Book Review: Their Last Full Measure

Their Last Full Measure:The Final Days of the Civil Warby Joseph WheelanDa Capo Press, 2015Senator Edwin Morgan of New York might have chosen a typically Victorian comparison, but his analysis of the final months of the American Civil War was neatly accurate: “We are like whalers who have been long on a chase,” he commented, “we have at last got the harpoon into the monster, but we must look how we steer, or with one 'flop' of his tail he will send us all into eternity.” It's those final perilous moments that form the subject of Joseph Wheelan's riveting new book Their Last Full Measure: The Final Days of the Civil War. Wheelan's previous book, Terrible Swift Sword, was an intensely interesting biography of diminutive Union General Phil Sheridan, and this new book makes for even better reading, covering the last five months of the war.Probably nothing displays the sordid perfidy of the Confederate slavocracy more sharply than those final months, when the South fought on the bitter embers of their racism and hillbilly brutality even long after there was no hope their cause could win. Wheelan does a concise and very effective job of conveying just how threadbare the Southern forces were by the time we meet them in his book, being led from one battlefield to another by their revered General Robert E. Lee:

Indeed, the Army of Northern Virginia's myriad problems were undermining its effectiveness. Besides the epidemic of desertions, it was not uncommon to see hungry Rebels picking up corn that had fallen under the horses while they were being fed and then to wash, parch, and eat it. Scurvy and pneumonia raged unchecked through the weakened ranks. There was a shortage of Confederate arms. Men in one unit might have five types of rifles and muskets, from muzzle-loaded muskets, to rifle muskets, to breach-loaders, to repeating rifles – whatever had been confiscated from prisoners or found on the battlefield – each requiring different ammunition. The equipment shortages, desertions, illness, disease, and enemy sharpshooters were pushing the army to the brink of collapse, Lee believed.

We read again of the final desperate battles (in which Wheelan's old subject Sheridan features balefully), the set-piece of Lee's surrender to General Grant at Appomattox Court House (Grant treated him courteously instead of shooting him between the eyes), the sucker-punch tragedy of President Lincoln's assassination, and the ragged aftermath that gave rise to the evils of Reconstruction. Wheelan is in complete control of his material and is a splendid storyteller, never missing an opportunity to put forward all the best anecdotes of the times (the moment when a headstrong young George Armstrong Custer loudly demands that stolid Confederate General Longstreet personally surrender to him and is sent away like a small schoolboy is particularly choice). There are many moments when Wheelan orchestrates his materials so wonderfully that you can feel the tension:

When he returned to Raleigh, Sherman told his senior officers that Lincoln had been assassinated. As the news filtered down through the ranks, grief and rage followed in its wake. “The army is crazy for vengeance,” wrote Captain Charles Wills of the 103^rd Illinois. “If we make another campaign it will be an awful one.” He and many other soldiers hoped that Johnston would not surrender. “God pity this country if he retreats or fights us.”

Wheelan also gives plenty of details attesting to the fact that the racism of the war was hardly confined to the South, mentioning Sherman's repeated scornful references to “Sambos” and Sheridan's infamous comment about using freed slaves in the Union army ranks: “It is an insult to our Race to count them as part of the [draft] quota.”It's all a familiar story, told many hundreds of times in the last 150 years, but Wheelan nonetheless gives it a fresh and energetic polish. Any Civil War library should welcome Their Last Full Measure to its shelves.