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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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The Longest Night: A Military History of the Civil War
“After reading through numerous
battle reports, I am convinced that the Confederate States of America could not
have emerged victorious in the Civil War. It
was beyond the south’s capabilities to withstand the hardships of an extended
war. And for the vast majority of
southerners, the war made life far worse.[i]” With those words, David
J. Eicher throws down a challenge to Alternate Historians, as well as Southern
Revisionists, Racists and other people who’s status and power depend on the
possibility, however slight, that a confederate victory was possible during the
civil war. The Longest Night
aspires to become the standard reference in its field and it may well succeed.
It is, however, strictly a military history of the Civil War, without the
political and social context setting that takes up so much space in James M.
heralded Battle Cry of Freedom and focuses almost exclusively on the
actual campaigns and combat. Eicher is not the
best writer on the Civil War, a title that may go to McPherson or Ivan Musicant, both of whom were able to interest the curious reader in
their books, rather than students or civil war buffs. Eicher’s dry style of writing
means that people need to pay careful attention to the book in order to enjoy it
properly – it is not one of the books that reward causal reading.
Like Nomonhan, it requires several readings to form an accurate
picture of the war, as seen by Eicher, although the book does have its lighter
moments. Eicher has the
benefit of new scholarship, as he himself points out, a big chunk of his sources
only became available in the 1990s. However, he does not disagree with writers who claim that
Gettysburg and Antietam were the most important battles in the war, which are
beliefs that most new historians challenge.
He follows a conventional course in such matters, but he holds that there
were many more important battles than people generally acknowledge, all of which
led to the final result. He tries
hard to place those battles in context, including the naval ones (an aspect
often missed by writers, who note the Trent Affair and no more) and shows
how important they really were. In some ways, The Longest Night comes
across as a fairly standard book on the Civil War, as the bulk of the book is a
chronological retelling of the war, starting with Fort Sumter and ending with
the death of President Lincoln and the various Confederate surrenders.
Don’t be deceived; the real strength of The Longest Night is its
intricate detail, which is full of information for writers and students,
including weapons, tactics, supply lines and far more.
In other ways, the book is generally remarkable, particularly for a single volume. The accounts of Antietam and Gettysburg are models of clarity, compared to so much of the writings that exist, which often lose readers in thickets of data and analysis. The maps are much better than many other maps and can be understood easily. The Longest Night draws
on hundreds of sources and includes numerous excerpts from letters, diaries, and
reports by the soldiers who fought the war, giving readers a real sense of the
battlefield. In addition to the main battle narrative, Eicher analyses each
side's strategy and examines the tactics of the leading figures of the war. He
also discusses such militarily significant topics as prisons, railroads,
shipbuilding, clandestine operations, and the expanding role of Black Americans
in the war. James M. McPherson writes in the
introduction that the book is a good starting point for civil war research.
I, however, disagree with the author, his own book (Battle Cry of
Freedom), is far more of a complete history of the war, although it covers
political and social matters that The Longest Night does not
touch. As a battle history, The
Longest Night is fine, but as a complete history, it is neither complete nor
conclusive. Eicher’s premise, however, as noted in
the quote above, is slightly flawed. The south, I would agree, under the circumstances it
faced, had no chance of military victory.
Like many other historians, as Scott often points out, he is reasoning
backwards from the result, not forward. He
might have done better, from our point of view, to write: “IF
the Northern states stayed together, IF the blockade held, IF the
South was unable to establish many factories to supplement its merger industrial
base, IF no foreign power intervened, IF the South did not win too
many embarrassing victories and (most important) IF Northern will stayed
pro-war, the South’s defeat was certain.”
If any of those factors had been different, the war might well have been won by the south or taken a radically different turn. The defeat of the CSA was not inevitable, by any stretch of the imagination. Ironically, the quality of Eicher’s scholarship succeeds above all in demonstrating that the Civil War offered no shortcuts to victory or defeat at the sharp end of battle.
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