Reviews for Mr. Lincoln's Forts: A Guide to the Civil War Defenses of Washington

The average rating for Mr. Lincoln's Forts: A Guide to the Civil War Defenses of Washington based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-09-05 00:00:00 Jonah Chavez Shelby Foote writes, in the afterward section of this, the third volume of his monumental history of the Civil War, how relieved he was to finally finish this labor of love after researching and writing for twenty years. A literary effort begun to commemorate the centennial of the Civil War ended long after, in his description, the centennial enthusiasm had dried up. True, a centennial celebration itself fizzles out, otherwise we, or rather our descendants, would never eventually get re-excited about a bi- and a tri- and on and on .. centennial. I'm not sure Foote is implying with this statement that Civil War enthusiasm waned after the mid-1960's, but if it took a dip, it was only temporary. Thanks to Foote and others, including Ken Burns, the American Civil War continues to fascinate generations of readers. It isn't necessary to read the three volumes of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War" in order, but my experience from doing so imparted the feeling that I had been exposed to the whole grand majestic scope of this struggle. Foote is all-inclusive in his choice of the war's significant struggles. His motive is revealed literally on the last page of prose (page 1065) in which he states that his writing aim was to provide a "more fitting balance" than many histories provide, by showing the patient reader how the actions outside the state of Virginia, vaguely labeled as in "the West", had no less importance to the war's outcome than the well-known battles such as Gettysburg and Chancellorsville. Foote shows how these geographically wide pieces fit into the 1864 puzzle in his first chapter, aptly titled "Another Grand Design". In the spring of that year, another recently-appointed Union commanding general, Ulysses Grant, launched a multi-pronged attack designed to hit the Confederate forces in numerous locations ranging West-to-East from Arkansas to Virginia. The greatest Union concentration of forces, personally accompanied by Grant, was the Army of the Potomac, which had had three years of up-and-down morale as various of Grant's predecessors tried to crack the nut of opposition to Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. All of these various conflicts occurring on land and water are narrated by Foote, who never loses the magic touch of making you feel the gravity of the struggle between blue-and butternut-clad armies, while making the reading experience compelling. As we know in retrospect, the time period covered in this third volume parallels the long, painful series of events leading to the Confederate downfall. Not that anyone knew for sure what the outcome would be, or when it would occur, as Grant started his spring, 1864 invasion. He may have been the national hero of Donelson, Shiloh and Vicksburg in the Western theater, but he was up against the best general in the Civil War now. With Grant, Lee continued his pattern of keeping his forces from being smashed by larger Union armies, while always inflicting heavier casualties against his opponent. Grant found himself being set up on numerous occasions for a smashing blow from Lee which would force him to withdraw from the field; he countered these sometimes surprising threats by "sidling" his army eastward across Virginia in a campaign we now know as "The Forty Days", as violent, bloody clashes occurred from The Wilderness, to Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor. Foote graphically describes the "concentrated terror" of one terrible day, when the struggle at the "Bloody Angle" at Spotsylvania involved fighting by both sides across a parapet at literally arms' length, a "waking nightmare" going on for sixteen hours, a defense as much as it was an attack by either side, where neither victory nor defeat mattered, and fighting continued on and on, under the influence of pure adrenalin, and "Slaughter became an end in itself" (p. 221). This one day resulted in 3000 Confederate soldiers captured, killed or wounded compared with 6820 of their enemy. And this day followed numerous others already involving many thousands of casualties on each side, to be followed by many more. Lee would somehow be able to block Grant again and again, in order to protect Richmond, the Confederate Capital. The cost of constant attrition of his forces during the spring, summer and fall of that year would find the two armies facing each other outside Richmond, at Petersburg. By November, Lee knew he was on the verge of calamity because his forces were spread very thin, and there were no more reinforcements to be had. Grant would continue to plan for the breakthrough that would send Lee's forces reeling from their intrenched positions, and it was provided by one of his most aggressive generals, Phil Sheridan, whose thrust at Five Forks on April 1st, 1865 tarnished the reputation of George Picket and began the unravelling of Lee's defenses. One of the Civil War's most dramatic chapters occurred while the Confederate government abandoned Richmond, beginning its itinerant railroad journey to avoid being captured, while Lee evacuated his army westward in the long-shot attempt to get the survivors of his forces to meet with General Johnston's army in North Carolina. Foote shows how Lee and his exhausted army never considered giving up trying to keep the fight going until Grant's relentless pushing of his forces finally boxed in the Confederates at Appomattox Courthouse. There were other Confederate forces still in the field, but Foote makes it clear how Lee's April 9th surrender gave really no alternative to the holdouts, forcing Richard Taylor to surrender his army of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi and East Louisiana to Federal General Canby, and Johnston to surrender his army of the Department of North and South Carolina and Georgia to William T. Sherman. Meanwhile, President Jefferson Davis was pursuing the hope of some kind of Confederate government-on-the-run survival, moving from town to town with his cabinet, on the Danville and Richmond Railroad, as cabinet members gradually gave up the cause and bugged out of Davis' retinue. Foote, a Southerner sensitive to the not-so sympathetic treatment given to Davis' memory by historians, documents the treatment and mistreatment received by the forever unrepentant leader from his capture in Georgia, to his long, harsh imprisonment and beyond. The war bestowed two legacies to Americans. Regarding the first, Foote notes the struggles Abraham Lincoln had in uniting what remained of the remainder of the United States in order to militarily recover the section that had departed, living to see this goal fulfilled, but not living long enough to observe how his returning veterans realized that a nation emerged from the crucible of strife. He writes: "They knew now they had a nation, for they had seen it; they had been there, they had touched it, climbed its mountains, crossed its rivers ....their comrades lay buried in its soil, along with many thousands of their own arms and legs." (p. 1042). The second legacy directly affected the southern veterans, who would also be part of the new nation but would claim membership in a new country south of the Mason-Dixon line; as their claim to nationhood through secession was denied, they claimed unity through pride in enduring a terrible war, the end of which was marked by a villification of their former leaders as instruments of Lucifer, and which was followed by the societal disruptions of Reconstruction and its aftermath. As Foote states: "Not secession but the war itself, and above all the memories recurrent through the peace that followed - such as it was - created a Solid South, more firmly united in defeat than it had been during the brief span when it claimed independence." (p. 1042). Why bother studying History, especially the Civil War? Because, otherwise, it is impossible to understand the difference, to paraphrase Shelby Foote, between "the United States are" and "the United States is" (p. 1042).

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-02 00:00:00 Dario Machleidt I want to do this... Because I just finished this... And it makes me feel like this... But then my elation is tempered and I'm humbled when I remember this ... First off, an apology in advance. I'm not going to give this series of books the analysis it deserves. I realize this is a generalized, low-effort review but I'm afraid that that's the way most of them are going to be from now on, as I have to put my mental exertions elsewhere. The upshot is: if you want a gripping, highly readable, comprehensive overarching view of the war, this is the place to go. Is it the only place to go? No. But these books finally put the whole war into perspective for me, and now I can proceed to more specialized or focused treatments of particular aspects of the conflict and know where those events place into the larger picture. I don't know the actual number hours I spent on Shelby Foote's magnum opus of the American Civil War. It was somewhere between 180 hours on the low end and 240 hours on the high. Scaling and descending this Mount Everest of publishing -- which took Foote two decades to complete -- entailed a traversal of three brick-thick volumes of 3,000 pages and 1.2 million words. I kept at it relentlessly, every day, for weeks, reading the physical books, the PDFs when I was at the computer, and the Grover Gardner superbly narrated unabridged audiobooks on Playaway MP3 devices from the public library when doing other things -- just to keep the narrative threads going and the momentum chugging. It's a credit to author Foote that, as exhausting as this exercise was, I was never bored and never reluctant to plunge right back in again and resume the tale. The canvas was just too rich and vast, dramatic, horrifying, deeply moving and heart-wrenching. There is a place for the Dunes and the Lord of the Rings and the Game of Thrones franchises of the world of lit, with their epic labyrinthine stories of violence and quests and wars and politics. But here, in these bristling and vivid pages, we have all those kinds of things in real life: a vast saga of inconceivable suffering and terror, bravery and fear, irony and incongruity. In so many cases, the stories of the Civil War are often stranger than fiction. It's the story of the kings, the rooks, the knights and the pawns, but also of the pieces that have no place on the battlefield, who have been dragged into the fray anyway in this template of future total wars. This third volume covers the titanic events of 1864-1865, with the undermanned and under-provisioned Confederacy still pulling unexpected tricks from its sleeve and the Federal North finally gaining painfully won victories from its grinding attrition warfare -- the kind of wins where you lose more men than the foe you supposedly beat. Grant finally takes charge of the Union effort to bring to it the strategic uniformity it has so far lacked and to goad his martinet underlings to work in concert to pull it off. The most fruitful of Grant's command allies was, of course, the fascinating William Tecumseh Sherman, the complicated, effusive and ruthless exponent of total warfare. I'd previously seen documentaries and read several books on the war, but have only now come to feel the Shakespearean tragic dimension that Foote brings to his comprehensive treatment. For the first time, too, I have a solid chronological grasp and moving map of the whole war in my inner mental library that I can access when placing events in context. As good as it is, there are some minor quibbles in this volume. One is Foote's Southern-apologist-bent dismissal of the seriousness of the Fort Pillow massacre -- a war crime still hotly debated among Civil War buffs. I chose to take his interpretation with a grain of salt and move on. Another is his insertion of a soldier's diary entry stating: "I am killed," that apparently has never had a verified source provenance. It's quite likely that Foote conjured some of his novel-writing skills for the sake of drama and brevity: to distill the essence into such cobbled bits of poetic license. Civil War buffs of the anal retentive variety (and there are quite a few of those out there) will be more outraged at such things than I am. These are the kind of guys who serve hardtack at Civil War reenactments and complain that the crackers aren't hard enough to break their teeth or don't have the right number of surface indentations on them. They can't see the Nathan Bedford Forrest for the trees, if you will. (Sorry, just had to.) What really struck me, too, while reading these volumes was the stubborn vehemence and faith-based intransigence of the Southern cause and its adherents. So many of the things they said and did in the face of contradictory facts have the same delusional qualities as the stuff peddled by today's elites and their Republican political minions, fomenting strife and tearing the common civil fabric with their political "Southern Strategy" of the last several decades -- basically stirring up the same kind of partisan nonsense and divisional hatreds that the country had once successfully buried. And now we have half the country at each other's necks again. Divide and conquer and follow the money, folks. History repeats, as we know, and it helps to understand the particulars, the context and the continuum. What one feels, ultimately, after reading these behemoth books is an overwhelming sense of the sheer suffering this war caused. A sense, I say, because to put it any other way would be presumptuous and even insulting. Reading about these things in the comfort of your own home is a world away from what these men and women went through. It's a testament to these books, I think, to say that I'd love to dive right into them again in a heartbeat and spend another 200 hours with them. If you're lucky enough to obtain them and have the time to do so, these volumes will provide one of the most rewarding reading experiences of your lifetime. -- kr/eg 2019 Credits: **Civil War graveyard photo was taken at Cave Hill Cemetery, Louisville, KY (my hometown) and is attributed to TripAdvisor and credited as required. **Old soldiers photo is attributed to Associated Press and used on a fair-use comment/educational basis.