Book-Length Memoir is Demonization A First For Signal Corps
Service with the Signal Corps: The Civil War Memoir of Captain Louis R. Fortescue. Edited by J. Gregory Acken. Illustrated, photos, notes, index, 412 pp.,
Civil War historians have estimated that over 70,000 books have been published pertaining to the “the late unpleasantness” since the rebellion commenced 155 years ago. That output equates to at leas 1.25 books per day since the war began, making the Civil War one of the most written-about topics in American history, second only to religion. Given that staggering volume, the casual reader might easily conclude that every possible topic relating the conflict has been written about endlessly. Yet with Service with th Signal Corps, editor J. Gregory Acken shows that is not the case, f this work represents the first-ever book-length published memoir from a soldier who served in the Union army’s elite Signal Corps. The Corps was the brainchild of Albert J. Myer, an antebellum army surgeon. Myer had a deep interest in sign language. When he entered the army in 1854 he used those principles to create a flag-based system to transmit information. Though his ideas were initially rebuffed by the War Department in the mid-1850s, he was given approval to create his corps shortl
added impetus was the realization that a former subordinate had used
wartime missions were to observe and communicate intellige regarding enemy movements and positions, as well as to relay information among its own various army commands. Its members had to possess above-average intelligence.
Despite early doubts regarding th corps’s value, by the end of the wa
signalmen’s work in high regard. An important part of the book is the editor’s detailed commentary with illustrations as to the logic behind the signals and their creati This memoir was written by Capt. Louis R. Fortescue, who was a
23-year-old first lieutenant with t 29th Pennsylvania Infantry when he accepted an offer to join the nasce Signal Corps in mid-1861. His wartime journey took him from the Upper Potomac to Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley in spring 1862 and then into eastern Virginia. Fortescue saw signal duty at the battles of Cedar Mountain, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsvil and Gettysburg, all of which are described in detail. This published version of his manuscript ends 10 days after the July 1863 battle at Gettysburg — following Fortescue’s capture by Confederates. He spent the war’s remaining 20 months in five separate Rebel prisons before being exchanged on March 1, 1865.
Though Fortescue’s manuscript also covers his time as a prisoner war, those months are not included in this volume. Fortescue’s comments on the war years’ key issues are peppered
throughout the text. They reveal to be a reasonably well-educated, staunch pro-Lincoln Republican who favored a hard war against the Confederacy. Consequently, he had little use for Democratic Gen George McClellan, whom Fortescue referred to as “the idol of Rebel sympathizers in the North.” Though anti-slavery, Fortescue used common racist slurs to descr blacks. His real vitriol, however was reserved for Southerners and their region’s purported hospital which he claimed was “a myth and deception” repeated so often that “its reiteration creates a nausea Fortescue penned his memoir about 30 years after the war. Onc finished, he had it typed and bou five volumes. The typescript memo was donated to Philadelphia’s Civ War Museum and Library in 1923, eight years after Fortescue’s dea 1915. The author based his memoir on his wartime diary and notes, rendering it of greater value to scholars than one written solely from memory. Six helpful maps and 20 photographs and sketches supplement this important new memoir. Civil War veterans’ recollecti abound. However, its heretofore unseen and fresh perspective on the great conflict makes this boo significant addition to any Civil bookshelf.
Paul Taylor is the author of six il War era books. His latest is t
award-winning Old Slow Town”: Detroit during the Civil War, pub
Damn Yankees! Demonization & Defiance in the Confederate South. By George C. Rable. Illustrated,
You can’t have war without hatred of the enemy, as George C. Rable reminds us in Damn Yankees! Drawing on sociological and psychological aphorisms — e.g., “emotional distance between our side and theirs is essential” — Ra surveys the breadth of Confederate literature to show how Southerners expressed their hatred of, well, d Yankees. “The words deployed against the other side help cement or establis national identity,” Rable begins. draws on newspapers, speeches, letters and diaries for Confederat denunciations of the enemy. The longer the war dragged on, the more poisonous and pervasive the anti-Yankee invective became. Soldiers and citizens, politicians preachers and editors all spoke th same language, using surprisingly similar themes and terms. The author casts a wide net, quoting 200 soldiers, 140 civilian a score of political leaders and t dozen ministers and essayists. I am impressed by his exhaustive use of 64 Confederate newspapers, especially the Richmond Dispatch. He also quotes from the Southern Illustrated News and Southern Literary Messenger. “Taken altogether,” R concludes, “these disparate source reveal much about how Yankees were defined, defamed, and decried.” This process of describing “a
war. Actual armed conflict only highlighted the enemy’s “cowardice
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They were a “mercenary, lowclass” bunch. They killed and raped, robbed and burned, according to Rable’s research is demonstrat by his voluminous endnotes, whic he offers in lieu of a bibliogra contemporary writers. I count over 350 notes in nearly “How poorly does the thieving, pages, about a quarter of the bo burning, murdering Yankee compare Some may say that Rable’s work with the generous, chivalrous a product of the Walter Lynwood Southerner,” wrote Ida Powell Fleming lectures he delivered at Dulaney in her journal. LSU, is primarily cumulative sin “This race of sharpers…have less he assembles so many written fight in them than any white race references to the hated enemy. I now on the globe,” declared the think so. Charleston Mercury in August 1861 A hundred fifty years afterwar (inaccurately, as Southerners would we in the Civil War remembrance learn). community continue to discuss wh Three years of war only intensified Americans went to war against on these feelings. “When I come in sight another. of their blue yankee uniforms,” wrote Recalling how war Lt. Col. Barrington King in July 1864, Southerners demonized “I only feel an intense desire to kill.” perfidious, malignant, & vile Ya Even as they faced defeat, race” — Edmund Ruffin’s words Confederates refused to acknowledge before he blew his brains out af anything positive about the Yankees. Lee’s surrender — serve us well “These worthless fellows whom we continue to scratch our heads we have so often whipped, whose Stephen Davis’ What the Yankees cowardly backs we have so often Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardseen,” wrote North Carolina captain ment and Wrecking of Atlanta was Henry Chambers, had only conquered published in 2012. He’s working brave Southrons “by sheer force of on a study of John Bell Hood for numbers.” Savas Beatie.
THE CIVIL WAR YEARS IN UTAH The Kingdom of God and the Territory That Did Not Fight
In 1832 Joseph Smith, Jr., the Mormons’ first prophet, foretold of a great war beginning in South Carolina. Three decades later, when Smith’s prophecy failed with the end of the American Civil War, the Mormons’ perspective on
the conflict required palliative revision. In The Civil War Years in Utah, the first full account of the events that occurred
in Utah Territory during the Civil War, John Gary Maxwell contradicts the patriotic mythology of Mormon leaders’
version of this dark chapter in Utah history.
KILL JEFF DAVIS The Union Raid on Richmond, 1864 By Bruce M. Venter
The ostensible goal of the controversial Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid on Richmond was to free some 13,000 Union prisoners of war held in the Confederate capital. But, orders found on Colonel Ulric Dahlgren dead body point instead to a plot to capture or kill Confederate president Jefferson Davis and set Richmond ablaze. What really happened, and how and why, are debated to this day. Kill Jeff Davis offers a fresh look at the failed raid and mines newly discovered documents and little-known sources to provide definitive answers.
MUSKET BALL AND SMALL SHOT IDENTIFICATION A Guide By Daniel M. Sivilich
Battlefield archaeologist Daniel M. Sivilich provides readers with the tools and techniques to unlock the stories of small shot in this book, the first definitive guide to identifying musket balls, from the oldest formed to those fired in the