Civil War Weather in Virginia (review)

In studying Civil War military history, we so often overlook several factors vital to an understanding of the struggle. One is drinking water. Surely a majority of soldiers must have been near or at dehydration in the later stages of an engagement.

A more important and common oversight is weather. Except perhaps for Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson's attack in a downpour at Chantilly in 1862, and the famous charge of the Virginia Military Institute cadets at New Market in 1864, weather conditions in the war are generally ignored by historians. This should not be. How soldiers felt, and under what conditions they fought, played essential roles in the campaigns of which they were a part.

Bob Krick has long been an historian's historian. A widely acclaimed authority on the Virginia campaigns as well as the Army of Northern Virginia, Krick is also an indefatigable researcher who seems constantly to be unearthing personal writings and data that bring light and life to Civil War history. His earlier compilation, Lee's Colonels, remains among the finest biographical registers in the field.

Now Krick has filled yet another void with this chronicle of over four years of daily weather in the Virginia theater. C. B. Mackee, a Presbyterian minister living at the time in the Washington suburb of Georgetown, maintained a daily log of temperature readings. Entries spanned the October, 1860-June, 1865, period. Some gaps existed in Rev. Mackee's ledger, but Krick has filled the breaches and expanded the daily tabulations with extant material from the Weather Bureau and similar sources.

The 57 tables published here include each day's sunrise and sunset times, temperature readings at three periods in a day, and any precipitation of note. Krick also delved into writings of soldiers and civilians for additional information. For example, Mackee made no side-references with the numerical figures he gave for January 1 and 2, 1864. Krick examined the diary of a Richmond war clerk and was able to add that New Year's Day had "hazy, misty weather" while the following day was "beautiful and spring-like."

It is difficult to cap the value of this compilation as a research tool. Any reputable historian henceforth working on Civil War happenings in the Eastern theater must consult it as part of basic research. Events become clearer and more accurate when weather data is inserted.

First Manassas, the opening battle of the war, occurred in eighty-degree temperature. The hottest day of battle in Virginia was 9 August 1862, at Cedar Mountain. The thermometer soared to ninety-eight degrees that Saturday. Contrary to legend, the 13 December 1862 battle of Fredericksburg did not take place in freezing weather. That day's high was fifty-six degrees. It was only one degree warmer on Palm Sunday, 1865, at Appomattox.