Seven Indispensable Narrative Histories of the US Civil War

by John C. Rodrigue
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7 books
Within the vast universe of scholarship on the US Civil War, the traditional narrative histories listed here are among the most influential works ever written on the topic. These seven titles—by five authors—are especially noteworthy for combining master storytelling with incisive analysis, exhaustive research, and exquisite writing. All but one of them are multi-volume works, and all but one were published prior to the advent of the “new” social history in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the scholarship on the US Civil War has moved in different directions in recent decades, incorporating new approaches and perspectives that have greatly enriched our understanding of the war, these titles remind us of the power of narrative history in relating the story of what many people still consider the nation’s greatest crisis.
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Battle Cry of Freedom

The Civil War Era
James M. McPherson, 2003
James M. McPherson is the modern-day titan of historians of the US Civil War. This book is the most recent title on this list, and it better represents the “new” scholarship than the older. But in the more than thirty years since its first publication, Battle Cry of Freedom has assumed the status of a classic. It remains the best single-volume history of the Civil War and one of the best books on the war ever written. McPherson incorporated into the military story the newer scholarship on the political, economic, and social history of the era, along with the groundbreaking work on slavery and emancipation in creating this masterpiece. Also, his essential argument on the “contingent” nature (that is, not inevitable) of the war’s outcome is a crucial insight.

Ordeal of the Union

Allan Nevins, 1947
If McPherson’s is the best single-volume history of the war, Allan Nevins’s magisterial, eight-volume Ordeal of the Union is often considered the pinnacle of Civil War scholarship. Beginning with the Mexican War (like McPherson), Nevins devotes four volumes to the build-up to the war before turning to the war itself. Although published between 1947 and 1971, Nevins’s work anticipated much of the subsequent, “modern” scholarship by weaving political, economic, and even social history into the military narrative. It managed to be both comprehensive and ground-breaking for its time.

The Civil War: A Narrative

Volume 1: Fort Sumter to Perryville
Shelby Foote, 2011
Shelby Foote considered himself a novelist rather than a historian, and in his hands the US Civil War becomes an American Iliad. His three-volume work may well be the most eloquent treatment of the military history of the war, and it became the work for which he was best known (along with his prominent on-air role in Ken Burns’s documentary on the Civil War.) Foote eschewed footnotes or other scholarly apparatus, which he believed would only distract the reader, and he admittedly emphasized the military story over other factors. But in employing the mindset of a novelist, he provides a riveting and poignant narrative of the war.

Mr. Lincoln's Army

Bruce Catton, 2015
If Shelby Foote has a rival as the pre-eminent narrator of the military history of the Civil War, it is Bruce Catton. His Army of the Potomac trilogy comprises three distinct studies on the primary Union army in the war’s eastern theater. Entitled Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox, they make up the first of two trilogies by Catton on this list. Taken together, these works—in addition to his two volumes on Ulysses S. Grant during the war, as well as his many other writings—established Catton as one of the towering figures in the writing on the US Civil War.

The Coming Fury

Bruce Catton, 1980
Catton built upon the success of his previous trilogy with a second one devoted to a general history of the war. Undertaken as part of the nation’s commemoration of the centennial of the Civil War between 1961 and 1965, Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War includes the individual volumes entitled The Coming Fury, Terrible Swift Sword, and Never Call Retreat, and it is more expansive than his previous trilogy. Catton was a “popular” historian who wrote for a wider, non-academic audience, and this work appeared during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, as the nation struggled with the legacy of slavery and the Civil War. Catton does not devote as much attention to emancipation’s consequences as would later Civil War scholars, but he tellingly frames the military conflict within its larger political context.

R. E. Lee: A Biography

Douglas Southall Freeman, 2016
Despite its many limitations, which subsequent observers have often noted, Douglass Southall Freeman’s four-volume biography of Confederate General Robert E. Lee still stands as the most comprehensive, exhaustive biography of this towering historical figure, and it remains essential to understanding the Civil War and Lee’s role in it. Freeman covers Lee’s entire life, but the war is obviously central to the story. To be sure, Freeman gave priority to the war’s eastern theater (especially Virginia) over the western, to the “brass” over the common soldier, and to military developments over other factors. He also failed to appreciate fully Lee’s connection to slavery and was perhaps too sympathetic to Lee and other Confederate leaders. Nonetheless, Freeman’s biography was published in the mid-1930s, and it must be read as a product of that time and not ours. Keeping that in mind, it enables us to comprehend why Lee, at so many turns, made the fateful decisions he did.

Lee’s Lieutenants: A Study In Command

Vol. I - Manassas To Malvern Hill
Douglas Southall Freeman, 2016
Like Bruce Catton, Douglass Southall Freeman followed up the success of one multi-volume study of the Civil War with another. Freeman’s three-volume Lee’s Lieutenants presents a thoroughgoing examination of the generals who served under Lee, of the Confederate command structure, and of how armies operate in general. It is often said that the South had better generals than the North, but Freeman punctures this myth by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of Lee’s most important subordinates and the institutional framework in which they exercised command. Published during the Second World War, this work was shaped by the events of the war, and it later came to influence military thinking. It also secured Freeman’s reputation as the nation’s pre-eminent military historian at the time, even though he had no military training or experience.