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The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It (Library of America #212) Hardcover – February 3, 2011

by Brooks D. Simpson (Editor), Stephen W. Sears (Editor), Aaron Sheehan-Dean (Editor)

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Part of: Library of America: The Civil War Collection (4 books)

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The first volume in a four-volume series on the American Civil War—featuring first-hand writings from Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and more

After 150 years the Civil War is still our greatest national drama, at once heroic, tragic, and epic-our Iliad, but also our Bible, a story of sin and judgment, suffering and despair, death and resurrection in a "new birth of freedom.” Drawn from letters, diaries, speeches, articles, poems, songs, military reports, legal opinions, and memoirs, The Civil War: The First Year gathers over 120 pieces by more than sixty participants to create a unique firsthand narrative of this great historical crisis.

Beginning on the eve of Lincoln's election in November 1860 and ending in January 1862 with the appointment of Edwin M. Stanton as secretary of war, this volume presents writing by figures well-known—Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Mary Chesnut, Frederick Douglass, and Lincoln himself among them—and less familiar, like proslavery advocate J.D.B. DeBow, Lieutenants Charles B. Haydon of the 2nd Michigan Infantry and Henry Livermore Abbott of the 20th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment, and plantation mistresses Catherine Edmondston of North Carolina and Kate Stone of Mississippi. Together, the selections provide a powerful sense of the immediacy, uncertainty, and urgency of events as the nation was torn asunder. Includes headnotes, a chronology of events, biographical and explanatory endnotes, full-color hand-drawn endpaper maps, and an index. Companion volumes will gather writings from the second, third, and final years of the conflict.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Library of America: The Civil War Collection
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840 pages
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English
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Library of America
Publication date

February 3, 2011
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5.09 x 1.36 x 8.15 inches
ISBN-10

1598530887
ISBN-13

978-1598530889
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Brooks D. Simpson, editor, is Foundation Professor of History at Arizona State University. He is the author of Let Us Have Peace: Ulysses S. Grant and the Politics of War and Reconstruction, 1861–1868 and Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity, 1822–1865, and the co-editor of Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865.

Stephen W. Sears, volume editor, is the author of Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam; George B. McClellan: The Young Napoleon; To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign; Chancellorsville; Controversies and Commanders; and Gettysburg.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean, editor, is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Florida and author of Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia and The Concise Historical Atlas of the U.S. Civil War.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Library of America (February 3, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 840 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1598530887
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1598530889
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.53 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.09 x 1.36 x 8.15 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #227,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #246 in American Fiction Anthologies
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A. Orth

Excellent selection of primary source material from 1860/61

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 19, 2011

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Short on time, so I'll be as succinct as possible. Hopefully I will say something that has not already been said.

1. The work represents a wide, diverse, and I think unbiased selection of private letters, public letters, speeches, diary entries, and editorials written in 1860 and 1861 relating to the impending secession crisis and resulting war.
2. Sources represent political leaders, stakeholders, and mere observers, but all are highly articulate. No source class is given greater voice than another.
3. The views expressed represent what I suspect, based on wide reading of historical writings covering the Civil War and its antecedent, are every major idea and theme either side could muster to support its causes.
4. Both pro-Union and pro-Secession views are expressed equally.
5. The sources are unedited, un-redacted, and unabridged and are presented as written.
6. While context is provided, both biographical and historical, it is universally brief, pointed, and largely given without comment or opinion.

The result of this is a rare feat: material a non-specialist would likely never encounter or if encountered, then only in support of a historian's or biographer's argument and only rarely in unedited form. What comes across most strongly is the contemporaneous nature of this conflict which, while frequently represented as an inevitable clash, was certainly not viewed with such fatalism by its participants. No one, from Lincoln down to the lowliest laborer or slave, had any idea what would come, when whatever would be would be, and how it would end.

There are particular jems. Senator Benjamin Wade's speech in the Senate between Lincoln's election and inauguration during which he as much as calls out the then Democrats, both North and South, as sore losers, is alone worth the price of the volume. His point? You were fine as long as you were winners but now that we have won, you have decided you no longer wish to play the game for no other reason than what you fear we will do, even though we have assured you that we mean only to carry out our agenda: which is the restriction of slavery to its current boundaries.

A second discovery - more of an exclamation point - is that slavery is mentioned or cited in almost every piece, underscoring the idea, which many Lost Cause apologists have striven mightily to obfuscate, that the conflict was exactly about slavery. The term 'state's rights' is never mentioned as such, and both South Carolina's and Mississipi's Declaration of Sucession cite the North's desire to abolish slavery as the primary cause prompting their desire to leave the Union. I've always thought the Lost Cause crowd's claim that the war wasn't about slavery is a pile of tosh, but what these pieces show is that secession, slavery, and the Confederacy cannot be discriminated as separate ideas, which makes Lost Cause apologists are either liars or fools.

10 people found this helpful

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A fine collection of primary sources of the Civil War's first year

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 12, 2011

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What a treasure this book is! It contains a series of documents of the Civil War's first year "by those who lived it."The inside front cover displays a map of the United States, with key battles from the first year underlined in red. Among them: Wilson's Creek, Belmont, Port Royal, Rich Mountain and, perhaps most famously, Bull Run. A Preface and Introduction set the table for what follows. As the Preface has it (Page xix): "Selections have been chosen for their historical significance, their literary quality, and their narrative energy, and are printed from the best available sources." But it is the documents themselves that are at the heart of this book. A few illustrations. . .

The first selection is an editorial from the Charleston Mercury, a southern newspaper. It asks the question "What shall the South Carolina legislature do?" To address what the editorial author sees as an effort to extinguish slavery, the words call out for (Page 1) ". . .the ball of revolution [to] be set in motion." The vehicle to address this? A state convention. That essay is followed immediately by notes from a meeting in Springfield Illinois, taken by Lincoln's secretary John Nicolay. At one point, just before the election, Lincoln says that he has tried to reassure the South on numerous occasions, but that it would be futile to continue providing such reassurances. At one point, the notes state that (Page 5): "Having told them all these things ten times already would they believe the eleventh declaration?"

On page 37, Sam Houston's response to a letter by prominent individuals to, in essence, start the process of Texas leaving the Union. Houston was opposed and this poignant response lays out his position. John Nicolay's notes of a December conversation with Lincoln record his response to events in Charleston Harbor. And read the two inaugural addresses--one by Jefferson David (Page 201) and the other by Abraham Lincoln (Page 210), to get a sense of their respective perspectives. On the military front, we read Winfield Scott's message to General George McClellan, in which the commanding general, Scott, lays out his "Anaconda Plan." Pages 504 and 505 record Lincoln's response to the drubbing of the Union forces at Bull Run. The final reading to be mentioned is the January 1862 meeting with Montgomery Meigs in which Lincoln noted that (Page 691) "The bottom is out of the tub," as he discusses what the Union should do next.

This volume closes with a useful chronology (Pages 697 to 706) and biographical notes on key figures from the first year of the Civil War.

A splendid volume! If interested in who was saying what at the time, this is a wonderful resource.

23 people found this helpful

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Frank

Well worth your time.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2019

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Interesting! This book is a compilation of documents relating to the first year of the Civil War. These documents were written by those who were either participants or witnesses or other categories in which they're hard to place and were not separated from the events by many years as we are today. For the most part the writers do write very well and are obviously well read. Understandably in some of the articles or entries the spelling could be improved but this was to be expected as schooling wasn't as yet compulsory and a number of them must have had very little schooling if any at all. Other than that these articles or documents gives the reader an incredible first hand account into just what went on during that first year whether it was by those who were in the midst of the battles or those accomplished writers who tried to impart just what was going on to their readers or those diarists who never imagined that what they were writing would be read by anyone other than themselves. Whether the writers were from the North or South they, for the most part, were passionate about what they or others were fighting for. You'll read the passion in which those who were advocating secession were trying to persuade others that to do so was the right thing and not so much the passion of those but the firm belief that the Union must be preserved! This was and is a wonderful read. In my opinion the writers here were better writers than those of today. Whatever your interest in the Civil War I believe that this book at least is a must.

One particular letter I'd like to point out that I consider a must read is the letter from Sullivan Ballou. His belief that his fighting to preserve the Union was just and his love for his wife and children are beyond description. How anyone can remain unmoved after reading it is beyond me.

7 people found this helpful

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William Jordan

collection of historically important writings rather than consistently great journalism or literature

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 28, 2014

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This collection of contemporary writings by a very wide range of different hands taught me much that I did not know about the American Civil War. It's all expertly presented and annotated.

But it wasn't quite the equivalent of the Library of America volumes containing journalism about the Second World War or the Vietnam War. Rather, much of the volume is about the preamble to war - what was the justification for Secession by the South (really none) and what prompted it (Abraham Lincoln's election, but as even Southern writers agree, that wasn't a sufficient reason for rebellion). And there is still much of primarily historical rather than literary interest as the war gets underway - various secession declarations and addresses to the Southern and Northern congresses.

What stood out for me was Walt Whitman's account of the aftermath in human terms of the battle of Bull Run; an account of life in Richmond as the blockade of the South starts to impact on the prices of common goods such as coffee and tea; Lincoln's first inaugural address (but not some of his later speeches); Frederick Douglass' pleas for a war on slavery (which this isn't at first - Lincoln has taken great care to make sure that the South starts hostilities at Fort Sumter and it is a war about preserving the Union); and letters from Ulysses Grant saying the only way it should be a war about slavery is if this is the only way to preserve the Union. And then there are the Southern justifications of slavery including one speech explaining that it was the 'corner stone' of the Southern way of life…

So actually there is much of interest here - but also many pieces that after a while I skimmed rather than read with great attention - and overall it was just a bit less gripping as a reading experience than I had hoped.

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