New and Noteworthy--- The Savage Civil War: A Military History

A Savage War: A Military History of the Civil War, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh Princeton University Press; 616 pages; maps, $35.

Brief: Combines scholarly and military perspectives in a study that emphasizes the distinct martial cultures of North and South, and the conflict's role in the rise of modern warfare.

From the Publisher: 
The Civil War represented a momentous change in the character of war. It combined the projection of military might across a continent on a scale never before seen with an unprecedented mass mobilization of peoples. Yet despite the revolutionizing aspects of the Civil War, its leaders faced the same uncertainties and vagaries of chance that have vexed combatants since the days of Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War. A Savage War sheds critical new light on this defining chapter in military history.

In a masterful narrative that propels readers from the first shots fired at Fort Sumter to the surrender of Robert E. Lee’s army at Appomattox, Williamson Murray and Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh bring every aspect of the battlefield vividly to life. They show how this new way of waging war was made possible by the powerful historical forces unleashed by the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution, yet how the war was far from being simply a story of the triumph of superior machines. Despite the Union’s material superiority, a Union victory remained in doubt for most of the war. Murray and Hsieh paint indelible portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and other major figures whose leadership, judgment, and personal character played such decisive roles in the fate of a nation. They also examine how the Army of the Potomac, the Army of Northern Virginia, and the other major armies developed entirely different cultures that influenced the war’s outcome.

A military history of breathtaking sweep and scope, A Savage War reveals how the Civil War ushered in the age of modern warfare.

Williamson Murray is professor emeritus of history at Ohio State University. His many books include The Iran-Iraq War.  
Wayne Wei-siang Hsieh is associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy. He is the author of West Pointers and the Civil War. They both live in Fairfax, Virginia.

Reviews:
"[An] outstanding account of the American Civil War. . . . This expertly written narrative will draw in anyone with an interest in the Civil War at any knowledge level."--Library Journal, starred review

"A genuinely fresh, persuasive perspective on the Civil War. . . . [A Savage War] will make even readers with a strong knowledge of the war think about how it was fought and why it ended as it did. A winner for Civil War history buffs."--Kirkus, starred review

"[A] very important new history of the American Civil War by two important historians."--Newt Gingrich

"[A] new and interesting military history of the American Civil War."--Francis P. Sempa, New York Journal of Books

"The best, clearest, and most instructive military history of the Civil War I have ever read. . . . [A Savage War] hit a home run."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution

Endorsements:
"If you think that there is nothing new to write about the Civil War, this book will prove you wrong."--H. R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam

"More than just another narrative of the Civil War, this thoughtful and often provocative book is an engaging analysis of the leadership, personalities, and strategies of both sides during America’s great nineteenth-century trauma."--Craig L. Symonds, author of Lincoln and His Admirals

"A Savage War is not just a riveting military narrative of the American Civil War written by two military historians with singular pragmatic experience, but a rare and much needed strategic assessment of the aims and methods of the Union and the Confederacy--highlighted with incisive, blunt--and persuasive-- appraisals of all the major generals and supreme commanders."--Victor Davis Hanson, author of Carnage and Culture and The Savior Generals

Table of Contents:  List of Maps ix, Preface xi, Introduction 1
1 The Origins
2 The War’s Strategic Framework
3 “And the War Came”
4 First Battles and the Making of Armies
5 Stillborn between Earth and Water: The Unfulfilled Promise of Joint Operations
6 The Confederacy Recovers, 1862
7 The Confederate Counter-Offensives, 1862
8 The War in the East, 1863
9 The War in the West, 1863
10 The Killing Time: The War in the East, 1864
11 Victory in the West, 1864
12 The Collapse of the Confederacy
13 The Civil War in History
Acknowledgments , Notes , Further Reading, Index

Text Source: Princeton University Press

Review--With the Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other

With A Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Militiary Thought in the Civil War North, Carol Reardon, Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 177 pp., 2012, $30.00

Review by Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr., Stillman College

First Paragraph of the Review: Carol Reardon (Penn State Univ.) has had a remarkably wide-ranging and influential career. She has written many books and articles on the Civil War and the Vietnam War, Pickett's Charge in History and Memory  perhaps the best known among them, particularly for its innovative approach to the battle at Gettysburg and its aftermath. She has also bridged the still considerable gap between academia and the public with appearances on C-Span and PBS and membership on the advisory boards of several museums and Civil War battlefield parks.

Last Paragraph of the Review: With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other is a fascinating and novel work. Some may quibble over its brevity and strict focus on the Union high command. But its concise and engaging style of presentation, cogent organization, and depth of research make it a very welcome contribution among the outpouring of publications marking the Civil War sesquicentennial. Well suited to undergraduate courses and graduate seminars, it will also provide much food for thought for anyone interested in the Union's strategic decisions and the formulation of military thought in democratic societies generally.

Read the entire review at   Michigan War Studies Review

Forthcoming: With A Sword In One Hand and Jomini In the Other

With a Sword in One Hand and Jomini in the Other: The Problem of Military Thought in the Civil War North , Carol Reardon, The University of North Carolina Press, 224 pp., notes, bibliography, index, $30.00

From the Publisher: When the Civil War began, Northern soldiers and civilians alike sought a framework to help make sense of the chaos that confronted them. Many turned first to the classic European military texts from the Napoleonic era, especially Antoine Henri Jomini's Summary of the Art of War. As Carol Reardon shows, Jomini's work was only one voice in what ultimately became a lively and contentious national discourse about how the North should conduct war at a time when warfare itself was rapidly changing. She argues that the absence of a strong intellectual foundation for the conduct of war at its start--or, indeed, any consensus on the need for such a foundation--ultimately contributed to the length and cost of the conflict.

Reardon examines the great profusion of new or newly translated military texts of the Civil War years, intended to fill that intellectual void, and draws as well on the views of the soldiers and civilians who turned t them in the search for a winning strategy. In examining how debates over principles of military thought entered into the question of qualifications of officers entrusted to command the armies of Northern citizen soldiers, she explores the limitations of nineteenth-century military thought in dealing with the human elements of combat.

Carol Reardon is George Winfree Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University and author of Pickett's Charge in History and Memory.

Pre-publication Reviews:"This excellent book will change the perceptions of military historians in general and Civil War historians in particular." --John F. Marszalek, executive director, The Ulysses S. Grant Association, Mississippi State University

"A superb book. Ingeniously researched, powerfully argued, and clearly written, it is a strikingly original contribution not only to Civil War literature but to the field of military theory as well." --George C. Rable, author of God's Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War

"Carol Reardon offers an incisive analysis of the impact--or lack thereof--of Jomini and other writers on military strategy, but she does a great deal more. This book provides one of the best accounts we have of leadership, morale, and combat stress in the Union army." --James M. McPherson

HNet Review: Were Southern Military Academies Making Southerners Into Yankees?

Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South, Jennifer R. Green, Cambridge University Press, 2008. Illustrations. xiii + 300 pp. $80.00.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Thomas Perry (Purdue University), Published on H-Education (July, 2011)

In her 2008 book, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South, Jennifer R. Green seeks to fill a gap in the historiography of middle-class formation in the antebellum United States, as well as in the history of education. Compiling demographic data on over one thousand cadets who attended state or private institutions in the Old South during the 1840s and 1850s, Green contends that military education is one location to view the development of the middle class in regional and national terms. Families from the middle ranks of southern society--largely nonmanual, nonagricultural professionals--“mirrored their northern counterparts in leveraging education to develop professional occupations” (p. 2).

Taking advantage of funding opportunities and a nonclassical curriculum, southern, middle-class families sent their sons to such academies as the Virginia Military Institute, the South Carolina Military Academy, and the Kentucky Military Institute, among others, to attain an education with the hope that it could promote both social stability and social mobility. Many cadets, she claims, adopted northern, middle-class values stressing industry, morality, and self-regulation, yet at the same time their vision of manhood retained some southern variations. The emerging middle class in the South never threatened the southern elite’s dominance of the region, she insists, which was based on slave ownership and landholdings. Instead, members of the middling rank hoped to separate themselves “from the yeomanry, plain folk, and any developing urban working class” (p. 181). The benefits of a military education, however, coupled with alumni networks and the increased professionalization of certain occupations, does suggest that the standards for mobility and social status were changing during these years.

Green argues that the middle class in the antebellum United States did not possess a class consciousness. Rather, they were a class “in itself,” whose members realized they held similar economic, occupational, and behavioral characteristics with a larger group of people but lacked a shared sense of identity. She agrees with much of Jonathan Daniel Wells’s book, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800-1861 (2004) but she furthers his analysis by “defining the group more specifically” to investigate what social mobility, status, education, and professionalism meant to the middling ranks of southern society (p. 20).

Although one-third of military cadets’ fathers labored in agriculture, most worked in professional occupations--“they were attorneys, physicians, and ministers, in order of frequency”--and looked to military education to instill discipline and useful knowledge in their sons to solidify or enhance their social status (p. 25). They were successful, Green asserts, as matriculates from the academies were more prevalent in professional occupations than their fathers.

The book review is continued at the following link. Text Source: HNet/HCivilWar

CWL: With an $80 price tag, readers may wish to go to their local library and request it through inter-library loan.

CWL---DRILL! DRILL!! DRILL!!! FIGHT! FIGHT!! FIGHT!!!

Drill, Training and the Combat Performance of the Civil War Soldier: Dispelling the Myth of the Poor Soldier, Great Fighter, Mark A. Weitz, Journal of Military History, 62 (April 1998): 263-289.

A theme irregularly runs through the military literature of the American Civil War: the worst soldiers made the best fighters and a wink towards the ragged rebels. To explain this characterization, some truisms are offered: a natural inclination towards fighting, the rural life, Celtic genes, and the strong ties of community and cousins. These explanations are couched in the notion of American, North and South, uniqueness. For Mark A. Weitz, these are not the answers. Civilians are made into good fighters by drill. The classical military definition of a professional army holds the answer. The effectiveness of drill and training is reported in the soldiers' statements. The soldiers' faith in training becomes obvious in their letters and diaries.

Non-military explanations for combat effectiveness divides the concept of fighter from that of a soldier. The skills of a good soldier had to be mastered before he could be an effective fighter. A second problem with most explanations is that they discount the abilities of the trained soldiers. A proclivity for personal violence in the civilian world does not translate to controlled effective violence on the battlefield. Rural life may have acclimated to harsh weather, long and vigorous physical activity, meager meals but the will to overcome threats to personal survival and comfort would not follow from having lived in a rural agricultural environment. The idea of a Celtic gene residing in the blood of Southerners, a notion offered by Grady McWhiney before the movie Braveheart appeared, offers little in the way evidence that the gene exists or Southerners have it.

Weitz first considers a definition of 'strong combat effectiveness'. Soldiers equated this a performing duty under fire while suppressing fear. In illustrating this, the author quotes both Frederick the Great of Prussia, Major Eugene Blackford of the 5th Alabama and Private Amos Steel of the 25th Massachusetts. The misperception that combat effectiveness came from environment and not from drill came from international observers. If the country had no significant military class and no military institutions with a storied past, then good soldiers could not be produced. How then did the American enlisted and and the American commissioned officer fight so well?

The stand of Prentiss' division at Shiloh, 1862, supports the traditional interpretation that training, drill, discipline and tactics contributes to combat effectiveness. Weitz briefly examines the military effectiveness of the ancient Sumerian army, the troops in the Thirty Years War and the army of Shaka Zulu in the 19th century. In each case, the transformation of civilians into soldiers is performed by drill in small and large units. Daily repetition of drills in company and battalion sized units. Patrick Cleburne, a former enlisted man in the British Army, relied on constant drill of his company, later regiment, then brigade and later division to become premier fighting units. Reliance on Hardee's Tactics, marching drill and rifle training were the keys to Cleburne's success as a battlefield commander.

A variety of regimental commanders, North and South, attested to the importance of drill as a means attaining cohesion and efficiency on the march and on the battlefield. As a whole, the great strides that McClellan made with the Army of the Potomac after the Battle of Manassas was due in large measure to constant drilling. Wietz's cites regimental diaries throughout the army as a way of making this point. The tremendous losses in the first two years of the war did not impair the soldiers' faith that drilling was essential for battlefield cohesion. Emory Upton, one of the Army of the Potomac's best field commanders and a tactical innovator, denounced the notion that a poor soldiers could be made into a good fighter by anything other than drill. When soldiers failed on the battlefield, Upton felt it in most cases that it was not that the soldiers were undrilled by that the soldiers nonprofessional officers failed to lead.