Expanding Freeman’s Confederate Bookshelf

 

   In 1939, Douglas Southall Freeman gave a series of lectures at Alabama College. These lectures were “an informal historiography” to the writings of Confederate history. There was probably no better person to provide this glimpse than Dr. Freeman. He had already finished his four-volume Pulitzer-winning R.E. Lee, and was hard at work on Lee’s Lieutenants. Later, his lectures were edited and published as The South to Posterity.

  Through these nine chapters, the subject of what had been written to that date was examined. Freeman examines letters penned home during the war, along with books and journals published in that frame of time. Chapter II covers those items written “while the ashes still smoldered,” (31) like Alexander Stephen’s Constitutional View of the Late War, Alfred Bledsoe’s Is Davis a Traitor, and Robert Dabney’s Life and Campaigns of Lieut. Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. Chapter III looks at tomes published on the life of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Of course, Freeman would have intimate knowledge of the subject, having spent years working on his own four-volume study.

   Freeman labeled Chapter IV “Controversy and Apologia,” an examination of the “savage controversies of the war” in which former generals engaged via post-war writings. Familiar names abound: Jubal Early, Joseph E. Johnston, John Bell Hood, Fitz Lee, James Longstreet, Jefferson Davis, P.G.T. Beauregard. And of course there are the journals and newspapers where these new battles were waged: The Southern Historical Society Papers, Century Magazine (Battles and Leaders), Philadelphia Weekly Times, New Orleans Republican. Chapter 5 gives a history of the publication of the War of the Rebellion: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Commonly referred to as the Official Records, or ORs, this 128-volume set, published by the United States government, radically changed the scholarship, both North and South. While there are gaps and materials found later, researchers had tens of thousands of documents written during the war at their fingertips. Chapter VI looks at the war through the writings of women. Freeman mentions Judith McGuire’s Diary of a Refugee, Phoebe Pember’s A Southern Woman’s Story, and Mary Chesnut’s A Diary from Dixie, among others. Chapter VII examines the writings of those from overseas, while Chapter VIII looks at more sentimental treatments of generals. Freeman wrote that by 1900, Confederate veterans had forgotten the diseases that ravaged camps, the lack of water on long marches, the “hunger of Vicksburg,” (171), and, the “ghastly picture of Malvern Hill on the morning after the battle,” (170). Freeman considered these books “charming and therefore dangerous reading.” (172)

   Finally, Dr. Freeman concluded with “Yet to be Written.” Freeman hoped for new biographies on James Longstreet, Albert Sidney Johnson, Richard Ewell, Joseph E. Johnston, and A. P. Hill. “The greatest gap in Confederate military history. . . concerns the Army of Tennessee,” wrote Freeman. “Scarcely less is the need of a comprehensive book on the Confederate service of supply. The work of the Mining and Nitre Bureau, of the Ordnance Bureau and of the Quartermaster’s office remains to be described in satisfying detail.” (199-200) Freeman believed there still needed to be books on blockade running, Southern-railroads, economics of war-time farm management, Southern women and the war, the psychosis of war.

   So, how do we stack up? What holes have been filed in Freeman’s Confederate bookshelf? Freeman would probably be pleased to know that Stanley Horn wrote The Army of Tennessee (1941), followed by Thomas L. Connelly’s two volume set on the Army of Tennessee, released in 1967. Added to this is Larry J. Daniel’s Soldiering in the Army of Tennessee (1991) and Andrew Haughton’s Training, Tactics and Leadership in the Confederate Army of Tennessee (2000). There are, of course, now biographies on Richard Taylor, Joe Shelby, Joe Wheeler, Gideon J. Pillow, Matthew Butler, Patrick Cleburne, Nathan Bedford Forrest, States Rights Gist, William H. T. Walker, even Braxton Bragg. (Ok, some of the above list is more Trans-Mississippi than Army of Tennessee.) There are, of course, many battle studies of the Western Theater, from Cozzens, to Powell, to Bradley. Freeman never really dives into that discussion, as his criteria is a strictly Confederate bookshelf.  

   There are biographies on all of the generals that Freeman mentions, even A.P. Hill. Actually, there are two on Hill, and many on Joe Johnston. There are even biographies on some of the division and brigade commanders as well, like William Dorsey Pender, Daniel Harvey Hill, Robert Rodes, Stephen D. Ramseur, “Extra Billy” Smith, Matt Ransom, Roger Pryor, William Wofford, Joseph B. Palmer, W.W. Loring.

   Freeman did not really feel qualified to essay on naval aspects of the war, but that field has improved as well. Hamilton Cochran’s Blockade Runners of the Confederacy (1958) and Stephen R. Wise’s Lifeline of the Confederacy (1988) have recently graced my own desk. There are even a couple of studies on Confederate marines: The Confederate States Marine Corps (1989) by Ralph Donnelly and Biographical Sketches of the Commissioned Officers of the Confederate States Marine Corps (1973) by David M. Sullivan.

   Readers may find books on several different Southern railroads, but a good general history is Robert C. Black III’s The Railroads of the Confederacy (1998). Along those lines would be R. Douglas Hurt’s Agriculture and the Confederacy (2015); Ella Lonn’s Salt as a Factor in the Confederacy (1965); Harold S. Wilson’s Confederate Industry: Manufactures and Quartermasters in the Civil War (2002); and Richard Goff’s Confederate Supply (1969). Ella Lonn also wrote Foreigners in the Confederacy (1940). Bell Irvin Wiley released The Life of Johnny Reb in 1943. Wiley published several other important works, including Southern Negroes, 1861-1865 (1938), The Plain People of the Confederacy (1943), and Confederate Women: beyond the Petticoat (1975). I would also add to this list The Confederate Negro: Virginia’s Craftsmen and Military Laborers, 1861-1865, William Robinson, Jr.’s Justice in Gray (1941), Jack Bunch’s Military Justice in the Confederate States (2000), Kenneth Radley’s Rebel Watchdog: The Confederate States Army Provost Guard (1989), J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr.,’s Buff Facings and Gilt Buttons: Staff and Headquarters Operations in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 (1998), and H.H. Cunningham’s Doctors in Gray (1958) There are undoubtedly other books that should be added to this list, probably some that I have owned and read, that simply did not cross my mind while putting together this list. (Please feel free to add them in the comments).

Freeman in his study. 

   A question we now need to consider is this: what areas still need to be covered? What is still in the “Yet to be Written” category? I think there is a lot of work still to be done on the Confederate medical corps. There are some really good books that look at both sides, but we really need a book on the army- level medical corps. I believe that there are huge gaps in state-wide and regional coverage or place histories (for example, there is still no book on Raleigh and the war). A lot of the state-wide books we use were written 50+ years ago, although Virginia did a great job with their five-volume set released during the sesquicentennial. We also really need more books on the Confederate Congress and Congressmen/Senators. That is really just a hole in the scholarship. They translate to the state level as well. There are many books on North Carolina governor Zebulon Baird Vance, but none on the state’s general assembly or supreme court.

   To be honest, there are not a lot of us out there writing solely Confederate history. There are some really good area-specific histories being written, just not much strictly on Confederates. A biography on some general appears every couple of years, usually a rehash of something done in the past, maybe a regimental every year, but that’s about it. In today’s society, where so much primary source material is available online, there should be more. But alas, there is not. Thankfully, scholars have filled in many of the gaps in scholarship pointed out by Douglas Southall Freeman.