A previous version of this book review was initially submitted for a contest hosted by Astral Codex Ten. It did not advance to the finals; as such, I am publishing it here.
I.
Sometimes you know from the start that a book is going to be hopelessly hagiographic. Douglas Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography of Robert E. Lee is one such example. Apart from dripping with Lost Cause nonsense, the book focuses on certain aspects of military history — on how the armies zigged this way or zagged that way because Lee was so damned smart — to the neglect of everything else.
Bell Irvin Wiley’s landmark text, The Life of Johnny Reb, is the exact opposite, which is probably why I liked it so much.
Funnily enough, Wiley and Freeman were pretty much scholarly contemporaries. So how did one of ‘em manage to swing for the fences and so thoroughly surpass the other?
Part of it might’ve been Wiley just being the sort of down-to-earth, principled fellow who wouldn’t be swayed by stupid myths. My edition of his book includes a foreword by the late James Robertson of Virginia Tech, who describes Wiley as a lifelong liberal Democrat and a strong supporter of Civil Rights. (That being said, the foreword also describes Wiley as never giving A’s in his classes, because he thought the grade was “perfection beyond a student’s reach.” So I guess he wasn’t perfect, either.)
Or maybe he was just a better historian. Wiley made a point of digging for primary sources, going back to the real things that people said at the time, written down in wartime records or in letters from the soldiers themselves. Freeman, meanwhile, failed to make any headway in academia and entered journalism instead. His greatest legacy today is probably the fact that Henrico County, Virginia named a high school after him.
To steal another anecdote from the foreword: Wiley, who lived during a time when some elderly Civil War veterans still lived, once had the chance to interview some of those old fellows. In the course of the interview, he happened to ask about whether Confederate soldiers ever patronized local sex workers. The veterans were indignant. How dare he question the honor of the Confederate army?
Wiley, telling the story later, would chuckle and note to his audience that he had happened upon a monthly health report for the Tenth Alabama. Among the reported maladies: sixty-two new cases of gonorrhea and six new cases of syphilis.
Okay, enough about the foreword (which wasn’t even written by Wiley). Let’s get to the actual book that he wrote.
II.
You really should just read the book.
On a less flippant note: one of the historians whose blog I follow, Bret Devereaux, made a very good point about the relevance of military history. Lots of people think that military history is all about whether a general zigged when he should have zagged and how that affected some battle. (Incidentally, highly complicated battle plans are mostly cinema bullshit if your best communications technology is still “man on a horse.” Point the men at the enemy and let ‘em go.) But if you look below the surface, military history (done correctly) has so much more cool stuff.
You want to know what kind of clothes Confederate soldiers wore? Wiley has a chapter about that. You want to know what dizzying array of armaments they were issued? Wiley has a chapter about that. You want to know what kinds of rations they ate? What letters they wrote to the home folks? What diseases they suffered? What cultures, regions, and countries they came from?
Believe it or not, Wiley did his fuckin’ research.
That’s probably why people liked the book (I’m talking about historians and also enthusiastic amateurs). It’s fun. Admittedly, Wiley does humanize the Confederate soldier, the archetypal Johnny Reb, more or less compassionately. He presents statistics sometimes, drawn from primary sources, but more often he just lets Johnny Reb tell the tale in their own words.
He also doesn’t bother to hide that a lot of them were kinda dicks. He quotes several examples of patriotic verse which adorned the letterheads of soldier correspondents, one of which ran thusly:
May those Northern fanatics who abuse their Southern neighbors,
Approach near enough to feel the point of our sabres;
May they come near enough to hear the click of a trigger,
And learn that a white man is better than a
In Wiley’s reproduction of the text, he does not omit the last word in this soldier’s poem. I am, of course, deeply disappointed in the Confederate author of the poem, both for his highly impolite language but also for his incompetence at writing poetry with a proper meter. Not only was this anonymous Confederate a racist, he was a complete failure at versification.
I really can’t stress enough how much racial hatred there was during the American Civil War. Despite what revisionists might tell you, a lot of Southerners were perfectly fine with slavery and harbored visceral antipathy towards anyone with a skin tone darker than theirs. An incident related by Wiley’s sources was the aftermath of the Battle of the Crater. During the siege of Petersburg, the Union Army made a well-planned but abortively executed attempt to break the siege by setting off a massive explosion under the Confederate lines. Last-minute meddling from high command fucked everything up and a lot of people died for basically nothing.
The Confederates were not amused to discover that the Union Army had used units of the United States Colored Troops in the attack. As Wiley reports:
Following the Crater affair a Reb wrote his homefolk that all the colored prisoners “would have ben killed had it not been for gen Mahone who beg our men to Spare them.” One of his comrades killed several, he continued; Mahone “told him for God’s sake stop.” The man replied, “Well gen let me kill one more,” whereupon, according to the correspondent, “he deliberately took out a pocket knife and cut one’s Throat.”
I mean, holy shit.
III.
So how well did the Confederates fight the war? Well, they lost, obviously. But you kinda get the picture that they shot themselves in the foot several times over.
Getting back to my favorite currently-active historian, Bret Devereaux, on his blog he’s got a series of posts about military logistics. The precepts he lays out are mostly in line with how an army, from ancient times to the early modern era, would have functioned up until the railroad came along and revolutionized everything. (Yes, there were railroads during the Civil War. It was maybe the first American war when rail transport was a thing; like many innovations, you see armies slowly but surely figure out how to make best use of them.)
One of the key problems that a lot of armies faced? Camp followers. On the one hand, it helped morale for soldiers to keep their wives, personal servants, etc. with them on campaign, and with any large body of men you’d see any number of hangers-on (washerwomen, sutlers, sex workers) ready to sell any product or service the soldiers might need. On the other hand, having so many of these non-combatants nearby put a heavy strain on army logistics, what with all the additional mouths to feed. An army that wanted to move fast — or to move at all without completely devastating a territory like an army of locusts — had to streamline operations as much as possible.
In Ancient Rome, virtuous commanders often made a point of banishing camp followers, something they were able to do via strict discipline and a robust military logistics system (although the fact that they kept having to do it suggests a long-term problem). More than a thousand years later, the kings of Spain looked at their Army of Flanders and thought, eh, fuck it, they’ll figure out logistics as they go along. It’s no coincidence that Rome is famous for dominating the Mediterranean for just about a millennium, while the Army of Flanders is most famous for sacking their own city of Antwerp during a mutiny.
The reason why I say all this is because the Confederate army was much closer to “Army of Flanders” than “Roman army (any era)” on this imaginary scale. Which, uh, kinda makes sense, because slavery. Obviously not every Confederate soldier was accompanied by a slave, but as Wiley documents in his book, many soldiers were, particularly officers from slaveholding families (although the practice was common enough among the enlisted ranks).
Still, the sheer number of anecdotes is enough to give one pause. We are told, for example, of the enslaved cook who was tasked with making bread out of a barrel of flour with very little notice: he “knocked off the [barrel’s] head, poured in river water and other ingredients as needed, and thus converted the entire contents into dough with rare dispatch.” And this was not unusual: slaveowners would often bring a slave (sometimes more than one) to function as a personal body servant, or else a slave might labor for a soldier’s mess unit, doing the domestic functions that the soldier could not bother to do. (Fellow-members of a soldier’s mess would customarily chip money in to recompense the slaveowner). Soldiers who did not own slaves were sometimes able to hire one.
How much did this really matter in the outcome of the war? I have no idea, and Wiley did not comment. Surely some Union men had personal servants of their own, and sutlers and washerwomen (or “washerwomen”) were common enough in all armies of this time. Although you sorta get the idea that the Union was at least aware of the issue — Ulysses Grant’s incredibly stupid General Order No. 11 was probably an attempt to deal with it, however incompetently — and of course, Union officers did not tend to come from slaveholding backgrounds.
But it’s really just one example of the Confederacy fucking up its logistics. The army’s provisions declined rapidly in quality while food rotted at railroad depots. Turns out, it’s hard shipping food around in pre-refrigeration times, especially when Sherman is tearing up all the railroad tracks. And you also had state governors like Zebulon Vance of North Carolina; while other historians note favorably his opposition to conscription and his successful fight to preserve the writ of habeas corpus in North Carolina, his “states’ rights” mindset definitely caused other issues for the central government. Many units in Lee's army were almost barefoot and clothed in rags, but North Carolina’s soldiers were well-dressed almost to the very end of the war, as Vance steadfastly refused to share the vast surplus of uniforms and equipment he’d stockpiled in North Carolina warehouses.
Wiley himself doesn’t really offer a central thesis on this point. His goal was to paint a picture of the ordinary Confederate soldier, a topic that had been neglected in the breathless hagiographies that came out to lionize Lee and Jackson and others of the officer class. This largely meant providing a vast quantity of firsthand anecdotes illustrative of various topics. The sample size is probably sufficient for you to draw broader conclusions, but Wiley doesn’t let it trouble him all that much.
IV.
Of course, the best parts of the book are the many, many entertaining little stories that Wiley unearthed, in archives and collections of personal correspondence.
We are told, for example, that Confederate soldiers would for lack of utensils or cookware improvise such delicacies as “cush,” a dish consisting mostly of beef fried in bacon grease, with breadcrumbs added and the whole thing stewed in water like hash. Or consider the notoriously eccentric Stonewall Jackson, whose response to an armament shortage in early 1862 was to start equipping companies of men with pikes. (Eventually the Confederates found more or less enough guns to go around, but Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia was so enthusiastic about the idea that he had thousands of pikes produced in Georgia factories.) Reflect on the memories of the wartime doctor, completely undersupplied, whose practice was limited to asking his soldier patients about their bowels: if they were “open,” administer a plug of opium, and if they were “closed,” a plug of blue mass. Commiserate with the soldier, frustrated with the monotony of his rations, raging that “If any person offers me cornbread after this war comes to a close, I shall probably tell him to — go to hell!”
…now that I read that over again, I realize all this just reinforces the point that Confederate military logistics really were a disaster.
What I’m trying to say is, reading this book was fun. You want to learn neat little facts about the Civil War? What kind of ink soldiers used to write? What songs they sung? What war crimes they committed?
(Maybe the most absurd anecdote, to me, was how powerful factions in the Confederate government repeatedly blocked proposals to free slaves and arm them in defense of the Confederacy, and how, during the final days of the war when a small force of loyal freedmen was finally outfitted, the citizens of Richmond responded by throwing shit at them. C’mon, guys.)
If that’s the kind of thing you find interesting, you could do far worse than check out Bell Irvin Wiley’s The Life of Johnny Reb.