North & South

Volume 8

Volume 8, Number 6
November 2005

Web Site

96 Pages

Page 4
Editorial
by Keith Poulter

Page 5
Crossfire

Letters to the Editor

Page 7
Cover Story

Page 8
Al Nofi's Knapsack
by Al Nofi

Al Nofi's Knapsack is a regular column in North & South that features vignettes and other reminiscences of the late War Between the States. In this issue, Nofi covers everything from Edgar Allan Poe's brief time at West Point to the grand nephew of Napoleon to the use of lances during the war.

Page 12
Do You Know?

Page 14
Thinking About The Unthinkable: "Confederate Emancipation" and Its Meaning
by Bruce Levine

Bruce Levine discusses the thinking behind Patrick Cleburne's (and later Robert E. Lee's) proposal to arm slaves to fight for the Confederacy in exchange for their "freedom". I use parentheses for the word freedom because in this article Levine demonstrates that Southern leaders intended to keep firm control of their former slaves, even if they were technically "free". They intended to accomplish this by enacting legislation which forced the penniless and landless blacks to farm the same land they had when they were slaves. With no choice other than to work or starve, blacks would have been forced to function in a slave-like role for a long time to come. Levine even mentions how long Jim Crow laws, and other methods to keep African-Americans down, took to be removed. Not for a full one hundred years did blacks finally begin to be treated on a somewhat equal basis. Levine believes this might have lasted much longer had the Confederacy been allowed their own form of "emancipation".

Page 24
The Battle Of Sabine Pass
by Edward T. Cotham Jr.

On September 8, 1863, Lt. Dick Dowling and 50 Texans turned back a Yankee invasion force many, many times its number, causing two Yankee gunboats to surrender in the process without losing even a single man. Cotham is eminently qualified to write this article, having already had a book published on the subject. He says that Dowling and his Texans "significantly aided the Confederate war effort" with their victory.

Page 36
Civil War Round Table Directory

Page 38
Of Beasts And Barbarities: Newspaper Coverage of the Union Occupation of New Orleans
by Andrew S. Coopersmith

Coopersmith takes a look at northern and southern opinion after the fall of New Orleans through the newspapers of that time.

Page 52
African Americans Resist the Confederacy: Two Variations on a Theme
by Steven H. Newton

Steven Newton writes a two-part article on the resistance of African-Americans in the South. The first part is an essay that uses the African-American population of Richmond as an example of organized black resistance to the Confederacy. In the second part of the article, Newton discusses the theory of "emergence", in which "large numbers of individual actors unconsciously coordinate their actions". This theory formed part of the framework of the essay.

Page 61
Clocks, Camps, And Prisons: Battle Time And The Civil War
by Cheryl A. Wells

In "Clocks, Camps, and Prisons", Wells covers the difficulty soldiers had adjusting to the new realities of time. Soldiers no longer governed what they did. Instead, they were governed by the clock. I enjoyed this one greatly for a non-battle article.

Page 70
The Battle of Pleasant Hill
by Curtis Milbourn and Steve Bounds

This article is especially important given the lack of tactical detail in every single Campaign Study done on the Red River Campaign. This is the third in a series of Red River Campaign battle articles Milbourn has done for North and South. This article details the Battle of Pleasant Hill, the final blow to Banks' campaign and his career as a general.

Page 90
Briefings

Books reviewed in this issue:

1. Retreat from Gettysburg: Lee, Logistics, and the Pennsylvania Campaign by Kent Masterson Brown
2. The Confederacy On Trial: The Piracy And Sequestration Cases Of 1861 by Mark A. Weitz
3. The Confederate Navy by John M. Coski
4. The Last Generation : Young Virginians in Peace, War, and Reunion by Peter S. Carmichael
5. The Mysterious Private Thompson : The Double Life of Sarah Emma Edmonds, Civil War Soldier by Laura Leedy Gansler
6. Through Ordinary Eyes: The Civil War Correspondence Of Rufus Robbins, Private, 7th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers by Rufus Robbins, Ella Jane Bruen (Introduction), Brian M. Fitzgibbons (Introduction), Jon Wakelyn (Editor)
7. I Hope to Do My Country Service: The Civil War Letters of John Bennitt, M.D., Surgeon, 19th Michigan Infantry ed. by Robert Beasecker
8. Glory Was Not Their Companion: The Twenty-Sixth New York Volunteer Infantry In the Civil War by Paul Taylor
9. I Belonged to the 116th: A Narrative of the 116th Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War by Gerald L. Earley

 

Page 96
Field Report
by Robert Lee Hodge

This edition of the preservation report details the recent successes at Franklin Battlefield in Tennessee.