New & Noteworthy: Campaign Fort The Confederate Coast: Blaocking, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War, Gil Hahn

 

 

Campaign for the Confederate Coast: Blockading, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War, Gil Hahn, 2021.$21.95, 322 pp., illustrations, index, bibliographic notes, West 88th Street Press 

Hahn offers a through but concise discussion of the aims, means available to the Confederacy as it seeks to maintain its economic trade with Europe and the aims and means available to the Union to restrict and minimize that economic intercourse. He well establishes the social and economic circumstances involved along with the evolution of the sea tactics and the emerging technologies of blockade and blockade running which include naval rams and seacoast fortresses.

Also, Hahn reviews the variety of ‘laws of the sea’ along with the rights of belligerents. His chapters on the commerce suppression campaigns of 1861 through 1863 and the successful adaptions made by the Federals during 1864 and 1865.

Benefiting readers, Hahn offers 13 chronological charts composed of the attempts, the seasonal successes and the losses of block-runners for the Confederate ports of Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, St. Marks, Mobile, New Orleans, and Galveston.

Additionally, for 1859-1865 Hahn presents charts for the production, the consumption, and the exports and the imports of 500 pound bales of cotton. These charts show related trends and blockade successes.  Importantly the charts include U.S. imports of cotton from the U.K and from the British West Indies and causes Civil War Librarian to wonder: Did the U.S. import cotton which had previously run the naval blockade? 

Campaign for the Confederate Coast: Blockading, Blockade Running and Related Endeavors During the American Civil War clearly and cogently describes, from both Southern and Northern points of view, the dozens upon dozens economic, technology and military policy conditions and adaptations which created military outcomes of the war. Throughout, Hahn offers these discussions in a writing style which is both accessible and concise. 

Forthcoming: Civil War Witnesses and Their Books, Fall 2021

Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works (Number 74 in the series, Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War), Gary Gallagher et al., 314 pp., Louisiana State University Press, $45.00

From the Publisher: 

Civil War Witnesses and Their Books: New Perspectives on Iconic Works serves as a wide-ranging analysis of texts written by individuals who experienced the American Civil War. Edited by Gary W. Gallagher and Stephen Cushman, this volume, like its companion, Civil War Writing: New Perspectives on Iconic Texts (2019), features the voices of authors who felt compelled to convey their stories for a variety of reasons. Some produced works intended primarily for their peers, while others were concerned with how future generations would judge their wartime actions. One diarist penned her entries with no thought that they would later become available to the public. The essayists explore the work of five men and three women, including prominent Union and Confederate generals, the wives of a headline-seeking US cavalry commander and a Democratic judge from New York City, a member of Robert E. Lee’s staff, a Union artillerist, a matron from Richmond’s sprawling Chimborazo Hospital, and a leading abolitionist US senator.

Civil War Witnesses and Their Books shows how some of those who lived through the conflict attempted to assess its importance and frame it for later generations. Their voices have particular resonance today and underscore how rival memory traditions stir passion and controversy, providing essential testimony for anyone seeking to understand the nation’s greatest trial and its aftermath.

Contents: 

 “From Manassas to Appomattox: James Longstreet’s Memoir and the Limits of Confederate Reconciliation,” Elizabeth R. Varon

“A Modern Sensibility in Older Garb: Henry Wilson’s Rise and Fall of the Slave Power and the Beginnings of Civil War History,” William Blair

“‘The Brisk and Brilliant Matron of Chimborazo Hospital’: Phoebe Yates Pember’s Nurse Narrative,’” Sarah E. Gardner

“George McClellan’s Many Turnings,” Stephen Cushman

“Maria Lydig Daly: Diary of a Union Lady 1861–1865,” J. Matthew Gallman

“John D. Billings’s Hardtack and Coffee: A Union Fighting Man’s Civil War,” M. Keith Harris

“One Widow’s Wars: The Civil War, Reconstruction, and the West in Elizabeth Bacon Custer’s Memoirs,” Cecily N. Zander

“Proximity and Numbers: Walter H. Taylor Shapes Confederate History and Memory,” Gary W. Gallagher

 Publisher's Page:  https://lsupress.org/books/detail/civil-war-witnesses-and-their-books/