A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 [Hardcover]

Russell F. Weigley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 22, 2000

A Great Civil War is a major new interpretation of the events which continue to dominate the American imagination and identity nearly 150 years after the war's end. In personal as well as historical terms, more even than the war for independence, the Civil War has been the defining experience of American democracy.

A lifelong student of both strategy and tactics, Weigley also brings to his account a deep understanding of the importance of individuals from generals to captains to privates. He can put the reader on the battlefield as well as anyone who has ever written about war. All of the important engagements are covered, and he does it countless times in A Great Civil War. From Fort Sumter to the early clashes in the West and border states to the naval encounters in the East and on through the great and horrible battles whose names resound in American history—Shiloh, Corinth, Bull Run, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Antietam, Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Appomattox. A brilliant narrator of battle action and historical events, Weigley is never content merely to tell a good story. Every student of war will find new insights and interpretations at the strategic and the tactical level. There are firm judgments throughout of the leaders on both sides of the conflict.

A Great Civil War also analyzes the politics of both sides in relationship to battlefield situations. Weigley is unique in his ability to put all of the pieces on the board at once; the reader understands as never before how war and politics (and individuals) interacted to produce the infinitely complex story which is the Civil War.

As with any major work, there are themes and subtexts, explicit and implicit:

Both sides began the war with strategic and tactical concepts based on Napoleon which were already obsolete because of changes in technology—and both sides struggled throughout the war to develop new strategic and tactical procedures.

The Civil War was great not only in the massiveness of the slaughter and destruction. It was, for all its horror, a war about values—democracy and the freeing of the slaves—that was worth the effort.

The South, despite its powerful defense, was ultimately ambivalent about leaving the Union and gave up more easily than might have been expected.

Finally, there is an intimacy, a sense of personal urgency, in Weigley's grand account. He is connected by blood as well as profession. Jacob Weigley, the author's great grandfather, visited Gettysburg soon after the battle and wrote about it to his brother Francis, who was serving with the 7th Pennsylvania Cavalry; Francis later died in a Confederate prison camp. Then and now the Weigleys live in Pennsylvania, and the war and its lessons remain part of the family's living memory, as it is also the nation's.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Weigley's history of the Civil War accepts slavery as the conflict's moral center, but describes the war as a military contest for political ends. For Weigley, professor of history emeritus at Temple, the Confederacy fought to defend a way of life that could be sustained only in an independent nation, while the Union government insisted on the unconditional surrender of that claim to sovereignty. The war's outcome thus depended on the adversaries' respective mastery of war-making. Weigley contends that the Civil War was not the modern, and modernizing, event described on so many television programs. North and South alike waged war on artisanal lines, making do with the tools available to them. Extensions of government power on both sides were limited and channeled. The major exception was at the war's sharp end, when improved firearms drove casualty lists relentlessly upward at the same time that armies had grown too large to be crushed in decisive battles on the Napoleonic model. Weigley's encyclopedic command of his sources enables him to combine narrative clarity and analytic perception in evaluating behaviors and decisions. To cite only one example, his discussion of Gettysburg makes clear in a few sentences why the Confederates were unlikely to have captured Cemetery Hill on July 1 under any circumstances. Weigley goes on to show the logistical reasons why Lee rejected Longstreet's proposal for an operational flanking maneuver. And he concludes by making a throwaway case that Dan Sickles may in fact have saved the Union army on July 2 by an often condemned advance to the Peach Orchard that created some maneuvering room for a constricted left wing. That kind of intellectual virtuosity, regularly repeated in these pages, makes this notable book the counterpoint to James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this in-depth review of the much-discussed War Between the States, Weigley (Eisenhower's Lieutenants: The Campaign of France and Germany, 1944-1945) takes an original tact. Rather than provide a singular account of the major events of the war, he offers several perspectives, then examines the military, political, and historical consequences of each event. This approach serves up several revelations. We learn, for instance, that the attack on Fort Sumter was not a complete surprise to the UnionDthere already was concern within the army that Confederate forces might strike. Weigley also discusses some of the reasons for the first military draft, such as the short enlistment terms of militia units and the casualties that were draining the winning as well as the losing army. This book could be useful in any library but would be most practical where there are informed lay readers and/or large military, history, or Civil War history collections.DTerry Wirick, Erie Cty. P.L., PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 648 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press; 1ST edition (June 22, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253337380
• ISBN-13: 978-0253337382
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #163,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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31 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great overview of our "great civil war", August 2, 2000

By 

David S. Wiedner (Philadelphia, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Hardcover)

A Great Civil War makes a strong case that the Civil War was a necessary tragedy. This gracefully written historical narrative, which takes its title from Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, effortlessly spans the range of Civil War scholarship. The focus shifts smoothly from vivid personal details to battlefield tactics, and from campaign strategies (or, all too often, the lack of them) to the intimate connection of warfare, policy, and politics. Along the way, Weigley gently but convincingly deflates a number of Civil War myths.

Amongst his always illuminating battle narratives, the author intersperses short essays on such subjects as the design of ever more lethal weapons, the era's formative military paradigms, and how the demands of full-scale war centralized the nation's banking system and greatly enhanced the power of the federal government.

This book's greatest contribution may be the author's willingness to make clear judgments based on balanced discussions of conflicting views. For example, Weigley presents a compelling argument that the Confederacy failed in large part because it could never overcome a basic ambivalence in its purpose: the incompatible goals of continuing slavery and the Southern lifestyle within a Union most Southern leaders believed in and complete severance from that Union. This ambivalence helps explain both why fighting ended so quickly after formal military defeat and why many Civil War issues remain unresolved.

A parallel theme Weigley develops is the Northern shift from fighting for Victorian ideals of duty and honor to fighting to advance the moral cause of liberation. With eye-opening clarity, he demonstrates that as popular support for the war and the Republican Party waned, Lincoln and others changed their rhetorical and moral focus from restoration of the Union to the elimination of slavery. Thus, slavery became a moral motive for the North to continue waging war in large part because of political expediency.

On a subject he has explored elsewhere, the author notes that each war develops its own momentum that reshapes the political purposes that began it. Thus, the Civil War, for the North, began as an effort to restore the constitutional union of the American Revolution but ended as a revolutionary struggle to uproot slavery and, along with it, the foundations of Southern life. The author implies an ambivalence toward emancipation that in some ways mirrors the South's ambivalence toward its cause. He finds in the North's eventual dedication to the elimination of slavery little concern for the practical matter of how the liberated slaves and their descendants would participate in America's democratic experiment -- a singularly important Civil War legacy.

The few flaws are minor: the maps and text occasionally differ in the spelling of place and road names; the important Richmond and Danville Railroad is unidentified on the second map although listed in the legend; the typo "throught" escaped spell-checking software and proof-reading; and the index, though useful, omits occurrences of repeated names, locations, and topics. In addition, Weigley seems undecided about how close to the fighting Civil War generals should have been; generals too close to the front could not coordinate large-scale movements (and often became casualties themselves), while generals too far away could not quickly identify places where local units needed reinforcement. Given both the limits of communication at the time and leaders' frequent need to motivate troops by example, however, such problems were probably unavoidable.

This superb -- and superbly readable -- work is at one level a model of the virtues of the narrative form backed by solid scholarship. At another, subtler level, it is a deeply principled call to re-examine our national myths and bring the lessons we learn to bear on this nation's many unresolved social and institutional struggles.

33 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Good, but Not Great, History of the Civil War, November 28, 2000

By 

Steven S. Berizzi - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Hardcover)

Russell F. Weigley is one of the pre-eminent military historians in the country, and his The American Way of War" A History of United States Military Strategy and Politics is a classic. Professor Weigley's current volume, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, is a solid survey of its topic but I believe that it adds relatively little to our understanding of the four-year conflict which is the great turning point in American history. In his bibliography, Weigley candidly refers to James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, published in 1988 as the "best comprehensive one-volume history," and so it remains. If the leading authorities had to choose, I suspect that most would continue to recommend Battle Cry of Freedom. As a result, Weigley's book will be of interest mostly to Civil War enthusiasts, like me, who never can get enough.

As befits a leading military history with broad knowledge of his field, one of Weigley's strengths is presenting the Civil War in context: I found the section of the introduction entitled "Nineteenth-Century Americans at War" and the sections in the second chapter entitled "Napoleonic War" and "War in a New Style" especially interesting. When democracies go to war, military decisions and politics cannot be separated, and Weigley wisely interweaves the two subjects in his narrative. Central to Weigley's interpretation of the war is this passage: General Robert E. Lee "rightly believed that the longer the war, the smaller the Confederacy's chances of winning it, because of the relative scarcity of Confederate resources. The South's best hope of keeping the war short lay in the Washington-Richmond theater." In this, I believe Weigley is absolutely correct. Although the war raged at various times from Pennsylvania to Texas and from the Atlantic Ocean across the Mississippi River, the conflict's most important events generally occurred in northern Virginia and its environs. General Lee's campaigns which ended at the battles of Antietam in September 1862 and Gettysburg in July 1863 were attempts to pose threats to the national capital so severe that the Union government would be forced to sue for peace, allowing the Confederate States of America to go their own way. Weigley's presentation of these critical campaigns are stronger on description than analysis of their consequences. However, Weigley make some telling statements of fact and observation about the key players. Early in the war, Lee "was widely distrusted in the Confederacy." General George B. McClellan, who commanded the federal forces around Washington D.C., during the first two years of the war, tended to avoid combat because "[l]aboring under the terrible responsibility of dispatching men to die, he apparently found the prospect of actually witnessing many of the deaths more than he could bear." According to Weigley, General Thomas "Stonewall" "Jackson's flank march to Manassas Junction [for the Second Battle of Bull Run] had been a Napoleonic manoeuvre sur les derrières as brilliantly executed as any by Napoleon himself." And, about the brutally-destructive Union campaign in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in 1864, Weigley writes: "A pillar of fire marked [General Philip] Sheridan's route northward...[I]n Sheridan's interpretation of what was necessary to deny sustenance to the rebel army, barns, mills, and corn-cribs all went to the torch. When occasionally a fire spread to a barn or farmhouse, that was unfortunate but part of the chances of war."

Weigley makes some curious choices. For instance, he devotes over four full pages to "Pea Ridge: The Great Battle of the Trans-Mississippi," in March 1862, which is noteworthy, as Weigley observes, primarily because it was "one of the few major Civil War engagements in which the Federals were substantially outnumbered," but less than a page to the battle of Fredericksburg in December of that year, when the Army of Northern Virginia mauled a considerably larger Federal force as it futilely assaulted Confederate forces dug into the high ground overlooking the Rappahannock River in this central Virginia city. Fredericksburg is significant in its own right, as well as because of the influence it had on the battle of Gettysburg; in the rolling hills of south-central Pennsylvania in July 1863, the Federals offered battle precisely because they held the high ground along Cemetery Ridge, and Confederate General James Longstreet's hesitated to assault the far right of the Federal position on the critical second day of the battle as a result, as Weigley notes, from Longstreet's fear of a "foredoomed Fredericksburg in reverse." In a book of only 450 pages of text, hard choices are necessary: Pea Ridge was noteworthy, but, in the grand scope of the war, Fredericksburg was more significant. Weigley might also have devoted more attention to comparing the presidents of the warring nations, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Weigley could have made the point that Lincoln, a president without a West Point education and experience as Secretary of War, largely had to leave matters of tactics, if not strategy, to his generals. But Davis had both that education and experience, as a result of which he spent most of the war meddling. In contrast, Weigley's comparison of President Lincoln with General McClellan, and especially their conflicting views about the war's purpose is splendid. (McClellan was eventually relieved of command and ran against Lincoln for the presidency in 1864.) There is absolutely no question about Weigley's command of the material. When I am critical, it is only of the author's execution of the daunting task of compressing that material into a cohesive narrative of approximately 450 pages.

A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History is written in smooth but not especially compelling style. I enjoyed reading it because the military history of the Civil War is among my favorite subjects, but I cannot honestly recommend this book as superior to previous one-volume histories, most notably McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Although Weigley is an exceptionally accomplished military historian, this book does not quite carry the day.

28 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Superbly Written and thought provoking Book, September 9, 2000

By 

"ewilliamsywam" - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865 (Hardcover)

This is one of the best books about the Civil War to be written in a very long time. It is literally food for the mind.Professor Weigley calls His book a political and military history.But it is mainly a military history and a brilliant one.Probably Weigley's most provocative statement is that the South lost basically because of a failure of will.That is the Leaders of the Confederacy both political and military were ambivalent about secession and failed to do certain things that might have helped them to prevail.He pronounces as the War's greatest illusion the Confederacy's hopes of European intervention and shows why this was never in the cards. Weigley comes to the defense of Generals like McClellan and Meade for their failure to pursue the enemy after costly victories at Antietam and Gettysburg by pointing out that no victorious General on either side ever did this for very obvious reasons.In His analysis of the Battle of Gettysburg the author says the major factor in Meade's victory was that the Federal commander exercised sound judgement in His choice of subordinate Generals to carry the battle,Reynolds,Hancock, Warren etc,while Lee exercised very poor judgement in His choice of subordinates;Longstreet who did''nt believe in the plan, Ewell who was entirely too cautious and Jeb Stuart who simply was''nt there.And of course Weigley indulges in the mandatory comparison of the Generalship of Lee and Grant.He concludes that Lee was the last of the Napoleonic Generals. Like His Hero Lee believed that the purpose of war was to bring on battles and ultimately the one great battle in which the enemy's army would be destroyed.Just as Napoleon did at Austerlitz. So Lee spent the entire war in search of His own personal Austerlitz and He never found it, though He came close at Chancellorsville. Grant on the other hand considered Napoleon's strategy obsolete and believed the purpose of war was to fight campaigns. A series of battles in

which the enemy's strength was gradually stripped away.Weigley thus concludes that Lee's strategic concepts belonged to the past while those of Grant belonged to the future. In other words Grant would have been quite at home in the two world wars or any of the other wars of the twentieth century.And finally as a son of Arkansas I am happy too see that some notable Historian has finally given the Battle of Pea Ridge some due recognition. Weigley calls it the war's most underrated battle, The Gettysburg of the west.Again this is a superb book, a magnificent reading experience.