Coming Soon (January '26 Edition)

Scheduled for JAN 2026¹:
• William Henry Seward and the Secession Winter (November 1860 – April 1861) by C. Evan Stewart.
• Lincoln's Frock Coat: The Enduring Mystery of an Assassination Relic by Reignette Chilton.
• A Nation Unraveled: Clothing, Culture, and Violence in the American Civil War Era by Sarah Jones Weicksel.
• Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith in the Civil War Era by Timothy Grundmeier.
• Confederate General D. H. Hill: A Military Life by Chris Hartley.
• William Watson and the Rob Roy: The Adventures of a Civil War Blockade Runner by Walter Wilson.
• Soldier of the South: Lieutenant General Richard H. Anderson at War and Peace by Edward Hagerty.
• George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries ed. by Geoff Wisner.
• The Complete Medal of Honor: Volume 1: 1861–1865 by Kevin Brazier.
• The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln ed. by Allen Guelzo.
• Preeminent Strategist: General Joseph Eggleston Johnston, The Confederacy’s Most Agile General by F. Gregory Toretta.
• A Little Piece of Hell at Gettysburg: The Attack and Defense of the Rose Farm, July 2-3, 1863 by Scott Fink.

¹ - These monthly release lists are not meant to be exhaustive compilations of non-fiction releases. They routinely do not include reprints that are not significantly revised/expanded, publisher exclusives, children's books, and digital-only titles. Works that only tangentially address the war years are also generally excluded. Inevitably, one or more titles on this list will get a rescheduled release (and they do not get repeated later), so revisiting the past few "Coming Soon" posts is the best way to pick up stragglers.

Booknotes: In Custer's Boots

New Arrival:

• In Custer's Boots: The Little Bighorn Campaign: Revelations, Reconstructions, and Reviews by Gordon Richard (Casemate, 2026).

By the sheer number of titles that have been (and continue to be) produced, the June 25–26, 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn is easily the Gettysburg of the nineteenth-century Indian Wars in North America. Coming out in a couple months is another addition to that ever expanding book and article literature, Gordon Richard's critical synthesis In Custer's Boots: The Little Bighorn Campaign: Revelations, Reconstructions, and Reviews.

From the description: "The Battle of the Little Bighorn remains one of the most debated events in American military history. In this collection of meticulously researched essays, the author challenges long-standing myths, examines key decisions made by Custer and his superiors, and re-evaluates the evidence surrounding the battle and its participants."

Most of the volume's sixteen chapters are based on published articles in the periodicals The Battlefield Dispatch, The Crow's Nest, and The Greasy Grass between 2009 and today. Several very nice maps are also carried over. Two chapters are composed of previously unpublished material.

A variety of topics are addressed. More from the description: "Drawing on articles published in leading historical journals, this volume delves into topics such as Custer’s reconnaissance, the accusations that he disobeyed orders, the strength of the warrior force he faced, and the reliability of testimony from the Reno Court of Inquiry. It also investigates the fate of the 7th Cavalry’s horses, the provenance of a multi-million-dollar battle relic, and the distortions of modern internet sources."

Offerings from the Spring '26 catalogs

LSU:
• Abraham Lincoln and the Heroic Legend: Reconsidering Lincoln as Commander in Chief by Kenneth Noe.
• Death or Victory: The Louisiana Native Guards and the Black Military’s Significance in the Civil War by A.J. Cade.
• A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers by Henry Motty.
• Henry Eustace McCulloch: Texas Ranger, Legislator, Civil War General by David Paul Smith.
• Lutheranism and American Culture: The Making of a Distinctive Faith in the Civil War Era by Timothy Grundmeier.

UNC:
• Out of This Strife Will Come Freedom: Free People of Color and the Fight for Equal Rights in the Civil War Era by Warren Milteer.
• A Mother's Work: Mary Bickerdyke, Civil War–Era Nurse by Megan VanGorder.

Kansas:
• Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War by Earl Hess.
• Procuring Victory: The Army Quartermaster and the Economics of Expansion in Nineteenth-Century America by John Wendt.

Kent State:
• Civil War Camps and Soldier Health: Sanitation and Military Effectiveness in the Union Army by Earl Hess.

Nebraska:
• Forward to Richmond: The Virginia Campaign of 1862 by Brian Burton.
• Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville: A Battlefield Guide by Brian Burton.
• Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment (Potomac Books) by Damon Root.

Oklahoma:
• Mollie Brumley's Civil War: Surviving the Guerrilla War in Arkansas by Theodore Catton.

Mercer:
Forthcoming.

SIU:
• The Forts Henry and Donelson Campaign: February 6–16, 1862 ed. by Woodworth & Grear.

TAMU Consortium:
• Texan in Blue: Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan of the First Texas Cavalry, USA (TSHA Press) by McCaslin & Stewart.

Tennessee:
• Haunted by Memory: Ghost Stories of the American Civil War by Neff & Fluker.
• Civil War Photo Forensics: Investigating Battlefield Photographs Through a Critical Lens by Scott Hippensteel.

Georgia:
• Deserter Declarations: Letters from North Carolinians Who Abandoned Their Confederate Units ed. by Judkin Browning.
• Mercy in Disaster: Abby Hopper Gibbons’s Journals and Letters from Four Years of Civil War Nursing ed. by Angela Schear.

Savas Beatie:
• Through the Civil War with the Fourteenth Ohio Infantry: Horatio Quiggle’s Memoir of Service edited ed. by Hagopian & Powell.
• Stonewall Jackson’s Winter Operations: The Raids Against the C&O Canal and the Bath-Romney Campaign, December 1861 to February 1862 by Timothy Snyder.
• Crisis at Antietam: The Cornfield and West Woods and the Opening Rounds of the Civil War’s Bloodiest Battle, September 17, 1862 by Steven Eden.
• Retreat from Victory: The Battle of Malvern Hill and the End of the Seven Days, July 1, 1862 by Francis O’Reilly.
• This Great Contest Afloat: The Civil War on the Seas, Coastline, Rivers, and Oceans by Neil Chatelain.
• Desert Empire: The 1862 New Mexico Campaign by Kelly-Fischer & Greenwalt.

Booknotes: Border War

New Arrival:

• Border War: A Yankee Family in Civil War Missouri by Marilyn Ferris Motz (UP of Mississippi, 2025).

Recent scholarship has emphasized the ways in which so many early to mid-nineteenth century Missourians wished to position themselves as westerners rather than northerners or southerners, but there's little doubt that where they originally came from to some degree continued to shape how they reacted to growing political dissension in the country at large. From the description: "When fiddler and farmer Henry Smith and his wife Harriet moved from Michigan to southwest Missouri in 1858, they considered themselves part of a Yankee cultural community whose taste and aspirations were shaped by northern publications and represented by the new Republican Party. By 1861 Vernon County Court Judge Henry Smith no longer called himself a Yankee or Republican, but he hoped his isolated prairie community would remain in the Union."

Marilyn Ferris Motz's Border War: A Yankee Family in Civil War Missouri is another volume that embeds its featured firsthand writings into a narrative format rather than presenting them in toto accompanied by editor's notes and text. From the description: "Throughout the turmoil, the Smiths documented their experiences in diaries, letters, school essays, magazine publications, and petitions. Drawing on archives, family papers, and government records, author Marilyn Ferris Motz pieces together the Smiths’ saga."

Part I uses the diaries of Henry and Harriet to examine their courtship and prospects for the future. The diaries and letters featured in Part II follow their adaptation to married life, growing political engagement, and decision to make a new life for their family in Montevallo, Missouri.

While Part II covers the path toward Civil War, the diary material highlighted in the third and final part of the volume describes the family's Civil War experiences of being caught in the middle between Union military occupation and mounting guerrilla warfare. More from the description: "Montevallo’s location at the intersection of roads from Boonville and Lexington south to Carthage and from Springfield to Fort Scott, Kansas, placed the Smith family’s log house in the path of troops fighting to establish Confederate or Union control of Missouri. The Smiths saw neighbor turn against neighbor as they played reluctant host to the succession of Union troops, Confederate soldiers, bushwhackers, and jayhawkers who swarmed past their homestead." That war on their doorstep eventually forced them to abandon their home and return to Michigan.

The Smith writings at the heart of Border War "illuminate wide-ranging challenges faced by many rural American households in the Civil War era." "As the Civil War divided family and community alike and future dreams were abandoned to focus on immediate survival, these personal writings capture what it meant to live during a time of immense uncertainty and mortal danger."

Booknotes: The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin

New Arrival:

• The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition edited by Jennifer Putzi (UNC Press, 2025).

UNCP has been going pretty hard on the Reconstruction and CW-adjacent stuff in recent catalogs, so it's no surprise that there is some direct overlap among them. That is certainly the case here, with both main subject and her husband also prominently featured in another F/W title, January's Requiem for Reconstruction.

From the description: "In 1867, Frances Anne Rollin, a Black writer and teacher from South Carolina, traveled to Boston to seek a publisher for her biography of famed Black abolitionist, writer, and Civil War veteran Martin R. Delany—the first full-length biography written by an African American. Beginning in January 1868, Rollin kept a diary while in Boston documenting her progression on Delany’s biography, negotiations with publishers, visits from friends, attendance at lectures and readings, and her marriage to William J. Whipper, a Black politician and jurist."

More from the description: Rollin’s diary has the distinction of being "one of the earliest known diaries by a Southern Black woman." Editor Jennifer Putzi's critical edition, The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin, "offers the first complete transcription and annotation of Rollin’s diary, along with a robust introduction providing important biographical, historical, cultural, and literary contexts for readers."

Saying the introduction is robust is a bit of an understatement as it runs 132 pages! In addition to the extensive footnotes attached to the diary, there is a hefty appendix section (much of it dealing with material related to Rollin's Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany, which was published in 1868). The diary itself "provides one of the fullest pictures of an African American woman as an author, activist, and well-connected and politically involved individual during the Reconstruction era(.)"

Booknotes: Requiem for Reconstruction

New Arrival:

• Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation by Robert D. Bland (UNC Press, 2026).

From the description: "Often remembered as a period of failed progressive change that gave way to Jim Crow and second-class citizenship, Reconstruction’s tragic narrative has long overshadowed the resilience and agency of African Americans during this time."

Robert Bland's Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry's Lost Political Generation weaves that larger narrative together primarily through the words and actions of a select group of contemporary "leaders, educators, and journalists" (ex. "South Carolina congressman Robert Smalls, Judge William Whipper, writer Frances Rollin, and others") who helped shape its course and historical remembrance. In his "cultural history of the political world" in which these individuals operated, Bland argues that the region under consideration, the South Carolina Lowcountry, was a "pivotal site of Black countermemory in the half-century that followed the removal of federal troops" (pg. 3).

More from the description: Framed as a "countermemory of Reconstruction," Bland's study "traces the impact of the Reconstruction generation—Black Americans born between 1840 and 1870 who saw Reconstruction as a defining political movement and worked to preserve its legacy by establishing a new set of historical practices such as formulating new archives, shaping local community counternarratives, using the Black press to inform national audiences about Southern Republican politics, and developing a framework to interpret the recent past’s connection to their present world."

Review - "Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas" by Jim Burnett

[Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas by Jim Burnett (Texas A&M University Press, 2025). Hardcover, maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xii,253/320. ISBN:978-1-64843-273-6. $35]

During the Mexican, independent nation, and early statehood periods of its history, Texas, with its vast amount of economically useful land but having only a small population positioned to develop it, was an inviting place for enterprising American citizens and foreign immigrants alike. An abundant source of the latter were the populous German states of Central Europe, immigrant passage and administration handled by aid ventures such as the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas (to which a fee was paid by immigrants in exchange for those services). Attracted by the prospect of free land along with access to a modest dwelling and other means of becoming quickly self-sufficient within organized Texas Hill Country colonies populated by fellow Germans, large numbers of individuals and families left behind centuries-old roots for opportunities they could only dream about in their land-restricted ancestral lands. One of those risk-taking families was that of Johan (later anglicized to John) and Johanette Stengler, who, along with seven children from Johanette's current and two previous marriages (surnames Krantz and Hankamer), left their home in the village of Dietz in the fall of 1845, arriving in the port of Galveston only two days after independent Texas was formally annexed by the United States on December 29. The Stengler family's immigrant story, with central focus on the Civil War period, is the subject of Jim Burnett's Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas.

Scholarly works tasked with publishing a notable body of historical correspondence generally come in two types. The first and most common variety is to reproduce the letters in full, organize them into chapters, and contextualize them via deeply researched introductory passages, bridging narrative, and footnotes/endnotes. The other method, the less common one and the one employed by Burnett, is to incorporate the most meaningful and informative portions of the letters into a broadly researched narrative, oftentimes supplemented with extensive block quotes of particularly noteworthy firsthand material. Each style has its merits, and Burnett's value-added enhancement of the letters through material gleaned from other primary and secondary sources is seamlessly executed.

Upon landing at Galveston after a long ocean voyage, the Stenglers were immediately confronted with a conundrum of life-changing (even life-threatening) proportions. While the German immigrant aid society that brought them to Texas was generally well-organized, its end-stage resources were taxed by both funding limitations and the Texas interior's primitive infrastructure. There was no immediate means of transportation available for the Stenglers to travel with their possessions all the way to the colony's faraway location, where it was also the case that a deadly epidemic was currently raging. Faced with those challenges, John and Johanette reluctantly made the decision to abandon their free land claim in the colony and instead settle on rental property in the Saltgrass Prairie region of SE Texas. In that part of Liberty County, accessed by lake boat travel, there existed good land for farming and cattle raising along with bountiful wood and fresh water resources. Even though there were few Germans in the area and none of the family members spoke English, the gamble paid off as the Stenglers prospered in farming and ranching, eventually owning their own property and assimilating into the local culture through economic exchange and intermarriage.

With the preponderance of the Civil War-era coverage of German immigrants in Texas centered on the pro-Union Germans of the Texas Hill Country, Burnett's detailed portrait of a single Saltgrass Prairie German immigrant family is noteworthy for contrasts in both allegiance and geography. As presented by Burnett, the Stenglers's words don't reveal much in the way of political engagement and nothing on the great slavery questions of the day, so one might surmise that their support for the Confederacy was grounded in localism and determination to protect their substantial and hard-won property gains from expected Union invasion threats.

Eventually, John Stengler himself, five sons, and a son-in-law served in the Confederate Army or with Texas state troops, all surviving the war and none deserting. Most went into the mounted Company F of Spaight's Battalion, which originated in Liberty County and was primarily involved with mobile coastal defense. Philip Caudill's Moss Bluff Rebel: A Texas Pioneer in the Civil War (2009), which doubles as both Company F captain William Berry Duncan biography and unit history of Spaight's Battalion, is arguably the best single source on the battalion's Civil War activities. Interestingly, neither the Stengler nor the Hankamer name appears in its index, their absence making Burnett's study one of even more signal importance in further documenting the unit's highly peripatetic wartime history.

Walker's Texas Division (the "Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi") is often cited as marching the greatest total distance and, less charitably, fighting the least amount of any comparably sized Civil War formation. Burnett describes Company F in similar fashion, likening most of its Civil War service as a chess match of back and forth marching between Galveston and western Louisiana accompanied by relatively little actual fighting. The men of the company were more fortunate than their fellow Texans of Walker's division, however, in rarely venturing more than 100 miles in any direction from their SE Texas homes. The heaviest combat that Company F was engaged in was during the Battle of Bayou Bourbeau, fought during the time when they were temporarily attached to Baylor's Regiment in Louisiana for eight months in 1863 before returning to Texas the following spring. As Burnett describes in the book, most of Company F's more static service time was devoted to dull garrison duties and guarding isolated points of strategic importance (such as bridges) from enemy naval incursions and guerrilla attacks by local Unionists.

With letters both to and from Stengler's Liberty County homestead surviving, Burnett's narrative also includes a great deal of information about the home front experience. Thirteen years her husband John's senior, Johanette struggled running the farm without the working presence of her husband and sons. Like most southern households, hers also had to deal with scarcities of goods and services stemming from the exigencies of war and ever tightening naval blockade. Extended family helped, and Company F's frequent proximity also meant that serving menfolk were able to obtain short leaves of absence from the army for needed farm and ranch work. The Stengler's family network also benefited from the shooting war not directly visiting their doorsteps, though there were constant worries about roaming Confederate deserter bands and Unionist guerrilla encounters.

Burnett's narrative also extends well into the postwar period. While the Stengler-Krantz-Hankamer clan survived the war intact and managed to rebuild and expand their Saltgrass Prairie farming and cattle ranching concerns during Reconstruction, they were visited in 1877 by a devastating smallpox epidemic that killed a great many close and extended family members, including Johanette herself and numerous Wilborns and Hankamers. Nevertheless, the family persevered and its ongoing Texas legacy (which includes Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business) is revealed in the final chapter.

Saltgrass Prairie Saga's numerous contributions to Texas's state and Civil War history are of a conspicuous nature. In addition to providing a fresh angle through which to view the mid-nineteenth century German immigrant experience in Texas, Burnett's study also offers new perspectives on both the Civil War in Southeast Texas and the operations of one of that region's longest-serving and most well-traveled Confederate local defense units. Highly recommended.

Booknotes: The First Confederate Soldier

New Arrival:

• The First Confederate Soldier: George Washington Lee and Civil War Atlanta by Robert Scott Davis (McFarland, 2026).

Robert Scott Davis's The First Confederate Soldier: George Washington Lee and Civil War Atlanta has an intriguing title. Civil War 'firsts' are always a popular topic for research and debate, and the author justifies this particular distinction by claiming that unsuccessful Atlanta businessman George Washington Lee's independent Georgia militia company ("Lee's Volunteers") traveled to Montgomery, Alabama to attend the inauguration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and was the first company to enlist its services with the Provisional Army of the Confederate States.

Lee remains an obscure figure, but, according to Davis, the officer "represents a great untold epic of the Civil War." Lee "raised numerous companies for the Southern army," and his fighting career "encompassed Atlanta, Pensacola, Savannah, and Richmond, reaching from the swampy Okefenokee to the Appalachian Mountains. Literally the first soldier of the Confederate army, he was one of the last men in gray, even leading Cherokee warriors in one campaign."

If Lee is remembered it is primarily for his service as provost marshal in Atlanta, where he engaged in "suppression of resistance to the Confederacy." In that capacity, Lee "fought arsonists, bootleggers, counterfeiters, crime syndicate members, deserters, draft evaders, espionage agents, failing Confederate entities, thieves, and war resisters." Those behind-the-lines actions placed Lee front and center in fighting both the covert war between North and South and the 'South versus the South' inner war that plagued much of the Confederate home front. "Lee served the new Southern nation faithfully despite near-fatal bouts of tuberculosis, assassination attempts, and--as ordered by General William Tecumseh Sherman--treatment as a war criminal." In the end, Davis's "account of Confederate Atlanta features an important yet neglected figure who oversaw it all in a dangerous world of devotion, loyalty, and treason."

Booknotes: Brigadier General William Haines Lytle

New Arrival:

• Brigadier General William Haines Lytle: The Union's Poet-Soldier by Bryan W. Lane (McFarland, 2026).

Ohioan William Haynes Lytle, an antebellum lawyer, elected Democratic Party politician, and militia general, began the Civil War as colonel of the 10th Ohio infantry regiment. Fighting in western Virginia in 1861, he was wounded at Carnifex Ferry. Upon recovery, Lytle joined Mitchel's Division for its summer 1862 trek across northern Alabama and, later on that year, at Perryville received another wound while also falling into the hands of the enemy. Paroled and exchanged after the battle, Lytle was promoted to brigadier general and was assigned to the Army of the Cumberland, getting hit yet again by enemy fire and dying on September 20, 1863 at Chickamauga.

The only other major modern work on Lytle that I came across during a cursory online search was Ruth Carter's scholarly editing of Lytle's Mexican and ACW correspondence in her 1999 volume For Honor, Glory & Union. So it appears that Bryan Lane's Brigadier General William Haines Lytle: The Union's Poet-Soldier could be appropriately classed as the first full biography of its subject.

Lane describes Lytle as "a poet, Civil War soldier, lawyer, orator, friend, beloved brother, jilted lover, flirt, drunk, unfocused talent and sometimes genius." His book "gives ample attention to the three battles in which Lytle fought, but does not neglect his relationships with family, friends, and lovers. Talented, charming, and well-liked, even by his enemies, Lytle was a cultured gentleman who made friends easily. At the same time, he was also devoted to his troops and a fearless warrior on the battlefield."

Lane's account of Lytle's life and Civil War career, which is based on "on Lytle's own written words, the words of his family, newspaper correspondents and other primary sources," also incorporates its subject's poetry throughout the narrative. Like it was for many other busy professionals seeking a creative outlet, poetry was a side gig for Lytle. He did achieve a fair bit of fame with it, though, especially through his 1858 poem "Antony and Cleopatra," about which Lane devotes a chapter.

Booknotes: A Forest of Granite

New Arrival:

• A Forest of Granite: Union Monuments at Gettysburg 1863-1913 by Brendan Harris (Brookline Bks, 2025).

Brendan Harris's A Forest of Granite: Union Monuments at Gettysburg 1863-1913 "(e)xplores how Union veterans at Gettysburg shaped memorials to honor their sacrifices and convey deeper meanings behind their battle experiences."

A forest of granite indeed. It seems that only a battle fought in an actual Vermont quarry could contain more visible granite than that placed across the Gettysburg battlefield. Someone who has visited great battlefields across the world would have a more accurate reference point than I do, but one does get the impression that the Civil War veteran generation was exceptional in just how much its members felt compelled to establish permanent markers, monuments, and tablets in such heavy concentrations at the very places upon which they and their comrades fought. At Gettysburg alone there are an estimated 1,300 of these in total for both sides.

Harris's study traces "the overlooked efforts of veterans who sought to build lasting tributes, not only to mark where they fought but to convey the deeper meanings behind their sacrifices." Spanning the half-century following the battle's conclusion, these monumentation initiatives were largely "grassroots efforts" by Union veterans "to immortalize their experiences on the battlefield that held the greatest significance for the Army of the Potomac." According to Harris, his detailed examination of unit monumentation at Gettysburg reveals both the "complex individual makeup" of the Union army as well as the reasons "why veterans revered Gettysburg more than other battles fought during the Civil War" (pg. xiii).

As the decades following the end of the war progressed, the purposes of the monuments and the messages behind them also changed. More from the description: "Through dedication speeches, correspondence, and historical records, the book reveals how Union veterans raised funds and rallied political support to construct these monuments, even as the nation moved toward reconciliation and reconstruction. Early monuments emphasized punishment for the South and the preservation of the Union, while later ones reflected themes of reconciliation. These tributes, set against the preserved landscape of Gettysburg, reflect the complex social, political, and economic forces of their time, and continue to shape our understanding of Civil War memory."

Each chapter examines a "specific monument type," providing a great many examples of each. Numerous photographs (nearly one every other page or so) accompany the text discussion. Chapters also compartmentalize the different "eras" during which veteran monumentation unfolded, the 1888-1894 period being labeled the "Golden Age" of Gettysburg monumentation. Due to the exceptional number of Pennsylvania and New York monuments placed at Gettysburg, a separate chapter is devoted to them. In addition to revisiting Gettysburg troop strength (by state) and casualty numbers, the appendix section breaks down monument number totals by state and also provides GPS coordinates of a select group of monuments.

Review - "Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital" by Larry Daniel

[Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital by Larry Daniel (University Press of Kansas, 2025). Hardcover, 3 maps, photos, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xviii,267/359. ISBN:978-0-7006-4010-2. $49.99]

Over the past four decades or so, a flood of western-themed Civil War books authored by professional and avocational historians alike has strongly challenged the eastern theater focus of previous generations and progressively redressed imbalances in content and interpretation. At this point in time, even many obscure corners of the Trans-Mississippi Theater have received strong attention in the literature. While military history book sales and publishing still reveals widest reader interest in the epic contest between the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, it can no longer be maintained that the war's western theater is still neglected or un(der)appreciated. But how did contemporary Civil War Richmonders, whose attention was naturally absorbed to a great degree by the war fought on their own doorstep but who nevertheless closely followed the many military events and disasters occurring elsewhere, see the West as events there were unfolding? That is the overarching theme of Larry Daniel's Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital, which revisits a well-studied chain of decisions and events spanning the entire war but does so from a freshly targeted point of view.

For the purposes of his study, Daniel defines the Confederate "West" as the Trans-Mississippi (Arkansas, Texas, and most of Louisiana) and Heartland (Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, most of Georgia, and the cis-Mississippi slice of Louisiana) regions together. That vast West also takes into account the Missouri and Kentucky state governments in exile (each officially recognized by the CSA with political representatives integrated into both houses of the Confederate Congress).

An inescapable factor that greatly affected Richmond's knowledge and perceptions of the war in the West was the extreme distances involved. In discussing state of the art mid-nineteenth century communications, it is commonly expressed in the Civil War literature how far the telegraph and railroad went in tempering the twin tyrannies of time and distance. However, Daniel's study amply demonstrates how persistent that challenge was for the Richmond government when it came to not only the very distant and isolated Trans-Mississippi Department but the far better connected western theater as well. Communications were slow and unfounded rumor rife, with the fastest and most accurate (at least in the near term) news coming from northern newspapers. It could take many weeks for accurate information about the progress and results of a major western campaign or battle to reach the capital. For example, as Daniel explains, for more than a month after Fort Donelson the Davis government and the country at large did not know with any degree of truth how many soldiers surrendered there. These vast gaps in transmitting critical information played a major part in hindering the central government's ability to react in reasonable and timely fashion to rapidly evolving strategic situations, be they opportunities for successful countermoves or responses to disaster. Fragmented and outright false information that reached Richmond from the West also affected how Davis's high-level military appointments were perceived, be they ones drawing mixed opinion such as Joseph E. Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard or near universally despised ones such as John C. Pemberton and Theophilus Holmes. A particularly interesting surprise was how highly, and for how long, Richmond elites championed Missouri's Sterling Price for bigger and better command roles in the war.

On the other hand, when information from distant western military operations did arrive swiftly it was often wildly inaccurate, proclaiming great victories that were in fact either abject defeats from beginning to end or battles ultimately lost after promising initial tactical success (the latter including key battles such as Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Stones River). Inevitably, crushing confirmation of western defeats arrived at Richmond in due time, leaving one has to wonder whether the repeated emotional rollercoaster was far more damaging to popular morale than if the bad news was accurately (or even semi-accurately) conveyed from the outset.

Cultural factors also figure into Daniel's discussion. In some ways similar to how the French historically drew heightened cultural distinctions between Paris society and life in the surrounding regions, easterners (as represented by Richmond social and political society) viewed the West at large as the frontier when it came to cultural attainment. This affected how westerners, including President Davis and his wife, were received in the capital, at least when it came to social interaction. Less clearly outlined for the reader are what effects alleged eastern cultural chauvinism had on the perception and direction of the war in the West from Richmond. One does wonder, though, how much of the persistent high regard Richmonders held for Missouri's Sterling Price, a general no modern historian rates higher than mediocre, was based on his Virginia roots and upbringing.

In creating his narrative detailing how the faraway western war was seen and interpreted from Richmond, Daniel samples widely. In addition to the words and actions of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, and the West's elected representatives, Richmond newspapermen, government workers, and civilians add their own perspectives. Some very well-known individuals figure prominently throughout the book as representative opinions and attitudes for or against the Davis administration's handling of the western theater. These include senior War Department clerk John B. Jones for his government insider knowledge and Judith Maguire and Edmund Ruffin for their keen-eyed observations from the civilian sphere. Freshest voices are found in the words of a great many Trans-Mississippi and Heartland elected officials from both houses of the Confederate Congress who are centered in this narrative but not featured much at all in other general histories of the war. The discordant personal and political behavior of too many of those individuals hindered Richmond's response to Union inroads in the West. Davis's revolving door series of War Department cabinet secretaries largely enter into Daniel's discussion in the context of their personally frustrating lack of autonomy when it came to the decision-making process. However, it is also claimed that George Randolph, who briefly occupied the position from March to November 1862, packed the War Department with fellow Virginians, many of whom were relations, creating a bureaucratic bloc that continued to exert Virginia-centric influence long after the secretary himself resigned from office.

In a rare moment of critical self-reflection, Jefferson Davis came to realize that his initial national cordon defense strategy was unrealistic for defending the vast West, but by late 1862 the damage was already done and it was disastrous (perhaps fatal). That and the focus on defending fixed strategic points against combined Union army and naval might, a risky practice culminating in the twin catastrophes of Vicksburg and Port Hudson in July 1863, was allowed to persist for far too long. In Daniel's view, western politics and politicians played a large part in this. Petty jealousies, internecine squabbling, and fervent opposition to presidential policy was a part of both sides during the Civil War, but Daniel contends that the Confederacy's western gubernatorial, House, and Senate demagoguery and parochial political culture contributed to a highly damaging hamstringing of Davis when it came to strategic freedom in allocating limited military resources where they could do the most good for the war effort at large. Fierce divisions within the Richmond capitol press over the direction of the war in the West, often expressed with rhetoric profoundly antagonistic toward the administration, also contributed much in the way of making it more difficult for Davis to make strategic and personnel-related decisions divorced enough from political considerations to remain militarily sound.

In tracing the path to Confederate defeat in the Civil War's western and trans-Mississippi theaters, Larry Daniel's Richmond Views the West follows a familiar pattern and narrative of events, but, in framing its view of those circumstances and decisions involved with them exclusively through a distant lens situated at the seat of power, this study offers a unique perspective deserving of standalone treatment. That the Richmond government based its distant direction of the war in the West on a partial and all too often warped understanding of personalities, places, and events there adds another persuasive element to the litany of other factors that together drove a progressive western collapse that ultimately doomed the Confederate national experiment.

Booknotes: A Precarious Balance

New Arrival:

• A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 by Antwain K. Hunter (UNC Press, 2025).

From the description: "Spanning the 1720s through the end of the Civil War," Antwain Hunter's A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865 "explores how free and enslaved Black North Carolinians accessed, possessed, and used firearms—both legal and otherwise—and how the state and white people responded. North Carolinians, whether free or enslaved, Black or white, had different stakes on the issue, all of which impacted the reality of Black people’s gun use."

The study begins in 1715 as that was the year the state assembly first passed laws regulating black firearm ownership/use. Hunter's book, which covers 150 years, "frames firearms as an instrumental part of Black North Carolinians' lives and labor from the late colonial era through to the Civil War" (pg. 16) in all its legal and social contexts and complications.

So the final chapter covers the Civil War years. It "highlights how Black and white North Carolinians and the state balanced the utility and threat of armed Black people" during the conflict. In that chapter, Hunter argues that armed black labor was "instrumental to wartime productivity at the local level," (including managing and protecting plantations against a variety of threats in ways that "both challenged and bolstered the Confederate nation") but that wartime necessity did not extend to white support for armed blacks when it came to military service (pp. 15-16).

Booknotes: The Decision Was Always My Own, pb ed.

New Arrival:

• The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign by Timothy B. Smith (SIU Press, 2025 pb edition).

After a quick glance through the front matter, I didn't see any indication that there were any prominent changes or additions to the text between editions, so I'll refer you to this page if you'd like to read the full site review of the hardcover first edition published back in 2018.

This book preceded the first installment of what would become a mammoth five-volume history of the Vicksburg Campaign by only two years, so it's probably safe to say that it played some part in organizing Smith's thoughts for what was to come. Presented entirely from the Union perspective, The Decision Was Always My Own is organized around what Smith's believes to have been Grant's key decisions beginning with the failed overland advance down the Mississippi Central Railroad in late 1862 and concluding with the post-surrender 'siege' and recapture of Jackson, Mississippi in July 1863. In addition to humanizing Grant through his family interactions, the book also emphasizes Grant's professional and political relationship-building skills (a notable exception being his persistently thorny association with ranking corps commander John McClernand).

From the description: "This volume presents a fast-paced reexamination of Grant’s decision-making process during the Vicksburg maneuvers, battles, and siege. Smith details the course of campaigning on military, political, administrative, and personal levels. The successful military campaign required Grant to handle President Lincoln’s impatience, as well as to deal with troublesome general John A. McClernand, all while juggling administrative work. In addition, Grant was more than a military genius—he was also a husband and a father, and Smith shows how Grant’s family played a role in every decision he made." Smith's The Decision Was Always My Own "shows how Grant’s decisions created and won the Civil War’s most brilliant, complex, decisive, and lengthy campaign."

Booknotes: War Fought and Felt

New Arrival:

• War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers by Joshua R. Shiver (LSU Press, 2025).

What factors motivated Union and Confederate soldiers first to enlist then to persevere has been a popular research topic among scholars for quite a while now. The resulting literature is firmly grounded in "sociocultural and ideological arguments." Joshua Shiver's War Fought and Felt: The Emotional Motivations of Confederate Soldiers, however, takes a different approach that supplements existing work on the subject. It "advances our grasp of the links between masculinity, emotion, and relationships during the American Civil War. It is the first broadly researched, multidisciplinary, and statistically supported approach to understanding the pivotal role of emotions in the everyday lives of Confederate soldiers."

Shiver's core sample is "1,790 letters and diaries from two hundred Confederate soldiers from North Carolina and Alabama," those selections being representative of individuals hailing from both the eastern theater Upper South and western theater Deep South. The study is also very multi-disciplinary. From the description: "Drawing on history, psychology, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience, it underscores the necessity of examining primal emotions when looking to understand soldiers’ motivations. It argues that the heightened emotions felt by these soldiers drove them to suffer, fight, desert, and willingly die."

War Fought and Felt takes into account a broad range of social connections. More from the description: Shiver's study "examines the vital role of emotions within the context of soldiers’ relationships with their parents, children, wives, sweethearts, and comrades. These relationships and the emotions they engendered defined Confederate soldiers’ firsthand experiences of war and ultimately redefined the Confederate cause itself."

In Shiver's view, the significance of other motivations commonly faded as the war progressed while emotional factors rose in prominence as Confederate soldiers increasingly faced defeat and the prospects of personal ruin. More: "A war that began steeped in ideology ended, for the soldiers, as one fought for the protection and future of one’s loved ones. Shiver demonstrates that the emotionally overwhelming nature of the war forced a tectonic shift in American masculinity in which the prewar emphasis on stoic individualism gave way to an outpouring of emotional expression and mutual interdependence."

In the end, "(b)y placing emotion alongside traditional ideological and sociocultural explanations for motivation, Shiver sheds light on a new area of research that promises to promote a deeper understanding of why the American Civil War was one of the bloodiest, most emotionally influential, and world-changing events of the last two centuries."