News----- 36 Pounds of Coffee A Year; Grounds For War; Ohio Barrista Becomes President

How Coffee Fueled the Civil War, Jon Grinspan, New York Times,   July 9, 2014 

It was the greatest coffee run in American history. The Ohio boys had been fighting since morning, trapped in the raging battle of Antietam, in September 1862. Suddenly, a 19-year-old William McKinley appeared, under heavy fire, hauling vats of hot coffee. The men held out tin cups, gulped the brew and started firing again. “It was like putting a new regiment in the fight,” their officer recalled. Three decades later, McKinley ran for president in part on this singular act of caffeinated heroism.

At the time, no one found McKinley’s act all that strange. For Union soldiers, and the lucky Confederates who could scrounge some, coffee fueled the war. Soldiers drank it before marches, after marches, on patrol, during combat. In their diaries, “coffee” appears more frequently than the words “rifle,” “cannon” or “bullet.” Ragged veterans and tired nurses agreed with one diarist: “Nobody can ‘soldier’ without coffee.”

Union troops made their coffee everywhere, and with everything: with water from canteens and puddles, brackish bays and Mississippi mud, liquid their horses would not drink. They cooked it over fires of plundered fence rails, or heated mugs in scalding steam-vents on naval gunboats. When times were good, coffee accompanied beefsteaks and oysters; when they were bad it washed down raw salt-pork and maggoty hardtack. Coffee was often the last comfort troops enjoyed before entering battle, and the first sign of safety for those who survived.

The Union Army encouraged this love, issuing soldiers roughly 36 pounds of coffee each year. Men ground the beans themselves (some carbines even had built-in grinders) and brewed it in little pots called muckets. They spent much of their downtime discussing the quality of that morning’s brew. Reading their diaries, one can sense the delight (and addiction) as troops gushed about a “delicious cup of black,” or fumed about “wishy-washy coffee.” Escaped slaves who joined Union Army camps could always find work as cooks if they were good at “settling” the coffee – getting the grounds to sink to the bottom of the unfiltered muckets.

For much of the war, the massive Union Army of the Potomac made up the second-largest population center in the Confederacy, and each morning this sprawling city became a coffee factory. First, as another diarist noted, “little campfires, rapidly increasing to hundreds in number, would shoot up along the hills and plains.” Then the encampment buzzed with the sound of thousands of grinders simultaneously crushing beans. Soon tens of thousands of muckets gurgled with fresh brew.

Confederates were not so lucky. The Union blockade kept most coffee out of seceded territory. One British observer noted that the loss of coffee “afflicts the Confederates even more than the loss of spirits,” while an Alabama nurse joked that the fierce craving for caffeine would, somehow, be the Union’s “means of subjugating us.” When coffee was available, captured or smuggled or traded with Union troops during casual cease-fires, Confederates wrote rhapsodically about their first sip.

The problem spilled over to the Union invaders. When Gen. William T. Sherman’s Union troops decided to live off plunder and forage as they cut their way through Georgia and South Carolina, soldiers complained that while food was plentiful, there were no beans to be found. “Coffee is only got from Uncle Sam,” an Ohio officer grumbled, and his men “could scarce get along without it.”

Confederate soldiers and civilians would not go without. Many cooked up coffee substitutes, roasting corn or rye or chopped beets, grinding them finely and brewing up something warm and brown. It contained no caffeine, but desperate soldiers claimed to love it. Gen. George Pickett, famous for that failed charge at Gettysburg, thanked his wife for the delicious “coffee” she had sent, gushing: “No Mocha or Java ever tasted half so good as this rye-sweet-potato blend!”

Did the fact that Union troops were near jittery from coffee, while rebels survived on impotent brown water, have an impact on the outcome of the conflict? Union soldiers certainly thought so. Though they rarely used the word “caffeine,” in their letters and diaries they raved about that “wonderful stimulant in a cup of coffee,” considering it a “nerve tonic.” One depressed soldier wrote home that he was surprised that he was still living, and reasoned: “what keeps me alive must be the coffee.”

Others went further, considering coffee a weapon of war. Gen. Benjamin Butler ordered his men to carry coffee in their canteens, and planned attacks based on when his men would be most caffeinated. He assured another general, before a fight in October 1864, that “if your men get their coffee early in the morning you can hold.”

Coffee did not win the war – Union material resources and manpower played a much, much bigger role than the quality of its Java – but it might say something about the victors. From one perspective, coffee was emblematic of the new Northern order of fast-paced wage labor, a hurried, business-minded, industrializing nation of strivers. For years, Northern bosses had urged their workers to switch from liquor to coffee, dreaming of sober, caffeinated, untiring employees. Southerners drank coffee too – in New Orleans especially – but the way Union soldiers gulped the stuff at every meal pointed ahead toward the world the war made, a civilization that lives on today in every office breakroom.

But more than that, coffee was simply delicious, soothing – “the soldier’s chiefest bodily consolation” – for men and women pushed beyond their limits. Caffeine was secondary. Soldiers often brewed coffee at the end of long marches, deep in the night while other men assembled tents. These grunts were too tired for caffeine to make a difference; they just wanted to share a warm cup – of Brazilian beans or scorched rye – before passing out.

This explains their fierce love. When one captured Union soldier was finally freed from a prison camp, he meditated on his experiences. Over his first cup of coffee in more than a year, he wondered if he could ever forgive “those Confederate thieves for robbing me of so many precious doses.” Getting worked up, he fumed, “Just think of it, in three hundred days there was lost to me, forever, so many hundred pots of good old Government Java.”

So when William McKinley braved enemy fire to bring his comrades a warm cup – an act memorialized in a stone monument at Antietam today – he knew what it meant to them.

Text Source: New York Times, July 9, 2014

New and Noteworthy---How Nature Worked To Kill Soldiers When They Were On Campaign

Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and theEnvironment in 1862 Virginia, Kathryn Shively Meier, University of North Carolina Press, 2013, appendices, notes, bibliography, index, 219 pp., $39.95

Stephen Berry’s 2012 top ten list of “predictions for how broader professional trends will reshape Civil War historiography in the coming decades” offers #7: The Blue and Gray Will Go Green. Berry predicts that by 2022 ignoring the natural environment “within which human events unfold will be as ludicrous as conflating all history with the activities of a few white men.” [1] In the same issue of the Journal of the Civil War Era, Lisa Brady states that environmental studies of the American Civil War has much more to offer than a catalog of the landscapes blighted by battles and cities crushed by armed conflicts. [2]

Kathryn Shively Meier’s Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia examines how troops on campaign challenged the marching, fighting and the natural environment when they sought to ruin the soldiers’ health.  Meier introduces her work with a discussion of public health issues as understood by both Confederate and Federal soldiers. Both “believed nature to be a significant and sometimes definitive force in shaping their physical and mental health”. [3] Sleeping, marching and preparing food out of doors made each of the natural environments challenging. Furthermore, typhoid, malaria, diarrhea, dysentery, rheumatism, scurvy, sunstroke, and a variety of emotional depressions were not limited to a single natural environment. 

Nature’s Civil War is both a medical history and an environmental history of eight months of military campaigns in Virginia. It offers the common soldiers’ perspectives on the environment and their feelings on how the natural environment is killing them. The Peninsula Campaign was fought in the midst of swamps and the Shenandoah Campaign was fought in what would appear to be a healthier environment of clear streams and rivers. The Shenandoah River Valley’s Eden is contrasted with the insalubrious swamps of The Peninsula. Readers may come to Nature’s Civil War with the notion that obviously the Shenandoah Valley must have been a great deal healthier environment than the Peninsula’s.  The author finds that the 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign that began in January with the Confederates marching to and encamping at Romney in the northern portion of the valley.  The march was challenging to the Confederate troops’ health.  On picket duty, soldiers froze to death. Mountainous terrain, quickly changing temperatures and weather, constant marching, and the general failure of Confederate logistics created health hazards during a season when foraging was less possible and self-care networks were not yet likely to be in place.

Meier understands troops’ seasoning process to be lengthy, constant and complex. The author states that the Army of the Potomac in 1862 was the second largest city in the Confederacy after New Orleans and that the Army of Northern Virginia was twice the size of Richmond. The initial stage occurs during the first large encampment during which measles, chicken and small pox, mumps, whooping cough, and diphtheria assault the recruits. Meier intuits that urban recruits may indeed have become less sick from diseases than did rural recruits.  A second stage occurs during campaign marching and battle. A third stage occurs after combat when burials of the battlefield dead, emotional shocks and melancholy rained blows on the survivors’ bodies and minds.  Not in Meier’s Nature’s Civil War is a discussion of battlefield surgery; diseases not bullets were the primary cause of the 750,000+ deaths during the war. The book is social history; combat is not a topic reviewed here by the author.  It is the time between the battles that is the focus of Nature’s Civil War. 

In the era before the war, the notion of heroic medicine was waning and homeopathic medicine was becoming licensed. During this era, medicine was performed by home members who followed popular and readily available guidebooks. The troops and doctors of the Civil War were products of Jacksonian America and they were often at odds regarding exactly what was good mental and physical health. Middle and upper class reformers in the U.S. Sanitary Commission challenged the U.S. Army’s Medical Department. Meier understands that possibly most of the soldiers of 1862 in Virginia had begun the seasoning process or had nearly completed it. During this year, the author believes that the soldiers were developing two networks of health care: one consisted of the regular army’s medical service and the other consisted of self-care assisted by comrades-in-arms and others.  Meier believes that it was midway through the seasoning process that soldiers began constructing their own network of self-care routines and friendships which included both comrades-in-arms and civilians.  Civilians who were in and around the camps and in the path of a march became members in individual soldiers’ self-care networks.  Often women and African-Americans were a part of this network. The author concludes that “self-care often demonstrably improved physical health and morale.” [4]  

Meier describes self-care and how it was performed. It was very individualistic and was concerned with what may appear to today’s readers as mundane activities. Soldiers sought to bath outdoors more frequently than ordered.  Bad water was made drinkable by boiling it with coffee beans.  Of course, the soldiers’ self-care methods engendered disputes with regimental surgeons and other regimental officers. Unaccustomed to professional care, the soldiers of 1861 and 1862 were suspicious and critical of medical services that followed regulations and disliked  surgeons who were wary of enlisted men and thought them to be likely shirkers.  One method of self-care included straggling which at times became an exercise to obtain vegetables and fruits. Straggling also occurred when soldiers believed that they needed rest in order to recuperate from long marches performed in staggering heat or drenching rain.  

Increased spiraling upward rates of sickness and poor morale frustrated commanders during the 1862 Shenandoah Valley and Peninsula campaigns. During these campaigns, officers as well as enlisted men developed personal health communities that included wives visiting camp and African American servants.  Concerns relating to cooking out of doors, finding clean water, and protection from inclement weather were constant. Fevers, fleas, flies, and frostbite were just a few of the medical concerns which were addressed by self-care networks. 

At the heart of Meier’s book is a sample of soldier letters, diaries and memoirs from winter 1861-1862 through mid-August 1862 created by 205 individuals. The author reinforces this sample by consulting The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, Outlines of the Chief Camp Diseases, the regulations of the Confederate army, the papers of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and other documents. One of her several goals for Nature’s Civil War is to serve as a reminder to military historians to “look beyond the battlefield to understand fluctuations in morale”. [5] Though beyond the mid-August 1862 limit of Meier’s book, an historian who dwelt upon this issue is Joseph L. Harsh. His trilogy, Confederate Tide Rising, Taken at the Flood and Sounding the Shallows are studies of Robert E. Lee’s strategy, tactics and his troops’ deteriorating health during the 1862 Maryland Campaign.

In The Life and Billy Yank and The Life of Johnny Reb, Bell I. Wiley established a field of Civil War literature that places the voices of the soldier in the forefront.  Throughout the Meier’s Nature’s Civil War the words of the soldiers are frequently offered and readers may be reminded of Wiley’s legacy.  The bibliographic resources of Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia are numerous.   

Notable is the amount of archived collections of personal papers, newspapers, government documents, published medical sources and personal narratives, and secondary works including books, articles and chapters consulted by the author.   Meier’s work is well written and is accessible to the general reader. Certainly it contributes to emerging field of environmental studies of the American Civil War and is a fine example for others seeking to develop a thesis regarding Lisa Brady’s request for environmental studies that do much more than “catalog the physical destruction caused by war and its related studies.” [6]  

[1] http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/forum-the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies/

[2] http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/forum-the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies/the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies-environmental-histories/

[3] Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, Kathryn Shively Meier, page 2.

[4] Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, Kathryn Shively Meier, page 5

[5] Nature’s Civil War: Common Soldiers and the Environment in 1862 Virginia, Kathryn Shively Meier, page 3

 [6] [2] http://journalofthecivilwarera.com/forum-the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies/the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies-environmental-histories/

This review first appeared in The Civil War Book Review [Spring 2014] published by Louisiana State University.

News--Underwater Wreck Reveals Covert Weapons Deal Between UK And CSA.

New Historical And Archaeological Research Is Shining An Embarrassing Light On One Of The Darkest Periods Of British Foreign Policy, David Keys, The Independent, June 25, 2014.

Investigations by a leading Scottish maritime historian have succeeded, for the first time, in locating the main secret British headquarters of the American Civil War Confederate government’s transatlantic gun-running operation. Other research, carried out over the past decade, has revealed the extraordinary extent to which substantial sections of Britain’s business elite were working with impunity to help the slave-owning southern states win the Civil War – despite the fact that Britain was officially neutral  and had outlawed slavery almost 30 years earlier.

What’s more, in the Bristol Channel, the remnants of one of the Confederate gun-runners – the 395 ton Matilda – has been tentatively identified on the seabed off the coast of the island of Lundy.

Three other confederate wrecks had already been identified in British waters – off the west coast of Scotland, off Liverpool and in the Bristol Channel.
In total some 200 vessels were purpose-built or upgraded on Clydeside, in Liverpool or in London for the Confederate states – and hundreds of thousands of guns (including heavy artillery) were manufactured in Birmingham, Newcastle and near London for the Confederate Army.
The entirely illegal, but tacitly British-Government-approved pro-Confederate gun-running operation is thought to have lengthened the American Civil War by up to two years – and to have therefore cost as many as 400,000 American lives.

“The identification of the Confederacy’s main secret gun-running headquarters should serve to highlight the role played by key elements of the British business elite in helping the slave-owning states in the American Civil War,” said maritime historian Dr Eric Graham of Edinburgh University.
“The clandestine headquarters was established just 32 miles by railway from Clydeside because it was the big shipbuilding magnates there who were being contracted to build or upgrade more than half of the two hundred vessels supplied to the Confederacy by UK shipyards.”

“It demonstrates that Britain’s neutrality was, in reality, a complete sham,” said Dr Graham, the author of a major book on the Civil War gun-runners, Clyde Built: The Blockade Runners of the American Civil War.
Bridge of Allan is located north of Stirling in Scotland
 
The guns were shipped from Britain to the British crown colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas on board commercial cargo vessels. But from Bermuda and the Bahamian port of Nassau, they were carried by 300 high-speed gun-running vessels - mainly shallow-draught paddle-steamers - two thirds of which had been purpose-built or adapted for the job in British shipyards.
Today none of these blockade runners survives above water – but of those that were wrecked or sunk, a number have been identified off the US and UK coasts.

Indeed, English Heritage has just turned one of the gun-runner wrecks, the 80m Iona 2, which sank in a storm off the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel in 1864, into an underwater tourist attraction. An official scuba diving trail, complete with suitably waterproof guide books for use underwater, has been officially launched around the vessel – and its illicit "dark heritage" status will undoubtedly make it all the more intriguing.

“This dive trail - English Heritage's fifth underwater tourist trail for protected wrecks to open since 2009 – is an important historical reminder of a part that Britain played in the American Civil War,” said English Heritage maritime archaeologist Terry Newman. A leading UK archaeological consultancy, Wessex Archaeology, has been monitoring the condition of the wreck on behalf of English Heritage.
James Bulloch of the Confederate States Navy was one of the senior Confederate agents based in Bridge of Allan. He was the principal procurement agent in Europe for the Confederate Navy
Three other Confederate wrecks around Britain’s coastline are the Iona 1, which collided with another ship and sank in the Clyde in 1862, the Lellia, which went down in a storm off Liverpool with the loss of 47 lives in 1865, and the Matilda, which sank in dense fog in the Bristol Channel in 1864.

The newly discovered main secret UK headquarters of the blockade-busting operation was a still extant mansion in the quiet and secluded Stirlingshire village of Bridge of Allan. At any one time, it housed around 10 Confederate agents who held their planning meetings there – and used it as a base from which they could visit top shipbuilding magnates and others on Clydeside and "test drive" vessels to assess their speed.

They seem to have located their headquarters in the countryside so as to avoid the attentions of the various detective agencies which had been appointed by the US Federal government to track them down. However, their wish for rural anonymity did not prevent some of the southern  agents from wearing “big hats and smoking large cigars” –  key clues which, in early 1864, led the amateur sleuths of the anti-slavery Dundee Ladies’ Emancipation Society to realize who they were – and to inform the US consul in Dundee accordingly. After much pressure had been exerted by the US on the British Government, the exposure of the secret headquarters led a year later to the British preventing the export of a giant, potentially game-changing 130m armoured warship - and four other warships - to the Confederate Navy.

Other research into the Confederate blockade-busting operation, currently being carried out by a Manchester-based historian, is revealing how the Confederate network extended over many different parts of Britain.

Researcher Gerald Hayes is piecing together the previously unstudied details of a complex of more than half a dozen blockade-busting companies based in Liverpool and London and their relationship with other Confederate sympathizers – including pro-Confederacy MPs at Westminster.
Britain was split down the middle in its attitude to the American Civil War. The left, many liberals and much of the working class was pro-US and anti-Confederate – mainly because of the South’s pro-slavery stance. But many Tories and much of the business sector were actively pro-Confederate, as there were considerable fortunes to be made from supplying guns, uniforms, medicines, textiles and even food to the south.

Geopolitically, the British government saw the USA as a growing challenge to its global domination – especially in terms of merchant marine carrying capacity. The British also feared US expansionism and potential US-originating threats to Canada and British colonies in the Caribbean.
“Economically Britain saw huge advantages in the break-up of the United States. It saw the American South as a source of raw cotton – and as a market for manufacturing goods, whereas it saw the North as an industrial competitor which sought to use protectionist policies to exclude Britain from American markets,” said Dr. Graham.

Full Text Link: The Independent, June 25, 2014

New and Noteworthy--Pictorial History of Ford's Theatre, Washington, D.C. 1839-Today

Ford's Theater: Images of America Series, Brian Anderson, Arcadia Publishing, 128 pp., profusely illustrated, $21.99.

Clear and concise pictorial history of Ford's Theater, Washington, D.C. Full of events and personalities other that April 14, 1865 and Lincoln. Covers the 1839 to 1859 construction of the building and its use as a church, The building's use as a theater from 1861 to 1865 reveals the social and entertainment life of DC during the war. It served as an office building and warehouse from 1866 to 1932 when it became a museum. The transition from museum to a museum/theater/educational complex is intriguing. and reveals that the management of the site has been thoughtful in response to the demands of the market and real estate values. A fine book for public history students and those interested in the history of Washington, D.C.

News---Lee's Gettysburg Headquarters, Motel, Brew Pub Go For $5.5 Million To Civil War Trust

Civil War Trust To By Lee's Headquarters, Amy Worden, Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 2014.

 For almost a century, the small, historic stone house on Chambersburg Road has been obscured by the commercial buildings surrounding it. But in 1863, it occupied a prominent position at the epicenter of fighting on Day One of the nation's best-known Civil War battle. That night, it would be seized and used as the headquarters of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. On Tuesday - exactly 151 years after the start of the Battle of Gettysburg - the Civil War Trust will announce the purchase of the four-acre parcel and the restoration of the site to the way it looked in 1863. 

"As far as preserving a historically significant structure and part of the battlefield, this is biggest deal we've ever done," said Jim Lighthizer, president of the Civil War Trust, a Washington-based nonprofit group that has preserved 40,000 acres of land in 20 states. "Lee's headquarters is one of the most important unprotected historic structures in America." Lighthizer said the trust would purchase the property, which includes a Quality Inn and a brew pub, from Belmar Partnership for $5.5 million and spend an additional $400,000 to $500,000 to demolish the modern structures and restore the historic building.                
. . . .
The house, believed to have been built in 1833, was occupied by a widow named Mary Thompson at the time of the war and was co-owned by U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens - a force behind the passage of the 13th Amendment ending slavery. The headquarters building was opened as a museum in the early 1920s in connection with the motel on the site.

Lighthizer said the artifacts, which were to be donated to the trust by the owners, would be sold and the building restored to the way it looked when Lee and his officers plotted strategy under its roof.
Lee would go on to defeat July 3 and retreat south after losing thousands of men in what is considered the turning point of the war.   "This spot is where some of most important decisions were made by an American general in the Civil War," said Lighthizer. "It had direct impact on the future of the country."

He said that there was no timetable for the restoration project or reopening the house after demolition of the modern buildings, but that the whole parcel would be donated to the National Park Service for inclusion in the Gettysburg National Military Park. "To the preservation community, this land was long considered lost," Deputy Secretary of the Interior Mike Connor said in a statement. "Thus, the journey we embark upon today is especially meaningful: We are not just protecting a piece of American heritage, we are reclaiming it for future generations."

Link To Full Text: Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 2014

New and Noteworthy---Illegal Arms Trade With The Confederacy, Illegal Cotton Trade With the United States

Trading With The Enemy: The Covert Economy During The Civil War, Philip Leigh, Westhome Publications, 183 pp., illustrations, tables, bibliographic notes, bibliography, $26.00.

Using clear and concise language, Philip Leigh cogently explains how the world's cotton market on the eve of the Civil War provoked Northern fears of its own economic collapse.  In 1860, cotton textile manufacturing was the planet's largest industry and it was dependent on the South. Northern manufacturing and the U.S. export trade was dominated by the annual cotton crop.  If the South when it became the Confederacy did not trade with the North then textile mills would become idle and the balance of payments abroad would become unfavorable for North.

Yet, the South would also be diminished by a trade embargo with the North. Wheat, corn, pork and a wide variety of manufactured items would be denied the Confederacy. With gold flowing out of the U.S. treasury, cotton became essential because one in Northern hands it could be exported in exchange for credits in Europe. Both Lincoln and Davis realized that inter-sectional trade would exist and very little could be done to prevent it.  Davis turned a blind eye to it; Lincoln sought to develop a policy that would cultivate it.

The 1862 Port Royal South Carolina effort encouraged African-Americans raised cotton on deserted plantations. The Red River and Olustee military campaigns were conducted to seize cotton. When New Orleans and Memphis fell to the Union both cities became gateway cities for cotton coming out of Louisiana and Mississippi. Also, with the fall of New Orleans the cotton trade migrated to Galveston, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico. Then the French involvement in Mexican politics was moved to the front burner in Seward's State Department. When Norfolk, Virginia and Vicksburg, Mississippi fell into Federal hands, other routes of cotton coming out of  the South opened up. Licenses to trade for cotton were granted to Northern merchants who dealt with the commanders of captured cities.  It was not a coincidence that Benjamin Butler commanded both New Orleans and Norfolk while serving in the army.

The U.S. treasury granted the buyer permits and demanded that those shopping for cotton pay with newly printed greenbacks and not gold. Hopefully, greenbacks would be currency in the Confederacy and undermine Southern home front loyalty. Yet in practice, whichever buyer had gold was the first one in line to buy the cotton made available by military expeditions and planters bring their cotton to market in a Federally captured city.

The passage of cotton via blockade runner to the Bermuda and Bahama Islands, as well as Havana, Cuba is thoroughly presented by Leigh.  He notes that much of this cotton was taken to Halifax, Nova Scotia, repackaged/rebranded and sold to Boston and New York textile merchants.  Did the New England and Mid-Atlantic textile merchants pay in weapons and medicine or know that their payments would be used to buy military arms and medicines?  Leigh finds that, in fact, merchants did.  

Leigh well documents his findings and supports in conclusions. With a writing style that is marked by clarity and precision, he presents information that is unfamiliar to most general readers of Civil War literature.  Yet, without a doubt, what the author offers is an articulate and thoughtful re-examination of Northern merchants complicity in a necessary evil, that of trading with the enemy during a civil war.

Philip Leigh is a regular contributor to the New York Times Disunion Civil War series and the Civil War Monitor. A professional writer, he holds an engineering degree from the Florida Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. He most recently edited a new edition of Co. Aytch, or a Side Show of the Big Show by Sam Watkins, also available from Westholme Publishing. Additionally, Leigh edited and added illustrations to Three Months in the Southern States, by Arthur J. L. Fremantle.

Off Topic, New and Noteworthy Detective Fiction-- Phillip Kerr's Prayer

Prayer, Philip Kerr, Putnam Publications, 409 pages, $26.95.

Philip Kerr, well known for his nine volume series featuring pre-war, World War 2 and Cold War detective Bernie Gunther, a German, often tackles ethical and spiritual issues in his detective novels and other works.  Prayer offers a Scotland born and U.S. raised Gil Martins working on the domestic terrorism cases for the FBI. Beginning with his Scottish first communion, Martins becomes an angry and skeptical Roman Catholic. Marrying an American evangelical and working in Texas, he encounters an assortment of churches and responds to them with a declaration of atheism. Yet, his closest friend is a Roman Catholic bishop who points him to the possibility of a conspiracy relating to the suspicious deaths of outspoken atheists.

The possibility of a conspiracy is somewhat confirmed by Martins during his independent investigation and then the FBI, to a very small degree, becomes involved because the deaths occur in several time zones. The stakes are raised because the deaths are not murders but suicides and there is no trace of a killer at the scene of the deaths. Martins' marriage dissolves, his atheism is tested, and Martins comes to grips with the possibility that the evidence is leading him to Old Testament declarations and the possibility that there may be one angel, reserved by God, who carries out judgement.

Kerr holds Martins' investigations, Christian faiths, atheism in balance in Prayer and the conclusion is sound and satisfying.  The close of novel allows this reader to hope that Gil Martins is heard from again.

News---More Acres To Be Added To Gettysburg National Military Park? Others?

Press Release/Media Advisory: Civil War Trust, Federal and State Leaders, to Launch National Preservation Effort on Gettysburg Battlefield 
 

The Civil War Trust, the nation’s largest battlefield preservation organization, will mark the 151st anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg by launching a national campaign to protect one of the most important parts of this hallowed battleground. Joining the Civil War Trust for the July 1, 2014 news conference will be officials from the Department of the Interior, National Park Service, and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, along with the Gettysburg Foundation and other conservation leaders.The news conference will begin at 10:00 a.m., on National Park Service property adjacent to the Lutheran Theological Seminary. 

Guest parking will be available in designated areas at the Seminary; please arrive early to allow time to access the event site from the parking area. Following the announcement, light refreshments will be available, and historians will discuss the history of the property the Trust is seeking to preserve.

 Members of the media should contact news@civilwar.org to reserve credentials.

WHAT: Major Preservation Announcement for 151st anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg

WHO: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of the Interior and National Park Service officials, representatives of the Civil War Trust, the Gettysburg Foundation and other conservation and education organizations

WHEN: Tuesday, July 1 at 10:00 a.m. EDT

WHERE: Gettysburg National Military Park. Parking is available at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, 61 Seminary Ridge, Gettysburg, PA 17325

Civil War Trust is the largest nonprofit battlefield preservation organization in the United States. Its mission is to preserve our nation’s endangered Civil War battlefields and to promote appreciation of these hallowed grounds. To date, it has preserved more than 38,500 acres of battlefield land in 20 states, including 940 acres at Gettysburg. Learn more at www.civilwar.org, the home of the Civil War sesquicentennial.

New and Noteworthy--So You Think You Know Gettysburg? Volume Two: Handy for Dashboards, Backpacks or Flashcards

So You Think You Know Gettysburg? Volume Two, James and Suzanne Gindelsperger, J. F. Blair Publishing, index, heavily illustrated, suggested reading list, appendices, 270 pages,2014, $15.95.

Of the 233 entries in So You Think You Know Gettysburg? Volume Two, all but about a dozen feature monuments. Three farms, a cemetery, the cupola, a fence, sets of rocks and a guard shack are quickly described. The monuments are numbered and the 11 maps are quite clear and attractive.The photography is superb. The authors have added a few off-the-beaten paths sites to their itinerary. It is good to see the Lincoln Cemetery for African-Americans and the fence around the Copse of Trees which before the Civil War witnessed the murder of the paramour of Daniel Sickles wife.

So You Think You Know Gettysburg? Volume Two is very handy as a 'dashboard book', a hiker's book' or as flash cards for the Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guide exam's segment on monument photographs.

Forthcoming and Noteworthy-- Did Female Authors Change Pre-Civil War Society's Perceptions of Slaves?

Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture, Sarah N. Roth, Cambridge University Press, 314 pages, 14 black and white illustrations 14 tables, $99.00.  [July 2014]

From The Publisher: 

• Demonstrates that white women had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War-era America via their influence on popular culture  
• Offers a fresh new angle on whiteness studies by focusing on the development of race consciousness among middle-class white women in the mid-nineteenth century 
• Utilizes novels, short stories, plays, and other popular culture media as historical sources

In the decades leading to the Civil War, popular conceptions of African American men shifted dramatically. The savage slave featured in 1830s' novels and stories gave way by the 1850s to the less-threatening humble black martyr. This radical reshaping of black masculinity in American culture occurred at the same time that the reading and writing of popular narratives were emerging as largely feminine enterprises.

In a society where women wielded little official power, white female authors exalted white femininity, using narrative forms such as autobiographies, novels, short stories, visual images, and plays, by stressing differences that made white women appear superior to male slaves. This book argues that white women, as creators and consumers of popular culture media, played a pivotal role in the demasculinization of black men during the antebellum period, and consequently had a vital impact on the political landscape of antebellum and Civil War–era America through their powerful influence on popular culture.

CWL: Though pricey for a private collection, your local librarian will be able find you a copy through inter-library loan.

News---Middletown, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania: Has It Uncovered An Underground Railroad Underground Tunnel?

News---Middletown, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania: Has It Uncovered An Underground Railroad Underground Tunnel?

 Mystery Tunnel Discovered In Susquehanna Valley Borough

A contractor stumbled upon a mysterious tunnel in Middletown Borough recently. News 8's Porcha Johnson took a closer look at how it was found and what's inside. 

Watch her report here: http://on.wgal.com/SK8xYt

New and Noteworthy----The Sioux on the Gallows, Lincoln and An Episcopal Bishop

Lincoln's Bishop: A President, A Bishop and The Fate of 330 Sioux Warriors, Gustav Niebuhr, 244pp., HarperOne Publishing, $26.99.

From The Publisher: Gustav Niebuhr's compelling history of Abraham Lincoln's decision in 1862 to spare the lives of 265 condemned Sioux men, and the Episcopal bishop who was his moral compass, helping guide the president's conscience.

More than a century ago, during the formative years of the American nation, Protestant churches carried powerful moral authority, giving voice to values such as mercy and compassion, while boldly standing against injustice and immorality. Gustav Niebuhr travels back to this defining period, to explore Abraham Lincoln's decision to spare the lives of 265 Sioux men sentenced to die by a military tribunal in Minnesota for warfare against white settlers—while allowing the hanging of 38 others, the largest single execution on American soil. Popular opinion favored death or expulsion. Only one state leader championed the cause of the Native Americans, Episcopal bishop, Henry Benjamin Whipple.

Though he'd never met an Indian until he was 37 years old, Whipple befriended them before the massacre and understood their plight at the hands of corrupt government officials and businessmen. After their trial, he pleaded with Lincoln to extend mercy and implement true justice. Bringing to life this little known event and this extraordinary man, Niebuhr pays tribute to the once amazing moral force of mainline Protestant churches and the practitioners who guarded America's conscience.

It is hard to recall what powerful moral voices Protestant church leaders had in the formative years of the nation. Gustav Niebuhr travels back to the Minnesota frontier of 1862 when Dakota Sioux rose up against pioneering families and slaughtered hundreds. Citizens demanded mass executions and deportations. Into this turmoil stepped Henry Benjamin Whipple, the state's first Episcopal bishop.

Whipple had already loudly decried the crimes and corruption of those managing Indian affairs and warned of calamity. Now he made the case of mercy and a deeper justice, which eventually led to meeting with President Lincoln. Despite being preoccupied with the Civil War, Lincoln was moved to intervene, surprisingly taking the time to review all 303 cases and overturning the death sentence for most of the Indians. Nevertheless, the result was still the largest single execution on American soil.
If not for Whipple's vigorous campaigning, both in state and in Washington, DC, a greater tragedy might well have occurred. His success should haunt us: Where today do we hear these trumpet calls for justice like those given by figures such as Bishop Henry Benjamin Whipple?

New and Noteworthy---Maney's Confederate Brigade At The Battle of Perryville

Maney's Confederate Brigade At The Battle of Perryville, Stuart W. Sanders, History Press, 40 illustrations, 5 maps, endnotes, index, $19.99.

Stuart W. Sanders, the author of The Battle of Mill Springs Kentucky and Perryville Under Fire: The Aftermath of Kentucky's Largest Civil War Battle, continues to offer clear and concise work on the Civil War in Kentucky.Sam Watkins of the First Tennessee Infantry who after the war became the  author of Company Aytch stated the the battle was the hardest fought battle in which that he had participated.

Relying equally upon secondary histories of the battle and primary sources of the eyewitness, Sanders' presents a  moving account of a Confederate brigade that suffered over 50% in casualties. Consisting of Tennessee and Georgia soldiers, Maney lead two separate assaults in which two Federal generals were killed, two artillery positions were overrun and caused the Federal left to nearly collapsing. Sanders' narrative captures both the momentum and exhaustion of the Confederate brigade.

Additionally, Sanders opens up the issues and even hostility that Confederate regimental, brigade and division commanders could show each other. Though the Maney's brigade gave a stellar effort during the battle, other commanders laid complaints against Maney and afterward a duel was fought between Maney and a surgeon. The author also presents an interesting discussion of how the citizens of Perryville dealt with the bodies and the wounded after the battle.  Stuart W. Sanders' Maney's Confederate Brigade At The Battle of Perryville is accessible to general readers. Those interested in both a cogent presentation regarding Tennessee and Georgia troops and the Civil War west of the Appalachian Mountains will be pleased. 

News--Is The Confederate States' Hunley Ready To Reveal Itself?

Hunley Finally Ready To Reveal Itself, Brian Hicks, Post And Courier, May 1, 2014.

The H.L. Hunley may not hide its secrets for much longer. Today, scientists at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center will immerse the Civil War-era submarine in a caustic bath of sodium hydroxide and water to begin a long-awaited conservation process that is expected to last about five years.

But within a few months, conservators and archaeologists expect to get their first look at the sub's iron hull - and it may hold clues that finally reveal why the Hunley sank off Charleston 150 years ago. "We have been waiting for this for years," said conservator Nestor Gonzalez. "Everything we're doing here is to preserve the Hunley as it was and to preserve information recorded on the sub. Now we will finally get to see the hull."

The Hunley conservation project is one of the most complicated in maritime history. This is the only complete ship to ever be conserved in this fashion, and it may be the largest artifact ever preserved with sodium hydroxide. It will test the capabilities of one of the most advanced maritime conservation facilities in the world. The 40-foot iron submarine is a complex piece of machinery with hundreds of nooks and crannies that will have to be preserved to prevent the sub from rusting away.
The first step will be the most revealing. In the 136 years that the Hunley lay buried beneath the Atlantic seabed, a hard layer of sand and shell formed on the hull.

That concretion, as scientists call it, has protected the Hunley - but it also obscured many details of the hull. The concretion has been left on the sub since its recovery in 2000 for protection.
Gonzalez expects the sodium hydroxide will take only a few months to loosen the hardened sediment enough to allow scientists to scrape it off. Scraping could take months, even with a team of conservators working daily. Michael Scafuri, Hunley archaeologist, said the concretion has been mapped, photographed and recorded with 3-D imaging to make sure they have every bit of information possible from the Hunley's protective shell.

And now they are ready to see what lies beneath."Under that concretion is the possibility of new information about the attack," Scafuri said. With the shell and sand removed, Scafuri said scientists should learn more about the Hunley's design and operations, and may be able to tell what caused the submarine to sink.

The Hunley disappeared off Sullivan's Island on Feb. 17, 1864, shortly after it sank the Union blockader USS Housatonic by ramming a torpedo into its flank. It was the first successful submarine attack in history, but the mystery of what happened after has endured for a century and a half.
The submarine was buried beneath the Atlantic seabed until 1995, when a dive team funded by Clive Cussler discovered it less than a mile from the Housatonic wreckage. Removing the concretion is perhaps the most anticipated step in the conservation process, but it is just the beginning. 

On Wednesday, scientists prepared the Hunley for its caustic bath and added giant jugs to the sub's tank to help with displacement and reduce the amount of chemicals and water needed by about 8,000 gallons. Gonzalez said the 76,000 gallon tank will be filled with a caustic mixture that is 99 percent water and 1 percent sodium hydroxide. That solution will start a chemical reaction that will extract salt from the iron hull - salt that soaked into it over a century. The solution will be changed out periodically until all the salt has been removed from the hull.

At that point, it will be safe to display the Hunley without immersing it in water.
This has been the conservation plan from the beginning, and scientists are committed to it. Gonzalez and the other scientists are excited to finally see the hull, but they are also a little worried about soaking a unique artifact in chemicals so dangerous the entire lab has had to be retrofitted for safety. The new safety measures are designed to protect the sub and the scientists, and to allow the lab to remain open for public tours. "It's like going in to your doctor for a basic procedure," Gonzalez said. "It's safe, but there's always a risk."

But the greater risk, said Senior Conservator Paul Mardikian, is to do nothing. The cold water and mild electrical current that have preserved the sub for the past 14 years cannot protect it forever.
"This is the only way to remove the salt," Gonzalez said. Mardikian said this is not just the only way to save the sub, it is the last chance to finally answer that nagging question: Why did the Hunley sink?

Full Text and Images Link:  Post And Courier, May 1, 2014

New and Noteworthy--- The River Was Dyed With Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest And Fort Pillow

The River Was Dyed With Blood: Nathan Bedford Forrest And Fort Pillow, Brian Steel Wills, University of Oklahoma Press, 274 pp.,  18 black and white illustrations, 4 maps,  appendices, bibliographic notes, bibliography, index, $29.95

From the Publisher: 

The battlefield reputation of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, long recognized as a formidable warrior, has been shaped by one infamous wartime incident. At Fort Pillow in 1864, the attack by Confederate forces under Forrest’s command left many of the Tennessee Unionists and black soldiers garrisoned there dead in a confrontation widely labeled as a “massacre.” 

In The River Was Dyed with Blood, best-selling Forrest biographer Brian Steel Wills argues that although atrocities did occur after the fall of the fort, Forrest did not order or intend a systematic execution of its defenders. Rather, the general’s great failing was losing control of his troops.

A prewar slave trader and owner, Forrest was a controversial figure throughout his lifetime. Because the attack on Fort Pillow—which, as Forrest wrote, left the nearby waters “dyed with blood”—occurred in an election year, Republicans used him as a convenient Confederate scapegoat to marshal support for the war. 

After the war he also became closely associated with the spread of the Ku Klux Klan. Consequently, the man himself, and the truth about Fort Pillow, has remained buried beneath myths, legends, popular depictions, and disputes about the events themselves.

Wills sets what took place at Fort Pillow in the context of other wartime excesses from the American Revolution to World War II and Vietnam, as well as the cultural transformations brought on by the Civil War. Confederates viewed black Union soldiers as the embodiment of slave rebellion and reacted accordingly. 

Nevertheless, Wills concludes that the engagement was neither a massacre carried out deliberately by Forrest, as charged by a congressional committee, nor solely a northern fabrication meant to discredit him and the Confederate States of America, as pro-Southern apologists have suggested. The battle-scarred fighter with his homespun aphorisms was neither an infallible warrior nor a heartless butcher, but a product of his time and his heritage.

Blurb:  "Readers of Brian Steel Wills's biography of Nathan Bedford Forrest, A Battle From The Start, know the quality of his work.  Wills now gives us the most comprehensive, dispassionate, and objective look wer are likely to get of Fo rrest's most controversial momnet---those awful minutes at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, when warfare briefly became butcher.  The River Was Dyed With Blood must become our safest guide through the murky terrain that separates soldiery frrom savagery, and how participants and posterity choose to remember moments many would rather forget."  William C. Davis, author of Fighting Men of the Civil War among others.