Continental Conflict

There is no accurate figure for the number of books published about the American Civil War, but one estimate puts it at about 57,000, just short of one for each day since the guns were stilled at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in April 1865. (I read five myself in the first six months of this year, even with no special effort to do so.) As the November election approaches and as the shrill voices south of the border get ever more angry and agitated, we can add a swelling multitude of contemporary books predicting a new civil war in the United States to the mountain of volumes already in print about the nineteenth-century conflict. Certainly the field of civil war studies, whether rendered in uppercase or lowercase letters, is a growth industry.

Even so, the latest work from the University of Virginia historian Alan Taylor — who with two Pulitzer Prizes is a member of an exclusive group that comprises such scholarly giants as Bernard Bailyn, Samuel Flagg Bemis...