TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Welcome back to TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog and thanks for reading!

UPDATE: The Discovering the Civil War Online Presentation is available to everyone free online.

I “attended” a webcast put on by American Public University and hosted by Dan Soschin on March 3, 2010.  Fellow bloggers Rene Tyree, Jim Schmidt, James Rosebrock and  Rea Andrew Redd were in attendance.

The webcast featured three presentations related to Discovering the Civil War Online:

1. Professor Steven E. Woodworth of APU and TCU discussing good websites with which to do online Civil War research
2. Tom Daccord of Best of History Websites showing attendees how to navigate around his site to explore some of the better Civil War sites
3. J.B. Tanner, Admissions Rep at APU, discussing some of the online courses and history disciplines which might have been of interest to students of the Civil War

Professor Woodworth’s presentation discussed the following web sites, some of which I’ve used heavily for my new Petersburg Campaign site Beyond the Crater:

APU Online Library

You need to be a student to access the APU Online Library, but those of you taking classes at any University probably have access to Civil War resources through your chosen institution of higher learning.  Many universities, for instance, allow students JSTOR access, and there are literally thousands of journal articles from the past hundred years relating to the Civil War.  Professor Woodworth made the point that many first person accounts need to be viewed critically because many of these men and women had their own axes to grind after the war.

eHistory.com (tOSU)

I have used eHistory.com (hosted by The Ohio State University) quite liberally at Beyond the Crater.  The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies is hosted there in its entirety in text format, page by page.  The site has allowed me to quickly and easily proofread all of the Official Records reports at Beyond the Crater wherever I can take a laptop.  It has saved me a tremendous amount of time in the process.  Similarly, all four volumes of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War are present at eHistory.com.  Other Civil War records include letters and diaries, oral histories, and medical documents.

Library of Congress

The Abraham Lincoln Papers are located at the Library of Congress web site.  In addition, you can find numerous photographs of Civil War personalities and sites.  If you are willing to search, you’ll find many documents of value to students of the Civil War.  Check out the Civil War Resources landing page for more information.

Thomas Tredway Library

The Thomas Treadway Library of Augustana College contains some Civil War resources, including the diary of 8^th Illinois soldier G.D. Molineaux.

Digital Library of Georgia

Another diary, this time that of Cornelius C. Platter, is located at the Digital Library of Georgia.

SoldierStudies.org

Dr. Woodworth incorrectly identified this as a University of Kentucky website.  It is in fact fellow Civil War blogger Chris Wehner’s site full of transcribed letters of Civil War soldiers.

APU Online Classroom

Obviously you must be a student at APU in order to take advantage of this resource, but one of the reasons this webinar was created was to entice interested students of history to take some Military History classes at APU.

Newspaper Databases

Newspaper Databases are something I’ve recently become interested in as a result of my Petersburg Campaign project at Beyond the Crater.  I personally subscribe to NewsInHistory.com in order to access old newspaper articles.  Dr. Woodworth pointed out Gale’s 19^th Century Newspapers as one site he uses.  The New York Times Archive offers old newspaper articles free for a time, with a subscription once you’ve looked at a set amount of articles.  The Richmond Daily Dispatch is offered free online, and I’m sure there are many others like this as well which I haven’t yet discovered.  If you know of other newspaper archive sites, please let me know in the comments below.

I’ll take a look at the second and third presentations in the coming weeks.  Check in next time to discover more useful and interesting Civil War sites online!

Check out Beyond the Crater: The Petersburg Campaign Online!

Check out Brett’s list of the Top 10 Civil War Blogs!

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States Rights—it’s not just for George Wallace any more.

Whether it’s correctly called a movement, a backlash or political theater, state declarations of their rights – or in some cases denunciations of federal authority, amounting to the same thing – are on a roll.

After 230 years the Army is dropping bayonet training.

Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, the three-star general in charge of revamping all aspects of initial training, said his overall goal is to drop outmoded drills and focus on what soldiers need today and in the future.

Bayonet drills had continued for decades, even though soldiers no longer carry the blades on their automatic rifles. Hertling ordered the drills dropped.

“We have to make the training relevant to the conditions on the modern battlefield,” Hertling said during a visit to Fort Jackson in January.

I received an email from Facebook tonight which alerted me to Scott C. Patchan’s new battle blog, Shenandoah 1864: The Valley Campaign. Scott is an expert on the lesser known 1864 Valley Campaign, much less covered than its famous 1862 cousin. He has authored three books on the subject, The Forgotten Fury: The Battle of Piedmont, Shenandoah Summer: The 1864 Valley Campaign, and the upcoming Opequon Creek: The Last Battle of Winchester. Scott introduces the blog with the following comments:

My purpose in writing this blog is to move beyond the bounds of traditional publications and share aspects of my research with fellow Civil War enthusiasts that might not otherwise see the light of day. Having met so many good friends over the years in the course of my research, I hope to make many more through this blog.

I’m looking forward to reading more of this new information compilation Civil War Battle Blog. Go check it out, and welcome Scott to the Civil War Blogosphere!

Loyal Hearts: Histories of American Civil War Canines
by Michael Zucchero

Product Details

• Hardcover: 184 pages
• Publisher: Schroeder Publications; 1st edition (February 16, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1889246573
• ISBN-13: 978-1889246574

Horses are famous.  Many of us can name a general’s horse without any problem at all.  Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveler, rated a novel by Richard Adams with him as the main character.  Monuments with mounted Generals are a feature of every battlefield.  Horses figure in numerous photographs from the war and count as casualties in artillery batteries.

What about dogs?

Even if there are no K9 units during the war, soldiers must have had them as pets.  Dogs are common, men like them, they like men.  However, most Civil War histories say very little about dogs in camp, on the march or in battle.  Stepping into the void while bring some light to the subject is this small well-written book.  Nineteen stories, from four to twelve pages each, tell the story of one unit’s dog during the war.  Each story is fully footnoted to original source documents and books.  Fifty-seven period photographs and illustrations add to the well-written stories.

You can read this book as a book or as a series of individual stories.  People that read about the Civil War and people that read about dogs will enjoy it.

Editor’s Note: Jim is a highly ranked reviewer of American Civil War histories on many book seller’s sites.

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Editor’s Note: Dean West has graciously decided to join TOCWOC as a new blogger.  Dean’s recent comments on one of Fred Ray’s posts and the resulting email exchange which followed made it clear Dean was one of the “obsessively compulsed” amateur Civil War historians who fit the profile of a TOCWOC blogger.  A little bit of dean’s history, written by Dean as an introductory post, follows below.  Please join me in welcoming Dean to the team.  I think you’ll really enjoy what he brings to the table.

No one including me knows how I first became interested in military history. My mother used to tell her friends that history books and toy soldiers simply showed-up in my baby crib one day. I date my interest from an inscription in a copy of Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Volume IV, which says, “Merry Christmas Deany, 1955.” I was ten years old. I’ve been “obsessively compulsed” ever since.

Throughout my life, the study of military history has been both hobby and avocation. For years I was part of the design team of well-known war-game designer John Hill. I worked with John as historical consultant and developer of the award winning miniatures game Johnny Reb, which is still popular after twenty-five years on the market. In 1996 my own miniatures rules, The Final Argument of Kings, were published. Final Argument is a tactical simulation of combat in the period 1740-1762. Through the years I’ve written numerous articles for various war-gaming magazines, and several years ago had a piece on Civil War cavalry published in North & South magazine. I have received credits as a researcher, copy editor and/or proof reader for historians Professor Christopher Duffy and Brent Nosworthy. I edited the western theater narrative in Keith Rocco’s Civil War art book “The Soldier’s View.” In the ’80s I was active in Civil War round tables, serving for awhile as president of the Jefferson County round table, located in Madison, Indiana.

I grew up in north west Indiana, on the Shores of beautiful Lake Michigan. I’m married and have three grown children and five feisty grand children. For forty years I made my living working for State Farm Mutual in its automobile claim department. For twenty-five of those years I managed auto claim facilities in two Indiana locations. A major part of my job was managing defense litigation. I retired a few years ago, and can now devote most of my time to the study of the “linear” or “Black Powder” era of warfare, 1689 through 1865.

In 1999 we bought a “hobby farm” in a very rural county of Kentucky. One day, while watching the terrific Civil War movie “Ride With the Devil” I decided I needed to learn to ride a horse well before I got to old. I had become intensely interested in cavalry, but knew I’d need the physical experience of riding to even attempt to understand the mounted arm. So at fifty-four I learned the basics of riding, bought two horses, and reconfigured the tiny hobby farm so we could care for horses there.  Then I bought a truck and a horse trailer and joined The Kentucky Cavalry Brigade reenactment unit. Being around these Kentucky cavaliers who had been on horseback since boyhood vastly improved my riding skills. I learned the drill and became a drill master, and was fortunate to eventually rise to the rank of captain. I retired last year, before I broke a hip or worse, but the adventures I experienced during my nine years in the “pretend cavalry” are without doubt the most exciting of my lifetime. Moreover, hands-on physical experience with horses has vastly enhanced my ability to speak and write confidently about cavalry. In 2008, I had the great honor to command the 9th Kentucky Cavalry Regiment, USA, at the Chickamauga National event.

Commentators on the rifle musket have made much of its so-called “rainbow” trajectory that made the rifle ball travel in a much higher arc than than today’s rifles due to its slow muzzle velocity. However, a lot of misunderstandings have also crept in. Most pundits seem to have looked at the illustration in Jack Coggins’ Arms and Equipment of the Civil War, shown below (click on either for a larger view):

Now Jack Coggins knew a lot about arms, and must have known that this was somewhat misleading. It shows a kneeling soldier with a rifle musket, the sight set on 300 yards. The bullet describes a perfect arc and will fly over an enemy’s head except during the first 75 yards or so and another 110 yards centering around 300 yards, where the sight is set.

There are two main problems here. One is that in the real world the bullet does not describe an arc—the muzzle energy drives the bullet forward on a more nearly horizontal path for the first third of its trajectory, which means it does not rise nearly as much as shown here. As the bullet loses energy, however, air resistance begins to take over and once it passes its apogee it begins to drop more and more steeply. The arc, then, is skewed toward the back part of the trajectory, as shown in this comparison of the .45-70 (very similar to the .58 cal. Minie ball) and the modern .308 round.

Even this is a bit misleading, since both rifles are shown being fired at an angle that will send the bullet to its maximum range, which would not be how a soldier on the battlefield would do it. As we saw in a previous post of engagement frequencies, most shots would be at targets 1-300 yards away, and the vast majority at 100 yards and under.

The second problem with the Coggins illustration is that it invites the reader to assume that a soldier set his sights to 300 yards and left them there. Green soldiers may well have done this but a veteran would adjust his sights as his enemy neared. Most used a battle sight setting such as the one shown in the Enfield below.

The sight (withe blade laid down on the ramp) could quickly be set on 100 yards (the default), 200, 300, and 400 yards, but many soldiers seem to have kept the default setting and added “Kentucky windage” (i.e. aiming high) as required. How did this work in practice? Joe Bilby observed:

Civil war soldiers seldom shot at each other at the long range capabilities of their small arms. My estimation of engagement ranges at Gettysburg, using markers and a modern digital range finder, suggests that 200 yards was the usual distance that troops began to shoot at advancing opponents (actually a greater distance than Griffith’s original mid-war estimates), and the available primary sources reinforce that conclusion.  A “center hold” using the 100 yard sight setting on a man sized target with a .58 caliber Springfield rifle-musket will hit it somewhere at a range up to 200 yards.

The greater the range, however, the more problematic the hit probability, as air resistance quickly slowed the bullet leading to a steep drop at longer ranges. Given these constraints and the small basic load (40-60 rounds), commanders often felt it better to let the enemy approach more closely than their weapons were capable of firing. Engagements at 200 yards and under, however, required little in the way of sight adjustment or range estimation, making them more suitable for the bulk of the soldiery.

Check out Beyond the Crater: The Petersburg Campaign Online!

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Bynum, Victoria E. The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies. The University of North Carolina Press (2010). 240 pages, 9 illustrations, 1 map, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN: 978-0-8078-3381-0 $35.00 (Hardcover).

Was the Lost Cause tradition of a “Solid South” a myth?  Author Victoria Bynum conclusively answers this question in the affirmative in her upcoming book The Long Shadow of the Civil War: Southern Dissent and Its Legacies, due out April 2010.  The author uses three completely separate but in some ways similar Southern “piney woods” communities to highlight the ways in which some Southerners fought against the Confederacy throughout its brief existence.  These communities are then followed throughout much of the rest of the 19^th Century and into the 20^th Century, showing how the Civil War molded and shaped them and their residents.  The result is an engaging and varied introduction into the complex world of the post-Civil War South.

Author Victoria Bynum is already well-known for her interest in and published book on Unionist Newt Knight, leader of the Free State of Jones in Mississippi and open father of mixed race children at a time when this practice was extremely taboo.  UNC Press has also published her book Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South.  In many ways, this work is a reflection on and extension of the earlier two.  Professor Bynum, has, in effect, written a book about those themes which have most interested her throughout her study of American History, neatly tied together in a common narrative which was interesting throughout.  This reviewer read the book in one sitting, something which happens rarely anymore.

The Southern Unionist communities of the Quaker Belt in North Carolina, The Free State of Jones in Mississippi, and The Big Thicket area of East Texas provide most of the subject matter for The Long Shadow of the Civil War.  The guerrilla leaders of these communities, Bill Owens in North Carolina, Newt Knight in Mississippi, and Warren Collins in Texas, were very different men.  In many ways, the communities were different as well.  Despite these differences, author Bynum shows how these communities were tied together by migration patterns, first from North Carolina to Mississippi, and then from that state to Texas, as the slaveholding populations of the first two areas grew.  In addition, the Unionist Collins family featured prominently in both Texas and Mississippi, with Warren’s brother Jasper serving as Newt Knight’s second in command in the Free State of Jones.  After explaining the differences in these communities, Bynum carefully looks at how the circumstances of each shaped the ways in which they resisted Confederate authority.  Levels of resistance varied even from county to county within each general area, as the author’s look at Orange and Randolph counties in North Carolina shows.

Each community offers up varied topics near and dear to the author’s heart, from Newt Knight’s repeated attempts to gain a pension from the U.S. government to the ways in which the three guerrilla leaders’ sons chose to remember their fathers in later years.  Issues of a heavily segregated South in postbellum years such as miscegenation, mixed race communities, and the “problem” of “White Negroes” for white supremacists are covered as well.  Essentially, this book serves nicely as a primer for those new to the study of the South in post-Civil War years.  The political battles of the heavily racist Southern Democratic Party with dissenters such as the Poluist movement in the late 19^th Century provide yet another avenue of study to pursue.  Even those more comfortable reading about battles and leaders will find many items of interest in The Long Shadow of the Civil War.

Interestingly, in books published about the primary Unionist men in later years, controversies such as the mixed race offspring of Newt Knight or the Socialist leanings of Warren Collins were alternately hidden or displayed, often for reasons one might not at first suspect.  Ethel Knight’s Echo of the Black Horn is one such example.

The struggle of Newt Knight’s mixed race offspring to succeed in life provides a major sub-theme of this book.  Some chose to identify as White, while others preferred to be called Native Americans or Blacks.  Each person tried to choose an identity which would best help them to prosper in the community in which they lived, with varying levels of success.

The Long Shadow of the Civil War, as its title should suggest, is not a book which focuses too much attention on the Civil War itself.  This might be a good or bad thing, depending on the interests of readers.  Those who enjoy the study of Reconstruction social and political battles as much or more than the military conflicts of the Civil War will find a wealth of material here for further study.  Bynum, as her writing shows, is extremely comfortable with, even fascinated with, the material in this book.  Her engaging writing style will no doubt interest many readers of her book as well.  With every published book similar to The Long Shadow of the Civil War, the myth of the Lost Cause fades deeper into obscurity.

I would like to thank Gina Mahalek at The University of North Carolina Press.

Disclaimer: A copy of the book reviewed was provided gratis.

Check out Beyond the Crater: The Petersburg Campaign Online!

Check out Brett’s list of the Top 10 Civil War Blogs!

Read many Civil War Book Reviews here at TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog!

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