Civil War Resources
Written resources on the Civil War abound. A wise guy once said that the real winner of the Civil War was the American Booksellers Association. Much was written right after the Civil War and in the decades following. But the real flood began in the centennial celebration years, 1961 to 1965, and has really never stopped. Virtually every general who accomplished anything has had one or more biographies written about him; armies, divisions, brigades and regiments have all had their own studies; every major battle has spawned multiple works, and even minor skirmishes have not been left untouched. It has been said that so much as it been written about Abraham Lincoln if you could get all the books into a large room.
A great deal has also been written about Generals Robert E. Lee, U.S. Grant, Sherman, McClellan, Stonewall Jackson, A.P. Hillin, as well as anabout all the other lieutenants of Grant, Lee, and their fellow commanders. Studies have been written of naval affairs, diplomacy, medicine, women in the Civil War, spies, the economics of the war, African-Americans, the Irish, and virtually every other subject large and small about which one could form an opinion. It is impossible to judge the total amount that is been written, but certainly, counting multivolume works, magazines, journal articles, collections of letters and other documents, not to mention resources that now exist on the Web, the number of items relevant to the Civil War certainly numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
James McPherson, Shelby Foote, Bruce Catton, Allan Nevins, David Herbert Donald, James I. Robertson and Stephen Oates are just a few of the names and that one will encounter over and over again—the list goes on. In James McPherson's Ordeal by Fire, a widely-used textbook on the Civil War, his selected bibliography, written in paragraph form in small print, numbers 37 pages. At Barnes & Noble online, a search for “Civil War” brings over 16,000 results, and in Amazon the number is 64,000. Ebay offers almost 10,00 items for sale on the Civil War.
So what is one to do? It is obviously impossible to read everything, and even narrowing one's scope down to a theater or army or even an individual—if it's someone like Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, Lincoln, Lee or Grant—the choices are wide, and a reasonable suggestion is to begin with with the best known and respected authors of the Civil War. Working through the bibliographies of the best known writers of the war years and cross checking will produce a workable beginning list. Many of the participants, including Jefferson Davis, Grant and Sherman left formal memoirs, and much of the writing of Lee and others survives, as do diaries and collections of letters of hundreds of soldiers and others.
One might think that with all that has been writtin, consensus would exist of the main points, but anyone familiar with the roundtables, magazines or other venues where opinions are welcome, knows that the war is still being fought with vigor. Every figure has admirers and detractors, even the venerable Robert E. Lee.
In the end, it's probably best to deide what you want to know. What really happened at Gettysburg? Weren't northern prisons just as bad as southern ones? What was it like in New York City in the summer of 1863? Why did Great Britian stay out of the war? How important were the navies? One can rest in the satisfaction of knowing that many fine writers have contributed to the assemblage of works, and visiting their words is to revisit the past.
Here are a few links to Civil War sites, all of them containing many links to yet other sites.
The United States Civil War Center at LSU is not a bad place to start. It contains an Index of Civil War Information to get you off on the right foot.
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville hosts the American Civil War Home Page.
James F. Epperson hosts several Civil War sites and this link will get you started.
The Civil War Reenactors Home Page has much information and links about individual battles.
Shotgun's Civil War Page. An old soldier shares his thoughts about the great war.