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Book Reviews These are some reviews from a recent issue of
The Civil War News:
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After the Thunder: Fourteen Men Who Shaped Post-Civil War America
by Wilmer L. Jones.
Illustrated, bibliography, index, 385 pp., 2000. Taylor Publishing Co., 1550 West Mockingbird Lane, Dallas, TX 75235, $26.95 plus shipping.
After the Thunder gives brief biographies of 14 key leaders, both military and civilian, from the Civil War, with a focus on their post-war contributions to American society. The 14 subjects (R.E. Lee, U.S. Grant, Jef-ferson Davis, Andrew Johnson, James Longstreet, W.T. Sherman, J.E. Johnston, Philip Sheridan, N.B. Forrest, George McClellan, John B. Hood, Joshua Chamberlain, J.S. Mosby, and George A. Custer) are carefully arranged in alternating Union-Confederate order, reminiscent of the basic structure of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. But, unlike Plutarch, Jones does more than just compare pairs of biographies, such as Lee and Grant, or Davis and Johnson; he also compares and contrasts his subjects in other interesting combinations such as Lee and Forrest, Lee and Johnston, or Longstreet and Mosby. Each biography begins and ends with a summation of the subject’s character and his overall contribution to the era. Here the author’s personal biases sometimes come through, as he clearly favors Lee, Grant and Sheridan and downright dislikes Forrest. Most, though, are shown with their strengths and weaknesses in a more unbiased man-ner. Biography is the backbone of history, and this book provides an interesting and informative read. Most of us who read The Civil War News will be familiar with each subject’s wartime activities, which the author probably spends too much time on — the subjects’ pre-war lives are more interesting for the way they shaped each man’s per-sonality and character. But most interesting is the manner in which each leader returned to his post-war life. Too often we forget that most Civil War figures had active lives that lasted long after the war ended. Many scenes make a strong impression on the reader’s mind — Grant struggling to complete his memoirs before he died, Davis sitting in prison for two years as he awaited his fate, Johnson fighting with Congress over the constitutional control of the government, Longstreet and Mosby forsaking their friends to support the Republican Party, Sherman’s phi-landering, Chamberlain’s return to his estranged wife. The book begins with two strong survey chapters on the last days of the war, and on the nature and course of Re-construction era. Its stress is on the post-war period, with its recurring themes of political conflict, economic re-vival, and westward expansion into the lands of the Indians. The subjects of the book’s biographies constantly interact and inter relate on these issues, sometimes causing re-dundancies in the narrative, but all the while stressing how important these men’s careers were to the post-war devel-opment of the reunited nation. Grant and Lee looked ahead and played key roles in helping establish the magnanimous peace that followed the cessation of hostilities; Davis, Johnston, Longstreet and Hood looked backward and spent their days defending their wartime careers; others simply tried to make a living, inside the army or out, but were unable to escape the war as the seminal influence on their lives. The book, however, does have a few shortcomings that need to be mentioned. Firstly, the biographies, which average just over 20 pages each, are necessarily cursory, and so often jump from event to event with little room for explication. Secondly, the author is prone to several errors of fact. For example, he states that there were 22,700 killed on both sides at Antietam; that Hood was wounded by a bullet at Gettysburg; and that Chamberlain’s defense of Little Round Top happened on July 1, 1863; not to mention some other errors or typos involving dates. It is also not clear what he means by declaring that Lee took over the Army of Northern Virginia when it was "beaten and disorganized," or that Hood was the "Confederacy’s last hope" in July 1864. Thirdly, the reader should be aware, as a survey of the endnotes will show, that the book is based almost entirely on recent secondary sources, some of which are cursory in their own right. For example, the Longstreet biography does not cite the general’s memoirs as a source; nor does the Sherman chapter cite Sherman’s memoirs, though it does have 20 footnotes citing articles from Civil War Times Illustrated. These shortcomings, however, do not detract significantly from the overall theme of the book, which is well and clearly presented.
David Martin
David Martin earned his Ph.D. in ancient history from Princeton and has published war games and numerous ar-ticles on military history. His Civil War books include Confederate Monuments at Get-tysburg, Carl Bornemann's Regi-ment (41st NY) and The Shiloh C
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