Thanks to everyone who attended this special live chat on how to understand the relationship between Confederate soldiers and slavery. It’s a complicated subject, but even a cursory overview is more than enough to be able to appreciate the ways in which slavery and emancipation shaped the understanding of Confederate soldiers, both in terms of what they were fighting for and their experiences on the battlefield.
Like I said before, this session will provide you with the tools for the next time your neo-Confederate uncle tries to convince you that Confederate soldiers were not fighting to maintain slavery.
This is the first in a series of topics centered around misconceptions of the Civil War that will continue to be made available to paid subscribers.
Some of the books that I referenced include:
Joseph Glatthaar, General Lee's Army: From Victory to Collapse
Joseph Glatthaar, Soldiering in the Army of Northern Virginia: A Statistical Portrait of the Troops Who Served under Robert E. Lee
G. Ward Hubbs ed., Voices From Company D
James McPherson, For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War
Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War
Kevin M. Levin, Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder
Kevin M. Levin, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth
Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers
Johanne P. Pearson ed., Lee and Jackson’s Bloody Twelfth
Jason Phillips, Diehard Rebels: The Confederate Culture of Invincibility
Bell Wiley, The Life of Johnny Reb: The Common Soldier of the Confederacy
All of these books will deepen your understanding of the subject even further. Happy reading.
Civil War Memory Book Group
I am also thrilled to announce a new book group. Some of you may remember that I organized a book group on Twitter some years ago. It actually worked better than I expected, but I suspect the live chat platform here on Substack will be much more conducive to our needs. I am still working out the details, but I envision dividing books in half and discussing them over two sessions.
I have selected Bennett Parten’s brand new book, Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation, as our first selection. I’ve already had a chance to read it and I can’t recommend it enough. Even better, Dr. Parten is a subscriber to this newsletter, so I bet I can convince him to join us for one of the two sessions.
Pick up a copy and start reading. Again, details will be forthcoming.
Once again, thank you to all of you who have chosen to support this newsletter as paid subscribers. I can’t do this without you. Your generosity allows me to carve out the time from my busy schedule to maintain this site, but more importantly, it makes it possible for me to volunteer to work with history teachers, who are unable to attend professional development workshops owing to a lack of funds.
Thank you for making it possible for me to do the work that I care most about.
