Robert Underwood Johnson anticipated great things from Ulysses S. Grant. It was the summer of 1884, and Grant had agreed to write a four-part series for Johnson’s Century Magazine on his exploits during the war. As the great hero of the age and savior of the country, Grant had insights into the war that no one else could match.

The first piece Grant submitted was an account of Shiloh, a battle where he turned the tide after a near-disastrous first day. Johnson’s excitement deflated almost immediately. The submission was, he later said, “substantially a copy of his dry official report.” Johnson later described it as a “blight” and “deadly.”

“The General, of course, did not realize the requirements of a popular publication on the war,” Johnson later explained, “and it was for me to help him turn this new disaster of Shiloh into a signal success.”

Johnson traveled to Grant’s summer home and met with his ersatz author. He carried the first draft of Grant’s article in his jacket pocket, but rather than take it out to review it with Grant, Johnson first invited Grant to tell him, in his own words, about the battle. “General Grant, instead of being a ‘silent man,’ was positively loquacious,” Johnson later said. “He spoke rapidly and long . . . and in the frankest manner” and in doing so “revealed a human side of his experience.”

There! Johnson said. That is what he wanted to see in the magazine article: “such a talk as he would make to friends after dinner.”

Grant understood at once what was required of him, and he agreed to take another stab at the article. “[I]f he would not try too hard,” Johnson said, he was sure Grant could do it. And he did. Grant’s Shiloh piece appeared in the February 1885 edition of Century, kicking off a regular series that would eventually become Battles & Leaders of the Civil War.

I passed Johnson’s advice on to my own writing students this month. First-year students sometimes fall into the trap of trying to “sound smart” when they’re writing their papers. They’re in college now, after all, so some of them figure they need to write brainy things. They get out their thesauruses and find big words and write long, convoluted sentences (made more torturous by an incomplete understanding of proper punctuation). No five-cent word will do when they can use a ten-dollar word instead.

Patrick Vecchio, a former colleague, used to say before his retirement, “Write like you talk, but better.” Get rid of all the um’s and uh’s and articulate complete sentences instead of fragments—clean up those ticks of speech we all have. (Eavesdrop on a public conversation sometime and you’ll see how imperfectly most of us talk.) If you write like you talk, but better, you’ll have a natural, clear way of expressing your ideas. And clarity, after all, is the single most important aspect of effective writing.

Don’t worry about “sounding smart,” I told my students; instead, I asked them to tell me what they want me to know as though we were friends sitting at the dinner table together—just like Ulysses S. Grant.

— Chris Mackowski, Ph.D.

Editor-in-Chief

Guest Posts

ECW is looking for new guest posts!

The editorial board is hoping to showcase new authors and new ideas. We're big fans of telling more stories, whether they're social history, cultural, or military. If you've got new research, a fresh take on a person or event, a cool source you want to share, or something else, we'd like to see it!

Be sure to read the submission guidelines carefully (check them out here), and then send your post over to  emergingcivilwar@gmail.com. All submissions are reviewed by our editorial board (so, yes, guest posts go through a peer-review process). It can sometimes take up to a month for us to make comments and get back to you, but rest assured we get to them all in the order they are received.

ECW offers our thanks to Jon Tracey, who has taken over as chair of our editorial board. The board evaluates all guest submissions to ECW and offers feedback to authors on their work. The board also helps Managing Editor Sarah Kay Bierle plot out some of the blog’s editorial content over the course of the year. You can read Jon’s full bio here.

The Central Virginia Battlefield Trust held its annual conference October 8-10, and ECW has a strong presence. Sarah Kay Bierle and Terry Rensel helped organize the conference in their day-job capacities as CVBT’s staff. ECW Chief Historian Kris White gave a morning tour of what’s left of the Salem Church battlefield. And ECW Editor-in-Chief Chris Mackowski served as emcee at the annual dinner and the Sunday morning brunch.

The November 2021 issue of Civil War News asked a panel of historians to share their favorite biographies and/or autobiographies of common soldiers. Among those sharing their thoughts were ECW’s Sarah Kay Bierle and Chris Mackowski. Sarah also contributed an article about Confederate Major Robert Beckham, who deployed artillery on property currently being preserved by the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust on the Chancellorsville battlefield.

From Edward Alexander: “Been doing a wide variety of map projects, from doing on the ground research of the August 1864 Second Deep Bottom battlefield outside of Richmond to tracking a Marine battalion's April 2004 operations in Iraq. Hopefully the next month will see a few projects hitting the shelves.”

Sarah Kay Bierle enjoyed visiting the Mariners' Museum in Newport News for the first time this month! It was a really special experience to go through the USS Monitor Center (especially after recently reading Dwight Hughes’s book about the Battle of Hampton Roads). 

Sheritta Bitikofer took a trip out west and visited the Texas Civil War Museum in Fort Worth in early October. Prior to that, she shot some videos at Vicksburg for the Civil War Roundtable of Central Louisiana Facebook group, which can be watched here.

Sean Chick’s Grant’s Left Hook: The Bermuda Hundred Campaign, got some love from Civil War Books and Authors. The site said, “ One of the best books in the ECW series (easily rating among the top handful in this reviewer's estimation), Sean Chick's Grant's Left Hook is highly recommended reading.” Read the review here.

Meg Groeling says she has been learning on the job. Meg is the moderator of the Facebook page for First Fallen, “which you should all check out,” she says. Go to FB & look for “First Fallen”--that should get you there (“as I have failed several times to add a link to this post,” she admits). Ask for permission to join. “I have let others in, so I am pretty confident I can do that,” Meg says. “We have cookies!”

Meg also published a review of Robert W. Black's Yank and Rebel Rangers: Special Operatives in the American Civil War in the November 2021 issue of Civil War News.

Dwight Hughes’s book Unlike Anything that Ever Floated about the battle of Hampton Roads received a positive review in that same issues of Civil War News. “[W]hile the book tells a familiar story, Hughes manages to tell it with flair while providing the reader with a guide to discover even more of the story,” said reviewer John Fowler. “Moreover, given that the military history of the war is disappearing from traditional academic study of the conflict, books such as this are increasingly valuable as introductions to important subjects.”:

Dwight and Neil P. Chatelain (pictured, above) presented papers for the US Civil War panel at the 2021 McMullen Naval History Symposium, US Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD—the largest regular naval history conference in the world. Neil presented on US Naval convoys to protect the Panama Route in the Civil War. Dwight (a graduate of the academy) discussed General Grant, Admiral David D. Porter, and the Vicksburg Campaign in “The Sailor and The Soldier at Vicksburg: Porter, Grant, and Unprecedented Joint Operations.” There were only THREE members on the panel, and TWO were Emerging Civil War Series authors!

On September 22, Neil also gave a virtual presentation to the Scottsdale Civil War Roundtable of Scottsdale Arizona about his 2020 book Defending the Arteries of Rebellion: Confederate Naval Operations in the Mississippi River Valley, 1861-1865. Finally, an article he wrote was just printed in Civil War Navy–The Magazine in their Fall 2021 issue. The article is titled "Association of Survivors of the Confederate States Navy: Battle for a Pro-Confederate Naval Memory."

Nations in the Balance, Chris Kolakowski’s study of the 1944 India-Burma campaigns, is now available for pre-order from Casemate Publishing. The book will be out next spring.

At Gordon Rhea’s invitation, Chris Mackowski pinch-hit for half a day on a bus tour at Spotsylvania Court House on October 22. Chris focused on the action of Burnside’s IX Corps along the Fredericksburg Road during the first week of the battle, May 8-13, 1864, and the fight at Myer’s Hill on May 14. The next day, October 23, Chris led a bus tour of the Fredericksburg battlefield for the Harrisburg and Hershey Civil War Roundtables.

On Oct. 23, Derek Maxfield portrayed Major General (Bvt.) John H. Martindale, USA—one-time military governor of Washington, DC, during the Civil War—at the Historic Batavia (NY) Cemetery for the annual Ghost Walk fundraiser to benefit the cemetery association. On November 5 and 6, respectively, Derek will address audiences at the Waterloo (NY) Library and Historical Society and the Southeast Steuben County Library in Corning, NY, about Hellmira: The Union’s Most Infamous Civil War Prison Camp – Elmira, NY.

Derek’s biggest news, though, comes from Oct. 2: Derek married Jess Scheuerman—a librarian and aspiring historian—in a ceremony at Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, NY (pictured, below). The wedding theme was Victorian mourning.

10 Questions . . .

with Terry Rensel

By day, Terry Rensel is the executive director of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust. By night, he’s a voracious reader with a serious Winston Churchill habit. He also serves on the ECW Editorial Board. You can read his full ECW bio here: https://emergingcivilwar.com/author-biographies/authors/terry-rensel/

When we first talked to you (back in December 2018), you were working in Alaska in public radio. Now you're working in Virginia in the Civil War preservation business. Can you tell us a little about that shift?

It was something that I wasn't expecting. It began with a conversation with an old friend named “Mackowski” who was looking for some advice about an issue that a board he served on [CVBT] was going through, and it escalated pretty quickly to the board as a whole wanting to talk to me. They eventually offered me the position, and here I am. I knew I would leave Alaska some day—I just never imagined I would leave public radio, until I did. The challenge and opportunity of this work was too good to pass up. 

What's it like to jump into the history field full-time?

It's been a lot of fun. Every day I'm learning something new about these battlefields, and the men who fought on them.

What commonalties do you see between the fields of communication and history? 

Storytelling is the key thing with both fields: knowing a good story when you hear it, and being able to tell a compelling story. Whether it's to keep people listening, or to help people understand why history matters, both personally and in the big picture, stories are central to both fields.

Care to give us a quick pitch about CVBT?

Knowing and understanding our shared history is important. The way CVBT does it is by preserving the hallowed ground where the men, Blue and Gray, changed America forever. Every day historic battlefield is lost. We save it!

Aside from your preservation work, do you have any other Civil War irons in the fire?

I'm in the early stages of working on a book about modern preservation. I am also always rooting about, looking for stuff about the three regiments, the 83rd, 111th, and 145th PVI, from my hometown of Erie, PA. I'm also interested in how the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) shaped the National Parks.

Lightning Round (short answers with a one-sentence explanation) 

Favorite primary source? 

The land. Walking the land, feeling it in the soles of my feet, helps me see the battle, the lines, and what happened. Also, Oliver Wilcox Norton's (of the 83rd PVI) letters are great reads. His letter about Gaines's Mill is quite something to read.

Favorite Civil War-related monument? 

The "it’s not" Strong Vincent monument (83rd Pennsylvania) at Gettysburg.

Favorite unsung hero of the Civil War era? 

Oliver Wilcox Norton. He's in the midst of the fighting at Gaines' Mill, with Vincent at Little Round Top, is co-credited with creating Taps, becomes a lieutenant with the 8th U.S.C.T. when it's formed. Not only published his letters, but also several books about the fighting on Little Round Top.

What’s a bucket-list Civil War site you’ve not yet visited? 

Fort Jefferson (Dry Tortugas National Park), which housed Dr. Samuel Mudd after the Lincoln assassination. Charleston and everything around it is another.

Favorite ECWS book ? 

Grant's Last Battle, because it's dedicated to me. It also tells the story of Grant's discipline, and basically willing himself to live long enough to finish his memoirs. Seriously, though, I've read about 30 of the titles so far. They are all great. Buy them—buy them all and read them.

By Phill Greenwalt

Did anything happen in October during the American Revolution? Well, there was the victory at Saratoga in October 1777 and the culmination of the Yorktown Campaign in 1781, of course. And the Battle of Germantown, also in 1777, had an effect on French intervention.

On October 31, after you fill your bag with candy—or empty your bowl of candy to Trick-or-Treaters—check out the next "Rev War Revelry" at 7 p.m. on Emerging Revolutionary War's Facebook page. There is a connection to another October event: Halloween. 

On November 12-14, you can join Emerging Revolutionary War  for the first annual bus tour, which will take you to Trenton and other sites attributed to the "Ten Crucial Days" of the American Revolution. At the publication of this newsletter less than 5 tickets remained. For more information, head over to www.emergingrevolutionarywar.org and sign-up. 

There is also news for next year as Emerging Revolutionary War teams up again with Historic Alexandria for the third annual Emerging Revolutionary War Symposium. Our theme: “The World Turned Upside: The American Revolution's Impact on a Global Scale.” Flyer is attached and updates will be on the blog as the event nears.