Reflections on the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Edited by John Leekley.

Would Serve as an Excellent Introduction to the Civil War

Originally published in 1981.

Bruce Catton (1899-1978) was the top Civil War historian throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. His particular skill was not uncovering new research or having particularly keen new insights, although he did help move the Lost Cause narrative out of the mainstream. He was, first and foremost, a historian with a real gift for writing for the regular reader. He broke down the complex things and made them understandable and interesting.

Reflections on the Civil War was published after Catton passed away. It was pulled largely from tapes of Catton discussing various aspects of the Civil War and then edited by John Leekley. Leekley co-created the Civil War mini-series The Bue and the Gray with Catton.

Catton starts out with the standard discussion of what caused the war and then moves into other topics like why men joined up, daily life for the soldiers in the war, the  was like for the men, how the two armies geared up for the war (mostly as it was already being fought), and more before he gives a short summary of the war. 

Union General Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885)

The last section concerns some drawings that had recently been uncovered. A young man joined the army in the first rush of enthusiasm after Fort Sumter and had decided to draw everyday pictures of camp life. He was hoping to sell them to newspapers or magazines as part of their war coverage. It turns out that he could not sell any because they were simply too mundane - not enough action and too much regular camp life. Of course, that makes them solid gold for historians.

Catton took the extra step - he researched the soldier and told about his experiences in the war based on the young soldier's writings and regimental histories. I thought this was going to be tedious, but it turned out to be the best part of the book.

This book is very well done. Like I noted before, the book was edited from audio recordings of Catton's lectures and question and answer sessions. He knew his topic so well and the book just flows wonderfully. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Reflections on the Civil War by Bruce Catton. Edited by John Leekley.

GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III

Originally published in 2007.

Edward Bonekemper was a Civil War historian who came to the game kind of late in life - after he retired as an attorney for the federal government. 

However, he brings his skills as an attorney to this book. Imagine a regulatory attorney bringing all of his research to bear in order to win a case by simply  overwhelming the other side with binder after binder of evidence. In this case, the evidence is almost 200 pages of appendices, endnotes, and a bibliography. 

Bonekemper makes an argument in this book that Grant was undoubtedly the superior general when compared to Lee. In fact, he makes the arguments that Grant was the best general in the Civil War by far and Lee squandered his soldiers and his resources by going on the offense almost all of the time.

Being the best general does not mean Grant made no mistakes. It does not mean Grant was perfect. Bonekemper acknowledges mistakes by Grant in every campaign and gives Lee his due from time to time. 

Grant and Lee is really a dual history of these two generals, comparing their pre-war careers and then various stages of the war itself. For example, there is a chapter called May-July 1863 where the Vicksburg campaign is compared to the Chancellorsville/Gettysburg campaigns. 

A constant refrain is that Lee's biggest weakness is that he did not conserve his resources by falling back on the defensive. His argument is that Lee did not grasp the strategic fact that the North had to literally conquer the South while the South just had to stay alive until popular support collapsed in the North and the Europeans recognized the Confederate government. 

Instead of building a series of fortifications and compelling the Union forces to destroy themselves in useless attacks, Lee kept lashing out at Union forces and invaded the North twice only to lose both times and discourage European intervention after both failures.

Lee rarely lost more soldiers than the Union forces he fought, but he did not have a constant supply of new soldiers coming to the front - and the North did. Not only did the North replace soldiers at an amazing rate, they also managed to create all new armies when needed.

I found that I basically agreed with Bonekemper. Grant was the better general. Lee was too focused on Virginia and too eager to go on the offense. He did not save his resources and did not share the ones he had with other theaters of the war.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: GRANT and LEE: VICTORIOUS AMERICAN and VANQUISHED VIRGINIAN by Edward H. Bonekemper III.

LINCOLN'S GENERALS (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Collection) edited by Gabor S. Boritt

Published by Oxford University Press in 1995.

Lincoln's Generals is a collection of 5 essays written by scholars of various aspects of the Civil War. In this case, they focused on how Lincoln worked with his various generals, mostly the generals of the Army of the Potomac. They are organized in roughly chronological order.

The first essay was very well-written. It was by Stephen W. Sears and concerned Lincoln and McClellan. The weakest, for me, was the second essay, ostensibly about General Hooker. It's focus was really the macho culture of the time that required men to prove themselves manly by exposing themselves to fire. It wasn't a bad essay, but it really was not about the relationship between Lincoln and Hooker.

The other three essays were about Meade, Sherman, and Grant. 

I got an appreciation for the difficulties of Lincoln's political position, especially as the election of 1864 approached. Viewing things from 161 years later, it seems like it was all pre-ordained. The reminder that it was a close thing was welcome.

I rate this collection 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Lincoln's Generals (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Collection) edited by Gabor S. Boritt.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN by James Daugherty

Originally Published in 1943.
The edition I read was a re-print published by Scholastic in 1966.

While not a terribly deep dive into Lincoln, Daugherty's (1889-1974) very readable small telling of his life has some of the most poetic prose I have ever read in a biography. 

There are a couple of factual errors in the book. One example that I noted is the assertion that Robert E. Lee replaced a wounded James Longstreet at the head of what became known as the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862. It was Joseph E. Johnston. That bears very little bearing on the story of Lincoln, even though I am sure he would rather Johnston would have been in the fighting rather than Longstreet. 

Here is an example of Daugherty's excellent prose (concerning Lincoln's early days as a lawyer): 

For the long, bony, sad man who was Billy's partner, the law office became a sanctuary and a refuge and a workshop, where through the years he slowly grew and learned and thought out the dark meanings and drifts of a troubled time. (page 55)

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: ABRAHAM LINCOLN by James Daugherty.

FRANKLIN PIERCE: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Biographies of U.S. Presidents) (kindle) by Hourly History

Published in 2025 by Hourly History.

Hourly History's biography of Franklin Pierce offers a concise but comprehensive telling of Pierce's life. He was a politician, but his wife hated Washington, D.C. and spent as much time away from the capital as possible. 

He had two major foreign policy successes - the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico and opening Japan to foreign trade, but I was really interested in his policies that helped lead to the Civil War.

Franklin Pierce is one of that group of 8 Presidents in a row from Van Buren to Buchanan that did not serve more than one term (two died in office) leading up to the Civil War. Some were stronger than others, but, as a group, these Presidents didn't show the kind of leadership needed to push the nation away from Civil War. 

Pierce was a New England Democrat that vociferously took the side of Southern Democrat slaveholders. His working theory was that there needed to be unity in the country and uniting behind slavery was a way to be unified. 

This was unpopular with his New England neighbors and didn't really generate trust among Southern Democrats because they saw the pushback, especially in Kansas. The fighting grew so severe among pro- and anti-slavery forces that it became known as "Bleeding Kansas."

I rate this e-book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: FRANKLIN PIERCE: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (Biographies of U.S. Presidents).

AMERICAN HERITAGE NEW ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: VOLUME 8: THE CIVIL WAR by Robert G. Athearn

Published in 1971 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

This book was part of a series intended to be a supplement to a history curriculum as part of a classroom library or in a school library. It is part of a multi-volume series. When I was a kid, I would see books like this used for extra credit (outline chapter X, etc.) when I was a kid.

Positives:

The pictures are great. The book title says it is illustrated and it does not lie. There are pictures on almost every page and many of them are the most famous photos, paintings, and drawings of the war.

There is an "Encyclopedic Section" at the end of the book. It has biographies of prominent people of the war and explanations of some of the big ideas, and events of the war. Before the internet, these little encyclopedias about a dedicated topic were extremely helpful.

There is an essay from Bruce Catton between the regular text and the Encyclopedic Section. It is excellent.

Negatives:

There is literally no explanation of the events that led to the Civil War. The first sentence of the book is: "The Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter sparked a great military conflagration that was to blaze in America for four bitter, bloody years." Then, it proceeds to talk about the post-Sumter military build-up. Page 2 discusses Bull Run and page 3 talks about Fort Donelson. Iti is almost like the war just happened. 

Slavery is almost entirely ignored. Because of this, I would describe this book is a "Lost Cause" lite history. The facts that are presented are accurate, but when you ignore the role slavery played in the Civil War, you are slanting things towards the Confederacy. It's not advocating "Lost Cause" points, but it lends itself towards that interpretation. This is not surprising for a book written in 1971.

The Reconstruction section is also tilted to the side of the former Confederates. 

I rate this mixed bag of a book three stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: AMERICAN HERITAGE NEW ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES: VOLUME 8: THE CIVIL WAR by Robert G. Athearn.

SONGS of AMERICA: PATRIOTISM, PROTEST, and the MUSIC THAT MADE a NATION (audiobook) by Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw

Published in 2019 by Random House Audio.

Read by the authors, Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw.

Duration: 7 hours, 40 minutes.

Unabridged.

It turn out that historian Jon Meacham and country music star Tim McGraw are neighbors. They decided to work together on Songs of America, a book that looks at the role of music in American politics.

They start with songs of the Revolution and work their way forward, hitting songs you've heard of such as The National Anthem (War of 1812) and The Battle Hymn of the Republic (Civil War) and songs you've most likely never heard of. 

Not every song is war related. For example, the anti-lynching song Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday. There is a nicely done section comparing two still-popular songs from the 1980s - Born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen and Proud to Be an American by Lee Greenwood. 

I particularly liked the juxtaposition of two Vietnam era songs: The Ballad of the Green Berets by Sgt Barry Sadler (1966) and Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival (1969) show how public perception of the war changed in three short years.

Despite the book having been released during the first Trump Administration, there is literally no mention of Donald Trump in the book.

Jon Meacham provided the bulk of the material for this book. He provided the historical context and the story behind how the song came into being. In the first 1/3 of the book, McGraw had practically no input except for reading the lyrics in a completely uninspired way. In the later sections, with more contemporary songs, McGraw's input was not only more frequent, but often more insightful.

But, the book dragged at times, especially early on. I was disappointed that there were only one or two actual pieces of music in an audiobook about music. Tim McGraw knows his way around many styles of music and I assumed that he would be at least playing the tune of the older songs. Sadly, he does not.

I rate this audiobook 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation.

UNCOMMON VALOR: A STORY of RACE, PATRIOTISM, and GLORY in the FINAL BATTLES of the CIVIL WAR by Melvin Claxton and Mark Puls

Published in 2005 by John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

The Emancipation Proclamation was effective on January 1, 1863 - it included a provision that former slaves were to "be received into the armed service of the United States". The Union Army was a little slow to enact this provision, but by 1864 there were plenty of African American Union soldiers ready to go into the field. Uncommon Valor follows one of those units during the Petersburg campaign of 1864-1865.

This history primarily follows Christian Fleetwood, an African American Baltimore clerk. Fleetwood was born free, but living in a slave state was a constant reminder of his second class status. He had been considering joining the army for a long while, trying to determine if it would be a blow for freedom, or just choosing to support one oppressive regime in order to fight an even more oppressive regime. If that was the case, he might as well sit it out and let both sides clobber one another.

Sgt. Major Christian Fleetwood (1840-1914)
in the year 1900. 

After eight months of indecision, Fleetwood joined up. Using Fleetwood's autobiography, the authors tell the story of his training, his concerns about unequal pay, and his frustrations with inconsequential assignments. He was frustrated with their lack of action - he was sure it was because the higher-ups feared that they would not fight well. 

Eventually, though, they were given more and more assignments, including probes into the outer defenses of the capital of the Confederacy itself. 

In the summer of 1864, General Grant determined that he would push Lee's army continuously until he destroyed it or Lee surrendered. Lee had to defend Richmond at all costs, so it was starting to become a static line, almost like a World War I line of trenches. 

Grant ordered a quick attack on Petersburg, a large train junction town more than 20 miles south of Richmond. The theory was that if the Union took Petersburg and stop the trains bringing in supplies, it could quickly starve out Lee's army. 

Fleetwood wanted action - now he had it. He would serve in multiple engagements and eventually earn the Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in the Battle of New Market Heights.

All of these battles and maneuvers are pretty well-described, but maps, even poor ones, would have been helpful. I am always a fan of lots of maps in my Civil War histories - it just helps the reader understand things so much better.

Besides the maps, this book really needed a section that discussed what the main people mentioned in the book did after the war. It didn't need a lot of detail, but something would have been nice.

I rate this history 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: UNCOMMON VALOR: A STORY of RACE, PATRIOTISM, and GLORY in the FINAL BATTLES of the CIVIL WAR by Melvin Claxton and Mark Puls.

VICKSBURG, 1863 by Winston Groom

Originally published by Knopf in 2009.

Winston Groom will always be best known as the author of Forrest Gump, but he should be equally well known as the author of a series of well-told American histories. Included in those histories is a trilogy of Civil War histories that focus on the Western Theater of the war.

Vicksburg 1863 is the second book in the trilogy, but it can be easily read as a stand-alone history. After a short introduction to the war itself, it follows Grant's campaign to take the Mississippi River away from the Confederacy, beginning with a mess of a battle in Missouri that proved nothing of any importance except that Grant was game to fight and push forward, even if the conditions were not perfect.

That, it turns out, was pretty much the key to Grant's eventual success in this campaign and in the war.

From there, we follow Grant through Kentucky, into Tennessee and the terrible Battle of Shiloh. Although ultimately successful, this marked a low point for Grant because he nearly lost his army. His immediate superior came to Shiloh to supervise him and killed most of the momentum of the campaign

Eventually, Grant regained his command (his superior officer was promoted to a desk position in the Eastern Theater) and began his campaign to remove the last major obstacle for Union control of the Mississippi River - Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Vicksburg was a challenge due to its location on an imposing cliff on a massive bend in the Mississippi River. The Confederate military placed cannons on the cliff that threatened any ship that dared to try to pass by. This book details the many efforts he made to bypass Vicksburg, including attempts to build a canal to reroute the Mississippi and an attempt to go through the swamps around Vicksburg. Eventually, he crossed the river south Mississippi and quickly moved his army to cut off Vicksburg, lay siege to it while also engaging and driving away any Confederate troops that could have helped to lift the siege.

Some people will argue with Groom's assertion that Grant did have bouts of drunkenness during the campaign. He describes a rather wild bender featuring Grant cruising through the swampy rivers north of Vicksburg during a lull during the siege, switching boats, and looking for more and more booze. Grant's defenders will deny it all, Grant's detractors will claim it was probably even worse. I go with the simple knowledge that addiction is powerful and Grant often brought along people that kept him accountable. If those people weren't around, I can easily imagine him falling off the wagon. Whether it was a wild run through the swamps or a binge drunk in the corner of a cabin...well, that depends on who told the story back then and who is writing the story now.

I rate this history 5 stars out of 5. It reads as easy as a novel. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Vicksburg, 1863 by Winston Groom.

See my review of Groom's Shiloh, 1862 here. 

WILD BILL HICKOK: A LIFE from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Published by Hourly History in November of 2024.

Hourly History offers free e-books every week. Each of the books take about an hour to read and the smaller topics are really quite good. The series is good for things you want to know more about, but you don't want to read a 400 page book on the topic.

There is probably a large book about Wild Bill Hickock (1839-1876), but I don't want to read it. This length made for a perfectly enjoyable and interesting read.

Hickock started out fighting in the pre-Civil War Bleeding Kansas conflict on the anti-slavery side, worked as a guide, a hunter, a sheriff, and eventually ended up being shut in the back of the head while playing poker in Deadwood in the Dakota Territory by a man who was too afraid to fight Hickock in a duel.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Wild Bill Hickock: A Life from Beginning to End. 

DIFFER WE MUST: HOW LINCOLN SUCCEEDED in a DIVIDED AMERICA (audiobook) by Steve Inskeep

Published by Penguin Audio in 2023.
Read by the author, Steve Inskeep.
Duration: 8 hours, 57 minutes.
Unabridged.

It's been said that no American has been the subject of more biographies than Abraham Lincoln. I don't know if that it is true, but I do know that it is pretty tough to come up with a new angle on the 16th President. In Differ We Must, NPR reporter/host Steve Inskeep has managed to do just that.

Inskeep follows through Lincoln's life and sees how he dealt with people that he had disagreements with. Some of them were major, some were minor. Sometimes, Lincoln responded to these disagreements by befriending the people he disagreed with, sometimes by patiently arguing his point of view, sometimes by appearing to accommodate them only to slowly change their minds, and sometimes by arguing fiercely against his opponent.

And, sometimes, as in the case of Frederick Douglass, Lincoln realized he was wrong and changed his mind as was the case with Frederick Douglass (and other black dignitaries) and black men serving as soldiers and him dropping his insistence on sending freed slaves to Africa.

One is left to wonder, as always how Lincoln would have reacted to the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction - the ultimate test of his ability to work with people that he disagreed with. We know that his successor, Andrew Johnson, failed that test in a spectacular way, but we will always have to wonder how Lincoln would have done.

While this was a unique entry into the collection of Lincoln biographies, I found it to be merely an "okay" biography. I listened to the audiobook and Inskeep's pleasant reading voice didn't hold my attention particularly well. I rate this biography 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: DIFFER WE MUST: HOW LINCOLN SUCCEEDED in a DIVIDED AMERICA by Steve Inskeep.

BASS REEVES: TALES of the TALENTED TENTH, no. 1 by Joel Christian Gill

 Published by Fulcrum Publishing in 2014.

Artist and author Joel Christian Gill is writing and illustrating a series of graphic novels that look into the lives of lesser known, exceptional African Americans. His inspiration is this quote from W.E.B. DuBois: "The Talented Tenth rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground." In other words, some will rise up and inspire/lead the rest. This is Gill's way of providing inspiration.

Bass Reeves was a legendary lawman in the Old West. He was a Deputy U.S. Marshal that chased down bad guys who would flee into Indian Territory (Oklahoma and Kansas) to hide from law enforcement in the neighboring states. If you've seen either of the two versions of the movie True Grit, that is the exact situation. The character Rooster Cogburn would have been real-life Bass Reeves' co-worker if Cogburn were a real person.

The graphic novel tells about Reeves' childhood as a slave in Arkansas, how he escaped during the Civil War (he was brought along to work as a body servant for a Confederate officer) and eventually lived for a while with Indians in the Oklahoma and Kansas Territories. He was hired to help deal Marshals deal with Indians and eventually he was deemed to be so helpful and so good at his job that the local federal judge went against all of the normal conventions and made Bass Reeves a marshal.

It turns out that Marshal Bass Reeves was very, very good at his job - maybe the best.

The book addresses racial issues in a couple of clever ways. Whenever the word n***** is used, a stylized caricature of a man in "blackface" is inserted. Secondly, whenever Reeves is confronted by racists, they are partially or completely illustrated as crows with angry red eyes. There are crows fleeing the law, crows in court, etc.

The problem with this story is that although Reeves lived an interesting and amazing life, the book is kind of flat. 

I rate this graphic novel 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BASS REEVES: TALES of the TALENTED TENTH, no. 1 by Joel Christian Gill.

See my review for a different book in this series HERE.

SLAVERY, RESISTANCE, FREEDOM (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Books collection) edited by Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock.

 

Published in 2007 by Oxford University Press.

The book consists of six essays about the experience of African Americans from the early American period through Reconstruction. 

They are arranged in chronological order and, as is the way with all collections, of varying quality. I did not enjoy either of the two essays by one of the editors, Scott Hancock. I did enjoy reading two of them quite a bit.

There are two strong essays that read more like small chapters from a Civil War history  about the United States Colored Troops (USCT) - the segregated units of black soldiers led by white officers. 

The last essay was by Reconstruction expert Eric Foner. It was a bit tedious to read, but it ruthlessly lays to rest that old Confederate and neo-Confederate lie that Black Reconstruction (when Blacks could actually vote and the old leaders of the Confederacy were not allowed to run for office) just elected illiterate field hands to the highest offices. The men Foner describes were mostly (80% plus) educated to at least the level of the average state legislators in the North and some were highly educated and exceptional men.

I rate this collection 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: SLAVERY, RESISTANCE, FREEDOM (Gettysburg Civil War Institute Books collection) edited by Gabor Boritt and Scott Hancock.

McCLELLAN and FAILURE: A STUDY of CIVIL WAR FEAR, INCOMPETENCE and WORSE by Edward H. Bonekemper, III

 

Originally published in 2007.
Published in 2010 by McFarland and Company, Inc.

If you are a student of the Civil War, George B. McClellan is a conundrum at best.

After the Frist Battle of Bull Run (Manassas) in July of 1861, the poorly trained Union Army had fled back to Washington, D.C. They were basically a semi-organized mob awaiting someone to take the lead.

Lincoln looked around and felt that the leadership team that lost at Bull Run was not going to provide a credible lead general so he looked around the Eastern Theater for anyone else with the aura of success.

George B. McClellan had a bit of success in Western Virginia and wrote a lot of reports that made him seem an even better General than he was so Lincoln looked to him to retrain and refit the Army of the Potomac (the main Union Army in the East.)

Statue of McClellan outside of the
city hall in Philadelphia. It was 
dedicated in 1894.  I have no idea
why they felt he deserved this honor.

When I have talked with students about McClellan, I like to compare him to a nervous guy who restores cars. He finds a junker with lots of potential, restores it, and then is afraid to take it out and drive it (the entire purpose of a car) because it might get wrecked again. His men loved him for that - they didn't want to go out and fight and die in a pointless battle. But it was up to McClellan to find a way to take the fight to the enemy and the purpose of an army is to fight, to kill people and blow up things, not to drill and drill and drill while the enemy sits just a few miles away in the middle of the war. 

McClellan took over 8 months to rebuild the army before he took it out to fight. It was the largest army of the entire Civil War and was magnificently well-supplied.  His predecessor had only been in charge of the same army for about 6 weeks when he took to the field. 

Bonekemper documents McClellan's excuses, his time wasted on political lobbying, writing political advice to the President, and his constant inflation of the size of Confederate armies. Bonekemper also makes a strong case that McClellan didn't want to push too hard against the Confederacy because he was pro-slavery and that he let another Union Army be defeated at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August of 1862 out of jealousy.

Once again - the most important general in the U.S. Army refused to engage the enemy because he sympathized with their war aims and he let an entire Union army be defeated when he was ordered to provide assistance because he was angry that the other army had an independent command.

Did McClellan make up for that by being a brilliant field general? No. His own men (generals and even privates) noted that he led from far behind the lines and rarely directed the men once the fighting started.

His last battle of any size was Antietam. Have you ever seen a karate movie where the group of bad guys engage the good guy by taking turns so he can defeat them all one at a time? That's how McClellan engaged with Robert E. Lee's much smaller Army of Norther Virginia - one brigade at a time and Lee basically fought them all to a draw - one brigade at a time.

In a modern army, McClellan may have had found a place dealing with logistics and training - procuring supplies and recruiting soldiers, training them and sending them to the front. But, that was not how things worked in the Civil War.

Of course, Bonekemper lays all of this in detail with the original sources and quotes. A lot of historians give McClellan a pass of sorts. To be honest, I don't know why. This book makes it clear that they shouldn't - he was among the worst of the Union generals.

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: McCLELLAN and FAILURE: A STUDY of CIVIL WAR FEAR, INCOMPETENCE and WORSE by Edward H. Bonekemper, III.

UNDERGROUND AIRLINES (audiobook) by Ben H. Winters

 

Published in 2016 by Hachette Audio.

Read by William DeMerritt.

Duration: 9 hours, 28 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Underground Airlines is set in the year 2015 in an alternate historical timeline. This is a world where the American Civil War almost happened but did not. In the real historical timeline, an amendment to the Constitution called the Crittenden Compromise was proposed in December of 1860 as the first Confederate states were seceding. It preserved slavery, limited its spread and clarified the role of the federal government in returning runaway slaves. The Crittenden Compromise was not taken seriously by most people and it failed.

In this alternate history, the Crittenden Compromise was taken  seriously because President-elect Lincoln was assassinated in Indianapolis as he was traveling to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. The shock of the assassination brought all of the states back together to negotiate and a version of the Crittenden Compromise passed. There was no Civil War and American slavery continues in 4 states on into the 21st century (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and a combined North/South Carolina.

The protagonist of the book is an escaped slave turned into a hunter of escaped slaves. He is working undercover using the name Jim in Indianapolis, Indiana tracking down an escaped slave. He's bothered a bit because the paperwork for this slave is very incomplete and this is rare. Usually, slaves are meticulously tracked, literally tattooed, bar coded and even chipped. 

Jim is nervous because the incomplete file. But, as you can imagine, he's not happy being an escaped slave who hunts down escaped slaves - but he has no choice. He is chipped with a device in his neck that tracks him and, with the flip of a switch, can kill him. It puts him an emotionally painful paradox - in order to maintain his freedom he must catch others.

Jim meets all kinds of people as he searches through Indianapolis - members of the Underground Airlines (the modern successor to the Underground Railroad movement of the 1800s), militant anti-slavers, militant pro-slavers, a white woman searching for the love of her life (an escaped slave), members of the black market that exists in freedman neighborhoods, and more. 

Still, once he finds out what is going on, it involves more than he could ever imagine and makes him go where he never thought he would go...

My review:

I am a fan of:

1) alternate histories,

2) study of the Civil War,

3) my adopted hometown - Indianapolis.

This means I was pretty much perfectly set up to enjoy this book and I did. This was a well-told story. I enjoyed learning about how this alternate world was different and the same. For example, Michael Jackson is a big deal in this alternate world, too.

But, the United States is technologically behind the rest of the world by a few years due to anti-slavery boycotts by the rest of the world and lack of technical innovation coming from America itself. It's about 20 years behind and not really an economic leader in anything except the production of cotton and cotton clothing.  America's big ally is South Africa, with its policy of apartheid.

It's clear that Ben H. Winters knows his way around Indianapolis. Indy is my adopted hometown - I've lived here for 30 years. Every bit of Indianapolis he describes makes sense historically. 

I enjoyed this book. I rate it 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: UNDERGROUND AIRLINES by Ben H. Winters.

RIOT (audiobook) by Walter Dean Myers

 

Published in 2009 by Listening Library.
Performed by multiple actors.
Duration: 2 hours, 36 minutes.
Unabridged.

July of 1863 was the height of the American Civil War. The month contained the Battle of Gettysburg, the end of the long siege of Vicksburg, and the battle at Battery Wagner where the 54th Massachusetts demonstrated that African American soldiers would be an effective and important addition to the Union Army.

It also featured one of the worst riots in American history - the New York City Draft Riot.

The riot was ostensibly a violent reaction to the imposition of a draft to fulfill state military quotas, but it was more than that and this short audiobook does a very good job of looking at those reasons.

The draft was unpopular for more than just the fact that the men who were drafted did not want to join the army. Rich people could afford to pay $300 to avoid military service if they were drafted. It took most workers more than 6 months or more to earn this sort of money. This encouraged that common refrain that happens in many wars - It was a rich man's war but a poor man's fight.

About 25% of New York City was made up of immigrants from Ireland. Those immigrants were at the bottom of the social and economic heap, but they were afraid that newly freed slaves would work their way to New York City and be willing to work for less, meaning that their wages would have to drop just to compete. 

Those factors combined to make this riot an ugly mix of economic, racial and anti-governmental violence that lasted for 4 days until Union troops arrived fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg to help New York State Militia restore order with gunfire.

This audiobook reads like a television script, including directions for camera cuts and the like. The actors who read the audiobook read it like an old-fashioned radio play. A narrator read the direction for the cameras and introduced the characters as they came into the drama.

This drama explores the complicated reasons for the riots and gives the listener a surprisingly nuanced view of the riots. This is especially noteworthy considering that the drama is so short.

The last half hour or so of the audiobook is a podcast-type discussion of the drama and the riots between the author and a history professor. This was especially well-done. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: RIOT by Walter Dean Myers.

TEAR IT DOWN (Peter Ash #4)(audiobook) by Nick Petrie

 

Published in 2019 by Penguin Audio.
Read by Stephen Mendel.
Duration: 11 hours.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Peter Ash served multiple tours of duty with the Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan. When he left the service, he wandered the roads of America - partly because he could not find a place to settle down and partly because he suffers from claustrophobia as a form of PTSD. He can't sleep indoors. He has a very tough team being inside unless it's a spacious room or has lots and lots of windows. 

The author, Nick Petrie.

Peter has been living with his very serious (and very rich) girlfriend helping maintain her compound and recuperating from the misadventures of the last book. But...he's getting bored.

His girlfriend gets word from a friend named Wanda in Memphis that people are threatening her in her new house that she bought in a tax auction. They are throwing bricks through windows and the like. Peter drives across the country in his restored work truck to help keep an eye out. When he arrives he discovers that things have gotten a lot worse.

They're not just throwing bricks any longer - they've driven a dump truck right into her house...

My review:

This owes a lot to Lee Child's Jack Reacher series (lone drifter who is retired from the military who works very well with smart, talented, independent women) and to Robert B. Parker's Spenser series (man with a moral code, a girlfriend and an African American friend with a brother-like bond of questionable background that comes in with things get tough) but it has a distinct voice of its own.

The series also has a formula that I happen to like. It would be wise of Petrie to shake it up a bit, but it is a formula that is working for me.

Petrie's descriptions of a musician in the grove approached poetry. Nicely done. It more than makes up for the touch of the paranormal that was throw in.

I rate this audiobook 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: TEAR IT DOWN (Peter Ash #4)(audiobook) by Nick Petrie.

STORM OVER the LAND: A PROFILE of the CIVIL WAR by Carl Sandburg

 

Originally published in 1942 by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc.

I read a 2009 re-print published by Konecky and Konecky.

Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)

In 1940, the famed poet, journalist and author Carl Sandburg won a Pulitzer Prize for his four volume biography Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (published in 1939.)

In 1942, his publishers came to him and asked him to re-work the biography into a history of the Civil War in response to America's recent entry into World War II. 

The result is a pretty solid history of the Civil War from basically the Union point of view. 

Carl Sandburg is best known as a poet and that shines though with some of his prose. From time to time, he comes up with a different and interesting way of telling the story of the war. 

The most obvious weakness to this history is the story of African-Americans in the war - the free, the enslaved, the recently freed, the soldiers and others. He mentions them, but does not look at them very hard. To be fair to Sandburg, this book was published 81 years ago and he covered the topic about as well as any mainstream history would have.

I rate this history 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: STORM OVER the LAND: A PROFILE of the CIVIL WAR by Carl Sandburg.

WHEN WE'RE HOME in AFRICA (audiobook) by Themba Umbalisi

Published in 2021 by Next Chapter Audio LTD.
Read by Crawford B. Bunkley III.
Duration: 4 hours, 34 minutes.
Unabridged.

I have no idea where I found this book. I think it was a freebie on Audible through Amazon's Prime Reading program. I know that I got it because I am a big reader of Civil War histories and fiction and this sounded like it was right up my alley.

Synopsis:

The description of this book is accurate, to a point. It is about a freed slave who joins the Union Army and then goes from job to job and place to place with a goal of settling in Africa.

My Review:

This book is basically a Forrest Gump type of story - one man goes on an epic journey and ends up going through a lot of the historical movements of the era.

Warning: Lots of *********SPOILERS********all the way to the end of this review.

This audiobook comes in at almost exactly 50% of the run time for FORREST GUMP and covers maybe even more territory. Our hero (his name changes multiple times) begins as a slave in Georgia who is freed by the Union Army. He goes on to:

1. Join the Union Army as an infantry soldier.

2. Participate in the Battle of the Crater.
3. Muster out of the Army.
4. Meet a woman and live with her for a while.
5. Join the Cavalry.

U.S. Army "Buffalo Soldiers"

6. Serve on Indian patrol as a Buffalo Soldier. Fight a number of battles.
7. Serve on the U.S./Mexican border as a Buffalo soldier. Fight a number of battles.

8. Go on trial as a horse thief simply for doing his job.
9. Almost get lynched.
10. Flee into the wilderness to escape the lynching mob.
11. Meet another woman and live with her for a while.

12. Eventually arrive in San Francisco.

13. Get shanghaied onto a ship.

14. Go around the tip of South America to the Atlantic Ocean.

15. Get involved in a mutiny somewhere near the Falkland Islands.

16. Escape the ship with a friend on a little boat with a sail just before the mutineers turn on each other.

17. Sail/Row the boat around the tip of Africa and land on the Indian Ocean side of South Africa.

18. Meet native Africans.
19. Join the British Army in South Africa as a scout. Fight a number of battles.

20. Leave the British Army and join the Zulus.
21. Get married.
22. Become the royal firearms specialist for the Zulu.
23. Watch the Zulu loose to the British and flee to the mountains.
24. Find a group of refugees.

25. Become king of these refugees and make a people out of them.
26. Start a family.

Those are 26 big steps in a 4 hour and 34 minute audiobook. This could have been epic if it were slowed down and each of these steps were explored. I actually skipped things (lots of women end up sleeping with this man) and there were actually steps that were explored in detail, which means that the others got even more of the short shrift treatment.

For example, the women always end up being a side story and the hike from Texas to San Francisco is an epic trip going through multiple Indian territories and crossing the Rocky Mountains and it gets just a few minutes.

This book is really more of a serious treatment of a book series rather than a single book. It is too busy and not filled in with enough detail to make a story. It could have been a decent series.

About the narration. Crawford B. Bunkley III has a great voice, but he read this book too fast. Commas are ignored. Periods are ignored. Just this wonderful voice pushing forward as fast it can while reading a story that just wants to push on as fast as it can.

The only reason that I am giving it 2 stars is because I actually finished it.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: WHEN WE'RE HOME in AFRICA by Themba Umbalisi.

THE FALSE CAUSE: FRAUD, FABRICATION, and WHITE SUPREMACY in CONFEDERATE MEMORY (audiobook) by Adam H. Domby

 

Published by Blackstone Publishing in 2022.

Read by Jack de Golia.
Duration: 8 hours, 58 minutes.

Unabridged.

The cover of the book and the short description offered by my library app gives the impression that this book is pretty much about the "Silent Sam" Confederate memorial that stood at the University of North Carolina from 1913-2018.

This book is much more than that, though. It uses Silent Sam as an entry point into a larger discussion of how North Carolina chose to remember how it performed in the Civil War (more than 10% of Civil War soldiers from North Carolina actually fought for the Union.)

He also discusses how White men lied about their service to get Confederate pensions and the government turned a blind eye in the name affirming White unity and White Supremacy. Whites that fought for the Union (but couldn't qualify for a Union pension) or actively fought the Confederate draft with violence or by simply going AWOL at every point possible were given pensions. The idea is that by the late 1800s and early 1900s the idea was to deny that any Whites had ever disagreed with the Confederacy in the first place. If a little graft and fraud had to be tolerated to achieve the illusion of White Unity than that was a reasonable price to pay.

A billboard during the height of the 
Silent Sam controversy

A large chunk of the book is devoted to making the point of the previous paragraph. It is convincing and a little tedious. Much more profound is the text of the speech that was given by a Confederate veteran and political bigwig at the 1913 dedication. Julian Carr was a political moderate when it came to African Americans in North Carolina, but he makes it abundantly clear that the Silent Sam statue is there as a visible reminder to everyone of the "good old days" when all Whites stood together against the North and all Blacks knew their place. 

Interestingly, that is exactly what the modern day anti-monument protesters claimed and exactly what the Neo-Confederates denied. 

The book patiently lays out all of its arguments (there are a lot more than I have laid out here) and proves its points - just not always in the most compelling manner. 

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE FALSE CAUSE: FRAUD, FABRICATION, and WHITE SUPREMACY in CONFEDERATE MEMORY by Adam H. Domby.