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Winner, Library of Virginia Literary Award for NonfictionWinner, Eugene Feit Award in Civil War Studies, New York Military Affairs SymposiumWinner of the Dan and Marilyn Laney Prize of the Austin Civil War Round TableFinalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the Museum of the ConfederacyBest Books of 2014, Civil War Monitor6 Civil War Books to Read Now, Diane Rehm Show, NPRLee's surrender to Grant at Appomattox Court House evokes a highly gratifying image in the popular mind -- it was, many believe, a moment that transcended politics, a moment of healing, a moment of patriotism untainted by ideology. But as Elizabeth Varon reveals in this vividly narrated history, this rosy image conceals a seething debate over precisely what the surrender meant and what kind of nation would emerge from war. The combatants in that debate included the iconic Lee and Grant, but they also included a cast of characters previously overlooked, who brought their own understanding of the war's causes, consequences, and meaning. In Appomattox, Varon deftly captures the events swirling around that well remembered-but not well understood-moment when the Civil War ended. She expertly depicts the final battles in Virginia, when Grant's troops surrounded Lee's half-starved army, the meeting of the generals at the McLean House, and the shocked reaction as news of the surrender spread like an electric charge throughout the nation. But as Varon shows, the ink had hardly dried before both sides launched a bitter debate over the meaning of the war and the nation's future. For Grant, and for most in the North, the Union victory was one of right over wrong, a vindication of free society; for many African Americans, the surrender marked the dawn of freedom itself. Lee, in contrast, believed that the Union victory was one of might over right: the vast impersonal Northern war machine had worn down a valorous and unbowed South. Lee was committed to peace, but committed, too, to the restoration of the South's political power within the Union and the perpetuation of white supremacy. These two competing visions of the war's end paved the way not only for Southern resistance to reconstruction but also our ongoing debates on the Civil War, 150 years later. Did America's best days lie in the past or in the future? For Lee, it was the past, the era of the founding generation. For Grant, it was the future, represented by Northern moral and material progress. They held, in the end, two opposite views of the direction of the country-and of the meaning of the war that had changed that country forever.
Elizabeth VaronAppomattox: Victory, defeat, & freedom at the end of the Civil WarNYC: Oxford Univ Press, 2014.• 1 map. 32 images (numerous portraits). Notes. Index with names predominating.• This book provides much more than a recounting of the conclusive defeat of Lee’s Army of Northern VA. It provides a solid summary of the transition from active warfare to reconstruction / restoration efforts (1865-1867). A central bridge is the quite different perceptions of the ‘terms of surrender’ as it impacts the interregnum between active, ‘formal’ warfare and the Presidential Reconstruction efforts by Lincoln & Johnson. A good starting point for ‘wrapping’ your mind around & attempting to understand Reconstruction.• Varon employs literary & artwork sources in her analysis of the meanings attributed to the surrender at Appomattox and sectional perspectives on ‘restoration’ & ‘reconstruction.’This reviewer is currently reading on wartime & postwar Reconstruction efforts in order to have a reasonable working knowledge for attending a CW conference on that subject AND to beginning an initial attempt to ‘wrap’ his mind around that topic. The additional books on my reading liat (in probable reading & overlapping time span sequence) are:Gregory DownsAfter Appomattox: Military occupation & the ends of warCambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2015.• 9 longitudinal maps on military post locations. 6 images. Notes. Index. 8 statistical appendices on the number of U.S. Army posts, soldiers, & soldiers / post; mostly longitudinally with some by region.“Statistics regarding U.S. Army deployments from 1865 to 1870, cited in the text & presented in the maps & appendices, are drawn from a database the author personally compiled from tens of thousands of departmental & divisional returns in RG 94 Entry 62 & RG 94, Entry 65, as well as from returns scattered through the individual department entries in RG 393, Port 1, all at National Archives I, Washington, DC. … The author has developed a website with digital maps, datasets, and full citations for the numerical data that is available at [...].” (p.ix)• TOPICS COVERED: gunpoint emancipation, reinstituting civil gov’t, an illusion of peace, enfranchisement through martial law, & governing without force.Eric FonerReconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1865-1877 Updated EditionNYC: HarperCollins, 2014. First edition published in 1988 by Harper & Row.• 3 maps. 57 photographs & images. Footnotes. Selected bibliography. Index.• [Author’s] Introduction to the 2014 [150th] Anniversary Edition, p.xxvii-xlii. “Some brief reflections on how the book was originally written, how historical scholarship on Reconstruction has evolved in the last quarter century, and why an understanding of the period remains essential today.” (p.xxvii)GOAL: “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution seeks to weave into a coherent narrative the political struggle over Reconstruction, the transition from slave to free labor in the South, the evolution of a new system of race relations, and the rise of a newly empowered national state, and to delineate how these processes interacted with one another.” (p.xxxiii)David W. BlightRace & Reunion: the Civil War in American MemoryCambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ Press, 2001.• A few images. Notes. Index.• Prolog, p1-5.SYNOPSIS: “This book is a history of how Americans remembered their most divisive & tragic experience during the 50–year period after the Civil War. It probes the interrelationship between the two broad themes of race & reunion in American culture & society from the turning point in the war (1863) to the culmination of its semicentennial in 1915. … [Blight is] primarily concerned with the ways that contending memories clashed or intermingled in public memory, and not in a developing professional historiography of the Civil War.” (p1)Considerable attention is paid to “Reconstruction politics, reunion literature, soldiers' memory, the reminiscence industry, African American memory, the origins & uses of Memorial Day, and the Southern Lost Cause. … But in every chapter … race [is] the central problem in how Americans made choices to remember and forget their Civil War.” (p2)Gregory P. Downs & Kate Masur (editors)The World the Civil War MadeChapel Hill, NC: Univ NC Press, 2015.• 1 map. 4 images. Endnotes. Index.• 12 essays on new directions in Reconstruction from the 2013 Brose Lecture conference by the Richards CW Era Studies Center at Penn State. “In this volume we consider some of the ways the Civil War echoed beyond 1865 in a dynamic, crucial postwar period whose contours have often proven difficult to capture. The essays collected here explore several different regions of the [U.S.] and the circulation of ideas throughout the nation & the world.” (p2)FN #1 (p17-18) recommends several histories & historiographies on Reconstruction.Another highly likely reading overlapping the era from 1861 through 1868 is:Brooks D. SimpsonLet Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant & the Politics of War & Reconstruction 1861-1868Chapel Hill, NC: Univ. NC Press, 1991.• No images. Notes. Bibliography. Index. The preface and introduction were first read for ALL these books prior to reading Varon's Appomattox. Some additional sections were read relating to CW literature in three of the books. Some additional preliminary reading was done in survey sources.
