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Review of Waite, Kevin, West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire
(The Civil War Monitor, 0021-07) Zander, Cecily N.
As an historian of the Civil War’s westernmost reaches, I have been eagerly anticipating the publication of Kevin Waite’s West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire. Waite’s book is a significant achievement of scholarship, building on older literatures of slavery, western expansion, and nineteenth-century imperialism while advancing a newer body of work grappling with alternative forms of coercive and unfree labor in the United States, the borderlands, the significance of the American West to the Civil War, and the interconnected relationship between the West and South during the Civil War era. Waite reveals not only the ways in which Southerners and slaveholders imagined the Southwest, but also examines the lasting consequences of those pro-slavery imperial visions for a region most Americans do not associate with slaveholding.
Review of Wittenberg, Eric J. & Scott L. Mingus, The Second Battle of Winchester: The Confederate Victory that Opened the Door to Gettysburg
(The Civil War Monitor, 2016-11) Zander, Cecily
The famous bloodletting in Adams County, Pennsylvania, on the first three days of July 1863 came after weeks of hard campaigning by Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and George G. Meade’s Army of the Potomac. The fighting in and around Winchester, Virginia, the third week of June resulted in one-tenth of the casualties sustained at Gettysburg, but served as a vital element of the maneuvering that brought the two most important Civil War armies to their grand collision. In The Second Battle of Winchester: The Confederate Victory that Opened the Door to Gettysburg, Eric J. Wittenberg and Scott L. Mingus, Sr., offer a new look at the engagement that eliminated the Union military presence in the Shenandoah Valley and cleared the way for Lee’s second invasion of the North.
Review of Stanley, Matthew E., The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America
(The Civil War Monitor, 2017-05) Zander, Cecily
During the Grand Review of Union Armies at the close of the American Civil War, newspaper reports celebrated the achievements of the returning veterans. The Boys in Blue were lauded for their efforts in preserving the Union, but as Eastern and Western soldiers met for the first time in the nation’s capital, it became clear that little more than uniforms united the men. Soldiers of the Western armies often observed—after being in close proximity with their Eastern counterparts—that Western men held fundamentally different beliefs about the war and its meaning than their Eastern compatriots. Sectional division not only separated North and South, but they also marked the difference between East and West. It is this internal division that Matthew E. Stanley deftly examines in The Loyal West: Civil War and Reunion in Middle America.
Review of Powell, David A., The Chickamaugua Campaign: Barren Victory: The Retreat into Chattanooga, the Confederate Pursuit, and the Aftermath of the Battle
(The Civil War Monitor, 2018-01) Zander, Cecily
Though the literature on the Chickamauga campaign takes up a respectable amount of space on Civil War bookshelves, room remains for useful studies like David A. Powell’s Barren Victory: The Retreat into Chattanooga, the Confederate Pursuit, and the Aftermath of the Battle, September 21 to October 20, 1863. Powell’s volume is a companion to earlier monographs detailing the initial phase of the fighting in South Tennessee and North Georgia and an examination of the bulk of the battle proper: the only major Confederate victory ever achieved in the Western Theater. In this third volume, Powell examines how both the Army of Tennessee and the Army of the Cumberland (and their respective commanders, Braxton Bragg and William S. Rosecrans) responded to the strategic situation following the fighting. Powell also provides several useful statistical appendices.
Review of Wert, Jeffrey D., Civil War Barons: The Tycoons, Entrepreneurs, Inventors and Visionaries Who Forged Victory and Shaped a Nation
(The Civil War Monitor, 2018-11) Zander, Cecily N.
Jeffry D. Wert is perhaps best known to readers of Civil War history as a chronicler of battles and leaders. For his latest book, however, Wert has turned his keen biographer’s eye to the stories of nineteen “Civil War barons,” whose industrial fortunes and futures were yoked to the outcome of the conflict. The result offers plenty for historians to consider about how wars change economies and how the Civil War accelerated American capitalist development. The book also provides interesting stories of ordinary Americans whose lives were altered by a war in which they never donned a uniform. Wert’s narrative demonstrates that a history of the Civil War can explore sweeping change without losing sight of the individuals whose actions accelerated those transformations.
Review of Masich, Andrew E., Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861-1867
(Michigan State University Department of History, 2019-02) Zander, Cecily
Andrew E. Masich’s Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands is an important intervention in the growing scholarly literature on the Civil War in the American West. As a region, the West has been largely ignored in scholarly assessments of the nation’s most transformative era, with such works as Donald S. Frazier’s Blood and Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest (1995) and Alvin M. Josephy’s The Civil War in the American West (1991) long considered the standard treatments. In the past decade, a new cohort of scholars has produced monographs, collections of essays, and dedicated issues of journals on the topic of the Civil War in the West. Masich joins this growing chorus of voices exhorting Civil War enthusiasts and scholars to include the West in their narrative of the conflict, though his approach reminds all scholars of the period to consider carefully not only what made conflicts in the far West similar to the Civil War but also what set them apart.
Review of Broomall, James J., Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers
(The Civil War Monitor, 2019-07) Zander, Cecily N.
James J. Broomall’s Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers joins a growing wave of new scholarship investigating the Civil War experiences of common soldiers. Like Peter Carmichael’s The War for the Common Soldier (2018) and Lorien Foote’s The Gentlemen and the Roughs (2010), Broomall considers the thoughts, feelings, and cultures of Civil War soldiers. And just as Stephen Berry did in All That Makes a Man (2004), Broomall elects to consider largely the perspective of Southern men, assessing the war’s impact on their conceptualizations of masculinity and self-reliance. Though Broomall’s book deals with questions Civil War historians have been asking for as long as there has been a history of the conflict, his astute analysis and engaging source material make Private Confederacies a worthwhile addition to the literature on the soldiers of the Civil War.
Review of Gwynne, S.C., Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War
(The Civil War Monitor, 2019-11) Zander. Cecily N.
In Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War, S.C. Gwynne presents a readable narrative that carries readers from Ulysses S. Grant’s arrival in the Eastern Theater to the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House. For the most part, Gwynne sets his story in the east, though side excursions to Fort Pillow and William Tecumseh Sherman’s March to the Sea break up the heavy focus on the exchange of blows between Grant and Lee at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg. The archival research is slim, as evidenced by a bibliography that lists mainly secondary works and published accounts. Gordon Rhea’s work heavily informs the military narrative of the Overland Campaign, while the classic texts of Bruce Catton and Douglas Southhall Freeman clearly shaped Gwynne’s portrayals of Grant and Lee, respectively.
Review of Taylor, Paul, The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known: The North's Union Leagues in the American Civil War
(Michigan State University Department of History, 2020-02) Zander, Cecily
Joining the growing tide of literature concerned with understanding nationalism in the Civil War-era North, Paul Taylor’s The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War offers a detailed analysis of the creation and maintenance of one of the war’s least understood institutions—Union Leagues. Union Leagues—private (sometimes secret) clubs formed by civilians interested in expressing their support for the Union cause, cultivating patriotic attitudes, and policing treasonous dissenters—were, according to Taylor, “the North’s primary arbiter of how loyalty and treason were defined” in the loyal states during the conflict (p. 12). In the literature on nationalism during the Civil War, a true study of these civilian-led institutions has been absent, though much needed. By providing the first full-length study of Union Leagues, Taylor offers historians a chance to better understand how Civil War Americans understood loyalty and treason, and, perhaps most critically, how they defined and expressed the idea of the Union in the midst of a war of disunion.
The Second Seminole War as a Civil War training ground
(Emerging Civil War, 2020-06-04) Zander, Cecily Nelson
In the popular narrative of the coming of the Civil War, the U.S.-Mexico War is often identified as the military crucible through which many of the war’s most famous battlefield leaders first passed—gaining lessons in leadership and combat operations under the watchful eyes of commanding officers Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. In the course of working on my dissertation, however, I’ve come to wonder whether it wouldn’t behoove more Civil War historians to cast their eyes back to the Second Seminole War to understand how men such as William Tecumseh Sherman, George Henry Thomas, Joseph E. Johnston, and Robert Anderson learned to be soldiers and wage long, multi-faceted wars.
Picturing Union victory - early images of the surrender at Appomattox
(Emerging Civil War, 2020-06-18) Zander, Cecily Nelson
Here’s a familiar story: On April 9, 1865, generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met in Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Courthouse to sign the documents that would dictate the surrender of the most important national institution in the Confederacy—the Army of Northern Virginia. Grant sat at a small wooden table with spindle-turned legs and an oval top. His aide, Lt. Col. Ely S. Parker, sat at another small wooden table in order to write out copies of the surrender. Lee sat at a much grander table, with a large black wooden base and a marble top. It’s very probable that neither general made much of the seating arrangements (Grant, in fact, fails to describe them in his memoirs); but that has not prevented them from being the subject of much controversy and conversation in the fifteen decades since.
Unintentional reconciliation – memorializing the cavalry fight at Gettysburg
(Emerging Civil War, 2020-07-03) Zander, Cecily Nelson
Though not far from the Civil War’s memorial epicenter, the cavalry battlefield at Gettysburg National Military Park sits relatively undisturbed by the crowds of tourists who come to see the site of the largest ever battle in the Western Hemisphere. Nearly every automobile, bicycle tire, and hiking boot that sets foot on the present-day battlefield eventually finds its way to the copse of trees and the monument to the High Water Mark of the Rebellion. There they find several artillery pieces, a small grove of trees, and an open bronze book—a monument that has guided thousands of visitors to the mistaken impression that the defeat of George Pickett and his Virginians (and J. Johnston Pettigrew and Isaac Trimble and their North Carolinians) meant the defeat of the Confederacy and that Gettysburg was the war’s great turning point.
Vanishing monuments – the case of Custer City, Colorado
(Emerging Civil War, 2020-07-23) Zander, Cecily Nelson
In the months and years that followed the battle of the Little Bighorn, dozens of towns and counties named after Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer sprang up across the United States—paying tribute to a soldier who committed, arguably, one of the worst blunders in American military history in pursuit of the cause of settler colonialism and a national policy of violent Indian removal. In 1877 the legislature of Colorado designated 740 square miles of mountainous terrain west of present-day Pueblo as Custer County, paying tribute to both Custer and the legacy of American military activities in the Centennial State.
Assessing the enemy: James Longstreet and John Pope at Second Bull Run
(Emerging Civil War, 2020-08-29) Zander, Cecily Nelson
Union general John Pope’s decision-making during the campaign of Second Bull Run has been justly scrutinized by historians and armchair generals alike. In large part this scrutiny has stemmed from Pope’s bombast upon his arrival in Virginia and his failure to back up his “headquarters in the saddle,” “only seen the backs of our enemies,” proclamation with a substantial battlefield result. Pope’s contemporaries gleefully took part in lambasting the Illinois-born, West Point graduate—among them Edward Porter Alexander, who called Pope a “blatherskite” in his personal memoirs. The index to Alexander’s Fighting For the Confederacy (UNC Press, 1989) includes the entry “Pope, John; EPA makes fun of” as if to underscore the degree to which Pope was a common subject of ridicule after the summer of 1862.
Review of Nelson, Megan K., The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the fight for the West
(Michigan State University Department of History, 2020-09) Zander, Cecily
The introduction of the American West as an important region in the historiography of the US Civil War has brought many issues into sharper focus for historians—among them questions about race and unfree labor in the age of emancipation and the length and extent of Reconstruction. In the case of historian and writer Megan Kate Nelson’s Three-Cornered War, old debates about nationalism are revived and given redefined stakes in a work that presents a sweeping history of competing political and social visions for the future of the Southwest in the midst of civil war.
Home libraries: My Civil War bookshelf - the Macmillan Wars of the United States
(Emerging Civil War, 2020-09-21) Zander, Cecily Nelson
While conducting the research for my dissertation I spent more time in one archival collection than any other, a collection that does not appear in a single footnote and provided almost none of the information I had hoped it might for the project I am now undertaking. But even as my time at the Western History Collection at the University of Oklahoma wound down and stacks of archival boxes filled with accounts of life in the frontier army appeared at my desk, I found myself drawn every morning to the papers of Robert M. Utley, a historian who wrote many of the books that sparked my interest in the military history of the American West. Utley’s papers comprise 42 linear feet of journals, correspondence, calendars, and manuscript drafts, as well as research files. I had selfishly hoped to expedite some of my own research by looking at Utley’s already completed research and picking up a few tidbits that would fill out my chapters. What I found instead, in his voluminous correspondence, was a remarkable synthesis of the history of the American army in the nineteenth-century West.
The Civil War in surprising places - Emily Dickinson’s poetry and the pop culture delights of Dickinson
(Emerging Civil War, 2021-01-14) Zander, Cecily Nelson
As a high school student I always dreaded our annual Emily Dickinson poem assignment, because, to be honest, the nineteenth-century poet from Amherst, Massachusetts didn’t speak to me. One can only consider ‘Hope is the Thing With Feathers’ so many times, after all. In graduate school, however, I underwent an attitude adjustment after taking a course entitled “One Hundred Years of American Poetry,” which covered the 1830s to the Great Depression. I entered the class fully convinced that I would carry on with my Dickinson disdain, but, then, ‘A Bird, came down the walk’ changed my mind. Meg Groeling’s ongoing ECW series on Walt Whitman has offered me a reminder of the profound and unexpected effects the Civil War had on American Literature. These effects are visible in both the poetry and letters of Emily Dickinson, and are currently being delightfully investigated in the Apple TV+ series Dickinson (now in its second season).
The William Belknap impeachment - some historical background
(Emerging Civil War, 2021-02-10) Zander, Cecily Nelson
When American author Mark Twain referred to the postbellum United States as living through a ‘Gilded Age’ he almost certainly had in mind the excesses exhibited by men like William Belknap, whose term as Secretary of War in the cabinet of President Ulysses S. Grant ultimately exposed the rot of political cronyism and the failures of postbellum political reform. For his involvement in what is now known as the “trader post scandal,” Belknap was impeached by Congress, after he resigned from his cabinet post, in the first impeachment trial of a private citizen who had left public office.
Learning Civil War history: The pandemic perspective
(Emerging Civil War, 2021-02-19) Zander, Cecily Nelson
On January 18, 2021, I began teaching a Civil War history class at Penn State, where most instruction is currently taking place via the (now) ubiquitous Zoom platform. I have been fortunate to teach the department’s Civil War survey in person previously, so I had my course materials ready to go. I quickly realized, however, that Zoom presents challenges to my style of teaching, which relies heavily on students answering questions that I pepper throughout my lectures, and, more importantly, laughing at my very funny comments about George McClellan and Joseph Johnston.
Review of Willis, Deborah, The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship
(The Civil War Monitor, 2021-03) Zander, Cecily N.
Ask any Civil War historian what they find compelling about studying America’s great national conflict and you are almost certain to receive an answer that includes the war’s visual culture. The war transformed many aspects of American life and culture; it was one of the first modern conflicts to be brought home to civilians via the medium of photography. In The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship, Deborah Willis has compiled arresting images and a compelling narrative. She argues that photography helped African Americans to form communities and forge a cultural identity as the country underwent its new birth of freedom.

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