New and Noteworthy---History and Guide to Civil War Shepherdstown: A Community of Suffering

A History and Guide to Civil War Shepherdstown: Victory and Defeat in West Virginia's Oldest Town, Nicholas Redding, Schroeder Publications, 144 pages, 56 illustrations, 6 maps, 2 appendices, order of battle, endnotes, index, 2012, $14.95.

 A History and Guide to Civil War Shepherdstown: Victory and Defeat in West Virginia's Oldest Town offers a intriguing description  of a village that began the war in Virginia and ended the war in West Virginia. Nicholas Redding finely balances aspects of Shepherdtown's citizens, it buildings and industries, and its proximity to Harpers Ferry, South Mountain, and the Battle of Sharpsburg. A third of the book presents Shepherdstown in the path of war. Wesley Culp, a recent immigrant from Adams County, Pennsylvania is typical of the town's  citizens who are divided in their allegiances. Reddington relies on eyewitness accounts of Shepherdtown's conflicted loyalities: Dr. Charles Wesley Andrew, Caroline Bedinger, and Henry Kyd Douglas and the Shepherdstown Register newspaper.

The middle third of the book is a guide to the Civil War sites in present-day Shepherdstown. The first third of the book is not retold; the discussion offers additional information that further clarifies the suffering and destruction of the town. The burning of the covered, two lane Potomac River bridge is well told and illustrated. Redding presents a black and white illustration of the bridge intact and a photograph of the remnants of the pilings.  Remarkably the illustration and the photograph were made from nearly the same location and reveals much about Shepherdstown. Ferry Hill in Maryland overlooks Shepherdstown and was the home of Henry Kyd Douglas, whose father practiced law across the river. Hotels, the town hall,  graffitti, homes that became hospitals, the residence of a Confederate spy, the site of the wagon shop where Wesley Culp was employed, churches and the cemetery are described and presented with personal primary source accounts of the structures' appearance and uses.

The final third of the book is a clear and concise history and guide to the September 1862 battle at Shepherdstown. Offered as a appendix, Mary Bedinger Mitchell's article in the 1886 Century Magazine recounts Shepherdstown citizens' experiences of the battles of South Mountain, Antietam and Shepherdstown. A second appendix is Henrietta Lee's lamentation addressed to Union general David Hunter; it presents the heartfelt anger of woman whose ancestral home was intentionally burned on the orders of the general.

History and Guide to Civil War Shepherdstown: Victory and Defeat in West Virginia's Oldest Town is both a satifying portrait of a border community overcome by the war and a guide book to the historic town. Redding's use of period photography, pen and ink sketches and primary sources is commendable. He introduces intriguing episodes that may compel readers to look further into Shepherdstown's history:  the Confederate spy network in the county, the printing of money that could be spent only in the town and the African Americans who remained in the town during the course of the war. 

Nicholas Redding's interview by the Civil War Trust

Other Voices: The Real War Is Getting Into The Books

People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, 1854-1877, Scott Reynolds Nelson and Carol Sherriff Oxford University Press, 345 pages, black and white photographs, maps, index, notes, bibliography. 2007, $28.00.

While reading People At War, a review of it by Randall M. Miller, of Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, came across my desk. Here it is.

"In a crowded field of books on the Civil War era. Nelson (Steel Drivin' Man) and Sheriff ( Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862), historians at the College of William and Mary, give us something new—an engaging, informed portrait of two peoples at war, with an emphasis
on how common soldiers and noncombatants adjusted to and were changed by the war.

The authors spend more time in recruiting halls, military camps, hospitals,and prisons than in battle to observe what moved men to war and some to flee it, as
well as how the physical and emotional demands of living away from home affected their sense of self and their national identity. At the same time, they discuss how the war came home to civilians, with the raids of armies and partisans, the demands of mobilization, the death and dismemberment of soldiers, the erosion of slavery, and the promise of freedom.

They are especially good at linking the experience of, and expectations about, the war with Americans' ambitions and interests in the West. Their vivid descriptions of disease and destruction will remind readers that war was hell even as it was also an instrument of social change. The new social historians' interest in "the people" gets its full due in this readable, reliable, and remarkably relevant book."

CWL --- Writing History: Answers to the Name of 'Soldier'

"The Blue and Gray in Black and White: Assessing the Scholarship on Civil War Soldiers," Aaron Sheehan-Dean in The View From The Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, ed., University of Kentucky Press, pp. 9-30.

Accounts written by soldiers during the war are highly prized by researchers. Postwar memoirs and article length reminiscences on occassion substitute interpretations for how it actually was in the face of battle. Answers to questions, running the gamut from emancipation and race to family and masculinity, are being readily mined today from 1860-1865 primary sources. Sheehan-Dean traces this trend to the work of Bell Irvin Wiley during the 1940s and 1950s. The author also calls attention to Albert Burton, on CSA conscription, and Ella Lonn, on army desertions, as being forerunners of Wiley in his perusal of frontline soldiers primary sources.

The movement to rejuvenate soldier studies by using the primary sources of 1860-1865 was encouraged by a 1970s study of European soldiers, The Face of Battle by John Keegan. The emergence of this historiographic movement in the 1980s is due to the growth in the sophisication of social history, the immediacy of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement during the 1970s.

Sheehan-Dean surveys the work of Reid Mitchell, Gerald Linderman, Mark Grimsley, Earl Hess, Chandra Manning, Joseph Glatthaar, James McPherson, Drew Gilpin Faust and several others. In these authors' works the attitudes of families, communities, and soldiers are being explored in a manner unlike any previous effort during the 145 years of writing about the American Civil War. In particular these studies of Southern and Northern counties and the soldiers they provided are setting forth new understandings of the war. In this field the work of Peter Carmichael, Martin Crawford, and Ward Hubb are revealing.

Families set in the context of communities, as illustrated by the work of James Marten and others, provide a picture of men and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers that is not like the Victorian paintings that provide illustrations for book jackets. The bibliographic notes to Sheehan-Dean's chapter provide a wealth of book and article titles that any reader having an interest in soldiers should examine.

Help Note: This chapter can be obtained by using your local library's inter-library loan services or by contacting me.