Steven E. Woodworth – författare

Sherman is not only one of the most important generals in the American Civil War, but also one of the most famous commanders in the military annals of the western world. He has become an almost mythical character in popular memory, the embodiment of grim-visaged, implacable war. Legend has him burning a sixty-mile-wide swath of desolation across the South, and southerners still confidently assert that their ancestors were burned out by Sherman and his vandal hordes. Sherman famously said, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it," and yet, even at his most destructive, he maintained strict limits on the degree of damage his soldiers could inflict. Sherman''s wartime career makes a fascinating study of the degree to which the severity of war can be channeled, directed, and limited--especially as it relates to the current war in Iraq.

Ulysses S. Grant did more than any other single Union general to secure the North’s victory in the Civil War, but he did not achieve that victory alone. Grant’s ability to inspire and cultivate the talents of the officers serving under him was a key factor in his remarkable military success. Steven Woodworth and his fellow authors provide ample evidence for that in this first of a two-volume reassessment of Grant’s officer corps from Cairo to Appomattox.

Covering the war’s western theater through July 1863, Woodworth et al. highlight the character and accomplishments of these men and show how their individual relationships with Grant helped pave the way to Union victory. They demonstrate how each officer’s service contributed to Grant’s success and development as a general, how interaction with Grant affected each officer’s career, and how the relationship ultimately contributed to the course of battle and the war’s final outcome.

These portraits include the most important of Grant’s lieutenants as well as some who are representative of various officer types. Here are William T. Sherman and Grant’s other trusted commanders from the Army of the Tennessee, revered mentor Charles F. Smith, and difficult subordinate William S. Rosecrans. Here too are such citizen soldiers as Lew “Ben Hur” Wallace and Peter Osterhaus, de facto intelligence chief Grenville Dodge, and naval officers Andrew Foote and David Dixon Porter, whose relationships with Grant proved crucial to the war effort.

Full of revealing insights regarding military leadership and the special problems of Civil War command, Grant’s Lieutenants adds a new dimension to our understanding of the Union road to victory and gives us the true measure of these dedicated men.

A companion to Grant''s Lieutenants: From Cairo to Vicksburg, this new volume assesses Union generalship during the final two years of the Civil War. Steven Woodworth, one of the war’s premier historians, is joined by a team of distinguished scholars—Mark Grimsley, John Marszalek, and Earl Hess, among others—who critique Ulysses S. Grant’s commanders in terms of both their working relationship with their general-in-chief and their actual performances.

The book covers well-known Union field generals like William T. Sherman, George Thomas, George Meade, and Philip Sheridan, as well as the less-prominent Franz Sigel, Horatio Wright, Edward Ord, and Benjamin Butler. In addition, it includes an iconoclastic look at Grant’s former superior and wartime chief of staff Henry W. Halleck, focusing on his wise counsel concerning Washington politics, the qualities of various subordinates, and the strategic environment. Each of these probing essays emphasizes the character and accomplishments of a particular general and shows how his relationship with Grant either helped or hindered the Union cause.

The contributors highlight the ways Grant’s lieutenants contributed to or challenged their commander’s own success and development as a general. In addition to revisiting Grant’s key collaboration with Sherman, the essays illuminate the hostile relationship between Grant and Thomas, commander of the Army of the Cumberland; Grant’s almost daily contact with “Old Snapping Turtle” Meade, whose expertise relieved Grant of the close tactical direction of the Army of the Potomac; and the development of a highly successful command partnership between Grant and Sheridan, his new commander of the Army of the Shenandoah. Readers will also learn how Grant handled the relative incompetence of his less sterling leaders—perhaps failing to give Butler adequate direction and overlooking Ord’s suspect political views in light of their long relationship.

Like its companion volume, Grant’s Lieutenants: From Chattanooga to Appomattox is an essential touchstone for Civil War scholars and aficionados. It offers new and profound insights into the command relationships that fundamentally shaped both the conduct of the war and its final outcome.

Winner: Fletcher Pratt Award

Steven Woodworth’s previous book, the critically acclaimed Jefferson Davis and His Generals, won the prestigious Fletcher Pratt Award and was a main selection of the History Book Club. In that book he showed how the failures of Davis and his military leaders in the west paved the way for Confederate defeat. In Davis and Lee at War, he concludes his study of Davis as rebel commander-in-chief and shows how the lack of a unified purpose and strategy in the east sealed the Confederacy’s fate.

Woodworth argues that Davis and Robert E. Lee, the South’s greatest military leader, had sharply conflicting views over the proper conduct of the war. Davis was convinced that the South should fight a defensive war, to simply outlast the North’s political and popular support for the war. By contrast, Lee and the other eastern generals—notably P.G.T. Beauregard, Gustavus Smith, and Stonewall Jackson—were eager for the offensive. They were convinced that only quick and decisive battlefield victories would prevent the North from eventually defeating them with its overwhelming advantage in men and materials.

Davis and Lee, Woodworth shows, shared a mutual respect for each other for most of the war. But it was respect mixed with a stubborn resistance to the other’s influence. The result of this tense tug-of-war was Davis’s misguided pursuit of a middle ground that gave neither strategy its best chance for success. The war finally ground to a bloody conclusion with Davis as indecisive as ever and virtually blind to how little confidence his generals had in his leadership.

Drawing extensively upon the papers of Jefferson Davis and the works of leading Civil War historians, Woodworth places the eastern military campaigns in an entirely new light and expands our understanding of Davis as leader of the Confederacy.