Ken Burns's 1990 television series led to a flowering in Civil War studies, but the renaissance is over.
Dozens of new titles emerge each year, but good books are hard to find. In the main, the new histories, biographies and novels have retreated from the spirit of Burns' work, which brought the Civil War alive for a new generation. Most of today's books make the period seem as cold and distant as the age of the dinosaur.
The reasons are several. Some of the best Civil War historians are writing formulaic books about familiar topics. How many treatments of Pickett's Charge or biographies of Sherman and Grant do we need? Even when new authors find fresh subjects, many fall to glorifying them or fail to do them justice.
What is troubling in this trend is that there remains a vast lode of contemporary Civil War papers -- letters, diaries, newspaper accounts -- that no modern historian has mined. Meanwhile, even seasoned scholars rely heavily on conventional sources, including memoirs written long after the war, when time had rounded off the facts and smoothed over the contradictions of actual events.
We make these observations on the basis of two years of reading or scanning dozens of Civil War books to prepare an annual omnibus review for The Sun. We did find good work among this year's books, although even some of those we recommend illustrate the problems outlined above.
The one superb new book this year will be Nelson Lankford's Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital (scheduled for August release by Viking, 298 pages, $27.95). The subject is neither new nor neglected. The fall of Richmond was touched upon in last year's overpraised April 1865, and Ernest B. Furguson dealt with the subject in his fine broader survey of Richmond during the war, Ashes of Glory (1993). For the tightly focused Richmond Burning, Lankford has turned a huge body of material into a narrative that captures both the frenetic pace of events and their many undercurrents.
More than the surrender at Appomattox Court House, the fall of Richmond signified the end of America's national catastrophe. Lankford has a clear eye for the many factions present at this key moment in history.
He dispels the myths that grow up around any such major event. And he discerns and lays bare the prejudices and motives of his wonderful cast of characters, from Thomas Chester, an African-American reporter, to John A. Campbell, the former U.S. Supreme Court justice who nearly duped Abraham Lincoln. Under Lankford's hand, even the icons Lincoln and Lee live and breathe on the page.
Richmond Burning is a parade of memorable human moments, perhaps none more poignant than the reunion of Garland White, chaplain of the 28th U.S. Colored Troops, which had come to occupy Richmond, and his mother, a slave who had sent him north to freedom in his youth. When she recognized him, she exclaimed: "This is your mother, Garland, whom you are now talking to, who has spent twenty years of grief about her son."
The political currents that made Richmond a capital in the first place are William C. Davis' topic in Look Away! A History of the Confederate States of America (The Free Press, 496 pages, $35). As a three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Prize for Confederate History, Davis writes with authority. Look Away! reduces to black and white the political story of the would-be nation in gray.
Davis argues that the Confederacy was a creature of the southern oligarchy. He explores how the unraveling of slavery during the war belied the myths Southerners employed to justify human bondage. And he maintains that, despite the loss of its fight for independence and the death of slavery, the elite that brought on the Civil War survived it.
This is history with an edge, slicing through the romanticism that surrounds so much writing about the Lost Cause. It is not the only book those interested in Confederate history should read, but even readers who focus on the valor of Southern warriors should open their eyes to Davis' argument.
The valor -- if not the glory -- of Union warriors underlies On Campaign with the Army of the Potomac: The Civil War Journal of Theodore Ayrault Dodge edited by Stephen W. Sears (Cooper Square Press, 240 pages, $29.95).
Dodge, a prominent 19th-century military historian, had the misfortune of doing his field research as a soldier on the wrong side of two routs. Dodge was adjutant of the 119th New York Volunteer Infantry, part of the 11th Corps, which skedaddled before Stonewall Jackson's flanking movement at Chancellorsville and was chased off the field again during the first day at Gettysburg.
Under even the most trying conditions, Dodge kept his journal faithfully. His accounts of Chancellorsville and the march to Gettysburg, where he lost his right foot, are crisp and detailed.
Dodge's journal also answers succinctly the questions modern readers would most want to ask him. Why, for instance, would men stand before such withering fire? As Dodge wrote after his first battle, the secret was not necessarily knowable even to the participant.
"Foolish as it was thus to expose my life uselessly, I was so excited that I stood during the whole firing looking down an opening in the underbrush," he wrote.
"It was a strange fascination, but I found myself almost unable to leave the place."
Dodge's fascination still grips visitors to the fields where the armies fought, perhaps none more than Gettysburg. For Gettysburg: Day Three (Simon & Schuster, 448 pages, $27.50), the veteran author Jeffry D. Wert has done his research, from the official records of the war to soldiers' letters.
Although his book occasionally drifts into the denseness of Harry W. Pfanz's bibles on this pivotal battle, Wert's writing style is reader-friendly.
Since there have been several recent books on Pickett's Charge, the Confederate advance during the afternoon of July 3, 1863, we were particularly interested in Wert's account of the earlier fighting at Culp's Hill. This narrative, accompanied by maps, is reliable and informative. It would serve well as a guide before and during a tour of the less celebrated northern end of the Union line.
Intimate Strategies of the Civil War: Military Commanders and Their Wives (Oxford University Press, 291 pages, $27.50) challenges a bad habit persistent among Civil War authors and readers alike: treating the conflict as a men's club divided.
Editors Carol K. Bleser and Lesley J. Gordon present essays on 12 famous Civil War relationships, from the Lees and the Davises to the Grants and the Shermans.
Their book shows that even warriors are best viewed as they lived -- whole, shaped not just by peers and battlefields but also by their loves.
Sadly, this is a better example of inspiration than of execution. In too many essays the promise of intimate portraiture is not fulfilled, leaving the authors to suggest rather than reveal the depths of their subjects. The ultimate value of Intimate Strategies is as a reminder that in Civil War studies, fresh ideas and explorations hold the promise of greatest interest.
Mike Pride and Mark Travis are the authors of My Brave Boys: To War with Colonel Cross and the Fighting Fifth. Pride is the editor of the Concord Monitor, New Hampshire's capital newspaper, where he has worked since 1978. A former Nieman fellow at Harvard University, he has earned the National Press Foundation's editor of the year award. Travis is the Monitor's senior editor. He has just been named a Nieman fellow for the class of 2002-2003.