Fredericksburg/Chancellorsville Staff Ride

Suggestions for further reading

All of the materials you need for the staff ride are in the packets you have received.   But should you have an interest in further exploration of the battles and the men who fought them, here are some suggestions:

Gary W. Gallagher, The Fredericksburg Campaign:  Decision on the Rappahannock;   Chancellorsville:  The Battle and its Aftermath.   (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1995, 1996).

Gallagher has a winning formula – and it produces very fine synopses of the most up to date scholarship from the best historians of the Civil War.

Stephen W. Sears, Chancellorsville  (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996)

A great work by the author of Landscape Turned Red;  the best serious account out there.

Jay Luvaas and Harold W. Nelson, eds.,  The U.S. Army War College Guide to the Battles of Chancellorsville and Fredericksburg  (Carlisle:  South Mountain Press, 1988). 

A detailed guide to the battlefield, using excerpts from the Official Records (see below).  Useful appendix on “Intelligence in the Chancellorsville Campaign.”

Connelly, Thomas L.   The Marble Man:   Robert E. Lee and His Image in American Society.  (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, 1977).

Nolan, Alan T.   Lee Considered:  General Robert E. Lee & Civil War History.  (Chapel Hill:  University of North Carolina Press, 1991).  

Two arresting, iconoclastic works about Lee, to be contrasted with the adoring and powerful biography by Douglas Southall Freeman.

Adams, Michael C. C.  Fighting for Defeat:   Union Military Failure in the East, 1861-1865.  (Lincoln:  University of Nebraska Press, 1978, 1992).

First published under the title Our Masters the Rebels,  Adams argues that the Army of the Potomac developed an inferiority complex that crippled it in action.

Wiley, Bell I.   The Life of Billy Yank  and The Life of Johnny Reb  (Baton Rouge:  Louisiana State University Press, various editions, 1948-1977).

Classic Civil War studies of the life of the average soldier, available in paperback.

War of the Rebellion:  Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies,  Series I, Vols. 21, 25, Parts I-II (Washington:  Government Printing Office 1889).

Nothing beats the originals:  it takes a while to figure out the organization, but the raw material – reports, correspondence, dispatches – is all here.

Websites:   www.nps.gov/frsp the webpage of the parks themselves -- go to the Online Visitors’ Center;    www.cwc.lsu.edu and sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/warweb.html are two civil war mega-sites from Louisiana State University and University of Tennessee, respectively.   Many hours of browsing here if you are interested