v1.1.1 / chapter 93 of 93 / 01 sep 07 / greg goebel / public domain
* This book has a convoluted history. I had a slight interest in the Civil War in my boyhood, back in the 1960s, focused on the unusual and intriguing ironclads used by both sides. I didn't get interested again until the mid-1980s, when for a year or two I eagerly read books on the Civil War. My interest faded for a few years, but around 1990 it was partially revived by Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series on PBS TV. Burns' documentary had featured commentaries by Shelby Foote, well-known Civil War historian and a most charming and engaging "propah" Mississippi gentleman. I eventually picked up his three-volume Civil War history, and found it very entertaining.
However, after reading it and other books I found that I could not clearly remember the details. In the summer of 1994 I decided to write an outline history of the war, arranged in a more structured and chronological order than the Civil War histories I had read, just to get the facts straight in my head. I estimated it would take me a year or two to write and would be about the equivalent of 300 pages long. By the beginning of 1997 I had written roughly 650 pages and was only up to April 1863. The work had clearly gone out of control and no longer felt rewarding. I set it aside to work on other projects.
The incomplete Civil War history remained archived for exactly two years. On the first day of 1999 I retrieved the material I had written, hoping to render it down to less detail so that I could complete the work in a year or so. Somehow the writing quickly went out of control again, and I found myself in the same rut as before. I was compelled to write down the details to a state of completeness that I found satisfactory; nothing less would do. I gave up any hope of finishing the work on a particular schedule, and decided to keep on writing until it was finished to my satisfaction, no matter how long it took. By the end of 1999, after indecisive fumbling with the document for much of the year, I was back on track. I was finally able to release the v1.0.0 version in the spring of 2003.
* In my technical writings, my usual policy on weights and measures is to use metric first and provide English measures in parentheses. However, since English measures were universal in America in the 1860s, using metric first would have been a little jarring, particularly when quoting contemporary figures. As a result, in this work I use English first and metric in parentheses.
As far as sources go, this document relies mainly on a handful of popular histories of the war. I used Bruce Catton's CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR to write initial outlines for the chapters, with some backup from his ARMY OF THE POTOMAC. The primary source for fleshing the outlines out with details was, as described above, Shelby Foote's three-volume THE CIVIL WAR, with the TIME-LIFE series of books on the Civil War used in parallel to add details and obtain alternative interpretations of events.
From the initial release I have added various bits and pieces, such as the list of biographical data at the end of the document. I ignored James McPherson's BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM for several years after the initial release, thinking that McPherson's book wouldn't cover much that I hadn't seen elsewhere, but I finally picked it up out of curiosity. It is a dry. academic book, strongly oriented towards politics and economics, but on reading it I had to acknowledge that my coverage of prewar events leading up to the conflict left much to be desired, and it also had a much stronger grasp of wartime political issues. I ended up expanding my text from front to back.
* I keep thinking that I'm done with the subject but I keep finding more to include; the online Wikipedia has proven an excellent source of clarification on endless small matters. I occasionally run across interesting books that suggest my views on things need some modification.
In particular, I've had to rewrite parts in light of the ideas of Confederate apologists, notions I wasn't aware of when I wrote the first release. While it's no surprise or cause for objection that there are organizations that commemorate the Confederacy and have a pro-Confederate outlook, it is startling to find that anyone could believe the Civil War wasn't caused by slavery; claim that large numbers of black folk fought as active combatants for the Confederacy; or even propose with a straight face the fantasy that the South should take another shot at secession.
It is understandable that Southerners resent the fact that slavery continues to be thrown in their faces, regardless of the fact that no living Southerner has ever kept slaves and that, slavery being common in history, it's a good bet that any person on the planet, regardless of their ethnicity, has an ancestor someplace in the family tree who kept slaves. It isn't even necessary to be a Southerner to be annoyed at the popular notion that the North's war against the South was a noble crusade to free the slaves, which as this document shows was, by even the most positive appraisal consistent with the facts, a half-truth at best. However, believing that slavery had nothing to do with the war and that black folk fought for the Confederacy requires a tunnel-vision focus on convenient evidence and a bland disregard of the inconvenient -- the sort of reasoning by which, as Lincoln put it, a horse chestnut can be made into a chestnut horse.
Incidentally, it turns out that there is another group of Civil War contrarians: libertarians, who take a dim view of the Lincoln Administration's massive expansion of Federal powers. Such folk are not so much pro-Confederate as they are anti-Lincoln, and as a rule they don't claim the war wasn't about slavery, much less say that black men fought for the Confederacy.
* Along with the work of writing, trying to even proofread and maintain such a large document is a labor in itself, and I sometimes wonder if I would have even started if I knew how much effort it was going to be. Of course I would: once I get the feeling that I need to write something up, I end up being forced to do so no matter how much labor it ends up being.
* Revision history:
v1.0.0 / 01 may 03 / gvg / Original 88-chapter release.
v1.0.1 / 01 aug 04 / gvg / Minor cosmetic update.
v1.0.2 / 01 mar 06 / gvg / Cleanup, more postwar material, 89 chapters.
v1.1.0 / 01 jan 07 / gvg / Added prewar material, 93 chapters.
v1.1.1 / 01 sep 07 / gvg / General polishing.