of postwar equal rights legislation. Robert Durden interweaves an account of the Confederate decision to arm blacks with illustrative documents, in The Gray and the Black: The Confederate Debate on Emancipation (Baton Rouge, 1972); while Ira Berlin et al., eds., The Black Military Experience, Series II of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (Cambridge, 1982) publishes a large number of documents from army records and provides excellent headnotes and introductions. Civil War prisons and the prisoner exchange question badly need a modern historian; William B. Hesseltine's Civil War Prisons: A Study in War Psychology (Columbus, Ohio, 1930) is the only comprehensive monograph, while Ovid L. Futch's History of Andersonville Prison (Gainesville, Fla., 1968) is the most dispassionate study of that impassioned subject.
Technological innovations produced to meet military needs during the war are the subjects of two studies full of fascinating information: Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War (Indianapolis, 1956); and Milton F. Perry, Infernal Machines: The Story of Confederate Submarine and Mine Warfare (Baton Rouge, 1965). The role of railroads is the subject of: George E. Turner, Victory Rode the Rails (Indianapolis, 1953); Thomas Weber, The Northern Railroads in the Civil War (New York, 1952); and Robert C. Black, The Railroads of the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1952). Civil War medicine is treated by: Paul E. Steiner, Disease in the Civil War (Springfield, Ill., 1968); George W. Adams, Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War (New York, 1952); and Horace H. Cunningham, Doctors in Gray: The Confederate Medical Service (Baton Rouge, 1958). For a basic history of the U. S. Sanitary Commission, see William Q. Maxwell, Lincoln's Fifth Wheel: The Political History of the United States Sanitary Commission (New York, 1956). Readers interested in a stimulating interpretation of the Sanitary Commission in the context of wartime transformations in northern attitudes toward other social and cultural issues should consult George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York, 1965).
The foreign relations of both Union and Confederacy have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention; among the most useful studies are: David P. Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers 1861–1865 (New York, 1974); Frank L. Owsley and Harriet C. Owsley, King Cotton Diplomacy: Foreign Relations of the Confederate States of America (2nd ed., Chicago, 1959); Ephraim D. Adams, Great Britain and the American Civil War, 2 vols. (New York, 1925); Brian Jenkins, Britain and the War for the Union, 2 vols. (Montreal, 1974–80); and Lynn M. Case and Warren F. Spencer, The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (Philadelphia, 1970).
A long-influential study of northern politics during the war was T. Harry Williams, Lincoln and the Radicals, (Madison, 1941), which stressed ideological conflict within the Republican party. For the now-accepted modification of this view, see Hans L. Trefousse, The Radical Republicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York, 1969), which emphasizes essential Republican agreement in the face of sharp differences with the Democrats. William B. Hesseltine, Lincoln and the War Governors (New York, 1948), shows the shift of power from states to the national government to meet the demands of war. Leonard P. Curry's Blueprint for Modern America: Non-Military Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, 1968) is a careful study of legislation that supplemented the war's revolutionary impact in transforming the United States from a decentralized agrarian republic to an industrial nation. For a study of some of the leaders who helped accomplish this result, see Allan G. Bogue, The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate (Ithaca, 1981).
The opposition, loyal and otherwise, is analyzed by: Joel Silbey, A Respectable Minority: The Democratic Party in the Civil War Era (New York, 1977); Christopher Dell, Lincoln and the War Democrats (Madison, N.J., 1975); Wood Gray, The Hidden Civil War: The Story of the Copperheads (New York, 1942), which tends to indict the Peace Democrats as disloyal; and in three books by Frank L. Klement, who sometimes protests too much in his attempt to exonerate the copperheads from all such calumnies: The Copperheads in the Middle West (Chicago, 1960); The Limits of Dissent: Clement L. Vallandigham and the Civil War (Lexington, Ky., 1970); and Dark Lanterns: Secret Political Societies, Conspiracies, and Treason Trials in the Civil War (Baton Rouge, 1984). For military arrests and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus to squelch anti-war opposition in the North, see: Dean Sprague, Freedom under Lincoln (Boston, 1965); James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (rev. ed., Urbana, Ill., 1951); and Harold M. Hyman, A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (New York, 1973). The peace issue in 1864 is treated by Edward C. Kirkland, The Peacemakers of 1864 (New York, 1927); while the in-fighting within the Republican party during the initial stages of the election campaign that year is chronicled by William F. Zornow, Lincoln and the Party Divided (Norman, Okla., 1954). The best single place to go for the history and historiography of Lincoln's assassination is William Hanchett, The Lincoln Murder Conspiracies (Urbana, 1983).
For the northern homefront, Emerson D. Fite's Social and Economic Conditions in the North (New York, 1910) is still valuable. It should be supplemented by George W. Smith and Charles Judah, eds., Life in the North During the Civil War (Albuquerque, 1966), which reprints numerous contemporary documents. Paul W. Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War (New York, 1965), deals with both North and South; while the essays in Ralph Andreano, ed., The Economic Impact of the Civil War (2nd ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1967) and in David Gilchrist and W. David Lewis, eds., Economic Change in the Civil War Era (Greenville, Del. 1965), focus mainly on the North; and Bray Hammond, Sovereignty and an Empty Purse: Banks and Politics in the Civil War (Princeton, 1970), covers only the North.
Two enlightening books on northern religion during the war are: James H. Moorhead, American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War (New Haven, 1978); and Benjamin Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee, 1945). For the role of northern women both on the homefront and in military hospitals, see Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnett Brigades (New York, 1966); and Agatha Young, Women and the Crisis: Women of the North in the Civil War (New York, 1959). For northern labor, see David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 (New York, 1967). The class and ethnic tensions that flared into the New York draft riots are analyzed in: Basil L. Lee, Discontent in New York City, 1861–1865 (Washington, 1943); and Adrian Cook, The Armies of the Streets: The New York City Draft Riots of 1863 (Lexington, Ky., 1974).
Southern politics during the war have received a great deal of attention. For general histories of the Confederacy, see the volumes by E. Merton Coulter and Emory Thomas cited earlier. Wilfred B. Yearns, The Confederate Congress (Athens, Ga., 1960), provides a narrative history of that institution; while Thomas B. Alexander and Richard E. Beringer's The Anatomy of the Confederate Congress (Nashville, 1972) offers a quantitative analysis. For the Confederate cabinet, see Rembert Patrick, Jefferson Davis and His Cabinet (Baton Rouge, 1944). Bell Irvin Wiley's The Road to Appomattox (Memphis, 1956) contains a caustic analysis of Jefferson Davis's leadership. Larry E. Nelson, Bullets, Bayonets, and Rhetoric: Confederate Policy for the United States Presidential Contest of 1864 (University, Ala., 1980), documents Davis's attempt to undermine the Lincoln administration. Frank L. Owsley, State Rights in the Confederacy (Chicago, 1925), expresses the theme that the Confederacy died of state's rights; but May S. Ringold, The Role of State Legislatures in the Confederacy (Athens, Ga., 1966) and W. Buck Yearns, ed., The Confederate Governors (Athens, 1984), emphasize the positive role that most legislatures and governors played in the war effort. For the two states in which opposition to the Davis administration was strongest, see John G. Barrett, The Civil War in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1963); and T. Conn Bryan, Confederate Georgia (Athens, 1953). Robert L. Kerby, Kirby Smith's Confederacy: The Trans-Mississippi, 1863–1865 (New York, 1972), studies a region that became semi-autonomous after the fall of Vicksburg.
Georgia Lee Tatum, Disloyalty in the Confederacy (New York, 1972), documents anti-war activity and unionism among disaffected whites, especially in the upcountry. Paul D. Escort, After Secession: Jefferson Davis and the Failure of Southern Nationalism (Baton Rouge, 1978), maintains that the greatest failure of Confederate leadership was its inability to sustain the support of non-slaveholders who increasingly saw the southern cause as a rich man's war and a poor man's fight. The theme of yeoman alienation and class tensions is also developed in: Philip S. Paludan, Victims: A True History of the Civil War (Knoxville, 1981); in several good articles published in recent years in the North Carolina Historical Review and the Journal of Southern History; and in many of the books on southern politics cited on pp. 868. A special category of unhappy southerners is treated in Mary Elizabeth Massey, Refugee Life in the Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1964). Another group of "outsiders" is the subject of Ella Lonn, Foreigners in the Confederacy (Chapel Hill, 1940). The contribution of women to the southern war effort is documented by Francis B. Simkins and James W. Patton, The Women of the Confederacy (Richmond, 1936).
The basic study of the Confederate homefront is Charles W. Ramsdell, Behind the Lines in the Southern Confederacy (Baton Rouge, 1944). John C. Schwab, The Confederate States . . . A Financial and Industrial History of the South during the Civil War (New York, 1901), is the encyclopedic treatment of this subject, while Richard C. Todd, Confederate Finance (Athens, Ga., 1954), is more readable. Emory M. Thomas, The Confederacy as a Revolutionary Experience (Englewood Cliffs, 1971), treats the hot-house industrialization forced on the South by the war, while Louise B. Hill, State Socialism in the Confederate States of America (Charlottesville, 1936), documents the role of state and Confederate governments in this process. Ella Lonn, Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy (New York, 1933), and Mary Elizabeth Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy (Columbia, S.C., 1952), document the efforts to cope with wartime shortages.
The drive to make emancipation a northern war aim is chronicled by James M. McPherson, The Struggle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), which also focuses on abolitionist hopes for racial equality as a result of the war. The role of northern blacks in this effort is the subject of: Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the Civil War (Boston, 1953); and James M. McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965), a collection of primary sources woven together by a narrative. The hostile responses of many northerners to emancipation are chronicled by: V. Jacque Voegeli, Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro in the Civil War (Chicago, 1967); and Forrest G. Wood, Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction (Berkeley, 1968). The attempts by Republicans to hammer out a reconstruction policy during the war are analyzed in three books by Herman Belz: Reconstructing the Union: Theory and Policy during the Civil War (Ithaca, 1969); A New Birth of Freedom: The Republican Party and Freedmen's Rights, 1861–1866 (Westport, Conn., 1976); and Emancipation and Equal Rights: Politics and Constitutionalism in the Civil War Era (New York, 1978). Louisiana became a showcase of wartime reconstruction efforts and also a historiographical focus on that subject; see especially Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, 1978); and La Wanda Cox, Lincoln and Black Freedom: A Study in Presidential Leadership (Columbia, S.C., 1981).
The pioneering study of the hard but exhilarating experiences of slaves and freedmen during the war is Bell Irvin Wiley, Southern Negroes 1861- 1865 (New Haven, 1938); the richest recent study is Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979). Ira Berlin and his team of editors have masterfully blended narrative and interpretation with illustrative documents in The Destruction of Slavery, Ser. I, Vol. I of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), which portrays vividly the process by which many slaves emancipated themselves by coming into Union lines and thereby forcing this issue on the army and government. The role of blacks and the process of emancipation have been the subject of monographs for several southern states: James H. Brewer, The Confederate Negro: Virginia's Craftsmen and Military Laborers 1861–1865 (Durham, 1969); C. Peter Ripley, Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1978); William F. Messner, Freedmen and the Ideology of Free Labor: Louisiana, 1862–1865 (Lafayette, La., 1978); John Cimprich, Slavery's End in Tennessee, 1861–1865 (University, Ala., 1985); Clarence L. Mohr, On the Threshold of Freedom: Masters and Slaves in Civil War Georgia (Athens, 1986); Victor B. Howard, Black Liberation in Kentucky: Emancipation and Freedom, 1862–1884 (Lexington, 1983); Charles L. Wagandt, The Mighty Revolution: Negro Emancipation in Maryland, 1862–1864 (Baltimore, 1964), and Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland during the Nineteenth Century (New Haven, 1985). A superb local study with broad national implications is Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (Indianapolis, 1964). Many of the foregoing books include accounts of the Union army's and government's flawed administration of freedmen's affairs, which is the explicit focus of Louis S. Gerteis, From Contraband to Freedman: Federal Policy Toward Southern Blacks 1861–1865 (Westport, Conn., 1973). The slaveholders' response to their loss of mastery is the theme of James L. Roark, Masters without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York, 1977); while Lawrence N. Powell writes wryly of New Masters: Northern Planters during the Civil War and Reconstruction (New Haven, 1980).