Grant lays siege to Vicksburg: “For nobody else believed in it!”

Guest blog post by Brooks D. Simpson, professor of history, Arizona State University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series was published earlier this month.

It had been a long and difficult winter for Ulysses S. Grant. For months his army had struggled in the bayous and swamps around Vicksburg, Mississippi, looking for some way to attack the Confederate citadel that blocked Union control of the Mississippi River. He had come under heavy criticism from many quarters, including some of his own subordinates. One of his corps commanders, the politically connected former congressman John A. McClernand, was busily intriguing to replace him by writing to President Lincoln about his shortcomings. Rumors circulated that Grant was drunk, stupid, or both. Newspaper reporters and editors freely abused him, and the authorities at Washington had dispatched several emissaries whose mission included finding out exactly what was going on in the Army of the Tennessee.

With the coming of spring, however, the roads and the levees began to dry, allowing Grant to make the move he had wanted to undertake since his arrival opposite Vicksburg at the end of January. Once Union gunboats and transports ran pass the batteries defending Vicksburg, Grant would move south, cross the Mississippi, and secure a foothold on dry land that would finally allow him to advance against the enemy citadel. He was aware that much depended upon the success of this maneuver. “I am doing my best and am full of hope for complete success,” he wrote to his father. Although he was aware of the criticism directed at him, “I have no idea of being driven to do a desperate or foolish act by the howlings of the press.” If he was to be removed from command, so be it; until then, he would continue to try “to put down the rebellion in the shortest possible time without expecting or desiring any other recognition than a quiet approval of my course.”¹

The course Grant took over the next month won him more than quiet approval: his campaign against Vicksburg is hailed today as a military masterpiece. Crossing the Mississippi on April 30, the lead elements of Grant’s command defeated a Confederate force at Port Gibson, Mississippi, the following day. As Iowa soldier Taylor Peirce recalled in a letter home, “when the victory was complete you ought to have heard the shout that rung out on the evening air. It was enough to pay us for all our fatigues and dangers.”² Two weeks later Grant entered the state capital at Jackson and drove off the Confederate forces gathering there before turning to face John C. Pemberton’s army east of Vicksburg. At Champion Hill on May 16 and Big Black River on May 17 Union forces scored decisive triumphs, driving Pemberton’s men back into the city. After two attempts to take Vicksburg by assault failed, Grant settled down on May 22 to lay siege to the city and its 30,000 defenders.

Within three weeks in May Grant had won five battles. Outnumbered at the outset of the campaign, he had beaten back two Confederate forces as they had attempted to converge on his army and annihilate it. His men lived off the land as they marched through the Mississippi countryside, while a flustered foe flailed away in an effort to sever non-existent supply lines (Grant had wagon convoys move his army’s medical supplies and munitions). Now he had Vicksburg and its defenders by the throat. William T. Sherman, who earlier had expressed his doubts about the operation, greeted his commander warmly as blue-clad soldiers crossed the Big Black River, declaring, “General Grant, I want to congratulate you on the success of your great plan. And it is ‘your plan,’ too, by heaven, and nobody else’s. For nobody else believed in it!”³

Back in Washington, Grant received an even more important seal of approval. “Whether Gen. Grant shall or shall not consummate the capture of Vicksburg, his campaign from the beginning of this month up to the twenty second day of it, is one of the most brilliant in the world,” Abraham Lincoln wrote to an Illinois congressman who had been critical of his military appointments.⁴ A few weeks later, the President declared that if Grant succeeded in opening the Mississippi, “why, Grant is my man and I am his the rest of the war!”

Little did Lincoln know when he thus spoke that Ulysses S. Grant had entered Vicksburg the previous day, July 4, 1863. Grant had bagged an entire Confederate army for the second time in the war. The President had found his general.

¹ Ulysses S. Grant to Jesse Root Grant, April 21, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 152.
² Taylor Peirce to Catharine Peirce, May 4, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 187.
³ James F. Rusling, Men and Things I Saw in Civil War Days (1899), 140.
⁴ Abraham Lincoln to Isaac N. Arnold, May 26, 1863, in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings 1859–1865 (The Library of America, 1989), 449.
⁵ James F. Rusling, ibid., 17.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson (April 30–May 6, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves” (March 31, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)

Historian Donald R. Hickey discusses how America’s “forgotten” war shaped our young nation

Donald R. Hickey, author of The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, spoke with us about the recent publication of the latest Library of America volume, The War of 1812: Writings from America’s Second War of Independence.

In your introduction you call the War of 1812 America’s “most obscure war.” Why is this?

This war has long been a forgotten conflict for several reasons. The causes don’t resonate with people today because nations no longer go to war over neutral rights. Who today understands the finer points of the British Orders-in-Council (which barred American trade with the European Continent, then dominated by Napoleon) or impressment (which was the Royal Navy’s practice of conscripting men from American merchant ships)? The outcome is also in dispute. The war ended in a draw on the battlefield, but scholars are still debating who really won. Beyond that, we don’t have a great president associated with the war. James Madison was shy and retiring, not the sort of person to fire the nation’s imagination in time of war. It is ironic that this war gets lost in the public memory because it left a huge legacy that shaped the nation. It gave us Andrew Jackson and the Battle of New Orleans, the national anthem and Uncle Sam, the Kentucky Rifle and “Old Ironsides,” a new respect for the national flag, and enduring sayings like “Don’t give up the ship!” and “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

What can a reader glean from reading these contemporary, firsthand accounts that a narrative history of the war doesn’t convey?

You get a real sense of immediacy, a sense that whatever is being described has just happened. Timing was important in this war. Unbeknownst to Congress, as it was voting to declare war—for the first time in U.S. history, no less—the British government was preparing to suspend the Orders-in-Council, which had established the very trade regulations that so offended Americans. But because it usually took six or eight weeks for news to cross the Atlantic, Americans had no inkling of this critical change in British policy. Similarly, at the war’s end, word arrived almost simultaneously of Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, the report of the Hartford Convention (a major statement of Federalist discontent with the war), and the signing of the peace treaty. The effect of this remarkable convergence of news was to burnish the notion that the U.S. had won the war and dictated the peace and to forever discredit the opposition party. By putting us in the thick of things as the news breaks, this book reminds us that history is often shaped by accident, chance, and even mistakes.

Reading the documents also helps us appreciate how effective certain leaders were. Jackson, for example, got a lot more out of the nation’s independent-minded frontier volunteer militia than anyone else could because, quite simply, they feared him more than the enemy. And with good reason, for on more than one occasion he threatened to personally shoot anyone who left camp because his term of service appeared to be up, and he did not hesitate to execute recalcitrant militia (see pp. 406–8). Likewise, we see young John C. Calhoun effectively marshal the arguments for war in his report from the House Committee on Foreign Relations recommending a declaration of war (pp. 10–22).

How do you think this collection might affect a reader’s views of such famous historical figures as James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Tecumseh, Thomas Jefferson, Dolley Madison, the Duke of Wellington?

The book gives readers deep insight into their characters. Tecumseh has such a commanding presence that even his arch-enemy, William Henry Harrison, called him “one of those uncommon geniuses, which spring up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things,” and when we read the great Shawnee leader’s speeches we see why (pp. 27–29, 323–24). Dolley Madison sacrifices her personal property to save vital government papers (p. 506). And Wellington has the wisdom to tell the British to end the American war (pp. 602–5).

The collection opens with vehement opposition and bloody rioting provoked by news of the U.S. declaration of war. Why was the War of 1812 so controversial?

It’s worth remembering that World War II, when just about everyone rallied around the flag, is the exception in our history, not the rule. Almost every other war, from the Revolution to the recent wars in the Middle East, has generated considerable opposition. That makes them a lot tougher to win, but that’s the price we pay for democracy. In the case of the War of 1812, Americans were not yet sure that opposing a war was really legitimate. That’s why Republicans in the summer of 1812 tried to silence Federalist opponents of the conflict with violence or threats of violence. But this was counter-productive in that it only hardened Federalist opposition to the war. Most Federalists considered the war unjust (why target innocent Canada and why go to war against a European nation that was fighting to uphold western civilization against Napoleonic tyranny?) and unwise (why seek concessions on maritime issues that the British would never make?).

There are a number of pieces by and about Indians. How significant was their role in the conflict?

Very. Most of the Indians in the Old Northwest sided with the British, and they played a crucial role in helping the British beat back American invasions early in the war. They were great scouts, trackers, and skirmishers, and their mere presence on the battlefield could panic an enemy force. They were not, however, always a dependable force. They were especially averse to casualties and could disappear in a New York minute if they sensed the battle was going badly or even before it began if they thought it might go badly. This was in many ways an important turning point for the Indians, the last time they played such an important role in any war, the last time they could count on a European ally. Scholars may dispute who won the war, but just about everyone agrees that the Indians were the greatest losers.

Do you think this book will be viewed differently in Canada than it is in the United States?

Yes. Canadians have a much better public memory of this war because, whether they admit it or not, it was their war of independence. If they had lost, Canada might have been swallowed up by the United States. Plus, they don’t have as many other big wars as we have and thus their heroes from this war loom much larger in their history. For Americans, the War of 1812 is one of many wars, overshadowed in the public memory by both the American Revolution and Civil War.

Most astonishing facts about the War of 1812?

The persistent and intense opposition of the Federalists, who laid out their case in a public document issued at the beginning of the war and then again in the report of the Hartford Convention near the end (pp. 46–53, 648–65). No less astonishing is the number of deaths that we can attribute to the conflict. U.S. battle casualties were light, around 2,300 killed in combat. But if you add in all those serving (especially in the militia or on privateers) who died of disease, as many as 20,000 Americans lost their lives as a direct result of this war. Relative to our population today, that would be over 800,000 deaths.

Most important discovery you made in course of assembling the book.

Probably how much material there was to choose from. It’s only when you try to assemble a collection like this that you realize the staggering number of documents that have survived. You also get a real sense for how difficult it was to move men and material through the wilderness, which is why offensive operations usually failed in this war. It was much easier to defend a fortified position near your supply lines than to overrun an enemy post at the other end of a crude or non-existent wilderness road.

Document you think readers will find most surprising.

I think readers might be surprised to learn that at the beginning of the war Jefferson suggested to Madison that Federalist opponents might have to be kept in check with tar and feathers or perhaps even lynch law and how the federal government needed to allow trade with the enemy to keep the war popular (pp. 44–45).

Personal favorites among the selections or writers in the book.

Whenever Federalists criticized the war, I find it compelling because, it seems to me, they were so often on the mark. They had a better sense of how difficult, probably impossible, it was for the United States to force the British to give up maritime practices, especially impressment, that were considered vital to maintaining their naval power and their war effort against France. I also like the handbill publicizing Francis Scott Key’s lyrics commemorating the defense of Fort McHenry. It was initially entitled “Defence of Fort M’Henry” rather than “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the headnote has a lot of detail about how the lyrics came to be written (pp. 544–46). Also among my favorites are Thomas Boyle’s proclamation of a mock blockade of the British Isles (pp. 533–34), and the arresting descriptions of the carnage at Horseshoe Bend, Lundy’s Lane, and New Orleans (pp. 409–11, 457–64, 666–78).

The Library of America’s Best-Selling Titles (2013 update)

Two years ago we listed The Library of America’s all-time best-selling titles, and we thought readers might enjoy seeing an update. Below are our current Top 15 titles, based on the total number of copies sold through all channels (including retail stores, book club sales, and our mail-order subscription program) since the first volume appeared in 1982.

LOA All-Time Best-Selling Titles

1. Thomas Jefferson: Writings [1984]
2. Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings [1982]
3. Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings 1832-1865 [two volumes, 1989]
4. Walt Whitman: Poetry & Prose [1982]
5. Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod [1985]
6. The Debate on the Constitution [two volumes, 1993]
7. Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays [1995]
8. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters [1990]
9. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays & Lectures [1983]
10. Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works [1988]
11. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry & Tales [1984]
12. Thomas Paine: Collected Writings [1995]
13. Jack London: Novels & Stories [1982]
14. William Faulkner: Novels 1930–1935 [1985]
15. Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman [1990]

Readers comparing the old with the new chart will notice there hasn’t been much movement in the rankings—except for a noteworthy surge two years ago in sales of the Ulysses S. Grant biography. (In the new list, the two-volume Lincoln and Debate on the Constitution sets take up only one slot, since both were released at about the same time—and each volume in the set has sold similar quantities.)

Of course, the methodology of the above list favors titles that have been out longer; the most “recent” title in the top 15 was published in 1995. Readers might be interested seeing which “backlist titles” (i.e., volumes published prior to 2011) sold the most copies last year, in 2012. Here are the Top 15 titles:

LOA 2012 Backlist Best-Sellers

1. The Philip K. Dick Collection [three volumes, 2007–2009]
2. American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau [2008]
3. Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works [1988]
4. Raymond Carver: Collected Stories [2009]
5. H. P. Lovecraft: Tales [2005]
6. Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America [2004]
7. Jack Kerouac: Road Novels 1957–1960 [2007]
8. Dashiell Hammett: Complete Novels [1999]
9. American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s [two volumes, 1997]
10. Thomas Paine: Collected Writings [1995]
11. The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams [two volumes, 2000]
12. Thomas Jefferson: Writings [1984]
13. John Muir: Nature Writings [1997]
14. Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters [1990]
15. Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose and Plays [1995]

All told, the 241 titles in the Library of America series now have 8.7 million copies in print.

The Battle of Chancellorsville, and the Death of Stonewall Jackson

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series will be published this week.

The bloody Union defeat at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in December 1862 and the aborted “Mud March” along the Rappahannock River the following month demoralized the Army of the Potomac and caused a widespread loss of confidence in its commander, Ambrose Burnside. On January 26, 1863, President Lincoln replaced Burnside with Joseph Hooker, who reorganized the army’s command structure and raised its morale by improving camp conditions, providing better food, and granting furloughs. With 134,000 men under his command, on April 27 Hooker began an offensive designed to drive Lee out of his defensive positions along the Rappahannock and force him either to retreat or fight on open ground. While one wing of his army prepared to cross the Rappahannock at Fredericksburg, Hooker sent the other wing upriver to turn Lee’s left flank. By April 30 Hooker’s flanking force had crossed the Rappahannock and Rapidan rivers and reached Chancellorsville, a crossroads clearing ten miles west of Fredericksburg in the midst of an area of scrub woods and dense undergrowth known as the Wilderness. Captain Charles F. Morse, a staff officer with the Twelfth Corps, recalled that when Hooker reached Chancellorsville that evening, the Union commander said “in the most extravagant, vehement terms” that “he had got the rebels, how he was going to crush them, annihilate them, etc.”¹

Surprised by Hooker’s adroit movement, Lee nonetheless responded audaciously by dividing his already outnumbered army of 60,000 men. Leaving 10,000 troops to defend Fredericksburg against the Union forces that had crossed the Rappahannock just below the city, he sent Thomas J. (Stonewall) Jackson and the remainder of his men to oppose the Union forces advancing from the west. On May 1 the two sides fought at the edge of the Wilderness, three miles east of Chancellorsville. When Hooker withdrew his men to defensive positions around the Chancellorsville clearing, Lee and Jackson decided to again divide their forces and seize the initiative. While Lee kept 14,000 men to face the 70,000 Union troops at Chancellorsville, Jackson marched 33,000 men twelve miles through the Wilderness on May 2 and struck at Hooker’s exposed right flank. “We loaded & started in run yelling & soon saw the blue rascals running like turkeys & our men—shooting, cheering, & pursuing as fast as they could,” wrote Alabama infantryman Samuel Pickens. “When Yanks got behind hill or breastwk they would stop & shoot & minute or two—but as our men would come charging upon them they’d be off again.”² Jackson’s men drove the Union right wing back toward Chancellorsville until night fell. Seeking to continue his offensive, Jackson rode forward in the darkness and was accidentally shot by his own men.

On the morning of May 3 Lee attacked the Union forces around the Chancellorsville clearing. “The rebels came up to the attack in solid masses and got within three hundred yards, but they were slaughtered by the hundreds by the case-shot and canister, and were driven back to the woods,” Morse wrote.³ Union Captain Samuel W. Fiske was taken prisoner in the dense undergrowth. As Fiske and his guard made their way toward the Confederate rear, they had to step “among mangled corpses of friend and foe, past men without limbs and limbs without men.”⁴ After several hours of intense fighting Hooker withdrew to a new defensive position closer to the Rappahannock as Lee learned that Union troops under John Sedgwick had captured Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg and were advancing on Chancellorsville.

Leaving about 20,000 men to face Hooker, Lee attacked Sedgwick on May 4 at Salem Church, four miles west of Fredericksburg. After an inconclusive battle, Sedgwick withdrew across the Rappahannock on the night of May 4. Hooker retreated across the river the following night, ending a campaign in which the Union lost about 17,000 men killed, wounded, or missing, and the Confederates about 13,000. Among the dead was Stonewall Jackson, who died from his wounds on May 10. On her North Carolina plantation Catherine Edmondston mourned “the nation’s idol,” who had died in “the brightness of his glory, a Christian patriot, unselfish, untiring, with no thought but for his country, no aim but for her advancement.”⁵

Many in the Army of the Potomac believed that the campaign had shown Hooker to be without “the qualities necessary for a general.”⁶ Nevertheless, Hooker’s failure did not markedly change the strategic situation. Despite Lee’s triumph, the Army of the Potomac was still encamped on the northern bank of the Rappahannock, only sixty miles from Richmond. Lee’s desire to drive it away from the Confederate capital, and his renewed confidence in the Army of Northern Virginia, would soon cause him to look north toward Pennsylvania.

¹ Charles F. Morse to His Family, May 7, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 196.
² Samuel Pickens: Diary, May 1–3, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 175.
³ Charles F. Morse to His Family, May 7, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 200.
⁴ Samuel W. Fiske to the Springfield Republican, May 9, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 206–07.
⁵ Catherine Edmondston: Diary, May 5–7, 9, and 10–11, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 194.
⁶ Charles F. Morse to His Family, May 7, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 203.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves” (March 31, 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)

Curt Meine on the powerful lyricism of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and the continuing appeal of his essays and journals

Curt Meine, author of the definitive biography Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work, spoke with us about the recent publication of the latest Library of America volume, Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation.

Why should people read Aldo Leopold? What’s his particular relevance today?

For decades people have read Aldo Leopold because his writing continually delights us, informs us, and challenges us. He was a gifted prose stylist, a keen thinker, a meticulous observer of the natural world, and a brilliant synthesizer of insights from literature, science, history, and philosophy. Often compared to Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Rachel Carson, Leopold was among the first to see the significance of the emerging science of ecology for our stewardship of the land. And he thought of “land” expansively. In his essay “Land-Use and Democracy” (1942), he defined it as the “soils, waters, plants, animals, and people.” He recognized that conservation was not just a technical or economic pursuit, but inherently a matter of ethics as well—of our relationships to one another, and our relationships to the natural world. In that sense he is the key figure bridging the early conservation movement and the modern environmental movement, and his comprehensive approach remains directly relevant to current debates involving sustainability, resilience, and community well-being.

What does Leopold mean by “thinking like a mountain”?

Leopold’s essay of that name is among his best known. In it he explores the “hidden meaning” that he found in his youthful killing of a mother wolf, a profound experience he recounts in A Sand County Almanac. The phrase memorably distilled Leopold’s mature understanding that if we are to achieve a healthier relationship with the land that supports us all, we need to reflect deeply and durably about the natural world, its evolutionary history and ecological complexity, and the changing roles and responsibilities of human beings within it. It was his call to be both humble and expansive as we do so.

What is the relationship between Leopold’s various activities—as a U.S. Forest Service ranger and land manager, hunter and fisherman, advocate and teacher, restorer of the land in Wisconsin’s sand counties—and his writing?

It was all of a piece. Throughout his life Leopold sought to connect his outdoor experience and actions to broader concepts and ideas—and to communicate his insights to varied audiences. But as he matured, and thought much more consciously about the role of the writer in gathering what he once called the “cultural harvest” of the land, the lyrical voice of Sand County emerged. That voice was the fully integrated expression of Leopold’s active personal and professional life, his commitment as a communicator, and his contemplative temperament.

What do the selections from Leopold’s journals included in the LOA collection say about him as man and writer?

In his journals, which Leopold kept from 1917 until his death in 1948, the reader finds the raw materials behind Leopold’s more finished prose. They show Leopold as an extraordinarily dedicated recorder of his outdoor activities and of natural phenomena. His journals were not primarily literary in character; they were his sportsman’s and naturalist’s notebooks. But it is hard to imagine Leopold the writer apart from Leopold the disciplined outdoorsman, observer, and naturalist!

Leopold is revered among environmentalists but somewhat less familiar to general readers. Why?

Leopold has long been labeled a “nature writer”—a term that can both connect and confine his writing to a particular reading audience. And as we as a society have become increasingly removed from the reality of the land and its history, his voice can seem more remote, even “old-fashioned.” Yet, for those seeking to explore and rethink our relationship to land and the Earth, that voice remains as relevant and fresh and provocative as ever. In his celebrated essay “The Land Ethic,” he calls upon his readers to become active participants in the “thinking community” through which an ethic evolves. That invitation remains open to us today.

The LOA collection includes a large selection of Leopold’s letters, almost all of them previously unpublished. How do these letters add to or alter our understanding of Leopold?

I think the letters give the reader what I as a Leopold biographer had: access to a more personal, more immediate, sense of the human being behind Sand County. They reveal in more intimate terms Leopold’s personal development and professional relationships. More than a few of them illustrate Leopold’s willingness to take controversial political positions on behalf of conservation. They enrich the reader’s appreciation of his talents and his flaws, his humor and his opinions, his passions and his commitments.

Do you have a favorite piece in the collection?

Of course that changes every time I open the cover again to read Leopold! But I have always especially appreciated a three-paragraph bit of manuscript that we have included called “Wilderness” (p. 375). Leopold wrote it in 1935 when he was visiting Germany. In it he ponders the “inevitable fusion” in our understanding of the dynamics of nature and human culture, calling it potentially “the outstanding advance of the present century.” That process of “fusion” continues, the need is as important as ever, and Leopold remains a sound and stimulating guide as we try to find our way forward.

General Henry Halleck writes to General Ulysses Grant: “The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves”

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It. The third volume of the series just arrived from the printer this past week and will be in bookstores on May 2.

On March 31, 1863, Henry W. Halleck wrote an “unofficial letter” to Ulysses S. Grant “as a personal friend and as a matter of friendly advice.”¹ As is often the case in communications between a superior and his subordinate—Halleck was general-in-chief of the Union army, Grant the commander of the Army of Tennessee—the “friendly advice” concerned serious matters: the policy of the Lincoln administration toward slavery and emancipation, the obligation of military officers to faithfully execute government policy, and the essential nature of the war against the Confederacy.

From the beginning of the conflict slaves had sought freedom by seeking refuge with the Union army. In May 1861 General Benjamin F. Butler made the ad hoc decision to shelter fugitives who fled to Union lines from their work on Confederate fortifications. His actions received legislative endorsement in August of that year when Congress passed a confiscation act emancipating slaves being used to militarily aid the rebellion. But the confiscation act provided no guidance as to how the army should treat fugitives from the border states, or escaped slaves from the seceded states whose owners professed loyalty to the Union. In March 1862 Congress adopted a new article of war prohibiting military and naval officers from returning fugitives.

Left unresolved was the question of whether the army should actively encourage slaves to come within its lines, or to what extent the Union should embrace emancipation as a means of war. Many conservatives officers abhorred the notion of waging war against slavery. In a letter he presented to President Lincoln on July 8, 1862, George B. McClellan, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, insisted that “the forcible abolition of slavery” should not “be contemplated for a moment,” and warned that any “declaration of radical views, especially upon slavery, will rapidly disintegrate our present Armies.” The war, McClellan wrote, “should not be, at all, a War upon population; but against armed forces and political organizations.”² When Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, McClellan described it as “inaugurating servile war” in a letter to a prominent New York Democrat.³

Halleck, unlike McClellan, accepted the necessity of emancipation as a war measure, and wanted to make sure that Grant accepted it as well. Believing that his army could neither provide for nor safely transport black refugees, Grant had issued orders on February 12, 1863, prohibiting them from coming into the Union camps along the Mississippi near Vicksburg. In his “unofficial letter,” Halleck bluntly expressed what the administration now expected: “It is the policy of the Government to withdraw from the enemy as much productive labor as possible. So long as the rebels retain and employ their slaves in producing grains, &c., they can employ all the whites in the field. Every slave withdrawn from the enemy is equivalent to a white man put hors de combat.” Grant was to “withdraw from the use of the enemy all the slaves you can,” and to employ them as laborers, teamsters, cooks, and, “as far as practicable,” as soldiers.⁴ It was Grant’s responsibility to see that administration policy was carried out, irrespective of the personal opinions of the officers under his command, and to appreciate the urgent nature of the struggle they were now engaged in:

The character of the war has very much changed within the last year. There is now no possible hope of reconciliation with the rebels. The Union party in the South is virtually destroyed. There can be no peace but that which is forced by the sword. We must conquer the rebels or be conquered by them. The North must conquer the slave oligarchy or become slaves themselves—the manufacturers mere “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to Southern aristocrats.⁵

Grant complied with Halleck’s directives, reversing his earlier instructions excluding fugitives from the army lines and energetically assisting Adjutant General Lorenzo Thomas in his efforts to recruit black troops in the Mississippi Valley. Unlike McClellan, Grant increasingly understood that the Confederacy could not be defeated by a war waged purely “against armed forces and political organizations,” but only by a war aimed at the foundations of southern society.

¹ Henry W. Halleck to Ulysses S. Grant, March 31, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 107.
² George B. McClellan to Abraham Lincoln, July 7, 1862, in The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It, 307–08.
³ George B. McClellan to William H. Aspinwall, September 26, 1862, in The Civil War: The Second Year, 540.
⁴ Henry W. Halleck to Ulysses S. Grant, March 31, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year, 105–06.
⁵ Ibid., 106.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)
• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)

Having Roth's Cake and Eating It Too

Above is the elaborate birthday cake created for Philip Roth's 80th birthday celebration at the Newark Museum this past Tuesday.

The event was recapped by Charles McGrath in The New York Times:

On Tuesday evening, before the cake cutting, fellow writers spoke in praise of Mr. Roth in the museum auditorium. The novelist Jonathan Lethem compared a love of Mr. Roth’s work to a kind of illness, “a long readerly sickness,” and he said that all those in the auditorium were his “fellow-sanatorium inmates.” Hermione Lee, the scholar and biographer, talked about Shakespearean themes in Roth, and Alain Finkielkraut, the French philosopher spoke about the tragedy of chance and randomness in Mr. Roth’s novel Nemesis.

In time for his birthday celebration, The Library of America recently completed the definitive nine-volume edition of his works. This Saturday morning, NPR’s Weekend Edition will broadcast host Scott Simon’s interview with Philip Roth.

Blake Bailey on “the versatility and breadth of achievement” of Philip Roth’s fiction and the challenge of writing his biography

Photograph by Mary Brinkmeyer

Last September Blake Bailey (the prize-winning biographer of Richard Yates and John Cheever) announced that he had agreed to write Philip Roth’s authorized biography, with unfettered access to the writer’s archives and correspondence. To commemorate the publication of the last two volumes of The Library of America’s definitive Philip Roth edition (Novels 2001–2007 and Nemeses), he spoke with us recently about Roth’s later works and how he will—and will not—approach the task of writing the biography.

Philip Roth’s career has been marked by a remarkable series of reinventions and transformations: the great breakthrough of Portnoy’s Complaint in the late 60s, the Zuckerman trilogy/epilogue in the late 70s and 80s, the masterpiece Sabbath’s Theater, the American Trilogy in the late 90s. Amazingly, at the age of sixty-eight, he then goes on in the next ten years to write the seven books published in these two Library of America volumes. What do you make of this accomplishment, and what in American or world letters would you compare with it?

In terms of versatility and breadth of achievement, I don’t think there is much to compare it with. Saul Bellow evolved in interesting ways over the course of his career, but once he hit his stride with The Adventures of Augie March, the style of his mature work was consistently, recognizably Bellovian. Cheever’s work changed remarkably—largely for the better—over the course of his long career: reading The Stories of John Cheever, Bellow remarked that he could “see the transformation taking place on the printed page.”
 
Then there’s Roth. Six years ago, The New York Times Book Review canvassed some two hundred “writers, critics, editors, and other literary sages,” asking them to identify the “single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years.” Six of the twenty-two books selected for the final list were written by Roth: Operation Shylock, The Counterlife, Sabbath’s Theater, American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. But of course Roth’s career extends—in both directions—well beyond the twenty-five years prescribed by the Times survey, and includes arguably his two most famous (if not his best) books, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). That first book is a delightful satire about Jewish suburban life at mid-century, but one could hardly predict, reading it, that its author would go on to write such incisive and essentially tragic novels as American Pastoral, The Human Stain, and Everyman.
 
The Library of America volume Nemeses gathers the four short novels Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, and Nemesis together for the first time as a single work, as Roth conceived them. How do you see this work in relation to what comes before, for example to the Zuckerman quartet and American Trilogy?

Mostly as a tightening of the lens on Roth’s part. The first and last books of the Zuckerman quartet, The Ghost Writer and The Prague Orgy, are shorter than most of the novels in the Nemeses group, but are very much components of a larger work—a work that was always conceived with the ending in mind: namely, Zuckerman’s discovery of the plight of dissident writers in Czechoslovakia, where literature is all the more potent because it’s repressed by the state, which of course forces Zuckerman to reconsider his own travails in terms of a global perspective. The American Trilogy features non-literary protagonists who all, in different ways, run afoul of the insidious forces of postwar American life, from McCarthyism to its ironical, latter-day equivalent, political correctness, and of course the canvas of each novel is vast. The Nemeses books focus on how a particular character responds to certain aspects of his mortality; time and place are important, of course—especially in the cases of Indignation and Nemesis—but mostly serve as a framework for the hero’s solitary predicament. Oh, and some say the Nemeses books lack the usual Rothian humor, but I’m not sure I agree. The humor’s there, all right, but more quietly so.

What do you make of Roth’s surprising venture, in A Plot Against America, into “alternative history,” a genre that isn’t often the domain of literary novelists. What do you think attracted him to this genre?

Roth remembers his childhood in the Weequahic section of Newark as mostly idyllic. The neighborhood was almost entirely Jewish, all his friends lived nearby and would gather at his house, which his kindly, competent parents made a very gemütlich place to visit. Also, Weequahic High School was one of the best in the state: full of high-achieving, second-generation Jewish kids who were eager to make their doting parents proud of them. Later, as Roth became more aware of rabid anti-Semitism (not to say the insecurity it provoked in Jews of his parents’ generation), I think he appreciated all the more just how fortunate a childhood he’d had, and how tenuous it was in many ways. Charles Lindbergh was an anti-Semite who openly chided the Jews for getting America into the war; he was a national hero who was especially admired by his fellow isolationists on the right. The pervasive anti-Semitism of war-time America was a potential tinderbox that certain demagogues such as the despicable Father Coughlin, say, might have liked to ignite. So what if the match had been struck by a Lindbergh presidency? It’s an irresistible question, and we should be grateful our greatest living novelist saw fit to address it. 

Do you have a personal favorite among these late works?
 
I’m very partial to Everyman. A masterpiece, I think.
 
What do you think about Philip Roth’s announcement of his retirement?
 
I’m happy because I think he’s happy. As recently as five years ago, retirement would have been out of the question because he still had another two or three books he wanted to write. Now he’s finished, and he has a mountain of richly deserved laurels to rest on. He’s earned the chance to be dans le vrai, as his beloved Flaubert would have it.

As a biographer, how do you compete with a writer who has so thoroughly and brilliantly transmuted his life into his work? And how do you feel about the rather unflattering portrayal of biographer Richard Kliman in Exit Ghost? There’s a sense in that book that biographers can overstep their bounds, and that to do so is a kind of ethical offense, an outrage even. Does this make you nervous?
 
No, it doesn’t make me nervous at all. Whatever my other faults, I’m not the kind of biographer that Kliman is. Kliman takes hold of a rumor that he thinks will explain everything, the life and the work, and it’s a nasty little rumor—that E. I. Lonoff, Zuckerman’s revered mentor, had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister. Whether this is true or not is beside the point: no human life—much less that of a great artist—can be explained with a single theory, a nasty little rumor, that becomes for people like Kliman a strand to which everything else is attached, and what can’t be attached is swept under the rug. The result is a lot of tendentious psychobabble, and Roth despises psychobabble and pat conclusions very much in general. What I try to do as a biographer is learn everything, or anyway as much as possible, and then determine what the main themes (plural) are, and how they relate (if at all) to the work and vice versa. The themes are multifarious, the contradictions are vast, and to what extent can they be resolved? That’s the good biographer’s task. As for “competing” with Roth, I’m doing nothing of the sort. It’s apples and oranges. As you say, he “transmuted” his life into the work, and if anything I’m doing the opposite.

Roth will celebrate his eightieth birthday this month in Newark, the city that may be the essential touchstone of his career. What does Newark tell us about Roth, and what does Philip Roth’s Newark tell us about America? 

Plenty, as I hope more and more readers will discover in the centuries ahead. For now, let us all pause a moment on March 19 and raise a glass to Philip Roth on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. He has gotten his work done, and the world is a better place for it.

“A very pleasant dinner”: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Louis Agassiz, and friends

Guest blog post by Christoph Irmscher, professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of the recently published biography, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.

I collect rare books and manuscripts. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that I would like to collect rare books and manuscripts. I make my living as a college professor, which means that there are strict limits to what I can (or ought to) buy. A few years ago, I acquired, for not very much money, a letter written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Louis Agassiz, sent from Longfellow’s house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Mass., to Agassiz’s house on Quincy Street, also in Cambridge, on June 17, 1867. The letter covers only one sheet, one half of a bifold with the other half (neatly) torn off. In the upper left corner, there is the embossed seal of “Delarue & Co.,” a London stationer and printer that had been in business since 1821. The letter is written in ink, in Longfellow’s characteristic handwriting—so straight and capable, leaning neither much to the left nor much to the right, that William Dean Howells felt compelled to compare it to Longfellow’s poetry: even-handed, safe, not given to extremes of feeling, aiming for the comfortable middle-ground where author and reader meet in mutual recognition.

My little letter didn’t have to travel far to reach its recipient, and what it says is so unremarkable that you might well wonder why I decided to buy it in the first place:

My dear Agassiz,
     It will give me great pleasure, as ever, to dine with you on Tuesday.
          Always Yours
          Henry W. Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to
Louis Agassiz, 17 June 1867,
Collection of Christoph Irmscher.
[Click to enlarge]

The letter presents no problems to the transcriber, with the exception perhaps of the European-looking “1” in “17,” which differs from the “1” in “1867” (it was not unusual, however, for Longfellow to write it both ways). June 17, 1867, the day he wrote the note, was a Monday. Longfellow’s unpublished journal gives us the barest indication of what else he did that day: as happened so frequently, an unbidden visitor showed up at his house, a young lawyer named Budd, carrying a letter of introduction from the well-known Philadelphia editor Samuel Allibone. Mr. Budd, with the sense of cheerful entitlement that seemed to come naturally to many of Longfellow’s uninvited guests, stayed on for dinner. The next day, Tuesday, June 18, the British publisher George Routledge dropped by (“much talk about books”). The weather was lovely, so Longfellow later in the afternoon would have walked to dinner at Agassiz’s house, past Appleton Chapel, across the leafy grounds of Harvard College.

Despite the considerable dents Darwin and his friends had made into his reputation, Agassiz, professor of natural history in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard University, was still one of the world’s most famous scientists. A staunch anti-evolutionist and believer in the separate creation of all things living and dead, including the human races, Agassiz had returned just the year before from a massive specimen-collecting expedition along the Amazon River and had quickly become a kind of self-declared expert on Brazilian–American relations. He now served as the spiritual godfather for a host of emigrants who, disgusted with Reconstruction, turned their backs on the newly reunited United States to seek their luck in the more reliably retrograde racial climate of the Brazilian empire. That afternoon at Agassiz’s house (among the Boston Brahmin, what we call “dinner” and they regarded as “supper” usually took place later in the evening), the departing Brazilian ambassador, Joaquim Maria Nascentes de Azambuja, had joined the party, as had Longfellow’s closest friend, the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner. “A very pleasant dinner,” Longfellow noted in his journal, with the characteristic refusal to share salient details that is a hallmark of his journal-writing.

A very pleasant dinner? How could it have been so, given that the conversation, with the ambassador in attendance, would very likely have turned to race? Slavery in Brazil was not officially ended before 1888, and Emerson and others report in their journals that Agassiz would inevitably broach the topic of race relations—and the allegedly detrimental effects of racial mixing—whenever someone as much as breathed the word “Brazil.” Awkwardly, Longfellow, whose account books show that he gave a considerable part of his income to ex-slaves and their supporters, vehemently disagreed with Agassiz on racial matters, as did Sumner (who actually felt that interbreeding would improve the impoverished genetic stock of whites).

What Longfellow’s letters and journals do not reveal, his poetry often barely hints at, but when it does so, it is hard to forget. After Agassiz died in December 1873, his powerful body holding on for days after his mind had already crumbled, Longfellow wrote an untitled sonnet commemorating his friend, without ever mentioning him by name. Imagining himself alone on the beach at Nahant, where Agassiz had maintained a seaside laboratory, Longfellow hears the ocean bemoan his dead friend’s absence, even as the rest of nature, from the rocks to the trees to the weeds at the bottom of the sea, acknowledges that Longfellow is still there.

I stand again on the familiar shore,
          And hear the waves of the distracted sea
          Piteously calling and lamenting thee,
          And waiting restless at thy cottage door.
The rocks, the sea-weed on the ocean floor,
          The willows in the meadow, and the free
          Wild winds of the Atlantic welcome me;
          Then why shouldst thou be dead, and come no more?

This is the point where, in the traditional Italian sonnet, the volta (literally, a “jump”) would mark a turning point, a new beginning. But the finality of Agassiz’s death makes such a dramatic shift impossible, and so the sestet picks up simply where the octet left off, with Longfellow’s lines twice spilling over into the next one:

Ah, why shouldst thou be dead, when common men
          Are busy with their trivial affairs,
          Having and holding? Why, when thou hadst read
Nature’s mysterious manuscript, and then
          Wast ready to reveal the truth it bears,
          Why art thou silent? Why shouldst thou be dead?

Louis Agassiz at the blackboard,
Carte-de-visite, ca. 1862.
Austin Augustus Turner, photographer.
Autographed by Louis Agassiz.
Collection of Christoph Irmscher

The agonizing refrain, an outburst really, “Why shouldst thou be dead?” is repeated three times in the crowded space of the sonnet, a moving testimony to the bereft poet’s helplessness in the face of death. But the intensity of this question, fanned by the wild winds of the Atlantic, also throws into bold relief Agassiz’s brazen confidence that science (practiced the way he thought proper) would allow him to uncover, once and for all, the meaning of the Book of Nature. Now it turns out that nature is doing fine without Agassiz there to inform us what it all means. Louis Agassiz, the great would-be decipherer of nature’s mysteries, was gone, forever gone. Yet men’s trivial affairs—the eating of meals, the visiting of friends, the writing of letters—continued, hour after hour, and day after day, the whole dreary business of living in a world where we “have and hold,” where we cling to our possessions as if none of this could ever end: a world Longfellow knew all about, a world that had produced that little note I bought, a world that, even when someone has died, at first gently, then relentlessly, tugs us back into ordinariness. What if there was no great secret to reveal, no final truth to tell?

We don’t know what, if anything, Longfellow, seated next to the Brazilian ambassador, said or felt on that warm summer afternoon at Agassiz’s Quincy Street house. But we do know that, a week later, on June 26, his translation of Dante’s Paradiso appeared in the bookstores, a tribute to the living light, “ever changing as I changed.”

* * *

Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Rebecca Stott praised Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science, noting that although men like Agassiz are often difficult to like, “irreconcilable contradictions make for interesting biographies. . . . Irmscher is a richly descriptive writer with an eye for detail, the complexities and contradictions of character, and the workings of institutional and familial power structures.” Professor Irmscher also edited John James Audubon: Writings & Drawings for The Library of America. You can read more about Agassiz’s life and influence at Irmscher’s blog.

Related posts from Reader’s Almanac
• Christoph Irmscher on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his beloved wife, Fanny

Vallandigham Denounces the Draft (February 23, 1863)

Guest blog post by Aaron Sheehan-Dean, Eberly Family Professor of Civil War History at West Virginia University and one of the co-editors of The Library of America's four-volume series, The Civil War: Told by Those Who Lived It (the first two volumes of which have appeared; the third will appear this spring).

What is the proper way for Americans to express political opposition to an ongoing war? How can the party out of power maintain its own identity without appearing disloyal? Can party members oppose the conflict itself and still proclaim themselves patriots? These questions pressed themselves on the Federalists during the War of 1812 and the Whigs during the U.S.–Mexican War and have recurred in recent years, but they took on a special urgency for northern Democrats during the Civil War. (Because a political party system never emerged in the Confederacy, opposition to the war in the South developed differently than in the North.) By the fall of 1862 the party had divided into “War” and “Peace” factions. While some War Democrats accepted the necessity of attacking slavery, most remained steadfastly opposed to emancipation and hoped that military success would result in the restoration of the Union “as it was.” The Peace Democrats went further, declaring the war to be a failure and asserting that the Union could be saved only through negotiations with the seceded states. In the aftermath of the Union’s bloody humiliation at Fredericksburg, the Peace Democrats were emboldened to call for an armistice with the Confederacy while they used the Emancipation Proclamation to incite fears in the North about the supposed social, political, and economic threat posed by free blacks.

Just as Democrats condemned Lincoln as a tyrant who violated the Constitution in order to elevate blacks above whites, Republicans excoriated antiwar Democrats, calling them “Copperheads,” venomous snakes that strike without warning. In early 1863 George Templeton Strong, the treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, lamented the “way the Dirt-Eaters and Copperheads and sympathizers and compromisers are coming out on the surface of society, like ugly petechiæ and vibices, shows that the nation is suffering from a most putrescent state of the national blood.”¹ In response to this diagnosis, some Republicans proposed a radical cure: Isaac Funk, a member of the Illinois senate, urged that “these traitors on this floor should be provided with hempen collars. They deserve them. They deserve hanging, I say, the country would be the better of swinging them up.”² This sentiment was echoed by soldiers who watched the off-year elections for state offices and read Democratic newspapers with increasing dismay and anger. In Pennsylvania the chief justice of the state supreme court, George W. Woodward, denounced emancipation and ruled conscription unconstitutional. A Pennsylvania officer wrote home to warn the Copperheads that if they “inaugurate rebellion in the North, they will find a mighty army of patriots ready to crush them to the earth. Mark that!”³

The draft, as much as emancipation, inspired the ire of antiwar activists. They regarded the resort to conscription, never used in previous American wars, as evidence that Lincoln had lost popular support. Conscription conjured up images of European tyrants who used impressment to build standing armies that oppressed their own citizens. The most vociferous opponent of the draft was Ohio congressman (and future gubernatorial candidate) Clement L. Vallandigham. In a widely-quoted speech in February 1863, Vallandigham argued that the draft was nothing more than “a bill to abrogate the Constitution, the repeal all existing laws, to destroy all rights, to strike down the judiciary, and erect upon the ruins of civil and political liberty a stupendous superstructure of despotism.” And all, in Vallandigham’s view, “to secure freedom to the black man.”⁴

Vallandigham lost his bid for governor and eventually disappeared from view, but his excesses tarred Democrats with a stain they could not erase. Many Democrats supported the conflict—including Lincoln’s secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton—and condemned the rhetoric of the antiwar wing, but Republican charges of treason weakened the party over time. For years after the war, Republicans continued to “wave the bloody shirt,” reminding northern voters of the sacrifices soldiers had made to save the Union despite the disloyalty of Democrats. From 1860 to 1932, only two Democrats—Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson—were elected to the presidency, a stunningly rapid and enduring fall from grace for what had been the dominant party throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Not all the Democrats’ postbellum electoral misfortunes can be blamed on the Copperheads, but the party’s failures in the Civil War revealed the perils that still await political dissenters in wartime.

¹ George Templeton Strong: Diary, February 3–5, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It, ed. Brooks D. Simpson (Library of America, forthcoming, 2013).
² Isaac Funk: Speech in the Illinois State Senate, February 14, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.
³ George Fisher McFarland to the Warren Mail, April 11, 1863, quoted in Timothy Orr, “‘A Viler Enemy in Our Rear’: Pennsylvania Soldiers Confront the North’s Antiwar Movement,” in The View from the Ground: Experiences of Civil War Soldiers, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 180.
⁴ Clement L. Vallandigham: Speech in Congress, February 23, 1863, in The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It.

(This item is cross-posted at Civil War 150, cosponsored by The Library of America, The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and the National Endowment of the Humanities)

Recent Reader's Almanac posts on the Civil War

• Brooks D. Simpson: The “Mud March” of the Army of the Potomac (January 1863)
• Aaron Sheehan-Dean: Lincoln’s Cabinet crisis (December 1862)