The Civil War, State by State

by Chester G. Hearn

Most books and articles about the Civil War cover the subject chronologically and examine the war as one continuous event, but Civil War State by State looks at the war from the perspective of the forty-five states and territories that existed during the period. It looks at the politics of each; the battles fought; the regiments raised; the famous people, soldiers, sailors and very occasional airmen who played their part. Richly illustrated with maps and photographs, this book will provide a fund of knowledge and make a valuable addition to any historian's library.

Genres: History, American Civil War, Military History, Nonfiction, Civil War, American History

448 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 2013

About the author

A 1954 graduate of Allegheny College, Chester Hearn served in the U.S. Army and worked in industrial management before becoming an author of books on the American Civil War in his retirement.

Reviews

[Kimberly · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good overview of every state and territory's part in the Civil War.
There were many good pictures on almost every page and maps sprinkled throughout.
Very glad I read it and recommended!

[Danielle Spencer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a lot of issues with this book. Here’s a list, in no particular order:

1. This book doesn’t know what it wants to be. A military history? A textbook? A research guide? A poorly written info dump? All of the above?
I struggled to think of the targeted audience/demographic for this book. Certainly not a casual reader just wanting a refresh or slightly deeper dive than what is taught in school. Certainly not any students younger than high school age. I would say students in high school/college, but the abundance of typos and misprints (I’ll get to that in a second) makes me doubt the credibility of the information presented. I’d feel inclined to Google the facts I was citing to make sure they were correct before including anything in an academic work. I don’t think I’m in the target audience either, even as a social studies teacher. It was very much too focused on tiny details and not focused enough on tying important events together or even discussing the impact of the war overall and each state’s contribution(s) to the end result. I will talk more about continuity between chapters more below.

2. Repetition
Some aspects of the war effort, especially on the Union side, were repeated way too often but also without referencing each other. The most prominent example is the fact that President Lincoln asked for 75,000 troops from Union states to serve a three-month term when the war began in 1861. This sentiment is repeated in almost every chapter as the author describes how state leadership responded to that call and how many troops they furnished and how quickly the troops got to D.C. (if they were going there). And yet, there is no recognition that by the time we get to New York, for example, we’ve read a variation of that sentence about a dozen times already. There is no reference to the fact that we know this piece of information already. It should have been more prominent in the introduction and/or readers told that this call to arms by Lincoln was going to be brought up in nearly every chapter. I’ll have more to say about the introduction later.

3. Lack of continuity across chapters
Each chapter of this book feels like it could be its own short volume, which I can see the benefits of somewhat, but the more impactful consequence is that anyone reading the whole book (rather than using it as a reference/research tool for a specific purpose) is left with 45 unconnected chapters that often repeat each other. There is no narrative or single thread that ties the chapters to each other or references information given in other chapters. The most that is done is sometimes there is a “see page ___” but they are few and far between, not to mention that doesn’t actually give the information, just tells you to go to another page. Expanding on my first point, it really seems to me that this book was never meant to be read in its entirety, and that’s why each chapter seems so separate from the others. It comes across more as a collection of information about each state’s participation in the war to serve as a research tool for people looking for specific people, battles, etc. That’s fine if that’s what this book is for, but it needs to be clearer/in the title/introduction. There is nothing to indicate that that’s the intended purpose.

4. Typos, grammatical errors, misprints, etc
I wish I was exaggerating when I say there’s an average of at least one editing error per page, but I’m probably not. From places being spelled wrong, to random commas placed throughout sentences with seemingly no rhyme or reason, to years in the 1900s instead of the 1800s, it was very difficult to get through the text. Also, there were multiple occurrences of extra spaces between words, which was very distracting, and it was super annoying that most of the time, punctuation marks were not included within quotation marks if it was the end of a sentence. In addition, some words had British English spellings (manoeuver, chequered) but the rest of the book was written with American English spellings (armor, color).
Here are a few of my favorite typos I wanted to share:
-page 421: “Both sides hoped for compromise[,] not Civil Car.”
-page 226: “He next struck firty-five miles eastward…”
-page 316: “His feud with Cameron, which began in 1950, lasted until the latter’s death in 1889.”
-page 53, 54: Has “La Glorietta Pass” spelled with two Ts multiple times, but page 56 repeatedly only uses one T, and then page 57 spells it with two Ts again. Page 32 also uses two Ts. The listing in the index just has one T.
-page 360: “By November 1862, The Union’s Army of the Cumberland (formerly Ohio) and the South’s Army of Tennessee confronted each other between Nashville and the small town of Murfreesboro on the Stones River. Yet neither of their commanders - Major General Braxton Bragg and Major General William S. Rosecrans respectively - took any offensive action…” The names of the commanders should be switched if the author wants to list them respective to the order they list the army names.

I need to emphasize how many examples I had to choose from. This little list doesn’t even begin to cover it.

5. Really boring in some parts
My brain can only handle so much information about the different regiments, battalions, generals, battles, commanders, etc. of the war. This book spends so much time on each state’s troop organization and every minute detail of nearly every battle each regiment ever fought. Maybe if you’re rabidly enthusiastic about the Civil War and the military-centric lens of history in general, you’ll enjoy that, but for me and the other 99% of readers, I got super bored and got no lasting knowledge or education from those passages.
Another common occurrence was paragraph(s) on inconsequential, tiny pieces of information that really just felt like filler. This book would be half as long if you were to take out repeated information across chapters, super specific troop-raising numbers, and things like the ever-changing title of the Confederate Department of South Carolina. From page 347: “This military department was established in August 1861, but underwent many changes during the war, becoming the Department of South Carolina, Georgia and East Florida in November, when General Robert E. Lee took charge. He departed in March 1862, replaced by Major General John C. Pemberton. Under Pemberton, it was renamed the Department of South Carolina and Georgia, but in April it was extended back into Florida as the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and East Florida once more. In September, another change saw Pemberton replaced by General Pierre G.T. Beauregard, who served until October 1864. By October 1863, the department had again been reorganized as the Department of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and it was finally reorganized twice in January 1865. Its last commander was Lieutenant General William J. Hardee.” What is the point of using a quarter of a page up on the slightly different title changes of the department? Everything said in the passage could have been summed up in a sentence or two. It never became relevant again in the other chapters of the book, so it wasn’t included to prevent readers’ confusion on similar-sounding titles. I really think it was just fluff in order to fill the page.
Another example (I hadn’t marked the page number and couldn’t find it when I went back to look again) has a general (or some other leader)’s biography section next to a few paragraphs about them/a battle they fought in or commanded. Sorry, the details are fuzzy. Anyways, I realized the text of the chapter and the text of the biography were the exact same. It was just a copy/paste of about 3-4 paragraphs on the same page next to each other. And no one caught/fixed it.

6. Too much trying to “both sides” in commentary
First of all, let me say I understand and appreciate the intention in general to remain as neutral and unbiased as possible when writing nonfiction, especially about topics that can be more inflammatory or evoke negative reactions. That said, I feel the language regarding some of the Confederate leaders and efforts went too far in the opposite direction as to come closer to praising their cause and even referred to one as a hero. Let’s be clear: anyone participating in the Confederate war effort was participating in order to perpetuate the continuation and expansion of chattel slavery (people being owned as property) in the United States, and were willing to secede from the country if necessary. None of those people were “on the right side of history” or should be lauded by historians, textbook writers, or the general public. These people felt so strongly positively toward the institution of slavery they were willing to commit treason and go to war with their own countrymen in an effort to preserve it. Which brings me to another point - the introduction goes out of its way to explain to readers that the Civil War was about slavery, sure, but really it was about states’ rights and was more complex than we think. No, actually, it really was about slavery. The book And There Was Light by Jon Meacham is an excellent resource on this, but here’s my paraphrased summary: Several times before and during the war, Northern leaders, Lincoln included, were willing to end the hostilities and welcome the seceded states back into the Union, if they would accept federal supremacy when it came to the power to ban slavery/the slave trade. And each time these offers were made, the South refused, saying they would not rejoin the Union if they couldn’t have slavery. So yes, it really was about slavery. Attempts over the years to try to shroud this fact in language like “an accumulation of separate issues,” as the introduction calls it, while potentially well-intentioned, actually serve to further support Confederate talking points and reduce culpability and accountability.

7. Organization of introduction & chapters
I alluded to this opinion earlier, but I would have moved the book’s format around. One, the introduction should have been longer and more connected to the actual content of the book. It was more like an overview of the time period right before the war leading up to Fort Sumter. Secondly, I think it would have been cool to split the book up into two sections, Confederate and Union states (or even a third section for contested/neutral states) and have each state’s chapter go in the order the states joined their side. It also could have been split up geographically for the Eastern and Western front and gone by how close each state was to the “action” of various battles. I could go on. I think just all 45 states alphabetically was super boring and not helpful. It probably contributed to the disjointed feeling between chapters.

8. Pictures, maps, diagrams, flags?
One of the only highlights I can touch on is the plentiful maps, photos/drawings, and diagrams throughout the book. I appreciate that most were in color and big enough to see small details, and the captions were mostly helpful. One thing I did not understand was the inclusion of all the state flags, and two versions of each? I also didn’t like where they were placed on the first page of each chapter. They were distracting and not relevant.


So all this to say, I got this book hoping to learn more about each state’s contributions to their side of the war and how that affected the war overall, and ended up being bogged down in trying to keep track of regiment numbers and which generals were on which side, and doing that over and over again each chapter. I retained very little usable information and was frustrated by all the editing errors. I expected more continuity and/or a narrative thread across multiple if not all chapters, especially for states that were neighbors or worked together on specific things. The title or introduction of the book should have been clearer if this was intended as a reference tool for academic or research purposes, not to be read all at once for a person with general/moderate interest in the topic.

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provided what could have been an interesting look at the Civil War by showing the contributions of each state and territory to the war. Unfortunately, there are numerous mistakes all through the book; for example, the author had Alexander Ramsey serve as Minnesota governor from 1860 to 1963. He also had Nathan B. Forrest commanding Confederate troops at Poison Springs, Arkansas, while the Missouri section refers to Samuel Curtis as "Alfred Curtis". The District of Columbia section actually concentrated mostly on the Union war effort in the East during the first two years; it mentions neither the D.C. military units nor even the Battle of Fort Stevens.

[Peter McGinn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though some of the content was not particularly interesting to me, I give it credit for looking at an old subject from a new and fresh perspective. What Hearn does is separate the chapters by state (as you can tell from the title!) So in each chapter, we learn about not only what officers and battles are connected to each state or territory, but also about the political figures and actions from each state. He also talks about the fighting units from each area. So with such a wide spectrum of topics, it would be surprising if none of them were less interesting than others. But young students of the Civil War or residents of a state can easily learn about the contributions and perspectives of each location. I read about my home state and then my adopted state first, and then moved on to the rest. And in a war where it was countrymen against each other, it was informative to learn how some states contributed officers and fighting units to both sides.

Despite the amount of material it covers, it is still a pleasant read and not bogged down with endless details or in-depth analysis.

[Douglas Graney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting tidbits and trivia. Fun to flip through.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

It would be difficult for a middle school student to read, but it's a good reference source.

[Jennifer Buchmelter · Rating 1 out of 5]

There are numerous mistakes throughout this book.