The best books on the American Civil War in the western theater

Thomas L. Connelly’s seminal final volume of his history of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, first published in 1971, remains one of the best works of Civil War history, not just of the Western Theater. Connelly’s writing helped to shift the historical focus from the Eastern Theater, where Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia dominated the conversation for more than a century. While the west was not totally neglected, it was clearly an afterthought.

Connelly’s work focused on the long, unfortunate history of the Confederate Army of Tennessee, a command which rarely tasted victory, and was saddled with a host of incompetent leadership from the top down. The long-running dysfunction between army commander Braxton Bragg and senior corps commander Leonidas Polk created chaos on and off the battlefield, eventually leading to Bragg’s replacement and (for a time) Polk’s banishment. Connelly examined and explained this and other command relationships in a way previously unknown, and revealed much of the inner workings of the Confederacy’s second most important field command. Well written and ambitious in scope, aimed at mirroring D. S. Freeman’s iconic Lee’s Lieutenants (a three-volume history of the Army of Northern Virginia), Connelly should be the starting point for any student of the Civil War in the trans-Appalachian west.

Larry J. Daniel’s history of the Federal Army of the Cumberland—the Army of Tennessee’s main opponent for much of the war—provides a thorough, insightful examination of that army; the first since the 19th Century. The Army of the Cumberland (first known as the Army of the Ohio) was named for the Cumberland River, which drainage became the army’s area of operations for much of the first half of the war. Commanded successively by Don Carlos Buell, William Starke Rosecrans, and finally, George H. Thomas, the Army of the Cumberland has received far less attention in Civil War than its two rivals, the Armies of the Potomac (in Virginia) and the Army of the Tennessee (in Mississippi.) Daniel’s work addresses that imbalance, and in doing so, brings the army’s officers and men to life.

George Thomas was, like Robert E. Lee, a Virginian; unlike Lee, he chose to remain in the regular army and fight for the Union. Famously reserved, Thomas left no voluminous record upon which to draw, and after his death in 1870, his wife destroyed his correspondence. As a result, unlike William T. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant, who did leave immensely popular memoirs, Thomas and the Army of the Cumberland became overshadowed. Daniel’s very welcome history of the Army of the Cumberland makes for a crucial counterpoint to Thomas L. Connelly.

Though Dr. Timothy B. Smith has since made quite the splash in Civil War historiography, this was his first book, covering the Battle of Champion Hill. On May 16, 1863, two armies collided between the Confederate fortress of Vicksburg and the Mississippi state capital at Jackson. The Federals were led by Ulysses S. Grant; the Rebels, John C. Pemberton. Each army numbered bout 30,000 men. While neither the largest or most famous battle of the war, Champion Hill was, nevertheless, a crucial engagement, for it decided the fate of Vicksburg. Frustrated for months by his inability to capture the fortress, Grant at last settled on a daring strategy to take it from the rear. Pemberton marched out to meet him. They met at Champion Hill.

Smith’s narrative embraces the top-down commander’s view of the battle, the soldiers’ view from the ranks, and the impact the fighting had on the local community. It is one of the finest examples of a modern battle monograph, and the first real study of the engagement. Champion Hill stands as a model of the genre, and should be read by everyone interested in the Civil War, the Western Theater, or modern military history.

Several books have been written about the Battle of Shiloh, fought on April 6 and 7, 1862. This is no surprise, as the battle was one of the very first large-scale engagements of the war, with more than 100,000 combatants and producing 23,000 casualties. That staggering butcher’s bill stunned the nation and created a deep-rooted interest in remembering the contest. A National Cemetery was created in 1866, and Shiloh was one of the five original military parks established by Congress in 1895. The park’s interpretive thrust has shaped the outline of the traditional narrative of the battle ever since.

In the 1960s, Edward Cunningham offered a corrective to that traditional narrative, in an unpublished academic thesis. Discarding long-held, preconceived notions, Cunningham hewed closer to the primary sources to provide a deeply insightful new interpretation of the battle. Unfortunately, he never found a publisher for that thesis—until 2009. Though Cunningham had long since passed from the scene, an editorial team—including Tim Smith, author of Champion Hill—managed to produce an annotated version in 2009. The result is an outstanding new (despite being 40 years old) and thought-provoking interpretation of Shiloh.

The campaign to capture Atlanta, waged over the summer of 1864, was one of the most decisive events of the entire American Civil War. Historians have argued that Atlanta’s fall, achieved that September, demonstrated to a war-weary North that the Lincoln Administration’s war policies were successful, and that victory was in sight. However, prior to 1992, there was very little coverage of any aspect of the campaign, let alone a narrative history of the full campaign.

Thirty years later, Decision in the West remains the standard work on the Atlanta Campaign. Though Castel’s coverage of individual battles (Resaca, Pickett’s Mill, Kennesaw, Peachtree Creek, the July 22 Battle of Atlanta, etc.) is limited to mostly a command-level discussion of those engagements, his interpretations of the decisions and actions of the three main principals—Sherman for the Federals, Johnston, and Hood for the Confederates—are both fascinating and thought-provoking. The author’s decision to rely on present tense narration is one of the most interesting aspects of the book, ultimately conveying a sense of immediacy not usually present in historical monographs, but it works. For a complete understanding of the war’s course in North Georgia that summer, Castel’s work is essential.