Chattanooga - A Death Grip on the Confederacy
By James Lee McDonough
The University of Tennessee Press
The very important Chattanooga battle - won in the last hour by a few good Union decisions and a few bad Confederate ones - appealed to Florida State's Ph.D. grad James Lee McDonough for several reasons.
First, it was crucial to the outcome of the war.
"The victorious emergence of the Union forces, in one dramatic hour, from a situation in which they had been trapped and besieged, resulted in reversing the course of the action, placing the Federals in a position to carry the fight into the deep South," McDonough wrote. "The triumphant Union forces would soon undertake the final stages of destroying the Confederacy."
And it was underreported by other historians. All had examined and written about Chickamauga, McDonough noted, but there was too little scholarly work done on the Chattanooga battle that followed it.
He wondered if the Chattanooga battle was considered less important because, though it made victory possible for the Union army, it caused relatively few casualties - 6,667 Confederates and 5,824 federal soldiers.
McDonough, a major scholar in Tennessee (his Stones River - Bloody Winter in Tennessee was reviewed as "splendid, the best yet on this battle") is a history professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Ala. - Margaret Leonard
Slaves and Freedmen in Civil War Louisiana
By C. Peter Ripley
Louisiana State University Press
This study of the end of slavery in Louisiana, which was repeated across the South, shows in well-written detail how it became "the tragic Reconstruction."
The just-freed slaves dreamed of owning land, supporting their families and building a free society. None of it happened.
Ripley shows how the military occupation allowed the freedmen to believe briefly that the Union army had brought freedom. The former slaves rejoiced sometimes in ways that terrified their former owners (kidnapped a Confederate soldier and put him in stocks, for example). They also built schools and filled them with their children.
But Ripley's research shows that the alliance was really between the Army and defeated plantation owners and, later, between the federal government and the plantation owners.
The result was that the plantation owners regained their land, ability to make money and political power.
And the former slaves settled in to search, for well over a century, for other ways than the Civil War to acquire freedom and security.
Ripley's book is a fascinating account - though regrettable like a movie we know the end of - of how Reconstruction played out.
He is a professor of history at FSU, where he earned a doctorate in 1973. - Margaret Leonard
Florida's Heritage of Diversity
Edited by Mark I. Greenberg, William Warren Rogers and Canter Brown Jr.
Sentry Press
Florida's Heritage of Diversity offers a dozen essays on the populations that have made Florida far more than the typical British protestant colony - later state - on the eastern coast of the New World.
Exploring the history of women, for example, begins with a close look at the 1787 marriage of Maria Rafaela to don Manuel Fernandez Biendicho in St. Augustine.
The next essay describes the life of "cracker women," and the third moves on to the black troops who "fought like devils" for the Union.
A black minister, in another essay, was freed to travel among the plantations preaching to slaves. His leadership survived the end of the war and the Reconstruction, leaving Tallahassee with the prominent Bethel Missionary Baptist Church.
Others who stamped the state - and are described in the book - include a late 19th century Jewish mayor of Tampa, Seminole Indians, an Irish nun, and a Democratic woman who somehow overcame Florida's anti-suffragist convictions to serve in Congress.
Other essays show eras: Reconstruction, mob violence against blacks, the mix of war and tourism and the Latinization of Florida.
The book was published to honor a retiring University of Florida professor, Samuel Proctor. But the editors and writers include FSU grads and faculty. - Margaret Leonard
The Black O
by Steve Watkins
The University of Georgia Press
The book is written by a Florida State grad - English Ph.D. grad Steve Watkins - about a stunning lawsuit of another Florida State grad - B.A. and law-school alumnus Tommy Warren.
Warren, a 1970 Seminole quarterback, was a civil rights lawyer in Tallahassee, and took a case that seemed incredible at first.
A couple managing Capt. D's Seafood restaurant in Marianna, Fla., told him that their corporate management (same corporation as Shoney's) had insisted that they employ fewer African-Americans and get rid of the black worker they had just promoted.
Warren's intense research made the story increasingly believable, and produced dozens more just like it.
The case grew for five years, until Shoney's finally settled - giving $132.5 million to more than 20,000 plaintiffs.
And Warren concluded that the giant racist corporation had turned around.
Finally, he said, "black people know this is a company where they can get ahead."
- Margaret Leonard