"Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front" by Timothy Smith

In high school and college, when we read about or study the American Civil War, we learn primarily about the political and military figures and the battles and campaigns. When I attended LSU, the school’s history department had a national reputation, with professors like T. Harry Williams, who was not only a highly regarded Civil War historian but also wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Huey Long. Williams published several books on Abraham Lincoln, P.G.T. Beauregard, Civil War generals, and related topics. 

In recent years, more attention has been paid to the war and how it affected civilians. When Union armies invaded the Southern states, they civilians they encountered were largely women, children, and older men beyond military age. And it is this group, and their lives in towns, cities, and farms, that Timothy Smith considers in Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

“The Real Horse Soldiers” by Timothy Smith

From April 17 to May 2 of 1863, a group of some 1,700 Union cavalry traveled from LaGrange Tennessee to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In less than three weeks, they cut a swath through central Mississippi surprising Confederate forces, Mississippi’s governor, and a number of cities and small towns along the way. Their goal: disrupt Confederate supply lines and draw attention from General Grant’s crossing of the Mississippi River right below Vicksburg. 

The cavalry, under the command of Colonel Benjamin Grierson of Jacksonville, Illinois (and a music teacher in civilian life), were wildly successful. Grierson’s Raid, as it became known, was celebrated in the North and even grudgingly admired in the South. It had pulled off what few thought possible.

 

One might think that such an event would have been the subject of numerous books. For whatever reasons, possibly including a bias toward the eastern battle front in the Civil War, few book-length accounts are to be found. Dee Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published Grierson’s Raid in 1954. It was not well received by critics, and its reputation has not improved with time. Brown often made fast and loose with his account, inventing conversations and scenes out of whole cloth. Even a non-historian like myself can read it today and see where Brown fudged, or invented, his facts.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.