One interesting approach but I haven’t actually read it is History in the Making. The approach is to take text book descriptions of the same event from books of different eras. For example, the Mexican War as taught in the mid-1800s versus late 1800s, etc.
A gifted engineer with an entirely defensive outlook. The worst possible type of officer you could put in command of an army in the field when you’re trying to prosecute a war.
Here’s a thread from not long ago about McClelland. It’s not so much as he was incompetent as he was gutless. He hardly had a chance to demonstrate competence or lack of it, because he wouldn’t engage the enemy.
Ken Burns has repeatedly said that Slavery and race are the overwhelmingly major themes that shaped American History, hence the Civil War, Jazz and Baseball all are treated with that lens. It is not necessarily an incorrect perspective, just something to keep in mind when watching his docs.
That topic has been debated here in several threads. And the consensus has been yes, he really was.
McClellan did have his virtues - he was great at building up an army and maneuvering it in the field. But these were vastly outweighed by his major military flaw - he was afraid to commit to a battle. Every battle is a risk and McClellan just didn’t have the moral courage to take that risk. And once his opponents realized this, they knew they could beat him - they just had to put McClellan in a position where he either had to risk a battle or withdraw and he would withdraw even in cases where he probably would have won the battle.
McClellan’s other big flaw was political. He wouldn’t admit to himself that his flaws were his own so he sought other people to blame for his failings. And his main target was Lincoln and other politicians - he blamed them for his inability to win the war. And in American history, any time it comes down to a general versus a president, it’s always been the general who’s lost.
Well, I mentioned four titles in post #14. Any or all of those could be a valuable companion or counterpoint to watching the Burns.
There are any number of additional books that speak to various under-told aspects of the story. For example, A Southern Star for Maryland, by Lawrence Denton, focuses on the currents of that state’s sympathies through 1860-'61, much of which is surprising to people who don’t today think of Maryland as Southern. To Die in Chicago, by George Levy, goes some distance toward balancing the more popular accounts of Andersonville.
War Crimes Against Southern Civilians, by Walter Brian Cisco, recounts some of these. While I don’t rank the book itself as highly as the others I’ve mentioned (the use of the “war crimes” terminology is a bit too free), there are certainly realities within that deserve wider notice, if we are to grasp the whole of the American experience of the time. A City Laid Waste, by William Gilmore Simms, edited by David Aiken, is an eyewitness account of Sherman in Columbia, South Carolina.
The request was for Excellent U S History Books…
Was there a standard of excellence you found unmet in your reading of something I mentioned?
Having spent some time in Columbia, South Carolina, I can only state that Sherman was right. 
History Channel did a documentary on Sherman’s March* that addresses it somewhat, but not much. Noah Andre Trudeau’s recent book, Southern Storm: Sherman’s March to the Sea is very good and goes into the matter, including how much he was blasted in the northern newspapers for his atrocities (so much that he exiled all journalists and newspaper employees from his camp followers**) and the events atEbenezer Creek. Sherman was a Buckeye by birth but very much a southerner by inclination, loved the south, hated having to leave Louisiana when the war broke out, and he was a racist even by the views of his time, and while all major wars have atrocities his deliberate war against civilians was almost unheard of and made many northerners protest. (Lincoln seems to have been of a pragmatic “It’s terrible, but if it will end the war then exitus acta probat/the end justifies the means” mindset, much as he was with Grant’s incredibly high Union casualty numbers- basically he saw it as [my words] “better 50,000 of our soldiers should be killed this year than 500,000 be killed as this drags on for 10 more years with still no end in sight”.***
*NOT to be confused with the documentary called Sherman’s March, which is only tangentially related to William Tecumseh Sherman.
**“If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.” Sherman
In addition to hating them for portraying him as Attila the Hun (literally in some editorials) he hated them for giving away his troop movements and positions; a joke at the time was that the best intelligence the Confederate Army had was from the headlines of the D.C. newspapers.
***I wasn’t as outraged at the Burns miniseries as many were and, in fact, I consider it a masterpiece. I think he was relatively even handed, but he does commit the sin of presentism in some of the scenes, but then so do most historical documentaries. I do agree though that it’s quite possible to see slavery as evil, in today’s terms especially, while not seeing the Civil War as clearcut Good v. Evil; there were generous helpings and double helpings of good and evil on both sides and besides that there were simply no easy answers to the problems. However, there are numerous very heated threads people by those who dispute that it was anything other than simple G.v.E. and have no interest in seeing the south as anything other than evil in concentrate form and refuse to see slavery in a historical context [when it was still evil, millions thought so at the time, but it was a very complex evil that could not be removed easily even if everybody had been willing]) and they are as pointless as writing in water so I won’t fire a shot that might lead to another one.
For a more light hearted read, I absoultely love the Dear America series, and all the others it spawned.
Another recommendation (more well-researched historical fiction): Gore Vidal’s America series.
I largely agree with all this.
Another point that’s ignored by the slavery=evil ∴ South=evil ∴ North=good formula is that from early colonial days right into the beginning of the war, the Northern economy was wrapped up with slavery too. Hartford Courant reporters Anne Farrow, Joel Lang and Jenifer Frank wrote what became the book Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, yet another lesser-known piece of the story that I’d recommend to any interested.
Ultimately slavery was evil. But that evil is part of the heritage of all Americans.
Then there’s the fact that slavery wasn’t something that the south had just thought up from scratch when they got ready to plant cotton. A grown man in the Civil War had not just grown up in a land where slavery was legal but so had his parents, his grandparents, his great grandparents, his great-great- and his great-great-great-grandparents; it had existed for more than 240 years, which, for perspective, is longer than the distance that separates us from the American Revolution, at which time incidentally there were slaves in all thirteen colonies. Anybody reading this message board will either be dead or older than the oldest person currently alive before we reach a point on the American spectrum where slavery has been illegal for as long as it was legal, and it’s only natural that most people did not view it through the lens of a modern viewpoint.
And while slavery was the single biggest reason the South went to war, it was far from the big reason the North went to war. Most northerners were too busy trying to earn their daily bread to feel that passionately about slavery, and to put it mildly most were less than liberal on the subject of race. It’s amazing to me how many people seem to think that ending slavery was an obsession to most northerners, when in fact the Emancipation Proclamation infuriated many northerners and even led some troops to threaten mutiny at the notion they were risking their lives to help slaves (though they didn’t use the word slaves). One of the most notorious incidents of the war was the violence specifically directed at free blacks during the New York City. Many free black settlements in the north had horrible relations with their poor white neighbors who regarded them with as much fear and unease and even open loathing that people today might view a community near U.S. suburbs peopled from the worst slums of Mumbai. (John Brown and his sons were sold land at $1 per acre on a note financed by Gerrit Smith in exchange for providing militia duty to the black colony at Timbuctoo in the Adirondacks, and it wasn’t just from slave catchers and it certainly wasn’t from rampaging southerners going hundreds of miles to harass them.)
While Andersonville was a disgrace and Wirz, imo, deserved hanging (there are those who would make a decent case he did not- I say he did because even with limited resources he could have done a lot more about the lack of hygiene in the camp), there were northern P.o.W. camps that should have led to war crimes trials as well.
Sorry- the point is I like that book by that guy that I read that time. Hijack over…
If you want an outstanding and eminently readable book about the way that the history of the Civil War shapes modern America, especially the South, i highly recommend Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz. It’s not a history book, per se, but it does talk a lot about the history of the war, and the different ways that it is interpreted by modern Americans (scholarly and otherwise), as well as the way it affects social relations.
Doesn’t Ken Burns’ show quote Lincoln’s opinion that the great War was a penance on the whole country, for having allowed slavery for so much of its history?
Probably. Lincoln was wrong though, to suggest that war was either necessary to accomplish the abolition or sufficient to erase the legacy.
Yes. And when the northerners demanded he revoke the Emancipation Proclamation, he basically said, ''I’m not going to do that, because if I did I would burn in hell."
I get a sense that his feelings about slavery changed over the course of the war. I don’t think he ever really cared for slavery, but it seems to have gradually dawned on him what a terrible evil it was.
(These impressions are just based on the Ken Burns series, which I am almost finished with now.)
Those who want to debate the role of slavery in the Civil War – please start a new thread in GD. The topic here is book recommendations.
Thanks,
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
I’ll offer another recommendation for anything written by Studs Terkel. Also, anything written by Henry Adams.