Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!

Rating:
Summary: Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!
Review: Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! written by George C. Rable is a book about the Civil War campaign Fredericksburg fought on December 13, 1862.

This is an engagingly gripping account of the battle known as Fredericksburg, a hard fought battle, that saw the the Union army delt a defeat by the Cionfederacy. Robert E. Lee, the commanding general in that battle lost roughtly 5000 men while the Union delt with 13000 as General Ambrose Burnside commanded the Union.

I found the book to be well-written with honest and fair accounting to both side of the battle. The campaign of Fredericksburg is portrayed in this book to be of broader politicl, social, and military context, than most, thus making the book a valuable reference as to the true ramifications of the battle to both sides of the war effort.

A sense of horrific carnage haunted the soldiers on both sides as well as in the civilian sector. Rable traces the impact of the battle, but more importantly beyond the fighting, we see the social impact. Rable blends the battlefield and the home front histories together making for an interesting read.

We read about how the southern victory bolstered the beleagured Confederacy in morale and how dispair found its way to Abraham Lincoln. You read about the raw emotions that immediately followed the fighting on both sides of the Civil War. I found this to be a fair written account of the Fredericksburg campaign.

The story of Fredericksburg is, of course, much more complex than it appears at first glance. Battle studies, with only a nod toward the political context, all too often concentrate so much as strategy and tactics that they neglect many elements of vital importance to common soldiers and civilians. This book pays it's due to the aftermath of the engagement of the battle. This book in contrast looks at the social, cultural, and to some extent economic patterns and constnts. Thus, this battle requires a fuller understanding, looking at both sides of the equation and mixing the elements... however spectacular, mundane and sublime.

This book would be a welcome addition to your home library. The well-written narrative has a balanced tenor, but doesn't loose sight of a hard struggle merely to survive in a world given over to destruction and bloodshed where most of the ordinary joys, pleasure, challanges, and even sorrows of life become overshadowed by that ever present and insatiable demon, civil war.

Rating:
Summary: A study of terrible battle in its rightful context
Review: George C. Rable explains in his prologue that he sought a blending of what he characterizes the "old" military history (dealing largely with leaders and dissecting strategy and tactics) and the "new" (focused on soldier life and its connections to larger social themes). And, I think it is fair to say, he well achieved that blending in "Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!" Combat operations are competently described, albeit not in deep detail. Where Rable excels is in providing what might be called the "context" of the campaign, including discussions of the impact of McClellan's replacement by Burnside, the continuing controversy over the planned formal issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the repercussions of recently conducted state and congressional elections, and the realities of army life in the field. And Rable delves deeply into the experiences of the wounded after the fighting ended and into how the battle was reported, both North and South. For the most part, there is little assessment regarding the performances of the generals on the battlefield; Rable's interests quite evidently focus more upon the lot of the common soldier. Despite the relative lack of emphasis on the tactical operations, the maps are entirely adequate to support the narrative.

Only a few months after Rable's book appeared, Frank Augustin O'Reilly published "The Fredericksburg Campaign". Inevitably, a comparison between the two must be made. O'Reilly has written a detailed military history, down to the regiment and battery level, laying out precisely the what, where, and when of combat operations. Fully 60 percent of his 500-plus page text is devoted to the action of December 13, 1862. This is not, however, a merely dry recounting of maneuver and sequence; O'Reilly takes care to maintain the vitality of his narrative by addressing the experiences and fates of individual officers and soldiers caught up in the fighting. All in all, however, O'Reilly's book is focused much more narrowly than Rable's, paying less heed to the general background of politics and the state of Northern and Southern morale at this stage of the war.

Of the two volumes, Rable's "Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!" is probably the more accessible by the general reader not deeply into the study of American Civil War military operations, while O'Reilly's book is clearly the definitive traditional military history of the Fredericksburg battle in the traditional sense. Paired with Rable's work, the two together provide a uniquely comprehensive study of the campaign in all its multitude of aspects. I recommend reading both.

Rating:
Summary: Decent Overview of the Fredericksburg Campaign
Review: I have been waiting for some time for a decent book to be published on the Civil War battle at Fredericksburg, now within a matter of months two very good accounts have appeared on the market. I must admit that it took me awhile to decide which book to purchase out of the two releases but in the end the weight of the reviews at Amazon guided me towards 'Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!' by George Rable. I am thankful for those reviewers who posted their opinions on this book at Amazon; it made my decision a little easier.

I quite enjoyed this account which as many of the previous reviewers have indicated is not just a campaign history of Fredericksburg but more of a micro social and military history of the men who fought this terrible battle. I found the details of the soldier's life very interesting and I enjoyed the author's description of the battle a great deal. It must be stated as it has in the reviews below, that the battle is not covered in great depth. However out of the 435 pages of narrative we get a full account of how this terrible battle affected not only the soldiers who fought it but also their political masters and the civilians at home.

The book offers more than just a military history of this battle; it provides the reader with a real insight into the life of a Civil War soldier. I was amazed with many of the first-hand accounts offered in the narrative and I really enjoyed reading about these men, both from the Federal and Confederate perspective. In the end I didn't notice that the actual account of the battle only took up a quarter of the book. The narrative is lively and full of interesting antidotes, both from soldiers and civilians alike.

A number of maps and black & white illustrations were provided and all were of a decent standard (a nice change!). For those who are interested the author has also provided an Order-of-Battle at the end of the book and over 130 pages of references and notes. Overall this is a very decent Civil War history and I think that most readers will enjoy this account of Fredericksburg.

Rating:
Summary: Tactics plus context
Review: In his splendid, prize-winning book "Race and Reunion," David Blight maintains that Civil War writing has changed little since the veterans themselves began putting pen to paper. Despite the recent advent of the so-called "new Civil War history," with its greater attention to common soldiers and non-combatants, battle narrative largely retains the earmarks--some would say the formula--of those earlier works. But is there really only one right way to describe a battle? George Rable's hefty new work, the culmination of a decade's work on the Battle of Fredericksburg, announces that the answer is "no." While Rable hardly ignores tactics and strategy--I found his tactical descriptions models of exposition and clarity--his broader purposes are to place the battle within the political and social context of late 1862 America, and to examine the lot of the common soldier during a critical campaign. In other words, who were these men, what were they fighting for, and why did their sacrifices matter? This is an important book, one that every scholar of the war should read and digest. I recommend it strongly.

Rating:
Summary: The New Military History
Review: It is worth paying attention to Rable's stated goals, as opposed to those desired by the blood and guts school of gunmetal and bayonetophiles. What is important about this book--which, of all the 50 or more studies of Civil War battles I've read, is among the finest--is that it's ambitions extend beyond the entertainments of military pornography. Any writing that attempts to incite in the reader, the same feelings sensations experienced by the figures being written about, is along one definiation pornographic. This is what a majority of battle studies do--along with their fictional godfather, Tom Clancy. While this can often be engaging material, the fact is that its use is spent once the book is closed. No deeper cultural, political, or for that matter military understandings emerge, and this is what Rable is trying to accomplish here. His extended preliminary chapters on the policital and social context of this battle are not simple addenda--social "fluff" to earn New Historicism points--to the main action that occured on the plains before Marye's Heights. As Rable so nicely suggests, they are integral to understand why this battle not only played out in the way it did, but why it was consequential. One can only hope that more historians will take Rable's lead in assembling studies of other crucial battles--such as Antietam, Gettysburg, the Seven Days--along these same lines.

Rating:
Summary: The New Military History
Review: It is worth paying attention to Rable's stated goals, as opposed to those desired by the blood and guts school of gunmetal and bayonetophiles. What is important about this book--which, of all the 50 or more studies of Civil War battles I've read, is among the finest--is that it's ambitions extend beyond the entertainments of military pornography. Any writing that attempts to incite in the reader, the same feelings sensations experienced by the figures being written about, is along one definiation pornographic. This is what a majority of battle studies do--along with their fictional godfather, Tom Clancy. While this can often be engaging material, the fact is that its use is spent once the book is closed. No deeper cultural, political, or for that matter military understandings emerge, and this is what Rable is trying to accomplish here. His extended preliminary chapters on the policital and social context of this battle are not simple addenda--social "fluff" to earn New Historicism points--to the main action that occured on the plains before Marye's Heights. As Rable so nicely suggests, they are integral to understand why this battle not only played out in the way it did, but why it was consequential. One can only hope that more historians will take Rable's lead in assembling studies of other crucial battles--such as Antietam, Gettysburg, the Seven Days--along these same lines.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent synthesis
Review: On Dec. 13, 1862, the South won perhaps the most lopsided major battle of the Civil War, in back of the Virginia city of Fredericksburg. Robert E. Lee's rebel army dug in behind a stone wall at the top of a long, steep ridge. His northern counterpart sent blue brigade after blue brigade right up that hill in the cold winter sunlight, in the face of the kind of gunfire that men lean into, as they do a wind-driven hail. By the time sunset stopped the carnage, the North had lost nearly 13,000 men.

The battle became a watchword, not just for Yankee defeat but for the folly of sending troops on long charges against dug-in enemies. Six months later, when Union troops along Cemetery Ridge poured a deadly fire into Pickett's Charge, they shouted to one another, "Give them Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!"

Thus the title of George Rable's new look at the battle. In this book, he's written an excellent and gripping description of the bravery and folly and just plain cussedness of one battle, and all war. But more than that, he's tried to bridge a schism that's often as rancorous as the North-South political divorce of 1860.

Look at any bookstore's shelf of Civil War titles and you'll likely notice they come in two varieties: the "battles and leaders" books, and the "social history" books. This bedevils our understanding of the times. The academics write slim volumes on social theory, and look on enviously as tacticians and retired military men rack up sales for vast books on every battlefield detail. To a professor, it's positively baffling.

James McPherson, the dean of Civil War history, in his provocative essay "What's the Matter With History?" (1995) described these cinder block-sized books as "more and more about less and less" and marveled that there are "two volumes by a single author on the second day (of the Battle of Gettysburg) totaling 725 pages. Only the most dedicated buff can wade through all of this prose."

But if Harry Pfanz's books seem to stop at the edge of the battlefield, as though the battle were a planet unto itself, the books of McPherson's colleagues often stop on the other side of it. They can write as though the least important thing about the war was -- the war. Most Civil War buffs seem to prefer the Pfanz version. It's hard to blame them. Arid socialistic moralizing and preachy rhetoric on the one hand, on the other, timeless tales of the bravery of average men wrapped in sumptuous prose. Yet the Douglas Southall Freemans are dead. And the present retreat from social history tends toward military minutiae and has become arid in its own way. Without a context, nothing is comprehensible. I remember watching a Civil War roundtable meeting let out, after an hour-long presentation about the Battle of Antietam, and one wife turned to another and muttered, "All that over a cornfield."

Rable, writing from the academic side, sets this all right with his Fredericksburg book, and he lays out a map for other scholars to follow. He is a history professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa whose previous books include "The Confederate Republic," which was an interesting political look at the Southern government. He also wrote "A Revolution against Politics and Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism," which is the kind of title professors love and Civil War buffs avoid.

The Fredericksburg book shows he can walk with the best of the military historians. He clearly explains the battle's troop movements, with the aid of many diagrams. Rable has an eye for the best anecdotes from a raft of first-hand sources, and they spice up his narrative in the best Bruce Catton style. He delves into the strategy and tactics, for fans of that. But he also explores army morale and the conditions of camp life, which can have as much effect on a battle's outcome as a commander's decisions.

And he sets this terrible battle in the context of two peoples at war in the same land. Civilians, soldiers' wives, politicians, blacks slave and free -- he's got them all in here.

Rating:
Summary: ...but not much about the "Battle" at Fredericksburg!?
Review: Rable's Bible-sized account of the Fredericksburg campaign appears to have one flaw - the "battle" itself seems to get short thrift! Rable does a excellent job outlining pre-and post- battle scenarios, but his blow-by-blow battle account left me cold. Indeed, much of the information offered is incidental to the battle proper. He offers generic accounts of camp life, medical care, etc - lots of "interesting stuff", but not much that justifies a supposedly "in-depth" look at this wonderful Confederate victory! I somewhat felt short-changed.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: This book was a big let down. The book is well written but it does not provide many of us what we expected. I ordered this 671 page tome hoping that the curiously overlooked Fredericksburg Campaign had at last been given a dramatic and definitive military history. But alas, such was not the case with Rable's book.

Author George C. Rable is a Civil War historian but he is a social and political historian not a military historian, as one can see from his previous books. This fact must be kept firmly in mind when evaluating his first foray into "military" history. For in this book he has produced a lengthy social and political history but a rather brief military one.

In his prologue, he distinguished between "'old' military history that dealt with leaders, dissecting strategy and tactics carefully, sometimes brilliantly ...and "new" military history which has focused on soldier life and it connections to larger social themes." He says he attempted to blend the two in his book but in realty, the "old" or military history is submerged in a vast sea of "new " or social history.

To get to the opening of the battle, the reader has to wade through over a hundred pages of mostly social and political commentary on themes such as soldier life in 1862 and the political scene in such diverse places as Washington D.C., Massachusetts, and Osaukee County, Wisconsin. Have you Civil War buffs ever wondered how Frederick Engels and Karl Marx fitted our bourgeois republic into their theory of class warfare? Do you want to know how more about the Emancipation Proclamation and the meaning of freedom? If so, don't miss this book. As a college professor, Rable doubtless expects that this approach to "military" history will bring more accolades from his politically correct, fellow academicians than will the "old" military history that we Civil War buffs buy books to read about.

It is with reluctance that I make these criticisms. Rable's few chapters on the battle are quite good. And he has clearly done an enormous amount of research. But he has produced a very lengthy volume resulting in a very hefty price which is more likely to be purchased sight unseen online by Civil War buffs looking for a detailed history of military operations than it is by academicians seeking social commentary. The result is likely to be quite a few disappointed purchasers. Readers seeking a definitive military history of Fredericksburg should turn to Francis O'Reilly's "The Fredericksburg Campaign."

Rable should have entitled his book, "Fredericksburg, a Social, Political and Military History" to at least give potential buyers a clue as to what to expect. Or, given the huge amount of material he developed, he could have produced two separate and excellent books: one an "old" military history of the Fredericksburg Campaign and another on its "new" military - social history. I think I know which of the two would sell better.

Rating:
Summary: Who Needs More Social Context?
Review: While a hefty and well-researched tome, F-F spends far too many words on what any half-literate student of American History in general, and the Civil War in specific, already knows. Volumes of individual soldier letters and diaries abound. The subject has been beaten to death--along with the home front. Likewise, the Emancipation Proclamation is its own cottage industry. So just tell me about the battle. Maybe 30 or 40 pages to set it up, then get on with the menauvers--the more detailed the better. Bottom line: Buy O'Reilley's