November 11, 2011 - The following book reviews are courtesy of Michael Wolf, a retired dentist residing in Manhattan, who has had a life-long interest in American history with a particular focus, since 1995, on the Civil War. He serves as a docent at the New York Historical Society.

Atlanta 1864: Last Chance for the Confederacy

By Richard M. McMurry

Unless you want lots of detail about the five-month Atlanta Campaign of General William T. Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee, this 190-page book is perfect for most Civil War and general readers.

While it provides sufficient basic information about command structure, troop strength, military strategy and tactics, Richard McMurry refers to concurrent campaigns in other areas, such as the Red River, the Shenandoah Valley, and the Overland Campaign. He explains Grant’s grand strategy, and which parts succeeded (Sherman), and which parts didn’t (most others). He discusses the dilemma faced by George B. McClellan as the politically handicapped Democratic presidential nominee in 1864, and includes vignettes and even-handed analyses of Confederate commanders and of Sherman’s theories of warfare..

Richard McMurry is an articulate and persuasive defender of the theory (held by a substantial minority, I’d say) that the Civil War was decided in the West. If you haven’t read "The Fourth Battle of Winchester," you’re in for a treat. It’s well-written, like everything he publishes, and is also a hoot. (How many Civil War books can make that claim?)

In discussing Sherman’s reputation as "usually regarded as one of the two or three best generals of the Civil War," he notes that "Success and victory...are like spackling paste. All three can cover up a multitude of mistakes and false starts and hide errors." Though McMurry concedes that Sherman was ultimately successful, he believes that "had he chosen to pursue aggressively either of his opportunities" at Snake Creek Gap in early May or at Jonesboro in late August, "he almost certainly would have broken Secessionist power in the West for all time and hastened the end of the war by many months."

McMurry believes that General Joseph E. Johnston, the Confederate commander, played the weak hand he was dealt fairly well, but offers a substantial list of maneuvers Johnston could and should have made. Johnston’s defensive mindset reminds me of Abba Eban’s assessment of the feckless Yasir Arafat: "He never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

McMurry’s appraisal of the much-maligned General John Bell Hood includes the good and the bad: the Hood who conducted the late fall campaigns in north Alabama and central Tennessee "Was arguably a different man – bitter, frustrated, disappointed and angry – than the officer who directed the last six weeks of the Rebels’ efforts to hold Atlanta."

He saves his harshest words for Jefferson Davis, alluding to "the putrid mess Davis allowed to grow and fester in the western army." He quotes historian Steven Woodworth, who termed the high command of the Army of Tennessee as "a pit of vipers."

The maps are good, and the accounts of the armies’ movements are easy to follow. For sprightly writing, lucid analysis of military strategy and its importance, and how the Atlanta Campaign related to political and military events of 1864, this book is for you.

 

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1861: The Civil War Awakening

by Adam Goodheart

Amid the spate of sesquicentennial books, symposia, tours (and a Hollywood movie, The Conspirators, which you should definitely see), this book stands out. It is beautifully written, takes a fresh approach to describing the causes of the Civil War and it earliest days, and provides information about the obscure and the famous: from Charles Starr King of California to Abraham Lincoln.

The president’s May, 1861 letter to the "regent captains" of San Marino, the "longest-lived constitutional republic in the world" presaged the Gettysburg Address, as did Lincoln’s July 4 message to the special session of the Congress elected eight months earlier. As Mr. Goodheart points out in his superb analysis of the latter document, "Although he might not have scribbled his 1863 address on the back of an envelope, as legend would have it, it should be no surprise that he wrote it fairly quickly. Lincoln had already done the hard work of the Gettysburg Address, the heavy intellectual lifting, in 1861. The two intervening years would go to pare away the nonessentials, to sculpt 6,256 words of prose into 246 words of poetry."

Adam Goodheart is a journalist (The Atlantic, the New York Times), and an academic. He is the director of the Center For the Study of the American Experience at Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

His opening chapter describes his discovery "in a crumbling plantation house...an attic full of family papers spanning thirteen generations" of American history. Among them was a packet of letters written in 1861 by "a career officer in the U.S. Army stationed at a remote fort in the Indian Territory of the far West. Writing to his wife and brother back East, the colonel agonized over which side he should choose in the impending conflict. He was a Southerner and a slave holder, yet could he betray the flag under which he had served ever since he had first donned the scratchy gray uniform of a West Point cadet?...In the end, the colonel chose to stand by his country."

"Reading those letters, across the distance of almost a century and a half, gave me a new appreciation of how history is decided not just on battlefields and in cabinet meetings, but in individual hearts and minds." This book is about these individuals: men and women, black and white, north and south: people you know about, and people you’ve never heard of. Senator John J. Crittenden and his failed compromise. Lucy Bagby, a slave who escaped to Cleveland, Ohio from Wheeling, Virginia in 1860, and was not rescued by local abolitionists. Just the opposite: the Cleveland Leader, "Ohio’s most radical Republican daily," urged that she be sent back to slavery, and urged black Ohioans not to attempt a rescue, to show that blacks and whites, free states and slave states, could co-exist in one Union.

Among the threads deftly woven through this narrative spanning less than a year are the stories of the "contrabands." At first, they were three escaped slaves who sought refuge in Fort Monroe, the Union bastion near Confederate-held Hampton, Virginia. This trickle soon became a torrent of thousands, and General Benjamin Butler and the Lincoln Adminstration had to decide how to deal with these refugees. One of the delights of "1861" is the skillful depiction of people and organizations: the odious Texan, Louis T. Wigfall; the brave Elmer Ellsworth and his Fire Zouaves; the disciplined Wide-Awakes, campaigning for Lincoln in 1860; the ill-fated Corwin Amendment, passed by both houses of Congress, but ratified by only one state; the St. Louis German immigrants, and many more.

Through all these wonderful vignettes, Mr. Goodheart never loses sight of the war’s main goal: a new birth of freedom. "Swept away forever would be the older America, a nation stranded halfway between its love of freedom and its accommodation of slavery, mired for decades in policies of appeasement and compromise."

"One person at a time, millions of Americans decided in 1861 – as their grandparents had in 1776 – that it was worth risking everything, their lives and fortunes, on their country...on a vision of what its future could be and what its past had meant.

 

"Eighteen sixty-one, like 1776, was – and still is – not just a year, but an idea." With its fascinating attention to detail and its grand sweep of history, this book is the story of those people and that idea.

 

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American Uprising:     
      The Untold Story of America’s Largest Slave Revolt.

by Daniel Rasmussen

This is the author’s first book, which grew out of his senior thesis at Harvard, where he graduated in 2009. Mr. Rasmussen has written a page-turner, but he has consulted numerous primary and secondary sources and has produced a highly informative study of a little-known event in American history.

It’s not exactly an untold story, as we can see from his many references. However, the slave revolt of January, 1811 on Louisiana’s German Coast, only forty miles from New Orleans, is about to become much better known. HarperCollins is the publisher, and the book has been reviewed in the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and (briefly) in the New Yorker. Mr. Rasmussen has been on Book TV, where I saw him and decided to buy his book.

Germans "had originally settled the area before being overwhelmed" by French immigrants. The sugar plantations lay between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain to the north. The French planters became immensely rich from their crop, which was totally dependent on slave labor. When slaves were "sold down the river," they came here, to a more arduous and brutal existence than they had known in the Upper South. Mr. Rasmussen describes the African background of these slaves, many of whom had military experience and knew how to use weapons. He describes the social structure of the planter and slave societies, and the Haitian revolution a decade earlier, which many slaves knew about.

The United States purchased Louisiana from France in 1803. President Jefferson offered the governorship to the Marquis de Lafayette and then to James Monroe, both of whom declined. He then appointed William C.C. Claiborne, "a fellow Virginian and political disciple distinctly lacking in qualifications." Claiborne, who couldn’t even speak French, got off to a rocky start with the haughty planters, but the "interim" governor stayed for eight years, and had the last laugh.

All this history is deftly described before Mr. Rasmussen gets to his subject. He said he wrote this for a general audience; while this book is perfect for an AP history class, Round Table readers will also find it useful and enjoyable. The author hasn’t discovered a trunkful of letters in an attic ("Lincoln’s Sanctuary" by Matthew Pinsker), but he has pored over documents, diaries, and trial transcripts. This is not "history lite," by any means, but an effective combination of a good read plus good scholarship.

Why is the revolt so little known today? There certainly wasn’t a conspiracy to suppress it. When a hundred heads of rebellious slaves were mounted on pikes along the road to New Orleans, the planters were advertising their vengeance, not hiding it. New York’s "slave conspiracy" of 1741 ("New York Burning, by Jill Lepore, 2005), in which more people were executed than in the Salem witch trials of 1692, is not well known, even in this city. Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia resulted in many whites killed (only two planters were killed in the German Coast revolt), and a national best-seller by William Styron placed Nat Turner in the national consciousness. Gabriel Prosser’s aborted plot in Richmond in 1800 and Denmark Vesey’s aborted plot in Charleston in 1822 (seems to happen every ten years or so), resulted in executions of the ringleaders, and are fairly well-known today.

Mr. Rasmussen describes the consequences of the revolt. The insular, aristocratic planter society changed their tune in a hurry, welcoming rather than disdaining the federal government.

"Unlike Virginians after the Nat Turner uprising, the citizens of the Orleans Territory held no debates about emancipation or colonization. Slavery was simply an unquestionable fact of life, no more controversial than the use of currency....Militarization happened quickly. The militia – once a largely decorative organization – began to meet weekly to train and organize."

"The federal government was receptive, sending troops, ships, and compensating planters for their losses. The government paid $300 for each slave killed in the rebellion and one-third of the appraised value of any property destroyed....The residents of New Orleans could have asked for no better government than the American one when it came to protections of slavery."

"Statehood inaugurated a Deep South boom that lasted until the Civil War. New Orleans became the second largest port – and largest slave market – in the United States. The slave population of North America tripled between the American revolution and 1820. The combined population of Louisiana (1812), Mississippi(1817), and Alabama(1819) expanded from 400,000 in 1820 to 2.5 million in 1860."

Other historians have written extensively about the growth of slavery and the southern economy, and how it led to war in 1861. (Judging from his generalized overview of United States territorial expansion and treatment of minorities, I suspect that the author wanted to write a mini-history, but the publisher said, "You’ve done a good job in 217 pages. Know when to stop." ) Mr. Rasmussen has revealed a slice of American history, and I look forward to the next book in his promising career.

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David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and
    The Underground Railroad in New York City

by Graham Russell Gao Hodges

David Ruggles (1810-1849) is barely remembered today, even among people familiar with the pre-war abolition movement and the Underground Railroad in New York. This is sad, because in his short life, suffering from chronic ill health (including blindness) and racial oppression, he was an influential fighter. He was a leader of New York’s black opposition to slavery and discrimination with his pen, his printing press, and in the courts – usually before corrupt and racially hostile judges.

Graham Hodges is a professor of history at Colgate University. He has written and edited more than a dozen books; this is one of the John Hope Franklin Series in African-American History, published by the University of North Carolina Press (2010). Professor Hodges, as one would expect from an academic, has drawn on varied sources, and his book has copious end notes and good illustrations.

We have seen many books, especially in this sesquicentennial year, about America on the eve of the Civil War. We have read about New York City’s dependence on the cotton trade, its warm hospitality to southerners (especially their money), and its cold shoulder toward African-American civil rights. This book is about New York on the afternoon before the Civil War, in the 1830s and early 1840s.

David Ruggles was the first person in New York to provide shelter and guidance to the escaped Maryland slave, Frederick Augustus Bailey, who soon re-invented himself as Frederick Douglass. At 2 a.m. on Sept 3, 1838, Bailey arrived in New York He had to beware of slave catchers, and saw in "every white man an enemy and in every colored man cause for distrust." He spent the night sleeping among barrels on the dock. "He had planned to find a black man named David Ruggles, who headed the New York Committee of Vigilance, an organization famous among enslaved people fleeing from their bondage." Bailey soon sent for his fiancee, and they were married that month in Ruggles’ home at 36 Lispenard Street (which remains in good condition). The couple moved to New Bedford, MA, where he found work as a caulker, and changed his name, adopting Douglass from Sir Walter Scott’s poem, "Lady of the Lake."

Historians may have ignored Ruggles, but Douglass never forgot his benefactor. (W.E.B. Du Bois doesn’t mention Ruggles in his list of "heroes of color" in his classic work of 1903, The Souls of Black Folk). In his first autobiography (1845), Douglass recalled Ruggles’ "vigilance, kindness, and perseverance." His last autobiography (1882) again notes Ruggles’ contributions to Douglass and the cause of African-American freedom.

The strength of this book is in its vivid description of the harsh conditions endured by people of color every day, especially in the supposedly progressive states of New York and Massachusetts. Professor Hodges writes, "Generally, New York City was unsafe for blacks." In 1830, blacks numbered 14,000 in a population of 200,000. "Their percentage of the total had dropped sharply since the initiation of gradual emancipation in 1799, largely because of declining economic opportunity and worsening racism..." Few blacks could vote in New York State because the revised constitution of 1821 imposed a $250 property qualification for black voters. (This was sustained in an 1860 statewide referendum by a vote of almost 2:1, with even more opposition in New York City.) "Job discrimination was rampant...Blacks were not allowed to ride on the city’s ubiquitous horse-drawn omnibuses, forcing them to walk everywhere. There was no sanctuary in church, where Protestant denominations routinely restricted blacks to ‘Negro pews’ far from the pulpit."

Beyond these economic and social indignities lurked a far worse danger: slave-catchers and kidnapers. "Enabled by sympathetic judges in New York, kidnapers regularly came to the city and grabbed any black whose appearance resembled their quarry." This "quarry" included children and free men and women. Even blacks would turn in "their brethren." Ruggles fought long and hard against the kidnappers, and won as many battles as he lost.

Professor Hodges terms Ruggles "among the most militant" of the black abolitionists in the ante-bellum period. He relates several instances where Ruggles was ejected from segregated railroad trains in Massachusetts. On July 6, 1841, he was traveling from New Bedford to Boston, when he refused to move to the "colored" car. "After an argument...several white men dragged Ruggles from the white car and threw him off the train...Angrily, Ruggles brought suit against his assailants for assault and battery." He lost in court, but his published report of the incident, Lynching In New Bedford, "galvanized the anti-slavery movement around New England." There had been reports of incidents over segregated seating for years, but it was Ruggles who aroused public opinion. The Boston Times demanded that the judge in Ruggles’ unsuccessful suit "have his ears cropped." Ruggles headed a mass meeting in New Bedford in July, where William Lloyd Garrison offered a resolution. Frederick Douglass led a procession of speakers at a Meeting of Colored Citizens to protest Ruggles’ treatment by the railroad and the court. Douglass learned first-hand of the segregated policy of the railroads when he was beaten by a "whole posse of brakemen, baggagemen, &ct" for refusing to sit in the Jim Crow car. In late September of 1841, the Secretary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, "a light-skinned black woman...was dragged out of the ‘whites only’ car with a baby in her arms. The child was badly injured, as was her husband, who tried to help her.

Over the next two years, petitions to the legislature attacking the railroads’ policies finally influenced the legislature. Though the state lawmakers did not take any real action, threats of regulation meant that gradually the railroads dropped their policies...Because of David Ruggles’ courageous example, blacks in Massachusetts could, by late 1843, sit where they pleased on such common carriers." (In 1854, future President Chester A. Arthur represented a young black woman in her suit against a New York omnibus company which had denied her equal access, and won. However, by 1860, most of New York’s omnibuses were still segregated.)

These stories, and the determination of Ruggles and others, are what kept me reading this book to the end. It’s well-written, but I wish that Professor Hodges had better narrative skills, like historians Doris Goodwin and David McCulloch. (I call this a Dragnet book: "Just the facts, ma’am.") As a New Yorker, this aspect of the city’s history has always drawn my interest. The casual reader, with many books on the "to be read" shelf, might find this biography, though set in turbulent times, less absorbing than I did.