Union Special Ops versus Mosby's Rangers

The Unvanquished: Jessie Rangers versus Mosby's Raiders,   Patrick K. O'Donnell, Atlantic Monthly Press, 432 pages, $21.50 paperback

The Unvanquished, a vital shadow war raged amid and away from the major battlefields that was in many ways equally consequential to the conflict’s outcome. At the heart of this groundbreaking narrative is the epic story of Lincoln’s special forces, the Jessie Scouts, told in its entirety for the first time. 

In a contest fought between irregular units, the Scouts hunted John Singleton Mosby’s Confederate Rangers from the middle of 1863 up to war’s end at Appomattox. With both sides employing pioneering tradecraft, they engaged in dozens of raids and spy missions, often perilously wearing the other’s uniform, risking penalty of death if captured. 

Clashing violently on horseback, the unconventional units attacked critical supply lines, often capturing or killing high-value targets. North and South deployed special operations that could have changed the war’s direction in 1864, and crucially during the Appomattox Campaign, Jessie Scouts led the Union army to a final victory. 

They later engaged in a history-altering proxy war against France in Mexico, earning seven Medals of Honor; many Scouts mysteriously disappeared during that conflict, taking their stories to their graves.

Patrick J. O'Donnell is an expert on special operations, he transports readers into the action, immersing them in vivid battle scenes from previously unpublished firsthand accounts. A combat historian, bestselling author, and public speaker Patrick K. O'Donnell has written 13 critically acclaimed books that recount the epic stories of America's wars from the Revolution to Iraq. A Fellow at Mount Vernon, he is the recipient of numerous national book awards. O’Donnell is a premier expert on elite and special operations units and irregular warfare.

He introduces indelible characters such as Scout Archibald Rowand; Scout leader Richard Blazer; Mosby, the master of guerrilla warfare; and enslaved spy Thomas Laws. O’Donnell also brings to light the Confederate Secret Service’s covert efforts to deliver the 1864 election to Peace Democrats through ballot fraud, election interference, and attempts to destabilize a population fatigued by a seemingly forever war. Most audaciously, the Secret Service and Mosby’s Rangers planned to kidnap Abraham Lincoln in order to maintain the South’s independence.

A little-known chronicle of the shadow war between North and South, rich in action and offering original perspective on history, The Unvanquished is a dynamic and essential addition to the literature of the Civil War.

Spotsylvania: The Iron, The Lead, & The Dead

 

 Tempest of Iron and Lead: Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864,Chris Mackowski, Savas Beatie, Hardcover, release date October 15, 2024, $34.95

May 1864. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia spent three days in brutal close-quarter combat in the Wilderness that left the tangled thickets aflame. No one could imagine a more infernal battlefield. Then they marched down the road to Spotsylvania Court House.  Even the march itself was unprecedented. 

For three years, the armies had fought and disengaged. That changed on the night of May 7. Instead of leaving the Wilderness to regroup, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant led the Federal army southward, skirmishing with Confederates all the way. “There will be no turning back,” he had declared. He lived up to his word. By dawn on May 8, the armies had tangled their way ten miles down the road and opened another large-scale fight that would last until May 21. 

“One thing is certain of this campaign thus far,” explained Dr. Daniel Holt of the 121st New York: “more blood has been shed, more lives lost, and more human suffering undergone than ever before in a season.”
The fighting launched a score of new place names and events that would sear themselves into the American consciousness, including Laurel Hill, Upton’s assault, the Mule Shoe, the Bloody Angle, and Harris Farm. The casualties exacted at Spotsylvania would exceed those of the Wilderness by thousands. 

The fighting would severely test the offensive capabilities of Confederate commander Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army, just as the defensive posture his men embraced would, in turn, test the limits of Federal endurance.
In A Tempest of Iron and Lead: Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864, author Chris Mackowski has crafted a meticulous and comprehensible study of this endlessly fascinating campaign.

 

Mackowski, long-familiar with the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, is a former historian at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Chris continues to give tours of the battlefield as the historian in residence at Stevenson Ridge, a historic property on the battlefield’s eastern front. His intimate knowledge of the landscape and nearly two decades of insight, together with primary source materials, outstanding maps, and helpful images, combine to create a readable and satisfying single-volume account the campaign has so richly deserved.

One Day in the Life of Eight Soldiers & President

 

A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind

Stephen Budiansky,  304 pages, W. W. Norton Publishing, $32.50, Release date: early September 2024

A panoramic account of the fateful Civil War battle and its far-reaching consequences for American society and culture.

The Battle of Antietam, which took place on September 17, 1862, remains the single bloodiest day in America’s history: more than 3,600 men died in twelve hours of savage fighting, and more than 17,000 were wounded. 

As a turning point in the Civil War, the narrow Union victory is well-known as the key catalyst for Lincoln to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. Yet Antietam was not only a battle that dramatically changed the fortunes and meaning of the war; it also changed America in ways we feel today. 

No army in history wrote so many letters or kept as many diaries as the soldiers who fought in the Civil War, and Stephen Budiansky draws on this rich record to re-create the experiences of those whose lives were forever changed, whether on the battlefield or in trying to make sense of its horrors in the years and decades to follow. 

Antietam would usher in a new beginning in politics, military strategy, gender roles, battlefield medicine, war photography, and the values and worldview of the postwar generation.

A masterful and fine-grained account of the battle, built around the intimate experiences of nine people whose lives intersected there, A Day in September is a story of war but also, at its heart, a human history, one that encompasses Antietam’s enduring legacy.

Stephen Budiansky is a historian, biographer, and journalist, the author of 18 books exploring intellectual and creative lives, military and intelligence history, and science and the natural world. He is the former Washington Editor of the scientific journal Nature and a regular book reviewer for the Wall Street Journal. He lives on a small farm in northern Virginia.

CWL: Paying attention to both American Civil War topics of Environmental History & Civilian Farms, A Day in September is likely to arrive for my personal library soon.

The Fabric of The Civil War Society: What The Soldiers and Veterans Wore & The Flags They Carried

 

Cox, Shae Smith. The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War Series. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2024. Illustrations. 318 pp. $48.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780807181171. Reviewed by Rachel Williams (University of Hull) Published on H-CivWar (August, 2024) Commissioned by Lindsay Rae Smith Privette (Anderson University) Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=60653 The Fabric of Civil War Society, Shae Smith Cox’s richly textured study of uniforms, flags, and badges during and after the Civil War, uses material culture to explore not only the contingency of citizenship and the tension between individual and collective identities during the sectional conflict but also the role of objects and performance in constructing and imposing potent collective memories decades after the war’s end. A highly readable and meticulously researched study, it joins recent work by Joan E. Cashin and Sarah Jones Weicksel in making a strident case for material objects as sites where the multiple and contradictory meanings of the war were played out.[1] The first four chapters, which focus on the war years, explore the challenge of outfitting the armies, the practical problems of keeping the armies clothed on the march, the ambivalent emotions elicited by uniform and flags among their wearers and bearers, and the home front industry producing (by hand or by machine) these tangible symbols of the cause(s). Cox amply demonstrates not only that uniforms were far from uniform (despite the increasing codification of dress regulation and eventual streamlining of requisition processes) but also that their practical and symbolic functions did not always neatly align. As tools to condition individuals for battle readiness, uniforms frequently fell short; clothing allowances were insufficient, leaving men ragged, exposed, and uncomfortable, or else weighed down by heavy material in punishing conditions. Theft was a perennial solution: men stole constantly from each other and from their enemies. Yet uniforms performed complex symbolic functions that transcended these quotidian practical challenges. Take, for instance, the relationship between uniform and honor. Men frequently articulated their service as an aspiration to “live up to” the uniform they wore. Conversely, such actions as disguising oneself in enemy uniform, or seizing an enemy flag and desecrating it, or using it as a means of deception were considered beyond the pale and prompted censure and punishment up to and including execution. In the remaining four chapters, Cox explains the rapidly changing meanings of Civil War uniforms between Appomattox and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1938 (the last major anniversary at which significant numbers of veterans were present), considering the role and regulation of uniforms and badges in postwar veterans’ organizations and the centrality of material items to reunions and anniversary gatherings. Again, the symbolic potency of uniforms is apparent in the postwar period; Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) badges made from melted-down Confederate cannons and Confederate uniforms being repurposed to clothe prisoners stick out as particularly pointed illustrations of the war’s unfinishedness. Moments of heightened patriotism and military mobilization—1898, 1917—often provided opportunities for Confederate veterans and their descendants to reimagine Confederate iconography and claim a space for Rebel badges, flags, and clothing in public pageantry. The material items that became fuel for postwar “memory machines” were less and less genuine relics of the war itself but, rather, newly minted objects that swiftly replaced their wartime equivalents in the public Civil War imaginary (p. 142). While organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy used the sale of badges to raise funds for their activities and assiduously policed their design, production, and sale, by the early twentieth century, the manufacture of ribbons, veterans’ uniforms, and other commemorative objects of varying quality increasingly fell to enterprising manufacturers whose profit motivation frequently took precedence over their political allegiances. Public interest in Civil War uniforms and ephemera is hardly novel: Hollywood is replete with (as Cox indicates, often highly inaccurate and mythologized) depictions of the blue and gray, and antiquarian societies, reenactment circles, and certain strands of military history boast considerable expertise in the minutiae of Civil War uniforms and accoutrements. Cox moves beyond the descriptive, however, by mining the political and cultural meanings of these objects and exploring their powerful individual and collective resonances during and—perhaps even more so—after the war. To explore the multiple meanings and uses of these objects, she draws on an impressive array of written, visual, and material sources. Weaving together military orders, regimental ledgers, governmental records, newspaper accounts, minutes of veterans’ association meetings, soldiers’ papers, and industry reports, she surmounts a pressing challenge of material culture history: how do we recover objects’ meanings when those objects no longer exist (whether through destruction, misplacement, or decay)? Yet, where possible, Cox introduces us to extant objects, which she herself has painstakingly collected. There is scope here for even further engagement with the visual record of Civil War uniforms (for instance, the vivid depictions of regimental mustering in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated), but the relatively modest list of figures here likely bespeaks the often prohibitive cost of image reproduction rather than any deficiency in Cox’s methods. Cox’s comparative approach is an ambitious and ultimately rewarding one. Evaluating the challenges both sections faced in clothing their armies appears largely to confirm the gulf in resources, industry, and infrastructure between North and South, yet also emphasizes the continuing ubiquity of handmaking, community labor, adaptation, and improvisation regardless of section. Moreover, in comparing how Union and Confederate veterans, their relations, and their descendants used material objects to maintain a visible demarcation between Confederate and Union veterans, assiduously policing in- and out-groups, Cox reveals the contingency and incompleteness of white reconciliation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Important, too, is Cox’s consideration of what uniforms meant to Black and Indigenous soldiers. As Frederick Douglass’s famous rallying cry—“let the black man get an eagle on his button”—signaled, uniform served to make African Americans legible as men deserving of the full benefits of American citizenship. Uniforms were frequent sources of pride and belonging for Black and Indigenous soldiers; Black communities, too, drew succor and encouragement from the sight of spick-and-span United States Colored Troops (USCT) regiments on parade. Yet uniforms provoked complex emotions for Black and Indigenous wearers. Upkeep exacerbated the existing pay inequality faced by Black troops. There is evidence that the sight of Black men in uniform, even as it visually refuted white supremacy, strengthened white Southern hostility and placed USCT regiments in heightened danger. Military authorities on both sides debated the merits of imposing uniform codes on Indigenous soldiers, and Indigenous soldiers struggled to reconcile tribal identities and sartorial traditions with sectional loyalties and aspirations. This ambivalence only deepened after the war. The often peripheral participation of Black and Indigenous people in veterans’ organizations revealed their precarious place in the postwar narratives of the war and the erosion of emancipationist memories of the conflict, despite the attempts of Black GAR members to keep alive their interpretation of the war as a new birth of freedom. Increasingly, by the end of the nineteenth century, people of color were deliberately incorporated into Confederate reunions and displays, used, Cox says, as “props” to shore up the Lost Cause by promoting the service of supposed “Black Confederates.” Future scholars will no doubt build on Cox’s work to explore less fully developed themes: there is surprisingly little discussion of gender and masculinity here (a brief passage about women soldiers notwithstanding), and there is scope to probe the intersection of material and environmental histories to consider the haptic and emotional dimensions of dirt, discomfort, recycling, disposal, and destruction. The very good treatment of Black and Indigenous uniform wearers leaves comparatively untouched the role of material culture in constructing and legitimizing sectionally specific whiteness. These critiques should not take away, however, from Cox’s wide-ranging and thematically coherent work. The Fabric of Civil War Society firmly situates uniforms, badges, and flags as potent repositories of meaning and memory and will make valuable reading for scholars of the Civil War battlefront, the home front economy, and postwar memory making. Note [1]. Joan E. Cashin, “Trophies of War: Material Culture in the Civil War Era,” Journal of the Civil War Era 1, no. 3 (2011): 339-67; Joan E. Cashin, War Stuff: The Struggle for Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Sarah Jones Weicksel, “The Dress of the Enemy: Clothing and Disease in the Civil War Era,” Civil War History 63, no. 2 (2017): 133-50; and Sarah Jones Weicksel, “Cultures of Confederate Military Clothing Production,” in Clothing and Fashion in Southern History, ed. Ted Ownby and Becca Walton (Oxford: University Press of Mississippi, 2020): 32-53. Citation: Rachel Williams. Review of Cox, Shae Smith. The Fabric of Civil War Society: Uniforms, Badges, and Flags, 1859-1939. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. August, 2024. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=60653