Customer Reviews

The American Civil War: A Military History

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(13)
2 star:		(17)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I'm a big John Keegan fan. I'm also a serious reader of Civil War history. On both counts I'm very disappointed in this book. Keegan is usually an insightful historian and a solid writer. This book falls short in both areas. I can't recommend the book even for serious Civil War buffs as, at best, there's nothing new here. The book has annoying factual errors (doesn't anyone fact check anything anymore?) and is very poorly edited to the point that it's almost incoherent in several sections.

The factual errors tend to be related to details, e.g. on page 321 Keegan states that Winfield Scott was 85 years old at the beginning of the war while Scott's actual age was 75 or on page 218 the Confederates are described as making preparations to escape from besieged Vicksburg by crossing to the "eastern shore" where in fact Vicksburg was on the eastern shore of the Mississippi River. This doesn't distract necessarily from Keegan's larger point but it's highly distracting to any reader who has background in the period. These types of factual errors are scattered throughout the book and their accumulation eventually undercuts belief in the larger picture that Keegan attempts to paint.

But even more seriously the book is almost unreadable in a number of sections. The quality of the editing in this book is nothing short of appalling. There are serious problems with continuity throughout the book. There is significant repetition in the book. These problems seems to occur much more frequently in the sections describing the war in the "west" (i.e. Tennessee, Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama). It is literally impossible to read the sections on Chickamauga or Hood's Nashville campaign and not get seriously confused and misled regarding what actually happened relative to who did what, in what sequence, etc. When poor editing leads to creating factual confusion, as in the discussion of the end of the siege at Vicksburg when we have the Confederate General Bowen seemingly described as a subordinate ("his emissary") of Union commander Grant, the results should be embarrassing to a publisher like Knopf and an author like Keegan.

There are many good single volume treatments of the American Civil War. This is unfortunately not one of them.

I'm a big fan of John Keegan. I first read The Face of Battle in the late '70s, soon after it was published. It convinced me he was going to be one of the more important historians of the last part of the century, and for the most part that's proven correct. He has since produced a large library of interesting, intelligent books, the content of which has been interesting. I can't say I agree with everything the author writes and advocates, but I can say that he's generally thought-provoking and intelligent. Which is why the current book is such a disappointment.

The American Civil War is perhaps one of the more written-about wars in world history. This is, of course, because the market for American history is so large, because there are so many Americans. It's also got something to do, I suspect, with the size of the conflict and its course. There's a tradition of foreign interest in the war (the current standard history of the Confederate Navy was written by an Italian historian, and then translated into English) and British historians have especially been fascinated by it. One of the older biographies of Stonewall Jackson was written by a British soldier, G.F.R. Henderson, in the late 19th Century, and early in the 20th J.F.C. Fuller and B.H. Liddel Hart wrote extensively about the war from various perspectives. Liddel Hart's biography of Sherman still has some followers; he made some good points.

Keegan has written about the American Civil War in the past. In his partially autobiographical book Fields of Battle, he recounts that he first came to America as a grad student with a grant to study the Battlefields of the American Civil War, what has to be 50 years ago or so. Knowing this, you'd imagine that the author would have a good knowledge of the conflict and the characters involved in it, and that he'd provide a good thorough history of the war. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Some of his general discussion of the war is interesting, and has insight, but the narrative is so confusing and riddled with errors you have to wonder how he came to the correct conclusions.

The book begins with a series of topical chapters, describing the events leading up to the war, and describing such things as American geography and the state of the Republic at the time of the war. These chapters are *generally* better than the narrative ones that follow, though the one on geography contains a few errors. Once we get to the account of the war however, things begin to deteriorate.

I actually went to the trouble of taking notes, writing down things I saw that were errors in the book. I kept this up for a while, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth the effort and stopped. When I stopped I had a page of tightly-written shorthand notes discussing everything from the sequence of events in the Valley campaign to Keegan omitting that Stuart got lost before Gettysburg. Most of the author's conclusions about the battles, campaigns, and characters would be sustainable with a factual history of the war, but the errors detract from the narrative. One blight on the conclusions page: the author seems to fall into the Paddy Griffith school of Civil War history. For those who aren't aware, Griffith is British, and he writes on 19th century infantry tactics. He's been rather controversial since his book on the American Civil War, which puts forward the opinion that the influence of rifles on Civil War battles has been greatly exaggerated, and that the battles were essentially still Napoleonic contests. I've never agreed with much of what Griffith wrote, and I was sorry to see his book in Keegan's rather slim bibliography.

There's also the issue of the writing style. All the negative reviews have noted that the book is repetitive, and often the repetitions aren't needed for the narrative to make sense. Occasionally a sequence of events will be recounted, erroneously, and then repeated correctly. I have another criticism, one that's a bit stranger. Keegan is British, and they have their own writing style, generally. It tends to be wordier, and your average Brit has to be edited pretty carefully (or so it seems to me) to avoid prose so dense it can't be penetrated. While he's a skilled writer, Keegan's prose here tends to run on and on and on. Some of the paragraphs are seemingly endless, and there's often no real reason for this. It's as if he got popular and powerful enough that no one dared edit his prose, when it was actually very neccessary. It's also fascinating that no one thought to have someone else look over the manuscript, and comment on what he wrote. If anyone did, they either didn't notice the errors or were ignored.

In addition to everything else, the illustrations occasionally leave something to be desired. The photograph of Jefferson Davis, if it's him, is from very late in his life. Davis was famously tall, spare, and had high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, and a small imperial under his chin, no mustache. The person in the picture is older, much older than Davis was during the war, and has a full beard and mustache, all snowy white. Also, there's a photograph of the C.S.S. Stonewall, with a caption describing her as something along the line of a typical Confederate river ironclad. As any Civil War naval buff will tell you, the Stonewall was pretty much unique, being the only Confederate warship I'm aware of with a turret, and the only ironclad one to cross the Atlantic. She also never sailed on an American river. As an aside, the maps aren't perfect either; the Gettysburg 3rd day map has the XII Corps lead by someone named "Ruge". This is probably Thomas Ruger, who was a division commander and may have led the unit for a day or two while Slocum was commanding the right wing, but why confuse the map by putting the man's name (misspelled) next to the unit? He's not in the narrative of the battle at all; for that matter Slocum's only very briefly mentioned.

I really wanted to like this book, and frankly was surprised by the poor scholarship underlying much of what's in the narrative of the war. Someone should go through this book and carefully edit every portion of the text before it's reissued as a paperback. You'll notice I said *should*. I seriously doubt the publisher will bother.

Like at least one other reviewer, I found this book disappointing and flawed. My biggest problem with the book is the repetition among and within chapters, which occurs numerous times. The flow of the book is disjointed, as might be expected from a book that was generated from separate magazine articles written by the author. I always am disappointed when I find this because the author generally makes little effort to synthesize those articles into a coherent whole, and that certainly happened here. There also are quite a few factual errors, most obvious enough to have been caught had any serious review effort been made. Keegan early on makes what I thought to be an insightful analysis of how geography impacted the Civil War, but seems then only to consider in a conclusory way how geography affected any particular battle.

Keegan also concludes that Grant was a great general and better than Lee, which certainly may be correct, if for no other reason than that he won, but I didn't think that Keegan supported his conclusion well in light of the tremendous loss of life resulting from battles initiated by Grant. And I was struck--unfavorably so--by Keegan's comparison in an early chapter of McClellan to Patton. I confess I couldn't follow that, because whatever Patton's faults, and he had quite a few, he wasn't afraid of engaging the enemy in battle. Rundstedt said that "Patton was your best"; I daresay no Confederate General ever said that "McClellan was your best." Keegan either is extremely readable and informative --e.g., the First World War--or is impossible to follow--I thought his book on the Iraq war fell within this category--and this book falls much closer to the latter category.

John Keegan needs no introduction to followers of military history, with some 19 books to his credit.

Keegan brings the perspective of an English military historian to the American Civil War, which does lend this history a rather unique flavor. One surprising element is the number of mostly small errors in the book. Some are inexplicable, such as mistakenly attributing desegregation of the American military to Dwight Eisenhower. In fact, it was his predecessor, President Harry Truman, who first ordered desegregation of the military. Eisenhower did pursue the issue during his Presidency as well as enforcing the Supreme Court's decision. In short, Keegan was partially correct in a way, but wrong on the major point. Keegan also errs in the combat deaths of the Civil War and American combat deaths in WWII. These are small errors, to be sure, but one wonders how they made it through both the writing and editing process.

There isn't much that hasn't been already said about the day-to-day history of the Civil War and most of the first 15 chapters are a retelling of what is already familiar to most military buffs. There is the occasional insight that only a historian of Keegan's caliber would recognize, but for the most part, it is well-trod territory. Keegan uses a number of British terms and colloquialisms which occasionally slow down the reader, but again this is not a major issue.

In the first 250 pages or so, Keegan pretty well lays out all the major aspects of the American Civil War.

In the last chapters, about 70 pages, Keegan comes fully into his own as he did in "The Face Of Battle". Here Keegan examines why the soldiers on both sides kept fighting despite casualty rates running around 30%. He points out the differences between the Civil War and all the wars before it, which is a fascinating exposition. His discussion of the strategy - or lack thereof - on the parts of North and South is among the very best I've seen. One of his points which I've never seen addressed in quite the same way is that the Civil War was a war of almost continuous battles, about 10,000 of them. This marked a significant departure from the Napoleonic doctrine of the time that sought great battle that would end the war.

Keegan also points out that the Civil War was the most important ideological war in history and his discussion is quite illuminating.

Overall, the last six chapters take a pretty good history and turn it into a superb and unique history of the American Civil War. There are more definitive histories, but Keegan's merits a place on the military history buff's bookshelf because of Keegan's singular perspective.

Jerry

I've been a fan of John Keegan's work since The Face of Battle, so I grabbed this book the moment I saw it on the shelf and went home to discover The Feet of Clay.

This is an extraordinarily bad book, with many special flavors of badness. First off, and most irritating, it is unedited. Calling the result "badly edited" is like calling Canyonlands "badly ploughed." At one notable point, I was puzzled (but, because it was well into the book, not surprised) to read a revised version of the sentence I had just finished reading. That's how ludicrous the repetition is, and it can't be accounted for by recalling that many chapters are badly connected journal and magazine articles (like the jarring "Walt Whitman and Wounds").

Secondly, and a bit shockingly, Keegan doesn't appear to have anything interesting to add to what's already been said about the Civil War. I'm not a buff, but I don't think "The Civil War was protracted because of the Napoleonic myth of 'the decisive battle'" is an earth-altering discovery. One begins early in the book to wonder why Keegan thought we needed THIS book, and the answer seems to be "because it was easy for him to write."

Finally, the book does not serve the casual reader. I've read McPherson, Catton, Sandburg, and Foote, so I'm not that reader. I've played computer simulations of at least a dozen of the key battles of the war. But even with that background, Keegan's narratives of battles are so chaotic that I couldn't make head or tail of most. And I wasn't especially tempted to, since the battles are reported with narrative blandness you could get from a high school history book. The chapters appear to be a chronology, and yet we keep looping back to explain things that were already explained in previous chapters. I can't remember how many times we visited the battles of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson (at least four), each time as if we'd never been there before.

This book ably expresses the contempt for fact that is endemic to our publishing industry. To have that associated with a historian of John Keegan's stature is sad indeed.

Please beware and do yourself a favor and read James McPherson's review of the book in the New York Time book supplement which details many of the factual errors contained in the book including worng geography and inconsistent positions. very por output by very good historian

This is a very strange book to come from the pen of John Keegan, who usually produces works that are cogent, well-written and persuasive. Aside from a few interesting insights into the nature of the American Civil War, the book is appallingly edited and apparently not fact-checked at all. While the writing in places shows Keegan's normal facility with the language, the flow is often poor and information is sometimes repeated almost verbatim several times, causing one to page back to check that, yes indeed, you just read the same thing four pages ago.

Most distressing to anyone with a reasonable knowledge of the Civil War are a host of factual errors. He gets dates wrong, names wrong, roles wrong... and those are just the ones I recognized en passant. The rationale for a book like this collapses if the reader can't trust the information on which conclusions are based.

This book is at such variance with Keegan's usual output that I really wonder what the backstory is. How could it have been written and published? Did some third party cobble it together from his notes while he was doing something else? As is, The American Civil War will do serious damage to Keegan's reputation.

I've read the bulk of Keegan's books and I've enjoyed most of them. This is by far the worst book he's ever written. I can't believe that he actually read the finished product. I'm convinced that Alfred Knopf & Sons didn't bother to edit the final manuscript - I guess they just ran SpellCheck and sent it to the printer. The repetition is so annoying that it's made me wonder if Keegan is suffering from some age-related health issues. Other reviewers have chronicled how many errors this book has; what grabbed me from the start is how in one paragraph he makes an argument of how wealthy the South was, and then in the next paragraph he contradicts himself by stating how poor the South was. Several of the chapters feel like they are cut and pasted together; there's a whole section on Chickamauga in one chapter, then in the chapter discussing Chancellorsville, there's a short paragraph about troop movements at Chickamauga again - very bizarre - as if the reader hasn't already read this in the prior chapter.

What's even more disturbing is how many good reviews this book has received, which just goes to show that reviewers don't actually read the books they review - so what's the point in reading reviews?

Why did I rate it two stars instead of one? Well there are chapters that written with Keegan's usual smooth prose - Bull Run is treated rather well. Other chapters leave a lot to be desired. There are tons of books on the Civil War, don't waste your time on this one.

Disclaimer: I've never read any of McPherson's books, so I don't have a particular agenda here other than that I'm severely disappointed in this book.

I'm an amateur concerning the Civil War, and I expected to, and did, learn many things about it from this book. I'll let others comment on the book's accuracy about historical events; but I was roused by the experience of reading the book to make some comments about its production. My conclusion is that no one---not an editor at the publisher, not an outside specialist reader engaged by the publisher, and most importantly not the author himself---copy-edited this book, or copy-edited it responsibly. So in that respect I'm sorry to say that it's a black eye both for Alfred A. Knopf and John Keegan. Here follow my reasons for saying so.

At the beginning of the book there is a large map of the Eastern U.S., marking Union and Confederate campaigns, movements, and victories. As I glanced at it, I noticed that the city name 'Gettysburg', and the map symbol for a Union victory next to it, are both shown as being in Maryland. I thought it was an odd mistake to have made it into the corrected proof; little did I know it was just an omen of things to come. Throughout the book, I picked up many repetitions (as have other reviewers), often just paragraphs apart. For example, on p. 246, we read, "Grant had fixed on a road junction known as Cold Harbor as the site of his next action." Yes, we know about "the crossroads of Cold Harbor," having been told about it (twice) on the previous page. On p. 251, we're told about a heavy artillery regiment that charged across breastworks and lost three-quarters of its number. On p. 253 this fact is repeated as if it had never been mentioned, the only difference being that now it's referred as the regiment's "assault on the earthworks, losing 632 men out of 850." Examples could be multiplied many times over.

There are about a dozen maps in the book, but often there are long descriptions of complex troop movements and place-names in battles that desperately call for maps without getting any. There are actually four maps dedicated to Gettysburg. Yet none of them shows the location of Cemetery Ridge and Seminary Ridge, even though these places figure very importantly in the detailed description of the battle. The book's lay-out is odd and the narrative is un-flowing (to say the least), a mixture of the topical and the chronological. As we get to the middle of the book, we are led in a more linear way to near the war's conclusion; but then that narrative stops on p. 280, when we are given seven chapters on a variety of unrelated subjects, and only then, in the last chapter, do we read an account of how the war ended. The book was obviously cobbled together from previously written pieces, and little work was done to integrate them. I often found it frustrating to read. It was a real disappointment.

By the way, I'll make one factual correction. On p. 116 we read: "The Great Kanawha River is one of the few which crosses the Appalachian chain; it rises in North Carolina and feeds the Ohio River. On it stands Charleston, capital of what today is West Virginia, and, eventually Pittsburgh, at the spot where it is joined by the Monongahela." Some readers will know that the Kanawha does flow into the Ohio, and that Charleston is on it, but that everything else here is false. It does not "cross" the Appalachians (its course is on the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau); it rises not in North Carolina, but in West Virginia, out of the confluence of the New and Gauley Rivers; it never goes anywhere near the Monongehela River; and the nearest it gets to Pittsburgh is about 150 miles.

Though decent enough in its main coverage, Keegan and his publisher should be mortified by the sheer number of errors in editing in this book. Just as one of many, many examples, Keegan at one point has Longstreet preparing earthworks to defend himself -- from Longstreet! There is a funny Anglocentrism to the book, too. Keegan asserts that McClellan may have come up with the idea for the Peninsular Campaign based on his observations of the British in the Crimean War, stating that America had never undertaken an amphibious campaign, and that the Mexican War was an entirely land-based campaign. That's just plain ignorance -- the major campaign of the Mexican War was an amphibious assault on Veracruz followed by an overland campaign to Mexico City; McClellan's Peninsular Campaign was practically a cabon copy in miniature. There are so many errors in names and dates it's simply embarassing. There are lots of single-volume books on the Civil War. This is not the one to buy.