Here’s a summary for Volume 8, Number 6 of North & South magazine. For those of you who have never read an issue, I consider this, along with Blue & Gray, to be the two best Civil War magazines today. (Note: I haven’t seen much of Gettysburg Magazine, which I hear is excellent from everyone I’ve talked to.) North & South features extensive endnotes, highly detailed maps (including topographical lines in many cases), and a who’s who of current authors. I hope to make these short summaries of each issue of North & South and the other Civil War magazines I subscribe to a regular feature of the blog. Feel free to add any comments on articles if they are of interest to you.
| Page 8 |
| Albert A. Nofi’s Knapsack |
| 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 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 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 |
| Page 96 |
| Field Report by Robert Lee Hodge |
| This edition of the preservation report details the recent successes at Franklin Battlefield in Tennessee. |
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