Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865

by Russell F. Weigley

Book Overview

A Great Civil War is a major new interpretation of the events which continue to dominate the American imagination and identity nearly 150 years after the war's end. In personal as well as historical terms, more even than the war for independence, the Civil War has been the defining experience of American democracy. A lifelong student of both strategy and tactics, Weigley also brings to his account a deep understanding of the importance of individuals...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0253337380
• ISBN13: 9780253337382
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Length: 648 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.8" x 7.0" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant One-Volume History.

Most books about the Civil War lack context. Buy a book about Gettysburg, and you discover that Fredericksburg was an issue, as was the leadership of Hooker. So you back up and read some other book about Fredericksburg. Then you scream: is there NO decent one-volume overview, something short of Shelby Steele and Bruce Catton and the 10 volumne version? This is the book. Very readable, captures all of the battles and strategies within a political framework. Weigley's discussion of Fort Sumter is a classic, exploring why Sumter closed the major port of the South, and occupying Sumter forced the South to open hostilities and clarify their intentions. This book opens up all of the controversies of the Civil War buff, without settling any... what a valuable book!

A Very Good, but Not Great, History of the Civil War

Russell F. Weigley is one of the pre-eminent military historians in the country, and his The American Way of War" A History of United States Military Strategy and Politics is a classic. Professor Weigley's current volume, A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, is a solid survey of its topic but I believe that it adds relatively little to our understanding of the four-year conflict which is the great turning point in American history. In his bibliography, Weigley candidly refers to James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, published in 1988 as the "best comprehensive one-volume history," and so it remains. If the leading authorities had to choose, I suspect that most would continue to recommend Battle Cry of Freedom. As a result, Weigley's book will be of interest mostly to Civil War enthusiasts, like me, who never can get enough.As befits a leading military history with broad knowledge of his field, one of Weigley's strengths is presenting the Civil War in context: I found the section of the introduction entitled "Nineteenth-Century Americans at War" and the sections in the second chapter entitled "Napoleonic War" and "War in a New Style" especially interesting. When democracies go to war, military decisions and politics cannot be separated, and Weigley wisely interweaves the two subjects in his narrative. Central to Weigley's interpretation of the war is this passage: General Robert E. Lee "rightly believed that the longer the war, the smaller the Confederacy's chances of winning it, because of the relative scarcity of Confederate resources. The South's best hope of keeping the war short lay in the Washington-Richmond theater." In this, I believe Weigley is absolutely correct. Although the war raged at various times from Pennsylvania to Texas and from the Atlantic Ocean across the Mississippi River, the conflict's most important events generally occurred in northern Virginia and its environs. General Lee's campaigns which ended at the battles of Antietam in September 1862 and Gettysburg in July 1863 were attempts to pose threats to the national capital so severe that the Union government would be forced to sue for peace, allowing the Confederate States of America to go their own way. Weigley's presentation of these critical campaigns are stronger on description than analysis of their consequences. However, Weigley make some telling statements of fact and observation about the key players. Early in the war, Lee "was widely distrusted in the Confederacy." General George B. McClellan, who commanded the federal forces around Washington D.C., during the first two years of the war, tended to avoid combat because "[l]aboring under the terrible responsibility of dispatching men to die, he apparently found the prospect of actually witnessing many of the deaths more than he could bear." According to Weigley, General Thomas "Stonewall" "Jackson's flank march to Manassas Junction [for the Second Battle of Bull R

A Superbly Written and thought provoking Book

This is one of the best books about the Civil War to be written in a very long time. It is literally food for the mind.Professor Weigley calls His book a political and military history.But it is mainly a military history and a brilliant one.Probably Weigley's most provocative statement is that the South lost basically because of a failure of will.That is the Leaders of the Confederacy both political and military were ambivalent about secession and failed to do certain things that might have helped them to prevail.He pronounces as the War's greatest illusion the Confederacy's hopes of European intervention and shows why this was never in the cards. Weigley comes to the defense of Generals like McClellan and Meade for their failure to pursue the enemy after costly victories at Antietam and Gettysburg by pointing out that no victorious General on either side ever did this for very obvious reasons.In His analysis of the Battle of Gettysburg the author says the major factor in Meade's victory was that the Federal commander exercised sound judgement in His choice of subordinate Generals to carry the battle,Reynolds,Hancock, Warren etc,while Lee exercised very poor judgement in His choice of subordinates;Longstreet who did''nt believe in the plan, Ewell who was entirely too cautious and Jeb Stuart who simply was''nt there.And of course Weigley indulges in the mandatory comparison of the Generalship of Lee and Grant.He concludes that Lee was the last of the Napoleonic Generals. Like His Hero Lee believed that the purpose of war was to bring on battles and ultimately the one great battle in which the enemy's army would be destroyed.Just as Napoleon did at Austerlitz. So Lee spent the entire war in search of His own personal Austerlitz and He never found it, though He came close at Chancellorsville. Grant on the other hand considered Napoleon's strategy obsolete and believed the purpose of war was to fight campaigns. A series of battles inwhich the enemy's strength was gradually stripped away.Weigley thus concludes that Lee's strategic concepts belonged to the past while those of Grant belonged to the future. In other words Grant would have been quite at home in the two world wars or any of the other wars of the twentieth century.And finally as a son of Arkansas I am happy too see that some notable Historian has finally given the Battle of Pea Ridge some due recognition. Weigley calls it the war's most underrated battle, The Gettysburg of the west.Again this is a superb book, a magnificent reading experience.

A great read!

If you can only read one book on the Civil War, this is it. It follows cause and effect such that the tragedy and necessity are understandable. Some of the battles, such as the seige of Vicksburg are now clear to me, as is Lincoln as a political man. I also, would have preferred another map, and perhaps a chapter before the first, on the early calls for seccesion.

A great overview of our "great civil war"

A Great Civil War makes a strong case that the Civil War was a necessary tragedy. This gracefully written historical narrative, which takes its title from Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, effortlessly spans the range of Civil War scholarship. The focus shifts smoothly from vivid personal details to battlefield tactics, and from campaign strategies (or, all too often, the lack of them) to the intimate connection of warfare, policy, and politics. Along the way, Weigley gently but convincingly deflates a number of Civil War myths.Amongst his always illuminating battle narratives, the author intersperses short essays on such subjects as the design of ever more lethal weapons, the era's formative military paradigms, and how the demands of full-scale war centralized the nation's banking system and greatly enhanced the power of the federal government.This book's greatest contribution may be the author's willingness to make clear judgments based on balanced discussions of conflicting views. For example, Weigley presents a compelling argument that the Confederacy failed in large part because it could never overcome a basic ambivalence in its purpose: the incompatible goals of continuing slavery and the Southern lifestyle within a Union most Southern leaders believed in and complete severance from that Union. This ambivalence helps explain both why fighting ended so quickly after formal military defeat and why many Civil War issues remain unresolved.A parallel theme Weigley develops is the Northern shift from fighting for Victorian ideals of duty and honor to fighting to advance the moral cause of liberation. With eye-opening clarity, he demonstrates that as popular support for the war and the Republican Party waned, Lincoln and others changed their rhetorical and moral focus from restoration of the Union to the elimination of slavery. Thus, slavery became a moral motive for the North to continue waging war in large part because of political expediency.On a subject he has explored elsewhere, the author notes that each war develops its own momentum that reshapes the political purposes that began it. Thus, the Civil War, for the North, began as an effort to restore the constitutional union of the American Revolution but ended as a revolutionary struggle to uproot slavery and, along with it, the foundations of Southern life. The author implies an ambivalence toward emancipation that in some ways mirrors the South's ambivalence toward its cause. He finds in the North's eventual dedication to the elimination of slavery little concern for the practical matter of how the liberated slaves and their descendants would participate in America's democratic experiment -- a singularly important Civil War legacy.The few flaws are minor: the maps and text occasionally differ in the spelling of place and road names; the important Richmond and Danville Railroad is unidentified on the second map although listed in the legend; t