A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865

by Russell F. Weigley

"The crowning achievement of one of America's most distinguished military historians." ―Lincoln Prize jury

"Readers will find much to debate in this book―including . . . its affirmation that, because of emancipation, 'the Civil War calls for a rethinking of the attitude . . . that war is always futile, that its rewards never match its cost, that any conflict [must be] immediately decisive and virtually without loss of American lives.'" ―Gary W. Gallagher

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

648 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Russell Frank Weigley, PhD, was the Distinguished University Professor of History at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and a noted military historian. His research and teaching interests centered on American and world military history, World War II, and the American Civil War. One of Weigley's most widely received contributions to research is his hypothesis of a specifically American Way of War, i.e. an approach to strategy and military operations, that, while not predetermined, is distinct to the United States because of cultural and historical constraints.

Weigley was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on July 2, 1930. He graduated from Albright College in 1952, attended the University of Pennsylvania for his masters degree and doctorate, and wrote his dissertation under Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Roy F. Nichols. It was published as Quartermaster General of the Union Army: A Biography of M.C. Meigs (Columbia University Press, 1959). After receiving his degree, Weigley taught at Penn from 1956 to 1958, and from 1958 to 1962 at Drexel University. Then he joined the faculty at Temple as an associate professor and remained until his retirement in 1998 as Distinguished University Professor. The school considered him the heart and soul of the History department, and at one point he had over 30 PhD candidates working under him concurrently. He also was a visiting professor at Dartmouth College and the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Weigley's graduate teaching emphasized military history defined in a broadly comprehensive way, including operational, combat history but also extending to the larger issues of war and its significance; to the history of ideas about war, peace, and the armed forces; and to the place of the soldier in the state and in society.

Weigley was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1969-70. He received the Athenaeum of Philadelphia Award for Non-Fiction in 1983 and the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize of the American Military Institute in 1989. His Age of Battles received the Distinguished Book Award of the Society for Military History for 1992 for a work in non-American military history. He has served as President of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the American Military Institute. In recognition of his scholarly achievements, Weigley was named Distinguished University Professor at Temple in 1985.

- from Wikipedia

Reviews

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review...

"A Great Civil War" by Russell Weigley.

So why buy another book on the American Civil War? I always ask myself this question. The topic is so heavily covered that you have to wonder if there is anything left to write about.

Weigley tackles the subject as a military historian first and foremost. His focus is primarily operational/strategic, even if the people he wrote about had trouble seeing the war that way. The insights come through as a sentence here, a paragraph there. Analysis is interwoven with narrative, so pay attention.

This book has to be placed within the context of Weigley's other works. "A Great Civil War" sits between "American Way of War" and "The Age of Battles." Weigley has long contended that Americans tend to fight their wars as all-or-nothing efforts. He traces this back to King Phillip's War in New England, when the Pequots nearly pushed the colonists into the sea, only to be wiped out by the colonists (and the Mohawks, but that's beside the point.) Then he brings up the futile quest for decisive battle throughout several centuries of European military history.

Keep these two threads in mind when you read "Great Civil War." Weigley notes the full court press by both sides, but the military leaders had trouble seeing that the ACW was not going to be a Napoleonic repeat of decisive battle, decisive outcome. The term "operational" had not been coined yet. Lee could fight masterful battles that would have rated him a peer of The Napster himself--Second Manassas, Chancellorsville, etc. Repeated attacks, however, charged a horrible blood price which slowly bankrupted the Confederacy manpower pool. Taking the war north and seeking decisive victory there might have offered the political hope of the Union giving up, but a bloody check at Antietam and a bloody loss at Gettysburg negated that strategy.

In the end, there comes the big question: Why did the South lose? (To paraphrase Pickett, I think the Union had something to do with it.) Weigley contends that the South psychologically did not make a full break from the USA. The southern leaders simply adopted much of the political structure, institutions and practices that they knew, thus creating something pretty much like the US that in the end was not worth fighting for, or at least not worth fighting total war, American style.

While this lack of a cause failed to animate the CSA to full fury, abolition and emancipation did so for the Union. Restoration was not enough of a worthy, idealistic goal to fuel the war effort. It had to be a second American revolution or it was not worth the sacrifice.

I give this book a very solid three-star rating. I would have liked to give it fourth star, but here Weigley disappoints on the basis of map craft. He once again turned to Temple University's computer graphics department and some idiot with a PC turned out too few over-complicated and cluttered maps chock full of repetitive detail. It would have been nice if the computer jockey actually understood what he was supposed to illuminate with his cartography.

[Jerome Otte · Rating 4 out of 5]

A graphic and well-written if not particularly well-organized history of the Civil War era, focused on why the war took place, how it was fought, and why the Union won it. The maps are of good quality and the narrative is smooth if not particularly compelling.

Although Lee is often criticized for limiting his strategic vision to the Virginia theater, Weigley argues that he was correct: due to Confederate resource shortages, the South could not afford a long war and thus a strategic victory in the Virginia theater was the South’s “best hope.” Interestingly, Weigley considers Stonewall Jackson a poor tactician, and is more favorable towards Longstreet, Hill, and Ewell. He is quite critical of Grant. Weigley argues that both the Union and Confederate governments were bad at planning and controlling their war efforts. Near the end he also questions the popular belief that war is always futile and unjustifiable, pointing out that these arguments are rarely used when discussing the Civil War or World War II, and that postwar generations are not necessarily wiser or more civilized because of terrible wartime experiences.

While balanced and readable, the narrative skips back and forth a bit chronologically and none of the era’s figures really come to life. Also, the leadership of Lincoln and Davis is never really compared, and naval affairs take up only a tiny portion of the text. And the descriptions of the battles are a bit disappointing and sometimes confusing: Weigley’s coverage of military campaigns, political, and social developments are much better. He also gets the years of McClellan and Albert Sidney Johnston’s West Point graduations wrong. He also calls Shiloh a Baptist church, writes that the Tennessee sunk, describes Davis and Bragg as close friends and mixes up Sherman with Hurlbut. There are also some unfortunate attempts to be witty that fall flat: “The unfortunate General Stone was made to serve as a Franklin’s kite, by which Benjamin Franklin Wade hoped to recapture the electricity of the first mobilization.” When discussing Second Bull Run, Weigley also takes McClellan’s hot-tempered rants a bit too seriously when he writes that McClellan “hoped Pope would fail”---this seems like a bit much, although McClellan made no secret of his contempt for Pope and his own belief that Pope would be and deserved to be defeated. And for some reason Pea Ridge gets as much space as the entire Peninsula campaign.

[Dale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published by Indiana University Press in 2000.

Russell F. Weigley (1930-2004) was a professor of military history at Temple University for 36 years. He wrote a whole bookshelf full of military histories, but only one book that focused exclusively on the Civil War (however, he was working on a multi-volume study of Gettysburg when he passed away).

This is an excellent single volume history of the Civil War saddled with an unfortunate piece of art done in American primitive style that makes it look like it was illustrated by the author's elementary school-aged great-grandchild. I know you aren't supposed to judge a book by its cover, but this cover makes the book look like a children's book.

This is far from a children's book. No more than a page or two is spent on the issues that brought on the war and no more than a page is spent of Reconstruction, but this is a Civil War history for people who have read a lot of Civil War histories. It tells the same story as many histories (this will be the 112th history that I have reviewed on this blog, so I am pretty familiar with the genre), but it takes a much more comprehensive look at the war than most histories.

Weigley doesn't spend a lot of time on individual battles (usually, just a page or two per battle) and certainly doesn't cover all of them. But, he does a good job of highlighting the main generals, the bigger battles and the political problems faced by both the Union and Confederate governments. He also explores important but usually overlooked areas like how the war was financed on both sides. Yeah, that can be boring, but someone had to buy the bullets, the uniforms and feed the soldiers and, in the end, the Confederacy ran out of that capacity...

Read more at: https://dwdsreviews.blogspot.com/2019...

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

It just so happens that the political and military aspects of the Civil War (and just about any other subject) happen to be my own favorite aspects of history, so this book had a lot of things going for it from the start, including being written by a wonderful historian.  For the most part, this book delivers, even though the author is rather sarcastic and seems to be holding the Civil War armies to levels of operational excellence that neither army achieved very well.  This book is really biting and sarcastic, and sometimes that is quite entertaining, but the author's snarky edgelord tendencies do not always come off well.  What comes off much better is the poignant discussion of the author's own family connection with the Civil War, a connection that many of us share who are Americans and who have family members whose deaths or injuries in the Civil War had massive effects on surviving relatives.  This book is at its best when it is at its most humane, showing compassion for the people caught up in war, which probably accounts for the author's irritation at the politicians who screwed things up so badly.

This sizable work of more than 450 pages is divided into thirteen large chapters that go in a chronological fashion from the prelude to the war to its conclusion.  The author begins with a list of maps and a note on style before beginning with an introduction that poses the question of why Americans fought the Civil War at all.  After that the author discusses the period from secession to the start of the war (1) and then discusses the formation of battle lines up to Bull Run (2).  There is a discussion of the grasping for strategy and purpose through the end of 1861 (3) and then a discussion of the bloodshed and indecision that took place at the beginning of 1862 (4).  After that the author looks at the Southern attempts to gain the initiative that ended at Perryville, Corinth, and Antietam (5) before looking at the relationship between liberty and war (6).  There is a discussion of armies and societies in the period between Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville (7) as well as a discussion of three seasons of battle including Gettysburg and the victory at Vicksburg and ending at Chattanooga (8).  After that the author looks at the horizon of the postwar world that was shaping up in politics (9) and the tension between traditional politics and modern war in 1864 (10).  Finally, the author closes with a discussion of the suspense and then resolution in victories at Atlanta, the Shenandoah Valley, and Mobile (11), the relentlessness of Sherman's war against Southern morale (12), and the surrenders that ended the Civil War in Union victory (13), after which there are notes, notes on maps, a bibliography, and an index.

Ultimately, this book is written well by someone who clearly knows his history and wants to convey both the massive importance of the war in Virginia as well as the larger political and military scope of the war.  Among the insights the author brings to bear is the ambivalence of Southern nationalism and a perception of the weakness of the South in being somewhat half-hearted about its desire to separate from the North.  The author is unsparing about the flaws of politicians and military leaders on both sides as well as the importance of operational and strategic thinking in successful military conflicts and the high price of failure on both sides that can be found here.  The author also manages to integrate the political and military aspects of the war and show how these concerns overlapped with each other and influenced each other in turn, giving more understanding about Lincoln's own delicate balancing act in seeking victory while also trying to hold together a coalition of largely racist Northern whites along with border Southerners who could not be pressed too hard on slavery and radicals who wanted to use the conflict to push massive and unpopular social change, all of which it was important to keep together.  The book's integration of war and politics makes for insightful and thoughtful reading that is easy to recommend to readers.

[Sean Chick · Rating 2 out of 5]

A missed opportunity and I fear Weigley lost his once great powers of analysis by this time. His take on politics is weak and he pays only cursory attention to the South, invariably to point out that there was some mystical weakness in the Southern psyche. I don't buy it but he repeats it like a litany.



His analysis of military affairs is the better part, but he never reaches a comprehensive vision and often he critiques generals and politicians but fails to dig deeper. Also while quite harsh on Lee and other generals, he is often on the edge of being critical of Grant and Sherman but never does, I suspect because of their sacred cow status in modern Civil War history. Overall you'd do better to read anything by Catton and Hattaway, who reached similar conclusions with more coherence.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was familiar with the late Dr. Weigley. I had met him a couple of times. He was a scholar.

However, A GREAT CIVIL WAR is not his best work. Dr. Weigley was an expert on 20th Century Military and Diplomatic History. He was also knowledgeable on the American Army. The American Civil War was not his area of expertise. While the text is brief, I found his frequent references to the 20th Century operational art of war out-of-context, and frankly not appropriate. His analysis of the diplomatic aspects of the American Civil War are the best part of the book.

There are better books on the American Civil War. However, there is always something to be learned from Dr. Weigley. I heartily recommend his, "The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy" (1977).

[Cary Kostka · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an in-depth and comprehensive book that shifted with ease between the political topics of the time and the actions on the battlefield. The author's writing style was mature and yet not dry; this was a very easy read.

[Mark Singer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A somewhat blunt and concise history of the American Civil War, this was required reading for a course on the same subject that I took at Temple University - Ambler in the Fall of 2009. It is primarily a military history, and as such does not delve into the causes of the conflict.

[Karen]

Found within the pictures of Frank Ghery's Architecture page for NYC