Don't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned

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Kenneth C. Davis

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Overview

Why did Abraham Lincoln sneak into Washington for his inauguration? Was the Gettysburg Address written on the back of an envelope?Where did the Underground Railroad run?

Can you answer these questions? If not, you're not alone! New York Times-bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis comes to the rescue, deftly sorting out the players, the politics, the key events -- Emancipation and Reconstruction, Shiloh and Gettysburg, Generals Grant and Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe -- and providing little-known facts that will enthrall even learned Civil War buffs. Vivid, informative, and hugely entertaining, Don't Know Much About® the Civil War is the only book you'll ever need on "the war that never ended."

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Kenneth C. Davis, the author of the highly popular Don't Know Much About series, offers his latest installment, Don't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned. Davis maintains the standard of excellence that sold more than one million copies in paperback alone of his previous Don't Know Much About books and put them on numerous bestseller lists.

Davis brings the Civil War to life by focusing on every aspect of the war, not just the battles and dates. Using the same unique question-and-answer style that made his past books so popular, he sorts out the key events, players, and politics involved. There is a human face given to the Civil War as he defines the impact it had on American history. Davis gives personality to such historical icons as Lincoln, Lee, Grant, Sherman, and Frederick Douglass.

The ongoing debate about the Civil War's origins is also analyzed. Davis demonstrates that the war was fought over slavery and explains that the other hypothetical causes were simply economic or political differences that could have been resolved without violence and war. Davis also highlights the personal views of those involved in the slavery debate. Abraham Lincoln, for example, opposed slavery but wanted to return the freed blacks to Africa; General Robert E. Lee, while not necessarily approving of slavery, allowed captured blacks to be brought back in chains.

Starting with the first slaves in Jamestown, Davis covers the debate over slavery through the Mexican War and Harper's Ferry. From thefirstshots at Fort Sumter to Shiloh, Gettysburg, the Emancipation Proclamation and finally to the last days of the Confederacy and the period of Reconstruction, Davis enlightens even the most knowledgeable Civil War enthusiasts.

Orlando Sentinel

A great gift for anyone who wants to get a grip on the Civil War.

More Reviews (2) Fewer Reviews

USA Today

Lively and relevant.

Children's Literature

Originally published in 1996 this title was part of a series of books that investigated important but neglected aspects of social science. In this case the subject is the cataclysmic rendering of the United States of America that commonly is called the Civil War. In the introduction to this witty and well-researched reprint, Davis notes that many Americans claim most of their Civil War knowledge from sources such as Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind and its film version. It is a sad truth that many Americans, young and old, have an extremely limited understanding of a series of historical events that continue to help shape the world we live in. This book chronicles the causes that led to the war, its violent course, and the aftermath. The structure revolves around a series of questions that are presented in a chronological fashion and which guide the reader through the tangled events of the Civil War. In answering these questions Davis not only tells the factual story of the war but also the human one as well. Readers learn about overlooked facets of Civil War history, such as the role of women, African-American soldiers, and the brutality of the fighting. This is a fine Civil War book that will inform both novice historians and those with a deeper knowledge of this important era in American history. 2004 (orig. 1996), Perennial, Ages 14 up.
—Greg M. Romaneck

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780380719082
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 9/28/1999
Pages: 544
Sales rank: 220,022
Series: Don't Know Much About Series
Product dimensions: 5.18 (w) x 7.94 (h) x 1.34 (d)

Meet the Author

Kenneth C. Davis is the New York Times bestselling author of A Nation Rising; America's Hidden History; and Don't Know Much About^® History, which spent thirty-five consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than 1.6 million copies, and gave rise to his phenomenal Don't Know Much About^® series for adults and children. A resident of New York City and Dorset, Vermont, Davis frequently appears on national television and radio and has been a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered. He blogs regularly at www.dontknowmuch.com.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Early in April 1865 Charles Coffin, a correspondent for the, Boston Journal, witnessed an extraordinary occurrence. Having reported on the Civil War from the earliest days, he had observed many sigificant events, from the First Battle of Bull Run four years earlier hrough Grant's final campaign in Virginia in 1865. Now he was present at the capture of Richmond and the arrival of President Abraham Lincoln in the fallen Confederate capital. Coffin recounted:

No carriage was to be had, so the President, leading his son, walked to General Weitzels' headquarters-Jeff Davis's mansion.... The walk was long and the President halted a moment to rest.

"May de good Lord bless you, President Linkum!" said an old Negro, removing his hat and bowing, with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks.

The President removed his own hat and bowed in silence. It was a bow which upset the forms, laws, customs, and ceremonies of centuries of slavery.

So ended the Civil War. Of course, it would be a few more days before Robert E. Lee's final surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. And monthsmore of dislocation, followed by years of bitter Reconstruction and decades of hatefulness between victor and vanquished. But in this brief moment, in the crumbling, burning remnants of the Confederate capital, the heart and symbol of the ruined Confederate Cause, the war came to a close. Hundreds of thousands were dead. A large part of the country was in ruins, smol-dering. A deep sense of regional mistrust and racial hatred would sunder America for decades. But here, as the tall, somber president bowed to a former slave, the war was crystalized in aneternal moment of reconciliation: the doomed Lincoln, symbol of the Union, worn down by the years and the losses, slow to name slavery as the enemy but indomitable in his will to ultimately destroy it, and an aged slave, bent by years of relentless labor, glorying in the first flush of freedom.

"We have the wolf by the ears," an aging Thomas Jefferson had written to a friend forty-five years earlier. "And we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self preservation in the other." Jefferson's "wolf" was, of course, slavery. And this big, bad wolf had been banging at America's door almost since the arrival of the English in America. It huffed and puffed and nearly blew the house down.

The United States was born out of a revolutionary idea that Jefferson (1743-1826) expressed eloquently in his Declaration of Independence: All men are created equal and are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These notions, along with the very radical statement that governments could rule only by the consent of the governed, formed the basis of the Great American Contradiction: How could a nation so constituted, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and supposedly founded on the cornerstone of "liberty for all," maintain a system that enslaved other human beings? It was this contradiction-this Great Divide-that eventually split the country in two.

Only about one quarter of the people in the slave states kept slaves. And of the five and a half million whites living in the slave states in 1860, only forty-six thousand held more than twenty slaves. But to understand fully the Civil War, this Great Divide-this American Contradiction-must be understood. Its roots were deep, planted about the same time that the first English colonists were learning how to plant tobacco in Virginia.

Who Brought Slavery to America?

George Washington did it. Patrick "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" Henry did it. Thomas "All Men Are Created Equal" Jefferson did it. George Mason, who wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights, on which the American Bill of Rights was based, was against it but did it anyway. Even good old Benjamin Franklin did it. In fact, many of America's Founding Fathers did it. They bought, kept, bred, and sold human beings.

When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to debate the great issues facing a struggling, infant nation, seventeen of these Founding Fathers collectively held about fourteen hundred slaves. George Mason, John Rutledge, and George Washington were three of the largest slaveholders in America. Most of Washington's slaves actually belonged to his wife, Martha Custis Washington; they had belonged to her first husband. This is the part of Washington's story that gets left out when children learn the tale of the cherry tree. The moral subtext: Telling lies is wrong; keeping people in chains isn't so bad.

Slavery was as American as apple pie. It was a well-established American institution in the thirteen original colonies long before Washington, Patrick Henry, Franklin, and Jefferson were born, but it threatened to tip the great American ship of state from the republic's very beginnings. Both Washington and Jefferson expressed deep reservations about the practice of slavery and its future in America. Nevertheless, neither of them fretted sufficiently about human bondage on their plantations to do much about it. Granted, Washington reed his slaves in his will. Jefferson, who seems to have been brilliant about everything but his finances, couldn't afford that luxury for most of his slaves. He had to rely on the kindness of creditors to let five of his favored slaves have their freedom.

Of course, America had no monopoly on slavery. The institution was as old as civilization itself. Throughout human history, slavery has taken on many guises, and few civilizations have been built without some form of servitude. In his prize-winning book, Freedom, Orlando Patterson wrote, "Slaveholding and trading existed among the earliest and most primitive of peoples. The archaeological evidence reveals that slaves were among the first items of trade within, and between, the primitive Germans and Celts, and the institution was an established part of life, though never of major significance, in primitive China, Japan and the prehistoric Near East."

First Chapter

Don't Know Much About the Civil War
Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned

Chapter One

No carriage was to be had, so the President, leading his son, walked to General Weitzels' headquarters-Jeff Davis's mansion.... The walk was long and the President halted a moment to rest.

"May de good Lord bless you, President Linkum!" said an old Negro, removing his hat and bowing, with tears of joy rolling down his cheeks.

The President removed his own hat and bowed in silence. It was a bow which upset the forms, laws, customs, and ceremonies of centuries of slavery.

So ended the Civil War. Of course, it would be a few more days before Robert E. Lee's final surrender at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865. And monthsmore of dislocation, followed by years of bitter Reconstruction and decades of hatefulness between victor and vanquished. But in this brief moment, in the crumbling, burning remnants of the Confederate capital, the heart and symbol of the ruined Confederate Cause, the war came to a close. Hundreds of thousands were dead. A large part of the country was in ruins, smol-dering. A deep sense of regional mistrust and racial hatred would sunder America for decades. But here, as the tall, somber president bowed to a former slave, the war was crystalized in an eternal moment of reconciliation: the doomed Lincoln, symbol of the Union, worn down by the years and the losses, slow to name slavery as the enemy but indomitable in his will to ultimately destroy it, and an aged slave, bent by years of relentless labor, glorying in the first flush of freedom.

Who Brought Slavery to America?

Don't Know Much About the Civil War
Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned. Copyright © by Kenneth Davis. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Interviews & Essays

Before the live bn.com chat, Kenneth C. Davis agreed to answer some of our question.:

Q: Which Civil War figure do you consider to be the most underrated and least spoken about? Why?

A: Of course, there are several candidates, including Grant, who has lived in history under Lee's shadow and his reputation as a drunk; Gideon Welles, Lincoln's navy secretary, who put together an effective navy out of nothing; Judah Benjamin, the "Jewish Confederate," one of Jefferson Davis's most able colleagues; Josiah Gorgas, quartermaster of the Confederacy, who somehow kept the Confederate army fighting in the face of unbelievable odds.

But the first name that came to mind is Clara Barton, a noncombatant woman. Untrained as a nurse, she was a woman of extraordinary valor who saw battlefield duty as a volunteer nurse, often putting herself in harm's way. After the war, she had the unenviable task of going to Andersonville in an attempt to locate the missing and identify the dead Union POWs there. All the words that come to mind with heroes -- courage, commitment, sacrifice, loyalty -- are embodied in Barton, who went on to found the American Red Cross after the war. Her story is also a reminder that the war didn't just happen to men!

Q: Who do you think is the best Civil War fiction author?

A: In the 19th century, Stephen Crane for The Red Badge of Courage. In the 20th century, Michael Shaara for Killer Angels. (I'm also partial to Vidal's Lincoln.)

Q: If someone were taking a trip to visit some Civil War historical sites, which places would you recommend?

A: So many! Gettysburg, the Ford Theater (a great assassination museum in the basement), Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy. Other great battle sites (before they get paved over and filled with souvenir stands): Antietam, Shiloh. There are many tour and travel books available for Civil War sites.

Q: What do you personally consider the greatest Civil War movie made? Why?

A: My personal favorite is "Glory." It is historically accurate and tells a story that most of us have never heard. It is also beautifully filmed and acted. "Gettysburg" is good but a little wooden, and the characters are a little too romanticized. Bottom of the list is "Gone With the Wind."

Q: What are some of your hobbies outside of writing?

A: My wife and children, Jenny and Colin, are my chief "hobby." I love spending time with them and we love to do things together, whether it's skiing, going to the movies, or playing Monopoly.

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Anonymous

Posted August 23, 2004

an accurate title,if ever there was one

I bought this book for my wife,because of a shared interest in the war,and found to my displeasure that it contained most of the same tired old revisionist history that's taught in school; truly,the victor writes the histories. As another reviewer noted,much of the book dealt with slavery as being the chief cause of the war,and sought to negate what most scholars agree were the actual causes. For a much more historically accurate work on this subject,I would recomend Thomas Delorenzo's book 'The real Lincoln.'

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Anonymous

Posted May 19, 2004

Don't waste your time

Don't waste your time and money on this piece of drivel. There are a lot of books on the market by authors who know what they are writing about. Davis spend 2/3 of this book exponding on his belief that slavery was the only cause of the war.

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Anonymous

Posted February 16, 2004

You won't learn much here

If you really want to learn about the war don't waste your time with this book. A full 30% of the book is devoted to the authors belief that the only cause of the war was slavery. I listened to the book on tape and was lost and confused most of the time. It is very poorly organized and jumps around too much.

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Anonymous

Posted July 27, 2000

Excellent primer; Wonderful style

Making history come alive is a gift Davis has in abundance. Far removed from the dry chronologies, this book provides prelude, context, pathos, and humor. When you finish, you will understand not only the war, but the times as well. If you're going to read only one book on the Civil War -- read this one.

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Anonymous

Posted February 10, 2000

This book is good.

I really enjoy reading this book, I think that it is very educational, and it gives you a lot of facts that you wouldn't learn in your basic History class. The author knows how to use entertaining writing. The way he wrote really kept my attention. I would recommend this book to anyone.

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Don't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned

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Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Orlando Sentinel

USA Today

Children's Literature

Product Details

Meet the Author

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

First Chapter

Chapter One

Interviews & Essays

Customer Reviews

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an accurate title,if ever there was one

Don't waste your time

You won't learn much here

Excellent primer; Wonderful style

This book is good.