The Civil War First-Hand

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY

WATCH OUT for these Civil War books. They will keep you at home nights, but away from your family. No other sector of our history takes hold as does this time when we fought ourselves right through to three hundred thousand deaths.

The best way, I think, is to take this history straight - from the pens of the men who were there. Old soldiers never lie, or at least they have to try to tell the truth, without any New York City tricks.

U. S. Grant wrote his Memoirs to pay his debts when he was dying. Those two volumes are blunt, serious and revealing. Grant captured three Confederate armies, despite all his stumbling.

Horace Porter was on Grant's staff. His picture (Campaigning with Grant) of the stubby, silent general sitting on a tree stump whittling while the bullets whiz is hard to forget.

Sherman's Memoirs are even better than Grant's. His two volumes were "Written by Himself." No ghost-writer could have manicured Sherman's forthright coverage. "Uncle Billy" was a thinking general and fundamentally a merciful man. The surrender terms he offered to "Joe" Johnston show that Sherman was nothing like the ogre still denounced in Georgia.

"Joe" Johnston wrote his own Narrative of Military Operations, a rather stiff-styled book defending his own record. But "Joe" Johnston really needed no defense. He was a masterful tactician - almost as great a general as his friend and classmate, R. E. Lee.

Don't miss Longstreet's From Manassasto Appomattox. James Longstreet was a mulish but wise leader. He balked whenever General Lee grew rash. But "Old Pete" joined the Republicans after the war. That one act ostracized him in the South. Southern authors are still prone to put the blame on Longstreet for other men's mistakes.

Among all the Rebel generals, Jubal A. Early (Autobiographical Sketch and Narrative of the War Between the States) was the boldest and the roughest. He led his boys — in 1864 — "up to the very walls of the Federal Capital" and saw "no reason to regret" his cold-blooded burning of Chambersburg. Read "Old Jubilee."

Better yet, have a look at Gen. Richard Taylor's Destruction and Reconstruction. Taylor was Zachary Taylor's son. He fought in Virginia; he fought in the West. He was always observant, colorful, sensing the meaning of it all. You can trust "Dick" Taylor.

Or would you ride fast thoroughbreds with the Confederate cavalry? Turn to Basil W. Duke's Morgan's Cavalry or W. W. Blackford's War Years with JebStuart. These were the great raiders that every boy of forty loves.

That driving fanatic, "Stonewall" Jackson, will never really die. Henry Kyd Douglas was a youngster on Jackson's staff. In his I Rode with Stonewall you can see how men could love and follow that great Puritan whose only vice was sucking lemons.

Then Gen. John B. Gordon takes a bow. In his Reminiscences he tells you, truthfully, how he took five wounds at Sharpsburg in September '62 and was back among the bullets at Chancellorsville in May of '63. General Gordon was a gallant Georgia gentleman, and he certainly could write.

There was a Union Gordon also: George H. of Boston. This colonel of the Second Massachusetts Infantry was in the war from start to finish. He wrote three intriguing books (Brook Farm to CedarMountain, History of the Campaign ofthe Army of Virginia, and War Diary). Any Yankee would feel proud to march with George H. Gordon.

Gen. W. B. Hazen was another smart, brave, skillful Yankee, born across the river from Hanover. In his Narrative ofMilitary Service you can see just what it was that Northern soldiers had and Southern soldiers lacked.

Charles A. Dana, from New Hampshire, was a civilian reporter. He went right with the Union armies as the representative of the War Department. In his Recollections Dana spotted every blunder that the generals made and some they did not make. This was the same Dana whose acid editorials made the New YorkSun famous for the next thirty years.

Joshua L. Chamberlain of Maine wrote the war's closing scenes in The Passing ofthe Armies. His memories start tears. There were courtesies and kindness when silence came at Appomattox.

Dartmouth's own F. A. Haskell, Class of 1854, made perhaps the finest of all the recordings. His Battle of Gettysburg is just a long letter to his brother. But as you read you are right there with Haskell on Cemetery Ridge.

The summit joy of all who want their Civil War first-hand is Battles and Leaders. Four heavy volumes, covering every major fight on land or sea. Actual participants - from both sides - tell you how their battle went and why. And the final grace of this majestic compilation is in the interspersed remarks of Private Warren Lee Goss. Private Goss felt what enlisted men in every war have felt about colonels, generals and the omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent Regulations.

Long before a man gets this far in his after-dinner reading a private thought will grab him: "How well would I, myself, have stood against those guns?" The question is unanswerable but it nonetheless lies underneath the mounting, spreading interest in our Civil War.

Write in if you want the names of other books. My special thanks to Don Lindell '44 for help in these selections.

Prof. Lewis D. Stilwell, a member of the Dartmouth faculty since 1916, teaches a course in the military history of the United States, in which battles and campaigns of the Civil War receive detailed study.

A famous Dartmouth teacher of military history recommends some personal narratives of the great conflict, which is approaching its centennial and is attracting fresh interest in its events and personalities.