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This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War
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Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
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The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom and the New York Times bestseller Crossroads of Freedom, among many other award-winning books, James M. McPherson is America's preeminent Civil War historian. Now, in this collection of provocative and illuminating essays, McPherson offers fresh insight into many of the most enduring questions about one of the defining moments in our nation's history.
McPherson sheds light on topics large and small, from the average soldier's avid love of newspapers to the postwar creation of the mystique of a Lost Cause in the South. Readers will find insightful pieces on such intriguing figures as Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Jesse James, and William Tecumseh Sherman, and on such vital issues such as Confederate military strategy, the failure of peace negotiations to end the war, and the realities and myths of the Confederacy. This Mighty Scourge includes several never-before-published essays--pieces on General Robert E. Lee's goals in the Gettysburg campaign, on Lincoln and Grant in the Vicksburg campaign, and on Lincoln as Commander-in-Chief. In that capacity, Lincoln invented the concept of presidential war powers that are again at the center of controversy today. All of the essays have been updated and revised to give the volume greater thematic coherence and continuity, so that it can be read in sequence as an interpretive history of the war and its meaning for America and the world.
Combining the finest scholarship with luminous prose, and packed with new information and fresh ideas, this book brings together the most recent thinking by the nation's leading authority on the Civil War. It will be must reading for everyone interested in the war and American history.
"James McPherson is the master historian of the Civil War in our time."
--Gabor Borritt, Director, Civil War Institute, Gettysburg College
"Not merely is McPherson the leading living historian of the Civil War, but he is a scholar whose knowledge and authority are unsurpassed; when McPherson speaks, even in a minor key, people listen."
--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 973.7
EAN: 9780195313666
ISBN: 0195313666
Label: Oxford University Press, USA
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2007-01-29
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Studio: Oxford University Press, USA
SIMILAR ITEMS:
• Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford History of the United States)
• Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution
• Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief
• What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford History of the United States)
• This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
CUSTOMER REVIEWS:
outstanding essays -
"This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War" is a collection of footnoted essays by one of the foremost Civil War scholars. McPherson offers four themes in the book: The Lost Cause and legacy of the Confederacy, high-level military and national strategy, a survey of period sentiments, and several mini-bios that provide a relevant digression from the more scholarly content.
The first half of the book focuses on the Confederacy, and it is riddled with an indictment of the "Lost Cause" mythology. McPherson offers no doubt that the Civil War was about slavery and provides evidence of the South trying to obfuscate its original intentions from even as early as 1865. McPherson says the Lost Cause myth helped the South deal with its painful defeat, and surmises the North indirectly allowed it to propagate in the interest of reconciliation. He documents decades of attempts at revisionist history which span even into modern times. It is all a hard pill to swallow, but I do not necessarily disagree with him. Just as McPherson quotes Southern historian Charles Dew's painful realization upon review of the facts, it is indeed painful for anyone proud of their Southern heritage to digest.
The essays discussing Confederate political infighting, "big-man-me-ism" and divergent strategies are fascinating and provide a good summary of what I have read in many other recently published materials. While the treatment here is definitely one-sided with the focus on the South's foibles, McPherson freely acknowledges the Union faced similar tribulations. He admits that it is the "squeaky wheel that squeaks" and if we were to take all this negative press at face value, "we could scarcely understand how the Confederacy could last four weeks, let alone four years".
McPherson examines Confederate war strategy, particularly the offensive stance of the Army of Northern Virginia. He peers into at Lee's goals at Gettysburg and looks at (and defeats) the theory that it was a mere raid which was only characterized as a pivotal battle after the fact. He looks at Lee's relationship with Davis and postulates on whether Lee was too pre-occupied with the Virginia theatre of the war.
The mini-biographies include John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Jesse James and Lincoln. McPherson even offers some fresh material on the Lincoln mythology as he provides some interesting commentary on his biographers, including Lincoln's partner and friend Billy Herndon. He concludes with a look at Lincoln's use of Commander-in-Chief powers in order to execute the war and offers a solid response to recent books that claim Lincoln abused those powers.
I really liked that the essays contained inherent book reviews as McPherson cites and comments on the work of other authors even as he puts forth his own fresh insights. I have several new books to consume now as the result of reading Scourge. In summary, "This Might Scourge" is an outstanding and [mostly] balanced set of essays. Perspectives like those presented here could only be written by a learned someone who spent his career studying and writing about the Civil War in detail. I would wager McPherson could keep writing these essays forever ... and I would probably keep buying them.
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Essence of the Story Wonderfully Told -
There are literally tons of excellent Civil War books, ranging from McPherson's own "Battle Cry of Freedom," a Pulitzer Prize winner, to Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote and their multi-volume sets. If you want a more undiluted and contemporary to the time view, there may be nothing better than the 19th century "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War," the four volumes of which are now available as re-prints (at least in used book stores) by Castle.
This digression is really a necessary back-drop for what McPherson has done here with "The Mighty Scourge." I can't think of a better distillation on the war, its causes and social currents before and after. McPherson does reintroduce some of his older material but the whole of the books hangs together very cohesively and persuasively. If you want to get into the details of each and every battle this book is not for you but if you want an authoritative and fully informed survey of what is most important about the subject, this is the book. When you know as much as he does about a subject, the decision of what to include and exclude to get the essence of the story across is high art. Princeton's McPherson has nailed it.
A Great Read ! -
This book is pleasureable to read just for it's great writing style, besides the fascinating perspectives it brings to light. My prediction is that southern readers might not appreciate it as much and will see a north-biased theme, however, being raised in the south and having lived in the north (and now the west) I feel it's only fair that southerners should see their past exposed for the sham attempt made by their ancestors after the war to cover up the facts about the south being "pro-slavery" before and during the war. All that hypocrisy about fighting for honor ! As usually happens in life, your "beliefs" are aligned with the main source of your income. One fifth of the south pre-war population was reaping unprecedented profits from cotton, from slavery. Anyway this book covers many interesting areas and delivers a lot of new insight and for me was a great way to re-visit civil war history, after a few years of absence.
Graceful and insightful -
There are dozens of remarkable men and women who write intelligently and prolifically about the Civil War, and many of them have been mentored directly or indirectly inspired by James McPherson. His prose is lucid, graceful, and at times dryly humorous, and his insights frequently penetrating and always courageous.
This Mighty Scourge collects a handful of his essays, most of them previously published in one form or another. About half of the reprinted pieces are redone book reviews that originally appeared in the New York Review of Books, and half are published essays that appeared in journals or anthologies. Many of them will be more than familiar to followers of McPherson's work. For those less familiar, they serve as a good introduction to McPherson's take on the Civil War.
There are three new pieces in the collection: one on Lee's hopes for winning the peace at Gettysburg, one on the Vicksburg campaign, and a fascinating piece on Lincoln and presidential powers during wartime (especially timely today, I might add).
For my money, though, the most riveting essay in the book is "Long-Legged Yankee Lies: The Lost Cause Textbook Crusade." Shortly after Appomattox, followers of the Lost Cause, trying to salvage something from southern defeat, began to insist that the war was fought exclusively over constitutional issues, and that slavery had nothing to do with the struggle. With the formation of the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) and United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), "educational" committees were established to watchdog textbooks used in primary and secondary schools as well as colleges and universities to make sure that "long-legged Yankee lies" weren't passed off as truth. Northern publishers who offended were lobbied to modify their texts, and public campaigns to expunge offending books (including Encyclopedia Britannica, for example) from libraries were launched.
Mildred Rutherford, historian general of the UDC, was a driving force in all this. In 1919, she published a list of instructions to teachers and librarians that advised them on which history books to keep and which to stay away from. Her recommendations included rejecting books that claimed the south fought to keep slaves, described slaveholders as cruel or unjust to slaves, glorified Lincoln or vilified Jefferson Davis, or neglected to tell of the "South's heroes and their deeds" (p. 102).
Extraordinary stuff. McPherson's tale of the textbook wars alone is worth the price of the book.
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Some Brillant Essays -
This book contains 16 different essays, each focused on a different topic related to the Civil War. Subjects covered include Jesse James, Harriet Tubman, the military strategies of Grant, Lee, Sherman and other generals and the effects of journalism on troop morale. Each essay is well written and has something interesting to say. But my favorite was the very first, "And The War Came", which provides an explanation of the causes of war that is as insightful, fair minded and knowledgeable as I have ever read.
McPherson correctly notes that the blame for the Civil War has to lie primarily with the South and their insistence that the "peculiar institution" of slavery be continued by any means necessary. Of course McPherson also recognizes that only a small minority of Northerners were actually dedicated abolitionists whose foremost concern was the liberation of black slaves. And when Lincoln was elected he did not immediately end slavery.
It's important to remember that the North and South had been in engaged in a bitter struggle over the admission of new states as either "slave states" or "free states" since the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The extreme determination of the South to expand the territorial boundaries of slavery is shown by their unsuccessful efforts to annex Cuba as a "slave state" in the 1850's and the efforts of Southern military adventurers to invade Nicaragua and northern Mexico in hopes of adding them as additional "slave states".
With the election of Lincoln the political tide seemed to be turning in favor of the "free state" Republicans. So pro-slavery Southerners, rather than to continue to engage in the democratic process, basically "picked up their marbles and went home", seceding from the United States.
Of course, the original and primary goal of Lincoln, and most people in the North, was not the immediate abolition of slavery but rather the preservation of the Union. In fact, as McPherson explains on page 129, if the South had been defeated prior to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1862 it would have been allowed to re-enter the Union and "slavery and the antebellum Southern social order would have remained largely intact."
Ultimately, it was a power struggle between the North and South over the direction of the country and thank goodness, for all our sakes, that the Yankees won. As a Southerner proud of the many positive aspects of life and culture here, I get feed up with these Confederate flag waving yahoos who still want to keep fighting the Civil War. The Civil War was fought over slavery and the South was on the wrong side of the issue. Get over it!
It's true that not all Northerners had the most altruistic of motives but they did manage to preserve the United States as a nation and we should all be happy about this fact. To me the most honorable people of all were the minority of abolitionists dedicated to ending the enslavement of African-Americans. Some abolitionists also lived in the South, including my own ancestors on my great-grandfather's side. These folks were from the Blue Ridge Mountains of north Georgia and western North Carolina, where far fewer people owned slaves and where the majority of people were opposed to Southern secession.
Much of what I have written I learned from this excellent book, which also contains a wealth of knowledge on many more intersting Civil War related themes. Kudos to the great scholar McPherson and recommended reading for all!
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