My thoughts: the story of the people drives the narrative in much of what interests me today. You do have to have a understanding of the details of the war. But to miss the story of the people living through this, misses the point of what the battles were about. IMHO.
I wrote this over the past week and overlaps with some of the context.
I’m not in the field as many of the commentators in this thread are but to me it’s a dichotomy between military histories and non military (politics, race, cultural), etc. I have always been more interested in the non military aspect (particularly in the run up to the Civil War) and very little in military aspects; general histories are sufficient for me. This could be due to my inability to grasp military terms and such but books principally devoted to particular battles and skirmishes have left me cold (the principal exception being Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg book, which I thought was fantastic).
Much of the recent scholarship in the field of military history does bridge the divide between tactics/logistics and the study of politics, race, and culture. It's what makes the comment that I was responding to in the post so odd.
It might be relevant to note that the NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie, in his new column "Trump is mired in a war of attrition," presents an analysis of the two Civil War sides' military strategies to arrive at this final paragraph:
"My Civil War analogy is not precise. It mostly reflects the fact that I spend a lot of time reading about the American Civil War, so it is often top of mind. And yet, if you will indulge me, it does feel as if November 2025 is to Trump what April and September 1862 were to the Confederacy. Not the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning of the end."
Good news for civilization and decency at both ends of his timeline.
We have the benefit of hindsight re: the trajectory of the Civil War, but there were plenty of moments when the course of events could have taken a radical turn between 1863 and 1865. Let's not lose sight of contingency in the past and the uncertainly of the present.
As someone who just completed an MA in Military History I aspire to write academic military histories/war studies on the Civil War. However, while the Reconstruction is part and parcel of Civil War history it’s an area I’m less well versed in and will likely not, at least for now, write on it. Just a personal choice however, as I lean towards writing on battles, units and individuals. My first book project however, I believe will encompass traditional military history and elements of social history. So while I certainly believe there is still much to say in a military history of the war I agree that military history has been altered by an embrace of social history.
Thanks for this. I pay no attention to what I call battles and generals and valor, but I also think that like lots of other areas that I neglect, it’s probably a shame that I neglect it.
A comment about this:
Quote
Bennett Parten, whose Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation explores how the Union army set the stage for the ‘self-emancipation’ of thousands of enslaved in Georgia in 1864.
Unquote
That term that you set off in quotation marks actually appears only once in this book that repeatedly validates the concept, while using other words. I noticed this because, given what I watch in national memory of the Civil War, I’m aware that, to take what is probably the leading example, Allen C. Guelzo severely disapproves of most of what is said about self-emancipation.
Here’s my point: That book’s near boycott of the term recurs in the new book about the self-emancipation movement, Tom Zoellner‘s The Road Was Full of Thorns. The term appears only once.
David Blight, in the process of affirming that there is a lot to what has been called the self-emancipation thesis, told the New York Times at the end of the sesquicentennial in 2015 that the term itself is “too operatic.”
Am I dwelling on trivia, I ask myself, or is there information in those two books’ near boycott of that term?
I don't think the word choice is trivial at all. I've said before that I tend to steer away from it not because I want to minimize the important role that the enslaved themselves played in the story of emancipation (it was central) but that it may leave people with the idea that it occurred in a vacuum apart from the movements of the armies and decisions made in Washington, DC.
In the end, I would like to think that we are on the same page.
I hear you, but I want to emphasize that I'd be the last to think that the word choice itself is trivial. I just meant that as the nerd who carefully tracks how the term is used--I even once posted about that, at https://selfemancipator.substack.com/p/historians-on-the-term-self-emancipation--I might be making too much of these two recent authors' severe limit on including it. I need to monitor my biases.
But I also need to learn more about the degree to which self-emancipations were military emancipations. Of course, you can--and should, in my view--say that once the war began, nearly EVERY escape to freedom was at some level military emancipation. But I'm working on a post now that points out, concerning discussion of that rebel statue in N.C. with the panel on it commemorating supposedly "loyal slaves," that the county in question abuts the Dismal Swamp and other swamps, where self-emancipators didn't go the U.S. Army; they escaped directly to fraught but real freedom. To what extent were maroons military-emancipated? There are other stories too.
My concern is what I see as neglect in some traditional professional historians, and more importantly in most journalists and in civic memory generally, for clear-sightedness about what it took for enslaved Americans to escape and seize freedom. At some level, I see some of that neglect as white saviorism resulting from systemic racism. Those brave, enterprising Americans were just "slaves," right? My prediction is that clarity about those exemplars of Americanism will evolve--whatever degree of military emancipation was involved. The system's receptiveness is not the point. Those Americans' enterprising, brave use of it is. It's a story we should tell the world.
At a Carter G. Woodson website (https://asalh.org/statement-on-fort-monroe-and-significance-in-americas-arc/), there's a page about the Fort Monroe freedom story of May 1861. It highlights the general who made the second, reactive, and widely famous decision, the "Contraband Decision," without so much as conferring the dignity of naming Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend. After all, those brave makers of the first, ***active*** decision were just "slaves," right?
There's something improvable about our memory of all of this. I profess no special wisdom about that, but I report that 20 years in the business of advocating for post-Army Fort Monroe would make anybody alive to it. But it's better now than 20 years ago, when almost nobody talked about those three men, even here in Tidewater.
Yes. Bona fide pithiness. I'm not sure I'd say the same for Allen C. Guelzo's distillation of the term's significance: "Marxist conceit." But that's another discussion.
3. Notwithstanding the much-celebrated Emancipation Proclamation, was the end of slavery not accomplished by the slaves themselves, by refusing to remain slaves whenever the presence of Union forces made this possible?
Blight: We have almost worn this question out. The answer should be and always has been that emancipation was both the result of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (the policy) and the brave volition and actions of the slaves themselves (the process). History can never be as simple as sometimes we would like it to be. “Either-or history” simply does not work in this instance. The crooked path to the Proclamation during 1861-62, its roots in Republican Party ideology, in congressional measures such as the Second Confiscation Act and in hugely important military events such as the battle of Antietam – all this is crucial to understanding how Lincoln ends up delivering the executive order to the armed forces to free all slaves in the states in rebellion by January 1863. But the thousands of individual decisions by slaves themselves, who were at least in proximity to the Union forces, to strike out for their own liberation are equally important.
The very term “self-emancipation” has sometimes been forced to carry too much weight and significance. It is simply too operatic. This dual story needs to be seen through real evidence, real stories on the ground during the war. There are thousands of such cases well documented in the documentary history of emancipation volumes published over the years at the University of Maryland.
But as a streamlined way into understanding how emancipation came about, see my book “A Slave No More,” which reprints the postwar memoirs of two former slaves, John Washington and Wallace Turnage. In each case, these former slaves would never have achieved their freedom without their own cunning and extraordinary courage. But they also would never have become free without the presence of the Union Army along the Rappahannock River in April 1862 (Washington’s case) and the Union Navy in Mobile Bay in August 1864 (Turnage’s case). Willing or unwilling, Union soldiers and sailors helped to “free” thousands of slaves who were already risking everything to free themselves.
I think it might be more correct to say that *many* Civil War military historians tend to *decouple* Reconstruction and the war, in the sense that they drive a hard line of separation between the two. (Also, many *don't* decouple them; Brooks Simpson comes to mind here.) Just to make a (dated) comparison/example: Bruce Catton discussed the background of secession as it applied to the war in several of his books, but I don't think he ever did much on Reconstruction. And that raises an interesting oddity (IMO): I suspect that many Civil War military historians are very comfortable being in Catton's boat, in the sense that they are fine giving background material on Dred Scott, bleeding Kansas, Lincoln-Douglas and all the other pieces of the 1850s train wreck that led to the war, but they do not venture into Reconstruction. And while I really should not refer to myself as any kind of historian, I am kind of in that same boat with Catton, and possibly for the same reason---I stay away from Reconstruction because I don't know much about it, and I don't know much about it because I've not read a lot on it, and I've not read a lot on it for reasons that I can't really explain or justify, other than to say that I've started a lot of books and eventually put most of them down. (There are a few on my radar that I'm going to try, soon.)
Wow---I was going to write a line or two and went on quite a rant instead. Sorry.
Thanks for the comment and for mentioning Catton, though I am thinking specifically of academic historians here because that is who, I believe, Jim Downs is referring to in this conversation. I think most academic Civil War military historians are interested in Reconstruction and routinely acknowledge the many connections between the war and post-war periods.
Thanks for the gentle clarification; I probably should have noted that on my own. (Bad Jim, no biscuit!) I still think that my core point remains, that Reconstruction is a separate realm of study from [name your favorite battle] or the secession crisis, or how Congress "fought the war" (I'm currently reading "Congress at War," which I think is by a non-academic historian; but I am enjoying it greatly.) And just as (forgive me) some mathematicians study modern algebra, others study topology and geometry, and the <joke> best study applied mathematics </joke>, academic historians of all stripes have their specialties. And it would not and does not surprise me that some academic military historians do not "do Reconstruction," in the sense that I do not "do topology."
Of course there are military historians out there who think little of things social and political, just as there are social and political historians working in the Civil War period who don't know a brigade from a bucket. But it's my sense that the "cordoning off" is most aggressively done by academic historians who choose not to recognize the broadening scope of work done by many military historians of the period. Glenn Brasher, John Matsui, Zachery Fry, Ethan Rafuse, Jonathan Noyalas, and others (including myself) have devoted significant effort to understanding the nexus of freedom, politics, and the armies in the field. Meanwhile (as you point out, Kevin), traditional military history and battle narratives have disappeared from the catalogs of university and large commercial presses and instead are now the realm of specialty presses. And the output of those, excepting Savas Beatie, is a fraction of what it was in the 1990s.
I did not view the presentation Kevin is referring to so maybe should not comment, but I am in broad agreement with the views expressed in this thread. As Kevin notes below, the "cordoning off" is done by the academic historians. I think this has shifted a little in the last ten or twelve years with the resurgence of operational military history with in the broader field of military history. But I think writing about battles, strategy, tactics, military operations, or logistics, especially during the Civil War and Reconstruction is not viewed as real history, certainly not universally anyway.
"But it's my sense that the 'cordoning off' is most aggressively done by academic historians who choose not to recognize the broadening scope of work done by many military historians of the period."
Exactly. It's the opposite of what Jim is suggesting.
The University of North Carolina press, as one example, has a blend of military and social histories from the era (https://uncpress.org/browse-all-books/?category=HIS036050&amount=50). With the digitization of primary source materials at more libraries and archives, we're seeing more micro-histories versus a broad look at the war or a three-day battle in southern Pennsylvania
UNC Press has been pushing the envelope on how we define Civil War military history for decades. It's been an honor working with them on two book projects.
My thoughts: the story of the people drives the narrative in much of what interests me today. You do have to have a understanding of the details of the war. But to miss the story of the people living through this, misses the point of what the battles were about. IMHO.
I wrote this over the past week and overlaps with some of the context.
https://substack.com/@jimthehistorian/note/c-180633542
I’m not in the field as many of the commentators in this thread are but to me it’s a dichotomy between military histories and non military (politics, race, cultural), etc. I have always been more interested in the non military aspect (particularly in the run up to the Civil War) and very little in military aspects; general histories are sufficient for me. This could be due to my inability to grasp military terms and such but books principally devoted to particular battles and skirmishes have left me cold (the principal exception being Allen Guelzo’s Gettysburg book, which I thought was fantastic).
Much of the recent scholarship in the field of military history does bridge the divide between tactics/logistics and the study of politics, race, and culture. It's what makes the comment that I was responding to in the post so odd.
It might be relevant to note that the NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie, in his new column "Trump is mired in a war of attrition," presents an analysis of the two Civil War sides' military strategies to arrive at this final paragraph:
"My Civil War analogy is not precise. It mostly reflects the fact that I spend a lot of time reading about the American Civil War, so it is often top of mind. And yet, if you will indulge me, it does feel as if November 2025 is to Trump what April and September 1862 were to the Confederacy. Not the beginning of the end, but the beginning of the beginning of the end."
Good news for civilization and decency at both ends of his timeline.
Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/opinion/trump-approval-opinion-confederate.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3E8.JxAm.jh1KZeiXfSn3&smid=url-share
We have the benefit of hindsight re: the trajectory of the Civil War, but there were plenty of moments when the course of events could have taken a radical turn between 1863 and 1865. Let's not lose sight of contingency in the past and the uncertainly of the present.
As someone who just completed an MA in Military History I aspire to write academic military histories/war studies on the Civil War. However, while the Reconstruction is part and parcel of Civil War history it’s an area I’m less well versed in and will likely not, at least for now, write on it. Just a personal choice however, as I lean towards writing on battles, units and individuals. My first book project however, I believe will encompass traditional military history and elements of social history. So while I certainly believe there is still much to say in a military history of the war I agree that military history has been altered by an embrace of social history.
Thanks for this. I pay no attention to what I call battles and generals and valor, but I also think that like lots of other areas that I neglect, it’s probably a shame that I neglect it.
A comment about this:
Quote
Bennett Parten, whose Somewhere Toward Freedom: Sherman’s March and the Story of America’s Largest Emancipation explores how the Union army set the stage for the ‘self-emancipation’ of thousands of enslaved in Georgia in 1864.
Unquote
That term that you set off in quotation marks actually appears only once in this book that repeatedly validates the concept, while using other words. I noticed this because, given what I watch in national memory of the Civil War, I’m aware that, to take what is probably the leading example, Allen C. Guelzo severely disapproves of most of what is said about self-emancipation.
Here’s my point: That book’s near boycott of the term recurs in the new book about the self-emancipation movement, Tom Zoellner‘s The Road Was Full of Thorns. The term appears only once.
David Blight, in the process of affirming that there is a lot to what has been called the self-emancipation thesis, told the New York Times at the end of the sesquicentennial in 2015 that the term itself is “too operatic.”
Am I dwelling on trivia, I ask myself, or is there information in those two books’ near boycott of that term?
Hi Steven,
I don't think the word choice is trivial at all. I've said before that I tend to steer away from it not because I want to minimize the important role that the enslaved themselves played in the story of emancipation (it was central) but that it may leave people with the idea that it occurred in a vacuum apart from the movements of the armies and decisions made in Washington, DC.
In the end, I would like to think that we are on the same page.
I hear you, but I want to emphasize that I'd be the last to think that the word choice itself is trivial. I just meant that as the nerd who carefully tracks how the term is used--I even once posted about that, at https://selfemancipator.substack.com/p/historians-on-the-term-self-emancipation--I might be making too much of these two recent authors' severe limit on including it. I need to monitor my biases.
But I also need to learn more about the degree to which self-emancipations were military emancipations. Of course, you can--and should, in my view--say that once the war began, nearly EVERY escape to freedom was at some level military emancipation. But I'm working on a post now that points out, concerning discussion of that rebel statue in N.C. with the panel on it commemorating supposedly "loyal slaves," that the county in question abuts the Dismal Swamp and other swamps, where self-emancipators didn't go the U.S. Army; they escaped directly to fraught but real freedom. To what extent were maroons military-emancipated? There are other stories too.
My concern is what I see as neglect in some traditional professional historians, and more importantly in most journalists and in civic memory generally, for clear-sightedness about what it took for enslaved Americans to escape and seize freedom. At some level, I see some of that neglect as white saviorism resulting from systemic racism. Those brave, enterprising Americans were just "slaves," right? My prediction is that clarity about those exemplars of Americanism will evolve--whatever degree of military emancipation was involved. The system's receptiveness is not the point. Those Americans' enterprising, brave use of it is. It's a story we should tell the world.
At a Carter G. Woodson website (https://asalh.org/statement-on-fort-monroe-and-significance-in-americas-arc/), there's a page about the Fort Monroe freedom story of May 1861. It highlights the general who made the second, reactive, and widely famous decision, the "Contraband Decision," without so much as conferring the dignity of naming Frank Baker, Shepard Mallory, and James Townsend. After all, those brave makers of the first, ***active*** decision were just "slaves," right?
There's something improvable about our memory of all of this. I profess no special wisdom about that, but I report that 20 years in the business of advocating for post-Army Fort Monroe would make anybody alive to it. But it's better now than 20 years ago, when almost nobody talked about those three men, even here in Tidewater.
I love that phrase of Blight’s “too operatic” It applies to so much.
Yes. Bona fide pithiness. I'm not sure I'd say the same for Allen C. Guelzo's distillation of the term's significance: "Marxist conceit." But that's another discussion.
Meanwhile, please indulge my pasting in of the Blight passage from the relevant part of the endlessly interesting end-of-sesquicentennial NYT interview of Blight, Adam Goodheart, Ken Burns, and Jamie Malanowski (https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/10/disunion-the-final-q-a/):
3. Notwithstanding the much-celebrated Emancipation Proclamation, was the end of slavery not accomplished by the slaves themselves, by refusing to remain slaves whenever the presence of Union forces made this possible?
Blight: We have almost worn this question out. The answer should be and always has been that emancipation was both the result of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (the policy) and the brave volition and actions of the slaves themselves (the process). History can never be as simple as sometimes we would like it to be. “Either-or history” simply does not work in this instance. The crooked path to the Proclamation during 1861-62, its roots in Republican Party ideology, in congressional measures such as the Second Confiscation Act and in hugely important military events such as the battle of Antietam – all this is crucial to understanding how Lincoln ends up delivering the executive order to the armed forces to free all slaves in the states in rebellion by January 1863. But the thousands of individual decisions by slaves themselves, who were at least in proximity to the Union forces, to strike out for their own liberation are equally important.
The very term “self-emancipation” has sometimes been forced to carry too much weight and significance. It is simply too operatic. This dual story needs to be seen through real evidence, real stories on the ground during the war. There are thousands of such cases well documented in the documentary history of emancipation volumes published over the years at the University of Maryland.
But as a streamlined way into understanding how emancipation came about, see my book “A Slave No More,” which reprints the postwar memoirs of two former slaves, John Washington and Wallace Turnage. In each case, these former slaves would never have achieved their freedom without their own cunning and extraordinary courage. But they also would never have become free without the presence of the Union Army along the Rappahannock River in April 1862 (Washington’s case) and the Union Navy in Mobile Bay in August 1864 (Turnage’s case). Willing or unwilling, Union soldiers and sailors helped to “free” thousands of slaves who were already risking everything to free themselves.
I think it might be more correct to say that *many* Civil War military historians tend to *decouple* Reconstruction and the war, in the sense that they drive a hard line of separation between the two. (Also, many *don't* decouple them; Brooks Simpson comes to mind here.) Just to make a (dated) comparison/example: Bruce Catton discussed the background of secession as it applied to the war in several of his books, but I don't think he ever did much on Reconstruction. And that raises an interesting oddity (IMO): I suspect that many Civil War military historians are very comfortable being in Catton's boat, in the sense that they are fine giving background material on Dred Scott, bleeding Kansas, Lincoln-Douglas and all the other pieces of the 1850s train wreck that led to the war, but they do not venture into Reconstruction. And while I really should not refer to myself as any kind of historian, I am kind of in that same boat with Catton, and possibly for the same reason---I stay away from Reconstruction because I don't know much about it, and I don't know much about it because I've not read a lot on it, and I've not read a lot on it for reasons that I can't really explain or justify, other than to say that I've started a lot of books and eventually put most of them down. (There are a few on my radar that I'm going to try, soon.)
Wow---I was going to write a line or two and went on quite a rant instead. Sorry.
Hi Jim,
Thanks for the comment and for mentioning Catton, though I am thinking specifically of academic historians here because that is who, I believe, Jim Downs is referring to in this conversation. I think most academic Civil War military historians are interested in Reconstruction and routinely acknowledge the many connections between the war and post-war periods.
Thanks for the gentle clarification; I probably should have noted that on my own. (Bad Jim, no biscuit!) I still think that my core point remains, that Reconstruction is a separate realm of study from [name your favorite battle] or the secession crisis, or how Congress "fought the war" (I'm currently reading "Congress at War," which I think is by a non-academic historian; but I am enjoying it greatly.) And just as (forgive me) some mathematicians study modern algebra, others study topology and geometry, and the <joke> best study applied mathematics </joke>, academic historians of all stripes have their specialties. And it would not and does not surprise me that some academic military historians do not "do Reconstruction," in the sense that I do not "do topology."
Of course there are military historians out there who think little of things social and political, just as there are social and political historians working in the Civil War period who don't know a brigade from a bucket. But it's my sense that the "cordoning off" is most aggressively done by academic historians who choose not to recognize the broadening scope of work done by many military historians of the period. Glenn Brasher, John Matsui, Zachery Fry, Ethan Rafuse, Jonathan Noyalas, and others (including myself) have devoted significant effort to understanding the nexus of freedom, politics, and the armies in the field. Meanwhile (as you point out, Kevin), traditional military history and battle narratives have disappeared from the catalogs of university and large commercial presses and instead are now the realm of specialty presses. And the output of those, excepting Savas Beatie, is a fraction of what it was in the 1990s.
I did not view the presentation Kevin is referring to so maybe should not comment, but I am in broad agreement with the views expressed in this thread. As Kevin notes below, the "cordoning off" is done by the academic historians. I think this has shifted a little in the last ten or twelve years with the resurgence of operational military history with in the broader field of military history. But I think writing about battles, strategy, tactics, military operations, or logistics, especially during the Civil War and Reconstruction is not viewed as real history, certainly not universally anyway.
"But it's my sense that the 'cordoning off' is most aggressively done by academic historians who choose not to recognize the broadening scope of work done by many military historians of the period."
Exactly. It's the opposite of what Jim is suggesting.
I add my agreement.
The University of North Carolina press, as one example, has a blend of military and social histories from the era (https://uncpress.org/browse-all-books/?category=HIS036050&amount=50). With the digitization of primary source materials at more libraries and archives, we're seeing more micro-histories versus a broad look at the war or a three-day battle in southern Pennsylvania
UNC Press has been pushing the envelope on how we define Civil War military history for decades. It's been an honor working with them on two book projects.