TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog

Although we Americans think of our Civil War as the defining war of the 19th Century, the Europeans were quite active in killing each other as well. I came across these casualty figures in an old book and thought I’d post them for comparison. The first conflict referred to is the German-Danish War; the second the Austro-Prussian War; and the third the Franco-Prussian War. The “mitrailleuse” referred to at the bottom is a sort of French machinegun used in that war. In all except the Franco-Prussian War you see that the vast majority of casualties were caused by musketry, just as they were in the Civil War. What’s different in that conflict is the percentage of French casualties (25%) caused by the highly efficient Krupp artillery.

The Franco-Prussian War ended Napoleon III’s career and empire. He and his entire army were defeated and captured at the Battle of Sedan, and the Second Empire fell shortly thereafter, putting him in the unemployment line. I mention this because he is seen now as an almost comic figure in European history, but prior to the US Civil War, and especially after his victories in Italy, he was seen as a sort of military oracle whose every pronouncement was considered the last word on the subject. As far as hardware goes, he is credited with spurring the development of a 12-pounder gun-howitzer that bore his name as well as the long range rifle. After his defeat the European military center of gravity shifted to Prussia. Unlike the extended and indecisive fighting so characteristic of the American Civil War, Prussia scored knockout victories in each of these wars in a matter of months after one or two decisive battles.

The latest History Carnival (#66) is out at Progressive Historians.  There is not quite as much Civil War content as usual, but as always there are tons of interesting blog entries to read.  Go check it out!

Bradley Gottfried. The Maps of Gettysburg: The Gettysburg Campaign, June 3 - July 13, 1863. Savas Beatie (June 2007). 384 pp., XX maps, notes, index. ISBN: 978-1932714302 $34.99 (Hardcover w/DJ).

Bradley Gottfried. Brigades of Gettysburg: The Union and Confederate Brigades at the Battle of Gettysburg. Da Capo Press (December 24, 2002). 704 pp., XX maps, notes, index. ISBN: 978-0306811753 $50.00 (Hardcover w/DJ).

Larry Tagg. The Generals of Gettysburg: The Leaders Of America’s Greatest Battle. Da Capo Press (June 17, 2003). 384 pp., XX maps, index. ISBN: 978-0306812422 $19.00 (Paperback).

Sometimes books just go together well, doing in tandem what each individually is incapable of alone. This definitely applies to the three books I’ll be discussing today. Bradley Gottfried’s books The Maps of Gettysburg and Brigades of Gettysburg obviously can be used together. Throw in Larry Tagg’s The Generals of Gettysburg and you have a nice beginner’s triumvirate of Gettysburg knowledge at your fingertips. I’ll spend some time briefly discussing each below and then give you some ideas of how to use them together.

I came up with this idea on my own while working on a freelance Gettysburg project, but I know I saw a similar Civil War blog post within the last several months. I meant to mention that blogger as well but I cannot find it now. If you are that Civil War blogger or if you know who the blogger is, let me know so I can credit them in this space.

Larry Tagg’s The Generals of Gettysburg is a valuable starting point to explore the various leaders who commanded elements of the armies at Gettysburg. Tagg breaks each army down and covers all leaders from army commanders down to the brigade level. Despite the title, the author does give the same attention to colonels as he does to other brigade leaders. If more than one leader commanded an organization, Tagg typically includes the events for a given unit under that leader as well, though he goes into less detail. I was a little concerned with the lack of notes in the book, as well as the typos scattered throughout. Despite these shortcomings, however, I find the book to be a useful starting point for studying the battle of Gettysburg in some detail.

Brigades of Gettysburg is Bradley Gottfried’s first book we’ll cover today. Gottfried goes into great detail for each brigade, Union and Confederate, on the field of battle. Each unit gets several pages and covers movements and actions down to the regimental level. In addition, the battle is not discussed in a vacuum. Gottfried gives readers information on each regiment, covering the history of each unit including earlier performances in battle and how each regiment could be expected to perform going into Gettysburg. Many readers make the mistake that brigades were homogeneous organizations, especially if the regiments are from the same state. While this might be true to some extent in some organizations (see Sickles’ Excelsior Brigade from New York, for instance), for the vast majority it was not. Some regiments had seen combat at First Bull Run, others had been called up in the late summer of 1862, and still others had seen no combat whatsoever. Many times these units of varying quality and experience would be brigaded together. Brigades of Gettysburg does discuss the commanders of each unit to some extent, but not to the level of detail of Tagg’s book. The fact that the book does cover even units which saw little or no participation in the fighting makes it a very useful one for wargamers.

The first thing I found myself thinking (and the reason this blog entry came about) while reading Brigades of Gettysburg was, “I wish there were more maps!” Lucky for me, I had just received Gottfried’s newer work, The Maps of Gettysburg. This book basically covers in map form what Brigades of Gettysburg did with text. Gottfried does what so many publishers and authors seem incapable of. He puts the maps not only NEAR the corresponding text; he places the maps on the page facing that text. This makes it easy for a reader to easily comprehend at a glance what is going on. The maps are beautiful and cover the battle in the level of detail I prefer. Gottfried covers the entire Gettysburg Campaign from the beginning to end, a nice change of pace from books focusing solely on July 1-3. For this reason, the scale of each map varies considerably. Obviously those maps representing tactical situations are going to be more “zoomed in” than those which display troop locations for a given day early or late in the campaign. The book looks like it would make a nice companion to tote along on a visit to the battlefield. I would only recommend against it if you are a collector like me and want to keep the book in pristine condition. Ted Savas also has hinted several times that future battles will be covered this way, including Chickamauga.

I know by now you are probably wondering how I read these three together. My idea is to read these in tandem, utilizing a desk or table with plenty of room. I realize I’m not alone here, I’ve heard of several other people using this method with this set of three books. Keep The Maps of Gettysburg open to your right or left. It will be supplementing your reading of the other two books. I started by reading The Generals of Gettysburg from Army of the Potomac commander George G. Meade and followed until I had gone through the entries for I Corps commander John Reynolds and First Division commander James Wadsworth, finally reaching Iron Brigade commander Solomon Meredith. This is where the reading in tandem starts. After reading the Meredith entry, which gave me a good overview of what the Iron Brigade did, I then read the Iron Brigade’s entry in Brigades of Gettysburg. While reading, I flipped through The Maps of Gettysburg, showing me on detailed maps where the regiments was located during the fighting. This method worked surprisingly well, and I suggest if you own all three you should do the same. If you own one or two, buy the others you need and give it a try. Gettysburg is unique in that this many books exist to pair up.

Let me know if you’ve used other books in a somewhat similar way. I’d love to hear about them!

Professor Sasha Volokh of Georgetown University would like your recommendation for a good general history of the Civil War. Who can resist a request like that?

The Washington Post’s Jonathan Yardley reviews Julia Keller’s Dr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel: The Gun That Changed Everything and the Misunderstood Genius Who Invented It.

“For all of Richard Jordan Gatling’s cool-headed technical finesse and businessman’s brio, he actually came up with his gun, he claimed, for the most tender-hearted of reasons: as a way of saving lives. ‘It occurred to me,’ he wrote to a friend in 1877, ‘that if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.’ As disingenuous and self-serving as that sentiment sounds, it ended up being quite correct: Innovations in arms steadily reduced the relative lethality of battles (not to mention the cost of waging war) throughout the twentieth century.”

Questionable, I’d say. Hard to say that WWI and II were less lethal, even if they were fought at longer ranges. Yadley notes that Keller is “given to broad strokes, sweeping generalizations, large claims and overheated prose.” Still, there were a couple of interesting tidbits, one being that probably the first “combat” use of the Gatling gun was when three of them protected the offices of the New York Times from mobs during the draft riots in the summer of 1863. These were private purchases (at $1000 each, about the cost of a Whitworth rifle), back in the Good Old Days when private citizens could own automatic weapons. Today’s NYT management has considerably different views on the matter.

And finally, Gene Hackman did make it to Asheville to flack his Civil War book, but I missed it due to family commitments. You can see the photo gallery here (no direct link, you’ll have to scroll down). The gentleman with Hackman is one of Asheville’s characters, Rev. H. K. Edgerton, who likes to promote Confederate heritage.

After a long and sometimes frustrating day of getting some things back to normal on Monday, I will probably just take a break until Wednesday, post then, and take another break for the holiday weekend.  That’s not to say you won’t see more posts.  It’s all I want to promise at this time though until I know more.  Thanks again for your patience and understanding.

Just a quick note to let everyone know TOCWOC is back online.  My web host had a server failure and lost not only the last few days of posts for me but also my scheduled posts for the next two weeks.  I have most of that information still available, but it is going to take some time to get it into the format I had it in.  I hope to have a new post up by Tuesday some time and to get all of the inevitable “kinks” out of the blog by the weekend.  I already have noticed several plugins working oddly.  Needless to say I’m not happy right now.  Bear with me folks and I’ll be back on track soon!

Here’s another Odds & Ends for a Saturday.  Regular posts will resume on Monday.

• Help “badfish20″ pick out a Civil War wargame that fits his needs.

• The London Times explains “[w]hy Times reports in 1863 were a shade unreliable”.

• Check out High Water Mark, a FREE set of Civil War wargames rules.

• Eric Jacobson, author of For Cause and For Country, talks about Cleburne’s controverisal proposal to arm slaves in 1864

• It’s pretty easy to use John Sedgwick’s quote shortly before his death as an example of irony!

• Scott Mingus asks the question, “Do you game with Native American AWC troops?“

• A review of This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War by James McPherson appears on War and Game.

• A JLC web site was recently launched by Bowdoin College.  If you don’t know who JLC is, count your blessings.  You have not been severely overexposed to Gettysburg like many of us.

• A review of AGEod’s American Civil War

• General Bartlett YouTube film

I’d like to take a moment to welcome Josh M. over at the new Civil War blog Student of the Civil War.  Josh is a graduate student at Rutgers University.  The blog has been around since February, so a hat tip is due to Tom at Touch the Elbow for discovering this fresh fish.  As I often do when welcoming a new member to the Civil War blogosphere, I’ve included Josh’s welcome message on his blog in its entirety:

I started this blog as a forum for me to write about the area of history that interests me the most; the Civil War. I have been a student of this war for years. The first history books I read were about this war and now, as a graduate history student, I am specializing in this time period.

I will use this blog to examine various new trends in schools of thought among Civil War historians. At times i will review new or classic works on the war. I will post news stories related to the war and will also try to present the lighter side of the war. Civil War memory is another topic that will garner much attention on this blog.

The posts that follow were originally posted on my other blog, entitled Publius

Enjoy,

Josh

Welcome to the group Josh!  I’ve added a link to Student of the Civil War to the right.  Go check it out!

I’m pleased to present a short interview with the lead programmer for Birth of America and AGEod’s American Civil War Philippe Malacher, well known as Pocus on the AGEod forums. Pocus was gracious enough to take some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about the game and the company. I greatly appreciate it.

Question #1: As many readers know, AGEod is based in France. Despite a European setting, the first two AGEod game cover American wars, including Birth of America (about the Revolutionary War/French and Indian War) and of course AGEod’s American Civil War. Why did you choose to portray these two conflicts first, and how do you decide what game topics you are going to cover next?

There are a number of reasons actually. The two main ones are that when we designed and developed Birth of America or American Civil War, there was no recent operational-level PC game on the subject especially true for BOA), so naturally, we wondered if something of interest to players (and to us, we are players also!) could be done! Also, from a pragmatic perspective, we needed, within the frame of our incremental engine development philosophy a binary, mainly continental conflict without too much need for an economic system. BOA, and to a lesser extent AACW, fitted the bill perfectly. And so the plan for the games was conceived.

Question #2: AGEod has won numerous awards for the game engine used in Birth of America and AGEod’s American Civil War. In searching the web, the response to your games is almost entirely positive. You’ve even impressed the notoriously hard to please grognards over at the Wargames-Historical newsgroup! In your view, what makes your games so popular with wargamers?

I think it has to do (partly at least) with how we design the mechanics of our games. Too often, game developers don’t go back to the reality behind game concepts they implement. By force of habit, they will reuse something which is already a well established mechanism in others games and adapt it to their own game. On the contrary, we start with a blank slate to do each feature, in an historical yet fun way. A typical example is how conscription recruitment was done in the ACW. People were called en masse and not continuously every week. So basically, you have to think of a system where you get rare but massive amount of conscripts points. And thus we created the options to call for volunteers. Where the fun begins is that you can ‘pay’ these volunteers, as it was done historically. This rethinking of some of the basics of wargames is perhaps one of the things which has pleased people, because they feel things fall into place naturally.

Question #3: AGEod has greatly impressed me with your willingness to incorporate mods into new patches for AGEod’s American Civil War and al of your other wargames. Gray-Lensman’s Railroad Mod, in which he has done an amazing amount of research trying to recreate the railroad network across America circa 1861, is one example. Some game companies would not only fail to recognize his hard work, they would frown on it. Why did you make your game engine so moddable, and why do you view mods and modders with such a favorable eye?

In my opinion, it’s important to understand that releasing a game is only the beginning of the adventure. Once this is done, beyond the usual bug fixing, caring about the players’ feedback is instrumental in the quality of the evolving game. You can’t possibly think about everything and it’s a question of humility somehow to understand that hundreds of people who will spend their evenings reenacting the maneuvers of G. Washington or the offensives of Lee can see things that you missed. This doesn’t mean that the developers don’t have a clear vision of their game from the start, though!

Louisiana State University has a digital collection of documents on line, some of which are about the Civil War. Of particular interest is a photograph album covering the years 1862-1900, in which are many Confederate portraits, such as this one of Captain B. R. Chinn of the 9th Louisiana Battalion.

There’s another collection of period lantern slides (John Langdon Ward Magic Lantern Slides) that has images like this one of the soldiers of the Tenth Regiment, Corps D’Afrique, as well as many photographs from the siege of Port Hudson.

And, in Maryland, an extensive collection of virtually very kind of document found in the attic of a plantation family who apparently never threw anything away. The letters, documents, and records go from the 1660s through the mid 1940s. A researcher’s dream come true.

Perhaps most strikingly, letters tell of a family’s torn allegiances during the Civil War. The Emorys lived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, across Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, where the plantation economy of the South ended and the abolitionist industrial North began.

It was a conflict the Emorys catalogued, anti-slavery petitions stacked alongside records of slaves sent to Natchez, Miss., and a packet of letters, still tied in silk ribbon, titled, “Correspondence with W.H. Emory and wife in regard to his resignation from U.S. Army, 1861.”

The Emorys owned slaves, but some signed an 1832 petition to the Maryland legislature calling for the gradual eradication of slavery.

One family member, William H. Emory, was a colonel in the U.S. Army when the Civil War began. He wrote out a resignation of his post, then changed his mind and fought for the Union.

Two sons also fought in the Civil War - one for the Union, one for the Confederacy. Bundles of letters from all family members detail their divided feelings. The family kept not just personal letters, but political posters about the conflict.