Blogging represents the ultimate in the democratization of history.
I am not a blogger. As a confirmed Luddite, I resist technological innovation of almost all kinds, yet I’m often drawn into the rapidly expanding blogosphere because it has added a lively dimension to Civil War discussion and debate. I possess neither the expertise nor the inclination to assess individual blogs but will offer some thoughts, and a word of caution, about the general phenomenon.
Bloggers are stunningly diverse. Constrained only by their sense of propriety, they represent every level of expertise and a variety of ideological and interpretive stances. They manifest excellent manners and utter boorishness, inform and misinform in ample measure, and lead readers alternately to praise and curse the Internet. Blogging represents the ultimate in the democratization of history, and many bloggers delight in pointing out that academic historians—often pilloried as hopeless elitists—have lost much of their former control over the dissemination of historical information. This last notion strikes me, a member of the academic historical community, as comically out of touch with the fact that most books published by university scholars influence about the same number of people as a tree falling in deepest Siberia. Even so, one blogger asserted that I’ve never published any real books, and should be considered the “Paris Hilton of the Civil War”—someone who is famous just for being famous. I treasured this last sarcastic sally because it suggested a public awareness of my existence about which I had been entirely innocent.
Blogging sites vary widely in focus and quality. Some amount to little more than diaries of the blogger’s thoughts and actions, or exercises in George B. McClellan-like self-promotion. Others render excellent service by keeping abreast of new publications, posting unpublished documents and images or providing a forum for useful exchanges about battles, commanders, political issues or other aspects of the war. Institutions as well as individuals run blogs.
Attention on numerous blogs can make an unworthy topic appear to be serious. The “debate” over black Confederate soldiers is a perfect example. This nonissue is kept alive, so far as I can tell, almost solely on blogs. The best bloggers have made clear from the outset, with unimpeachable evidence to back them up, that there were not thousands of black Confederate soldiers. They argued what any scholar familiar with wartime sources knows—substantial numbers of slaves accompanied Confederate armies and worked in myriad noncombatant roles, and these men were not soldiers “serving” in the Confederate Army. Like slaves who labored on fortifications or harvested crops or worked at Tredegar Iron Works, they contributed to the Confederate war effort as part of a system of forced labor that allowed the incipient slaveholding republic to mobilize a very high percentage of its white military-age population. The nearly obsessive attention lavished on Andrew and Silas Chandler [see the February 2012 issue of Civil War Times] strikes me as worse than unproductive because it helps keep alive the hallucination that large numbers of black men shouldered arms in support of the Southern rebellion.
Visitors to blogging sites can also encounter a number of smaller errors. An example from my own experience: In attacking James M. McPherson for his review of Amanda Foreman’s A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War, one blogger incorrectly asserted that McPherson picked “an absurd quarrel” with me in the review. He then added: “Regular readers of this blog will remember that Gallagher, an editor at UNC Press, promised to let McPherson write a history of Civil War navies. That promise was broken, the book being written by Craig Symonds. Bad feelings?” Key parts of the passage relating to McPherson and me are incorrect. As one of the co-editors of the Littlefield History of the Civil War Era, a series published by UNC Press, I did invite McPherson to write the volume on the naval side of the war—which will be published by UNC Press within the next year. As for Symonds, he wrote The Civil War at Sea (Praeger, 2009), a volume with no connection to me, UNC Press or McPherson’s work on the Union and Confederate navies.
My last observation concerns the speed with which blogs can provoke shrill reactions. Another example from my own experience: In print and in lectures since the late 1990s, I have questioned the value for most readers of ever-more-detailed tactical studies of episodes at Gettysburg. My views always spawned lively discussion among audiences but otherwise had scant effect. In an interview published in CWT in 2007, I reiterated, “If you just love Gettysburg and want to know everything about it, then this flood of books…looking at tinier and tinier parts of the battle in greater and greater detail are of interest.” But I suggested that most people who want to understand the Civil War, or even the war in the East or the Gettysburg Campaign, do not need to read 450 pages on two hours of fighting in the Railroad Cut. I also wondered whether there was “anything new to say about Jeb Stuart in the Gettysburg campaign.” Thinking beyond tactical minutiae, I observed that “all the arguments have been laid out, pro and con….So you either pick your John Mosby school that says Stuart was pretty much doing his job…or you go to the other side where it’s Jeb Stuart’s fault.”
The reaction in the blogging world was immediate and amazing. I was the worst kind of snob who hoped to stifle serious work by nonacademics, a hypocrite who had edited several books on the campaign, and someone whose own credentials were highly suspect.
Overall, my limited engagement with the Civil War blogging world has left me alternately informed, puzzled and, on occasion, genuinely amused. I suspect these are common reactions to the mass of valuable information and unfiltered opinion that crowd the multitude of blogs out there.
Originally published in the June 2012 issue of Civil War Times. To subscribe, click here.
