DWD's Reviews

  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 w...

  Published in 2105 by Regnery History. Edward Bonekemper (1942-2017) was a lawyer by day and historian in his spare time. He worked for the federal government in a couple of regulatory departments. Imagine an attorney coming into a conference room and telling you that you have regulatory issues and then proceeding to lay down one document after another after another that proves it until you have a pile of papers covering your table. Bonekemper brings that tenacity to his history books as well. He often comes with a point to prove and he brings tons of proof. In this case, he goes after "The Lost Cause". What is The Lost Cause? It was (and still is) an apologist movement for the Confederacy that says that slavery was not a primary cause of the war and, besides that, slavery was not that bad. Robert E. Lee was the best general of the war (maybe American history) and his personal honor was unimpeachable and his only fault was that the trusted men like his subordinate General Ja...

  Published in 1998 by Sergeant Kirkland's Museum and Historical Society, Inc. Bonekemper lived the dream of most students of the Civil War - once he retired as an attorney, he created a second career as a Civil War author, college lecturer and a frequent guest on C-SPAN to talk about leadership in the Civil War. He also gave 10 lectures at the Smithsonian! Bonekemper is an unabashed fan of the Union side in the war, especially General Grant. I reviewed a book he wrote about Grant here . As Bonekemper loves to point out, only 4 armies were captured during the Civil War and Grant captured 3 of them Grant's subordinate Sherman captured the fourth after Lee had already surrendered his army to Grant. The only general on the Confederate side that can compare to Grant is, of Course, Robert E. Lee. Lee is generally celebrated as the best general in the war and Bonekemper dedicates How Robert E. Lee Lost the Civil War to proving that wrong.  Bonekemper ignores the easiest place to go...

  Originally published in 2010. Re-published in 2017 by Regnery History. Do you remember back in school when you would get a topic to argue for in an essay? That's pretty much what this book is. The topic is "Grant has the reputation for wasting his men in useless attacks. Is Grant's reputation as a butcher justified?" Ulysses S. Grant: A Victor, Not a Butcher might be mistaken as a biography of Grant, but it is not. What it is is a fantastic defense of Grant's record in the Civil War. Bonekemper was a federal government regulatory attorney for 34 years before he started writing books, delivering lectures, hosting discussions and teaching classes on the Civil War as a second career after he had retired. All that practice of 34 years of digging through books and digging through stats and regulations shines through this book. You would think that what I just described is a boring book, but it is well-written and flows smoothly from one campaign to the next. Very rea...