SGM Paola M. Delarosa-Lloret looks beyond the generals who dominate Civil War history to the enlisted leaders who held regiments together in combat. Her case study is the assault of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry on Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863, an attack remembered for the death of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the heroism of Sergeant William H. Carney. The regiment advanced along a narrow approach against earthworks and interlocking fields of fire that inflicted severe officer casualties within minutes. With its commissioned leadership decimated, continuity depended on the sergeants and corporals embedded in the ranks. Drawing on the regimental history and institutional records, the author shows how these noncommissioned officers steadied their men, contested the parapet under intense fire, and brought the regiment back in organized formation. Carney’s preservation of the colors, she argues, symbolizes a broader reality: in volunteer armies with uneven officer experience, NCOs were the backbone that translated intent into action, even in tactical defeat.
James Bowden challenges the enduring popularity of the Zouaves, the colorfully uniformed regiments that served on both sides of the Civil War. Examining regimental histories, battle accounts, and the French North African units that inspired them, he argues that American Zouaves were rarely effective except in limited roles. In most cases they suffered fewer combat casualties than the regiments on their flanks, which he reads as a reluctance to engage the enemy as directly as their peers. Bowden traces this to the units’ composition, their failure to use small-unit tactics, and their performance when measured against comparable non-Zouave units in company-level actions. He narrows his study to four representative regiments, two Union and two Confederate, including Collis’ Zouaves of the 114th Pennsylvania and Hawkins’ Zouaves of the 9th New York. His conclusion is that the Zouaves were more a phenomenon of popular image than of battlefield achievement, and he suggests further research on a wider range of units, North and South.
Patrick Smith offers a provocative reassessment of the 1862 Peninsula Campaign and the competing theories of victory held by Abraham Lincoln and George B. McClellan. As General-in-Chief, McClellan proposed a national strategy of joint, coordinated operations, built on a thorough understanding of both armies and the theater. Smith argues that this plan could have produced the war’s decisive campaign, but that Lincoln’s interference at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels disrupted its execution. Driven by a limited grasp of military operations, impatience to end the war quickly, and pressure from Radical Republican backers, Lincoln dissolved McClellan’s broader command and shifted priorities, leaving Union forces in Virginia isolated as the campaign stalled on the James River. Smith contends that the war in the East became a dismal record of defeats until Grant, after costly battles such as Cold Harbor, combined multiple armies, naval support, siege operations, and unity of command, the approach McClellan had advocated from the start.
MSG Robert D. Wall Jr. reviews the Battle of Gettysburg, fought from July 1 to 3, 1863, and defends one of the most criticized decisions of the war. More than 165,000 soldiers of George Meade’s Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia converged on the Pennsylvania crossroads town during Lee’s second invasion of the North, and the three days of fighting produced an estimated 51,000 casualties, making Gettysburg the bloodiest battle of the conflict. Wall outlines the condition of both armies before the battle and the course of the fighting that turned the war against the Confederacy. He then examines why Meade did not pursue Lee across the Potomac, a failure that drew sharp criticism from President Lincoln. Meade’s officers opposed an aggressive pursuit, his troops were exhausted and short of supplies and ammunition, many men lacked shoes after weeks of marching, and heavy rains made Confederate movements impossible to track. Given these handicaps and Lee’s fortified position, Wall concludes that Meade was right not to pursue.
MSG Garrett D. Roberson Jr. argues that the Union victory at Vicksburg in July 1863 mattered even more to the outcome of the war than the better-known triumph at Gettysburg. By October 1862 the Union controlled the Mississippi River from its source down to Vicksburg and from the Gulf of Mexico up to Port Hudson, leaving Vicksburg as the Confederacy’s vital link between its eastern and western states. Roberson explains why both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis regarded the city as essential and follows Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to take it, culminating in a siege that forced the surrender of some 29,000 Confederate soldiers along with their weapons and equipment. Its fall gave the Union the entire Mississippi, cut the South’s supply lines, and split the Confederacy in two. Roberson contends that Vicksburg broke the South’s fighting spirit and marked the beginning of the end for the Confederate cause. If Gettysburg was the nail in the Confederacy’s coffin, he concludes, Vicksburg was the lid.
Joseph Ryan reopens one of the most famous episodes of the Civil War: the discovery by Union soldiers of Robert E. Lee’s Special Order 191 during the Maryland Campaign of September 1862. After crossing the Potomac, Lee needed to bring his worn-out army into the Shenandoah Valley, and the lost order, wrapped around cigars, revealed his plan to divide his forces. Traditional accounts treat its loss as a near-catastrophic accident that allowed George McClellan to attack at South Mountain and Antietam. Ryan weighs the evidence like a trial lawyer, examining Lee’s staff procedures, the testimony of participants, and the movements of both armies. He concludes that, taken as a whole, the evidence makes it more probable that Lee lost the order intentionally, as a ruse to draw McClellan’s weight against Turner’s Gap rather than Crampton’s Gap. Comparing Lee’s calculated risk with Eisenhower’s gamble before the Battle of the Bulge, Ryan argues that the ruse bought the Confederacy time and two more years of existence in the East.
Richard Tilley argues that the most significant innovation of the Civil War was neither the railroad nor the rifled musket, but Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph. The telegraph introduced electronic command and control and permanently changed the relationship between the commander-in-chief and his generals. Tilley traces how Lincoln, after early setbacks at Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff, moved the army’s communications center to the War Department beside the White House and secured legislation giving the army control of the nation’s telegraph lines. From there he could follow and influence operations as no head of state had before. The telegraph had limits, as the Shenandoah Valley Campaign showed when Lincoln tried to direct distant forces against Stonewall Jackson, but he overcame them by finding Ulysses S. Grant and letting him manage the war in both theaters. Today’s leaders who watch operations from the White House Situation Room, Tilley concludes, owe their command system to Lincoln’s adaptation.
Larry Parker tells the remarkable story of an ironclad that served under six flags without ever firing a shot as a Confederate warship. Built in France and patterned on the French battleship Gloire, she carried a 300-pounder Armstrong gun, two 70-pounders, and a ram, and looked formidable on paper. In reality she was poorly constructed, leaked badly, drew too much water, and wallowed dangerously in heavy seas. Parker follows her through the diplomatic maneuvering that saw her French builder sell her to Denmark, her acquisition by the Confederacy as the CSS Stonewall, and her sale in Havana after the war ended. Passing to the United States and then to Japan, she became the Kotetsu and played a prominent role in the Boshin War, helping end the 268-year rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Renamed Azuma, she later took part in suppressing the Saga and Satsuma rebellions before being scrapped in 1908, a ship that had helped set Japan on its path to empire.
Walter Giersbach recounts the Confederate plot to set Manhattan ablaze on November 25, 1864. Eight men calling themselves the Confederate Army of Manhattan checked into hotels across the city, each carrying bottles of the incendiary “Greek fire” and responsible for burning four buildings. Within minutes fires broke out at the St. James Hotel, Barnum’s Museum, and many other buildings, but the blazes were contained. Giersbach explains that the scheme had begun as something larger: Confederate agents operating from Canada had planned to strike as Lincoln’s re-election approached, seizing federal buildings, arming sympathizers, and sparking a Copperhead uprising in New York. When that plan fell through, only the arson attack went forward. All but one of the conspirators made it home; Robert Cobb Kennedy was arrested near Detroit, tried in New York, and hanged at Fort Lafayette in March 1865. Giersbach concludes that even the larger plot was unlikely to succeed and that the fires were an odd sideshow in the war’s final year.
Roger Craig and Michael Artis examine the Battle of Chickamauga, fought along Chickamauga Creek in northern Georgia in September 1863 for control of the region around Chattanooga, with its fertile land and vital rail connections. Having lost the Tullahoma Campaign to Major General William Rosecrans, General Braxton Bragg’s Confederate army gathered reinforcements and a numerical advantage, while the Union army brought momentum and higher morale. The authors follow the costly fighting that became a battle of attrition, the roles of commanders such as George H. Thomas, Joe Wheeler, and Joe Hooker, and the mistakes, indecision, and luck that shaped the outcome on both sides. Although the Confederates won the battle, Bragg failed to exploit his victory, allowing the Union army to recover its strength around Chattanooga and inflict heavy losses on his forces. The authors argue that Chickamauga was therefore the Confederate victory that led to Confederate defeat, opening the way for the Union advance to Atlanta and the Atlantic coast.
Michael Irvin defends William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea against the charge that it was a criminal act. Atlanta, the industrial and railroad hub known as the Gate City of the South, fell in September 1864 after months of fighting, giving Lincoln a crucial boost toward re-election. In November, approximately 60,000 Union soldiers left the city for the Atlantic coast, determined to destroy Georgia’s ability and will to support the Confederacy. Irvin explains how Sherman won the approval of a cautious Lincoln and Grant, then follows the march across Georgia to Savannah, where General Hardee chose to evacuate his army into South Carolina rather than lose it. Sherman presented the city to Lincoln as a Christmas gift, complete with heavy guns, ammunition, and twenty-five thousand bales of cotton. Irvin acknowledges that Sherman’s men did things that would be unacceptable today and took more than they needed, but he argues that they committed no war crimes and, for an army moving through hostile territory, treated civilians remarkably well.
Michael Collie questions a long-standing theme in Civil War historiography: that the conflict was the first modern, or total, war. Since the Second World War, many historians have pointed to breech-loading weapons, primitive machine guns, ironclads, balloons, trench warfare, railroads, the telegraph, mass volunteer armies, industrial capacity, and the targeting of civilians as evidence that the Civil War opened a new era. Collie argues that “modern war” is an imprecise idea, since every war is modern in its own time, and that “total war” is properly a twentieth-century concept. Examining tactics, weapons, logistics, economics, and the treatment of civilians, he shows that many supposedly new features had clear precedents in European warfare from the sixteenth century through the Napoleonic Wars, while others were only partly developed in 1861–1865. Drawing on scholars who see the war as essentially old-fashioned, he asks at what point truly modern industrial war was achieved, and suggests that the Civil War was in many ways an old-fashioned war.
Michael Collie investigates who conceived the bold flank march around John Pope’s Army of Virginia in August 1862, the maneuver that led to the Confederate victory at Second Manassas. His starting point is an entry in the wartime journal of Jedediah Hotchkiss, Stonewall Jackson’s topographical engineer. In March 1863, during a visit to J.E.B. Stuart’s headquarters, Hotchkiss recorded Stuart’s remark that Jackson deserved all the credit for the movement around the enemy and that Lee had only very reluctantly consented to it. Collie weighs this evidence against Douglas Southall Freeman’s interpretation, which credited the plan to Lee and dismissed recollections of councils between the two generals as confused memories. Examining the accounts of Hotchkiss, Hunter McGuire, Henry Kyd Douglas, and others, as well as the meaning of Lee’s “consent,” he argues that Freeman’s reasoning is convoluted. Collie concludes that the more likely explanation is that Jackson proposed the movement and Lee agreed to it, although detailed planning and swift execution were essential to its success.
Walter Giersbach tells the story of Timothy Webster, the first Union spy hanged by the Confederacy. Born in England in 1822, Webster grew up in New Jersey, became a New York City policeman, and met Allan Pinkerton while on duty at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1853. He later joined Pinkerton’s detective agency, and when war came he was one of its most valuable operatives. Working with a female agent, Hattie Lewis, who posed as his wife, Webster established himself in Maryland and then in Richmond, where his apparent loyalty to the South won the trust of Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin. Recruited as a courier on the Confederacy’s secret line between Washington, Baltimore, and Richmond, he became a double agent, carrying Confederate messages while reporting to Pinkerton. Giersbach follows his eventual exposure, trial, and grim execution in Richmond, when the rope slipped and he had to be hanged a second time. Pinkerton later declared that no braver or truer man died during the war.
Bryan J. Dickerson examines the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, July 3, 1863, a day usually remembered only for Pickett’s Charge. Placing the battle alongside the fall of Vicksburg as a decisive turning point, he reviews how the first two days of fighting left the attacking and defending armies essentially stalemated, despite Confederate successes in the Wheatfield and Peach Orchard. Dickerson then analyzes four separate attacks made on July 3. Robert E. Lee launched three: renewed morning assaults on Culp’s Hill, the great infantry charge against the Union center, and J.E.B. Stuart’s wide cavalry sweep toward the Union rear. Late in the day, a Union cavalry attack ordered against the Confederate right under Elon Farnsworth also failed. Dickerson shows how defensible terrain and interior lines gave the Union army decisive advantages, while the Army of Northern Virginia lost more than 8,500 men that day. His conclusion is that July 3 was a day on which the defense decisively prevailed, a pattern that extended well beyond Pickett’s famous charge.
Roger Daene recovers the story of Colonel Patrick O’Rorke and the 140th New York, whose role in the defense of Little Round Top at Gettysburg is often overshadowed by Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. History, he observes, is often written by those who survive the battle, and O’Rorke did not. Daene traces O’Rorke’s path to command, including his education at West Point, and explains how the armies converged on the crossroads town of Gettysburg in late June 1863. On July 2, as General Gouverneur K. Warren recognized the danger to the undefended hill, O’Rorke led his regiment up Little Round Top at the critical moment, arriving as the right flank of Colonel Strong Vincent’s brigade began to give way. O’Rorke was mortally wounded leading the charge that stabilized the line. Daene argues that the failure to take the Round Tops helped lead to Pickett’s disastrous assault the next day, and that O’Rorke deserves recognition on a par with Chamberlain and Vincent.
Walter Giersbach follows the improbable Civil War career of Henry Morton Stanley, later famous as the explorer who greeted David Livingstone in Africa. Born John Rowlands in Denbigh, Wales, in 1840, Stanley endured a childhood that included years in a workhouse before making his way to America and settling in Arkansas, where he joined the Dixie Greys of the 6th Arkansas Regiment more for adventure than for patriotism. Giersbach recounts his experience at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, where on the second day he found himself almost alone facing a line of Union soldiers and was taken prisoner. Sent to Camp Douglas outside Chicago, Stanley gained his release by enlisting in the Union artillery, only to be struck down by dysentery. He later served in the Union Navy and observed the attacks on Fort Fisher, writing vivid accounts that newspapers welcomed. By the war’s end, Giersbach shows, Stanley had discovered his two lifelong professions, newspaper correspondent and adventurer, that would eventually take him deep into Africa.
Richard D. Pitts follows the Ringgold Cavalry Company through its first months of Civil War service in the Alleghenies, from June to November 1861. When the war began, the regular army’s handful of cavalry, dragoon, and mounted rifle regiments was scattered across the country, but one independent company was already prepared. Formed in 1847 by residents of Beallsville and Washington County, Pennsylvania, and named for Major Samuel Ringgold, who was mortally wounded at Palo Alto, the company had continued to drill as a militia unit, providing its own horses, equipment, and weapons. Pitts traces how Colonel, later General, Benjamin Franklin Kelley put these experienced horsemen to work in western Virginia, scouting and fighting along steep ridges, narrow valleys, and farm trails, culminating in operations against Romney. These months, he argues, made the Ringgold as proficient as its Confederate opponents and kept it on the front line, preparing it for years of service against partisan rangers and cavalry leaders such as John Imboden and John McCausland.
