Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War ed. by Andrew S. Bledsoe, Andrew F. Lang (review)

The state-of-the-field military history essays authored by Gary W. Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier in the Journal of the Civil War Era and Earl J. Hess in Civil War History in 2014 caused an uncommon stir among historians. Both pieces acknowledged the benefits of a wide aperture in defining the purpose and provenance of military history as a scholarly genre, but (among other points) they also dared to assert that traditional military history inhabited a marginal position in the world of academics, with deleterious consequences for the larger goal of rigorously understanding the American Civil War in all its aspects.

Upon the Fields of Battle: Essays on the Military History of America’s Civil War, a collection of essays edited by two established but not yet senior scholars, thus sets foot on fraught historiographical terrain. Many of the collection’s contributors are also in the middle of their careers, and the volume serves as a proxy of sorts for the field’s future. Much to their credit, the editors succeed in this volume at least in productively bridging the divide between “drum-and-trumpet histories and the more theoretical war-and-society approaches that sometimes minimize or circumvent military considerations” (p. 7).

The pieces testify to the field’s diverse set of interests. Strong essays on army command from Andrew S. Bledsoe and Jennifer M. Murray represent operational military history. Kenneth W. Noe’s piece on the effects of weather in the Peninsula campaign is splendid, and an essay by John J. Hennessy on the sack of Fredericksburg continues a productive strand of scholarship on “hard war” and the question of whether (and how) Civil War violence was limited. Andrew F. Lang authors a related piece on the relationship between ideas of American exceptionalism and military occupation. Three chapters by Brian D. McKnight, Kevin M. Levin, and Brian Matthew Jordan cover different aspects of Civil War violence and its effects as seen in guerrilla warfare, executions of deserters, and the long lingering effects of battlefield trauma, respectively. There is also an essay by Keith Altavilla on understudied Democrats in the Union army during the election of 1864 and a concluding piece by Robert L. Glaze on Albert Sidney Johnston’s hitherto neglected place in Lost Cause memorialization. It is impossible to do justice to each individual essay, but they are each concise enough for readers to consider directly.

Nevertheless, the pessimistic tone of Earl J. Hess’s essay in this volume, which lays out a research agenda for operational military history, remains unanswered by the larger field. Hess rightly identifies a deficit in academic scholarship on important topics such as field artillery and cavalry, never mind important support services like logistics. Even operational military historians have not paid as much attention as they should to the transportation and administrative infrastructure needed to project military power across vast distances—a phenomenon vital not only in the American Civil War but also in other contemporary conflicts such as the Taiping Civil War and the German Wars of Unification. Modernity, empire, cultural distinctions between wartime and peacetime, and American exceptionalism (or lack thereof) are issues that implicitly or explicitly loom over the larger field—but those themes rely on assumptions about the practical workings of Civil War armies that could be more thoroughly tested in the same way that Hess and other historians have scrutinized the significance of the rifled musket. Regardless, while debates over the past, present, and future of the field of military history will continue for the foreseeable future, there should at least be a consensus that this volume of essays represents a fine contribution to the larger body...