Katherine Addison's Blog, page 5

Review: Burton, The Siege of Charleston (1970)

The Siege of Charleston, 1861-1865 by E. Milby Burton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


So, yes, this book has the flaws you would expect from a history of the siege of Charleston originally published in 1970. He goes on about "honor" and "gallantry" and the magnificent spirit of Southern women and evinces no real recognition of Black people as having subject positions of their own.* Also, the writing lacks something which we might possibly call panache. It's clear and easy to follow (99% of the time), but there's no life in it.

On the other hand, if you ever want to write a story set during the siege of Charleston (I don't think I do, but you never know), E. Milby Burton is the guy who has figured out who were the officers, both Union and Confederate, involved in every piece of the siege (not, of course, the enlisted men). So if it's a matter of who was where when or what happened to a particular general, he's great.

Also, he told me about the Confederate submarine H. L. Hunley, by which I was of course fascinated in the uneasy way I am always fascinated by submarines and submarine disasters. The career of the H. L. Hunley did not make me less uneasy.

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*Burton is not entirely wrong about the gallantry. There WAS distinct camaraderie between Union and Confederate soldiers. This WAS a war in which officers on both sides were expected to behave like gentlemen. And I don't want to sound like I don't know that the North was racist; many men were willing to fight to preserve the Union while being actively hostile to Black people. What I object to---well, one of the many things I object to---is the myth of Southern superiority. Southern women are more womanly and more spirited, Southern officers are more gallant (I hate the word "gallant"), the South is somehow the injured party in the Civil War---this being a pose Southern politicians had been perfecting for thirty years. I think this myth, like its concomitant myths of white superiority and the Lost Cause and so on and so forth, has done and is still doing tremendous amounts of damage.

So I believe that most white Southerners believed their own rhetoric implicitly; they weren't conscious hypocrites (well, at least, most of them). I just don't think we should talk about them without pointing out that their refined, civilized, GALLANT way of life was predicated on chattel slavery, and that that needs to be unpacked with a recognition of the equal humanity of the enslaved people.



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Review: Furguson, Not War But Murder (2000)

Not War But Murder: Cold Harbor 1864 by Ernest B. Furgurson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book is about Cold Harbor, blow by terrible blow. Furguson (and, yes, it really is spelled with two u's, although if you want to find him on Amazon, you have to spell it Ferguson) is an excellent writer, very thoughtful and interested in reconstructing, as much as is possible, the psychology of the people involved, especially Meade and Grant, to figure out WHY Cold Harbor happened the way it did. Neither Meade nor Grant comes out of it looking terribly good, Meade for letting his wounded amour propre get in the way of doing his job, Grant for NOT PAYING ATTENTION to the effects of his orders.

Grant and Lee both have a certain amount of trouble---Lee not so much here, where all the Confederates were doing was holding a defensive line, but definitely at Gettysburg---wherein they want their generals to do their jobs without being told HOW. They want to be able to say, "Do this," and have their subordinates figure out how to make it happen. Sometimes this works out great (e.g., Lee and Jackson), and then sometimes it really really doesn't, as with Grant and Meade and their major generals at Cold Harbor, where the major generals desperately need someone who can see the big picture to be telling them, not so much what to do, as when to do it. They had no good way of coordinating attacks among themselves, and so they went haphazardly and without supporting each other, and the result of THAT was inevitable defeat.



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Review: Lankford, Richmond Burning (2002)

Richmond Burning: The Last Days of the Confederate Capital by Nelson D. Lankford

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is an excellent book about the fall of Richmond. It's frankly better than I thought it was going to be after the first few pages. Lankford writes about the fire (the Burning in Richmond Burning) both clearly and vividly, so that I understand both WHAT happened and as much as I can of what it meant to the people it happened to.

Lankford has combed exhaustively through the primary sources, and he's interested in EVERYONE's point of view: women, men, white, Black, North, South, officers, enlisted---and he's alert to the differences between the Unionist residents of Richmond and the Confederates. Not everybody saw the entry of the Union troops into the city as a good thing, and "good" was itself very much up for grabs. The Yankees restored order and fought the fire (set by Confederate soldiers) that was destroying Richmond's business district, and some Confederates recognized that as "good" and some couldn't recognize ANYTHING the Yankees did as "good." And Lankford is keenly aware of the ways in which the Civil War didn't end with the fall of Richmond, or with Appomattox, and the ways in which the (incredibly toxic) relationship between white Southerners and Black Southerners was destroyed by the Emancipation Proclamation without having anything to put in its place. (This is not saying slavery was a good relationship to have, only that it was familiar, and that its destruction, while morally and ethically necessary, merely tore things apart without reconfiguring them into a new pattern. This, of course, is one of the places where Reconstruction should have happened and didn't.) It is very frustrating to watch white Richmonders fail to have any theory of mind or any ability to see the conflict in anything but starkest Manichean dichotomies (with themselves, of course, always as the "good" people). It's almost equally frustrating (though of course, not quite, because I don't think they're as manifestly wrong as the white people who can't understand why the enslaved people of Richmond are so happy not to be enslaved anymore) to watch the Northerners do the same thing, to fail to live up to Lincoln's Second Inaugural. (One of the amazing things that occurs in Richmond Burning is the visit of President Lincoln to Richmond, which is so surreal it's hard to believe it happened.)

Lankford is also very much aware of the potential unreliability of his sources, of how much, for example, Northerners wanted to see the white people of Richmond as either resigned to their defeat or actually relieved, when in fact, while that was true in some cases, it was not true in all or even most. White Richmonders, like white Southerners across the South, were not resigned to their defeat at all. So Lankford, while writing only five years after Klein (Days of Defiance), is much more alive to the schisms that the Civil War manifested---or caused---but could not mend.



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Review: Klein, Days of Defiance (1997)

Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War by Maury Klein

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a book about the fall of Fort Sumter and therefore about the beginning of the American Civil War. Klein does a very good job of weaving together the various strands: the men in the fort who can't get a straight answer out of Washington, the white people of Charleston who are frankly drunk with rebellion, Abraham Lincoln trying to put his Cabinet together. It is not quite as sensitive as I would like to the viewpoint of the enslaved people of Charleston---we see them only through the eyes of the white Charlestonians and, while that may be a simple matter of what the historical record has left us, Klein makes little to no effort to read against the text. He is unnecessarily catty about Harriet Beecher Stowe, and it's very hard to tell from here whether Mary Todd Lincoln was as awful as he makes her out to be, or if there are wheels within wheels. So I guess perhaps there's a little less nuance than would be ideal.

It's also a little uncomfortable reading a book written in 1997 that assumes that, no, of course America could never possibly do anything of the sort again, and I think about four years of Trump and the January 6th insurrection, and it's not as far away as Klein thinks it is.



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Review: Price, A World of Darkness (2020)

A World of Darkness: Cotton Mather and the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials by David W Price

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This book was very disappointing. It's about Cotton Mather and the Salem witchcraft crisis, which is a very interesting juxtaposition of person and historical event, since Cotton Mather has become a byword for Puritanism and bigotry and ignorance largely because of his part in what happened in Salem, and yet when you go and look, his part in what happened in Salem is actually quite small. He attended one hanging and he wrote a hot mess of a book trying to defend the judges. At no point was he out there hunting down witches himself; at no point was he the one condemning people to death. (And when you read about Cotton Mather, as for example Kenneth Silverman's excellent biography, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather, you discover that in fact he was about as UNbigoted and UNignorant as anybody in colonial New England.)

So what Price is trying to do is to demonstrate that (1) Mather's participation in the Salem witchcraft crisis is commensurate and consistent with his other writings on witchcraft, both before and after, and (2) Mather's participation in the Salem witchcraft crisis was limited and ambiguous, his book The Wonders of the Invisible World being largely written in what Silverman calls "Matherese," which is a textual mode of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. It is also a mode of sometimes astonishing passive-aggressiveness, in which Mather habitually indicates what he wants by pretending he has no interest in it.

A World of Darkness started as a Ph.D. thesis and it seriously still reads like one, meaning that it is clunky clunky clunky. All the gears are showing. (The only person I have ever read who could get away with this is James West Davidson, whose book The Logic of Millenial Thought makes a brilliant virtue of its defects.) And Price doesn't have the writing chops to get away from the thesis-evidence-analysis-link paragraph structure that, while it gets the job done, is so very awkward.

That's not the disappointing part, though. The disappointing part is two-fold. (1) that Price says nothing new and (2) that Price is a sloppy historian. (1) is probably a measure of how much reading I've done about Salem (and, I suppose, about Cotton Mather). (2) is what truly irritated me. Price gets things weirdly wrong, like saying that the first two afflicted girls were both Samuel Parris's daughters when one of them was Parris's niece (I know this seems trivial, but it's right there in their names. Betty Parris is the daughter of Samuel Parris. Abigail Williams...is not.) He also doesn't discriminate between "affliction" and "possession," although they were considered different problems and if you've read John Demos, who is in Price's bibliography, you know that. The afflicted girls (and women and men) in Salem were NOT possessed---affliction was inflicted on you by a witch, possession you brought upon yourself by trying to be a witch. One is an innocent victim, one is not.) In one place he elides Mary Sibley from the story, saying that the counter-magic urine cake (you bake the afflicted girls' urine into a rye cake and feed it to the dog) was Tituba's idea, while in another place he recognizes that Tituba was doing what Mary Sibley told her to do. He says for some reason that Giles Corey's death (pressed to death) was unintentional, which I have never seen anyone else claim and which is clearly false if you read the contemporary account of it. And he conflates brothers Samuel Sewell (trial judge) and Stephen Sewell (trial clerk). Again, I recognize this is a relatively minor detail, but it's also easy to get right. (Also, yes, I obviously have done a lot of reading about Salem, but not more than someone ought to who wrote their Ph.D. dissertation on it.)

So, yeah. If this book has a right audience, I am not it.

Two and a half stars, round up (grudgingly) to three.



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Review: Woodworth, Jefferson Davis and His Generals (1990)

Jefferson Davis and His Generals: The Failure of Confederate Command in the West by Steven E. Woodworth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So there's been a cultural shift since this book was written. Woodworth belongs to the generation of Civil War historians where it's okay to just say "slavery" without any consideration of the human beings actually enslaved---or any consideration of the moral/ethical question of whether anyone who protects the institution of slavery can be an admirable person (Robert E. Lee, I am looking at you)---and okay to write about the Civil War as a contest between two honorable forces. So this book doesn't ask some questions that it should be asking and it assumes that its readers are prepared to admire Jefferson Davis, which I am not.

But, okay. The past is a foreign country. This is an in-depth, blow-by-blow analysis of why the Confederacy failed in the western theater of the Civil War, with an emphasis on Davis's decisions and actions. The Confederate generals make the Union generals look like grown-up professional soldiers, which is saying something. Aside from a paragraph near the end where he loses his mind and asserts the Confederacy could have won the Civil War if Davis had just made a few critical decisions differently (and the general failure to question the Confederates' passionate belief in themselves as deeply honorable men), Woodworth offers a good military and psychological analysis of where the Confederate high command went wrong.



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Review: Hall, Ways of Writing (2008)

Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England by David D. Hall

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This book isn't as good as Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment, but it's still a good book. Hall is talking about what "publication" meant in 17th century New England, and the different ways that the two modes of publication (print and scribal) were used by different people (not all men! Anne Bradstreet gets discussed!). He's also talking about all the people who were involved in the publication of a work, the author, the printer, the typesetters, the person who carried the manuscript from Boston to London, the person who wrote a foreword, the person who found the manuscript among the author's library after their death...and how all these people have a share in the text as we receive it.



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Review: Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment (1989)

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England by David D. Hall

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


(2022) This is an excellent book about seventeenth-century New England. Hall is talking about religious belief---which, of course, was massively important to the Puritans, but, as he proves, not monolithic. He discusses the Puritans' interest in "wonders"---by which they meant anything out of the ordinary, e.g., rainbows, though most of the wonders they collected were disasters or portents of disaster: earthquakes and comets and monstrous births. He also talks about their literacy rate, and what it meant to come as close as they did to achieving the Protestant ideal of every person able to read the bible for themselves. (They came very close, and it did not go as expected.) He has chapters on the uses of ritual (in a culture that had deliberately stripped all the ritual out) and the meetinghouse as the interface between the clergy and the laity, and his last chapter is on Samuel Sewell's* understanding of his world, as revealed in his diary, and it's strange and sad and alien. (I find the Puritans and their City on a Hill fascinating, but I also think it's the most unappealing utopia anyone has ever imagined.)
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*(In)famous as the only judge in the Salem witchcraft crisis who made a public apology.

(2020) So this is a book that I should have read for my dissertation but did not find until 15 years too late. It's about religion and popular culture in 17th century New England, and so was actually illuminating for one of my obsessions, the Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692.

Hall talks about the ways in which both ordinary people and the learned elite experienced religion in their lives. For most people, this meant most immediately the Bible (and other books: catechisms, psalters, sermons, chapbooks and "penny godlies"), so he's talking also about literacy and print culture, and about the way the Bible saturated the lives of the colonists. (In Samuel Sewell's house, they read aloud from the Bible every evening, from Genesis to Revelations, and when they got to the end, they started all over again at the beginning, and I'm sure Sewell---who was a magistrate, not a minister---was not unique in this.) He also talks about the role of organized worship and the many uses of ritual. And he discusses the controversies of the day (like Antinomianism, the Halfway Covenant, the Quakers), and does a really good job of conveying how something like baptism looked very different in the popular understanding from the way the ministers meant it to be seen. (MINISTERS: Baptism is a sacrament of admission to the church. PEOPLE: Baptism means my children won't go to hell when our shocking infant mortality rate catches them.)

This is an academic book, so the prose is not lively (I *have* read academic books with lively prose, but I can count them on the fingers of one hand), but it's very clearly written and clearly argued.



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Review: Ray, Satan and Salem (2015)

Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692 by Benjamin C. Ray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Another write-up of what happened at Salem (of which I must have four or five). What makes Ray particularly useful is that he makes a little bit of extra effort to get into the viewpoint of the afflicted girls and not only acknowledges that there must have been some amount of fraud, but talks about why that might be so. How terrified they must have been and how important it must have seemed to them that the people they believed were witches be convicted. So not fraud for fraud's sake, but fraud in the service of what they believed was a higher purpose.



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Review: Weisman, Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in 17th Century Massachusetts (1984)

Witchcraft, Magic, and Religion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts by Richard Weisman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As the title suggests, this is a very academic approach to the wider subject of witchcraft in colonial New England. Weisman is a sociologist (which shows a bit in his prose style), and he lays things out in an orderly and easy-to-follow fashion. He's interested in what the colonists thought witchcraft was and why they prosecuted the people they prosecuted, and he's also interested in what social functions witchcraft served for various levels of society. He is not the only person to talk about the disjunct between what people who brought witchcraft accusations thought they were talking about and what the people who adjudicated witchcraft accusations thought they were talking about, but he does a good job of explaining what that meant.



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