Kidnapped At Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White,

Andrew Sillen, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024, 366 pp.,

bibliographic notes, bibliography, index.

With over 500 bibliographic notes, 20 charts, 12 illustrations, maps,

newspaper images and even sheet music, Kidnapped at Sea is an

exhaustively researched story of seafaring, blockade running, piracy,

racism -- and a kidnapping.

 

On one level it is a true crime story of a free Black American who was

kidnapped from a civilian packet ship by a Confederate naval officer. The

surrounding characters range from admirals to deck hands to diplomats.

Together they offer perspectives on the America Civil War that are

seldom explored amid the focus on land battles. Within the context of

slavery, freedom, emancipation and employment opportunities, the

author immerses reader in the spirits of the age.

 

Much of the action takes place on or about the CSS Alabama, a

Confederate raiding ship conceived in Richmond, Virginia, and birthed in

Liverpool, England, which circumnavigated the planet before the ship was

sunk near Cherbourg Harbor, France in 1864. David Henry White, a

young free Black man who had become a hotel worker and then a

contraband of war, was seized as a slave by Raphael Semmes, a

Confederate naval officer and held captive on the CSS Alabama.

The story is stirring, with vividly crafted characters who author Andrew

Sillen has reconstructed from Delaware public records and crew

manifests. He recounts White’s life before Semmes kidnapped him and

what unfolded on the Confederate raider. Schematic drawings of the CSS

Alabama and its final battle add to the dramatic account.

This is great history well told that speaks to the issues of our day.

Hopefully, Andrew Sillen has retained the film rights.   [text by CWL]

 

Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia

Michael Hardy, $27.95, Savas Beatty, March 2025, 176 pages, 37 images, one map, $27.95, hard cover

Carlton McCarthy, a former artilleryman with the Richmond Howitzers, noted after the war that historians would only write about big battles and campaigns, not how the common soldier fried his bacon and baked his biscuits. McCarthy was correct. Save for a few scattered references in a handful of books, no one has documented how an army was fed or has discussed in any detail the daily eating habits of Confederate soldiers until Michael C. Hardy’s Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.

Although seldom studied, food (or the lack thereof) and the logistics behind it played a critical role during the war, contributed mightily to the success and failure of campaigns, and affected the overall outcome of the conflict. Understanding how soldiers prepared their food, how they ate and, very often, went hungry, is a vital tool to understanding their individual experiences and the larger history of supply and logistics within the Confederate army.

Hardy bases his unique study on more than 300 sets of letters and diaries that closely examine the importance of sustenance in the day-to-day life of the soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia. Various chapters examine food issued by the army, food sent from home to the front, and food carried, collected, and eaten during campaigns. These accounts dispel many misconceptions and assumptions about food during the war and provide a rich and complex picture of the arduous journey various meats, grains, and other foodstuffs underwent to reach hungry soldiers in the field.

In addition to the common soldier, Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia examines what the Confederate high command ate and explores the relationship between hospitals and food, demonstrating the importance of proper nutrition in the recovery and care of the wounded. Hardy also examines the vital role played by camp servants, as well as the critical connection between proper nutrition and morale. The voices of the men themselves provide a multifaceted examination of this central, but often overlooked, field of history.

Battles and campaigns would not have been possible without a proper diet and a functioning logistical system to support the men at the front. Feeding Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia offers invaluable insight into this overlooked and understudied topic that made it all possible.

Text from Publisher

The post-war marketplace for Civil War Memories 

Marten, James Alan; Janney, Caroline E., eds.. Buying and Selling Civil War Memory in Gilded Age America. UnCivil Wars Series. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. 274 pp. $114.95 (cloth),   $19.94 (paper)

    James Marten and Caroline E. Janney’s selection of essays superbly navigates the cross-section between two central themes of Gilded Age America: sectional reconciliation and rampant commercialism. The essays demonstrate the complex ways that these two factors influenced each other. 

    While calmer sectional tensions often played into the hands of businessmen who sought to expand their clientele, the profit-seeking motive also caused tension between those who took Civil War memory seriously and those who wanted to make a quick buck. The authors of this volume also investigate the extent to which companies and individuals utilized (or rejected) the Lost Cause memorialization of the Civil War.

    The late John Neff demonstrates the tension between commercialism and Civil War memorialization in his essay on the removal of Libby Prison from its original site in Richmond. At the behest of northern investors who wanted to use the Civil War prison as the structure for a museum in Chicago, laborers disassembled and reconstructed Libby Prison, brick by brick, in the Windy City. For many northern and southern veterans, the move aroused negative feelings. Southerners did not want a war artifact stolen from Virginia’s soil, and northern veterans, especially those who spent time in Libby Prison, objected to the commodification of their suffering. Despite the protests, the investors continued the project, and the museum opened on September 21, 1889. The attraction initially garnered success, but attendance gradually declined until the museum’s closing almost a decade later. Eager to construct new buildings on the prison’s valuable real estate, the investors demolished it in 1900 with few qualms about its history. The building’s owners sold the remains of the prison for scrap, demonstrating the importance of profit over preserving wartime structures.

    Consumerism could also envelop the more sensitive aspects of the Civil War. Jonathan S. Jones’s essay focuses on the popularity of opiate addiction “cures” in the postwar era. Many soldiers acquired morphine addictions to cope with pain during the war and struggled to kick the habit once they returned home. In a world where people treated addiction as a severe lack of self-control, veterans’ physical reliance on opium often caused them psychological distress and a crisis of manhood. 

    As a result, desperate and suffering veterans often sought addiction cures of questionable validity. Advertisements in veteran-targeted newspapers often featured testimonials from former soldiers stating that these remedies helped them break their addiction and renew their manly vigor. Despite the touted benefits, Jones points out that the “cures” contained few, if any, legitimate properties to help addicted veterans. The remedies that helped often contained morphine themselves, causing former soldiers to continue the cycle of addiction.

    While the commodification of Civil War memory produced conflict between veterans and company interests, the profit motive contributed to positive outcomes by promoting sectional reconciliation. However, rectifying the relationship between the two sections required individuals and companies to distort the historical record. Natalie Sweet demonstrates how companies navigated these issues in her essay on a marketing campaign for Duke’s cigarettes that featured prominent figures from the Civil War era. In the 1880s, Duke’s began to include a cardboard insert (similar to a trading card) of a notable Civil War “hero” in each pack of cigarettes. 

    The “Heroes of the Civil War” campaign featured short biographies of each figure that often employed Lost Cause ideas. The blurbs portrayed Federals and Confederates positively, arguing that both had fought valiantly for noble goals. Duke’s romantic distortion of the Civil War paid off—“Heroes of the Civil War” contributed to Duke’s becoming a bestselling American cigarette. In this sense, the Lost Cause represented a positive marketing effort—by portraying both sides as noble Americans, Duke’s could increase their market share in both sections of the country. However, their stories about Civil War generals left the American public with a romantic and distorted picture of the conflict.

    Though Gilded Age Americans often embraced the Lost Cause, two essays in this work show that some northerners rejected the idea of a valiant Confederacy. In her essay, Margaret Milanick analyzes the hand-cranked Myriopticons that progressed the user through a series of scenes of the Civil War. The Massachusetts-based Milton Bradley & Company that created the Myriopticon spurned Lost Cause celebrations of the South. The visuals and accompanying text portrayed Confederates as treasonous aggressors who opposed a virtuous Union fighting for liberty and equality. The Myriopticon even featured a positive portrayal of the USCT Fifty-Fifth Massachusetts entering Charleston in 1865. 

    Caroline E. Janney’s essay also questions the ubiquity of the Lost Cause during the Gilded Age. Her work examines panoramic paintings of Civil War battles (“cycloramas”) displayed in various cities across the United States. While northern audiences enjoyed scenes of the battles of Gettysburg and Antietam, where the North claimed victory, they grew squeamish at battle scenes where Confederates won the day. Though reconciliation rhetoric often dominated the Gilded Age, Milanick and Janney’s study of northern art demonstrates that they could respect the Confederacy while leaving “no doubt about who had been right” (p. 219).

Buying and Selling Civil War Memory represents an important contribution to the literature by showing how Americans filtered Civil War memory through consumer culture. The essays in this volume prompt readers to think more about the mediums through which Americans received stories about the conflict. Does the message resonate differently, for example, if the listener received it in a cigarette advertisement rather than a classroom? Overall, the book’s entertaining and thought-provoking stories make it an excellent choice for undergraduate or graduate classrooms.

Review Source: H Net Book Reviews, December 11, 2024

Link:   https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=59566

 

Sexual Violence and American Slavery:

The Making of a Rape Culture in the Antebellum South

 Shannon Eaves, University  of North Carolina Press,

242 pp., illustrations. index, bibliography, $27.95  April 2024,  paperback, 2024.

Eaves mimes a wealth of primary sources including autobiographies, diaries, court records and more to show that rape and other forms of sexual; exploitation entangled slaves and and slave owners in battles over power to protect oneself and one's community, power to avenge hurt and humiliation, and power t punish and eliminate future threats.

By placing sexual violence at the center of the systems of power and culture, the author shows how the South's rape culture was revealed in enslaved people's and their enslavers' interactions with one another and with members of their respective communities.

More Important Than Good Generals: Majors, Captains, Lieutenant Colonels, and Colonels in the Army of the Tennessee

More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee, Jonathan Engle, Kent State University Press, $35.95, Spring 2025

 Union’s forgotten mid-level officers and their commitment to the cause

More Important Than Good Generals is an in-depth study of the Army of the Tennessee’s junior officers—the company and field grade lieutenants, captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. While many studies have examined generals and common soldiers, Civil War armies’ “middle management” has been largely ignored. 

Officers had a substantially different array of duties than the soldiers they commanded and the generals above them, resulting in a drastically different wartime experience. Moreover, it is not only Civil War officers who have been overlooked but also the army Grant and Sherman commanded—the Army of the Tennessee—despite the fact that it was one of the most victorious armies of the war. 

Pushing back against the commonly accepted narrative of disillusionment among officers, Jonathan Engel concludes that the Army of the Tennessee’s company and field grade officers endured the war’s trials with their moral and political ideology intact. 

Further, rather than becoming indifferent to the Union cause, Engel argues that the reverse was often true: officers who started off racist or disinterested in the issue of enslavement became advocates of emancipation. 

Engagingly written and meticulously researched, More Important Than Good Generals is a lasting work of scholarship that will appeal to Civil War historians and general readers alike.

No Cover Image Available

Feel The Bonds That Are Drawn By American Civil War Photography

 

Feel The Bonds That Draw: Images of the Civil War at the Western Reserve Historical Society

Christine Dee, editor; Western Reserve Historical Society, Kent State University Press, 128 pages, 2011

For a century and a half, images of the Civil War have allowed millions of Americans to experience, commemorate, and reinterpret the conflict. Photographs, engravings, lithographs, and original artwork have revealed heroic volunteers, mobilized regiments, battle preparations, and the war’s grim aftermath.

“Feel the Bonds That Draw” presents nearly 200 images from the extensive Civil War photographic collections of Cleveland’s Western Reserve Historical Society, complementing author Christine Dee’s reflections on topics such as historical memory, the war as economic engine, and the impact of mobilization and combat on civilians and the environment.

Included in the volume are stirring images by Mathew Brady, preeminent Civil War photographer, and by Henry Moore, who documented military fortifications and soldiers, particularly at Fort Pulaski on the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia. Moore photographed troops in traditional poses and groupings, and he captured the likenesses of formerly enslaved African Americans. These latter pictures played an important role in shaping public opinion in the North in support of emancipation.

“Feel the Bonds That Draw” is a fine addition to the library of anyone interested in the history of America’s cruelest conflict.

 William C. Davis, Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech:

“It is always a pleasure to turn the eye back to those magnificent images left behind by the photographers of the Civil War. Theirs was the first epic human event captured by the camera, and their daring, ingenuity, and scope of interest never fail to impress. The Western Reserve Historical Society has one of the finest collections of wartime images in existence, and Feel the Bonds That Draw gleans some of the very best, including some not before published. As we enter the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War, everyone would profit by taking a look at the faces of the men and women who actually lived it.” 

Joan Waugh, author of U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth:

Feel the Bonds that Draw show cases the stunning collection of Civil War photographs held by the Western Reserve Historical Society. That is reason enough to buy this book, but fortunately there is much more to be gained. Christine Dee's chapters provide a lively and informative context and commentary to understanding how photographers and the art and business of photography shaped the interpretation of the conflict for the generation who lived through the war, and for the generations that followed. A fascinating and enjoyable read!” 

Earl J. Hess, Lincoln Memorial University, author of Into the Crater: The Mine Attack at Petersburg:

“This book is a welcome visual journey, an enjoyable ride through many regions, and among the civilians as well as with the soldiers, of the Civil War. I especially like the photographs that are here published for the first time, and the extensive commentary provided by the capable author of this new and important book.” 

“Peter S. Carmichael, Fluhrer Professor and Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College

Feel the Bonds that Draw brilliantly explores how Americans discovered the brutal realism of organized warfare through Civil War photography. Although we often claim that seeing is believing, Christine Dee reveals that the act of seeing could be horribly deceptive. The Northern public thought they had had found the ‘real war’ in images of physical destruction, mangled bodies, and wrecked landscapes, but in actuality they were viewing the artistic expressions of photographers who created the illusion of war as a coherent, orderly, and knowable experience.” - 

The 2024 Wyler-Silver Prize Winner ---Gradual Emancipation Politicians and Immediate Emancipation Camps Struggle Together the Transform the Union and Win The War 330 pp, $50.00, 2024.

at the University of Bonn, The New School, and the University of Virginia.

The prize committee praised Dr. Cirillo's book as follows: "In an extraordinarily nuanced and well-written analysis of abolitionists, Frank J. Cirillo’s The Abolitionists Civil War: Immediatists and the Struggle to Transform the Union assessed how these men and women acted during the war that ended slavery.

Even the abolitionists who had fought so hard to end slavery had to recalibrate their assumptions and expectations on how to achieve their goals amidst the unprecedented transformations wrought by a massive war. In this ambitious study, Cirillo found that these ideologues, specifically those who had advocated for the immediate end of slavery, divided on the verge of achieving their most dearly held ambition. 

On the one hand, some of these men and women continued their allegiance to immediate and radical action to end slavery to ensure America’s moral redemption. Those who stayed true to immediatism rejected political maneuvering because they believed achieving abolition by political means corrupted their movement. 

On the other hand, some immediatists joined the political fray and supported the Republican Party to achieve their purpose. These interventionists were willing to sacrifice the purity of their movement to ensure slavery's end. Cirillo argues that the unrepentant immediatists' predictions came true; interventionists’ political allegiances resulted in their sacrifice of racial justice because they had identified their movement with the Republican Party and its limited vision of emancipation, which rejected both the need for white redemption and black equality.

 Lincoln understood the reason for this realignment when, in the Second Inaugural Address, he asserted, 'Neither [side] anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding.'  If the people most likely to support African American social, civil, and political rights embraced black freedom as defined by white racist partisans during this cataclysm, then the formerly enslaved had little chance of fully realizing the benefits of emancipation. 

This book contributes significantly to understanding the United States’ failure to make emancipation more meaningful despite the realization of immediatists' decades-long dedication to the slave's cause."

Text Dource: https://lsupress.org/9780807179154/the-abolitionist-civil-war/

GRANT'S OWN WORDS, ANNOTATED

 

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant: The Complete Annotated Edition, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2017, 816 pp., $39.95

The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant have been in publication since their original re‐ lease in 1885, just months after Grant’s death from a long bout with throat cancer. In this most recent edition, the editorial staff of John Marszalek, David Nolen, and Louie Gallo has assembled a completely annotated version of this autobiography, a Herculean effort for which we should be grateful.

Grant’s narrative remains a masterpiece: “not only a major piece of war literature, but also a classic of all American literature … the pinnacle of American nonfiction” (p. xxvi). The editorial team maintains as much of Grant’s original prose as possible, only cleaning up typographical errors and errata in the main narrative while acknow‐ ledging when such steps are taken. Grant’s pith, humor, and erudition seep through every page. Much of his humor comes from self-deprecation, which makes the book feel like it was written by an everyman who recognizes his flaws rather than the man often credited with winning the war that divided the United States. He recalls moments from his life, specifically from his time in combat, down to the day that they occurred with precision as to what was said to whom and where. His battle against cancer as he wrote these memoirs makes his recall and his prose even more incredible, and his dedication to completing this task kept him alive as long as possible, succumbing to his dis‐ ease but days after he last put pen to paper on this project. Grant wrote a book in which all readers can find value.

The editorial staff mention in their acknowledgements that they have tried to do as Grant wrote in his memoirs: “Everyone has his superstitions. One of mine is that in positions of great responsibility everyone should do his duty to the best of his ability” (p. 767). With the publication of this work, they have fulfilled the tall order given H-Net Reviews by the man at the heart of this project many years ago.

H-Net Reviews   [online link to complete text of review]