Interview with S. C. Gwynne, author of Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War

This is an interview with author S. C. Gwynne about his recent book Hymns of the Republic. To read a review of the book click here.

What was your inspiration for this project? Why did you decide to write a book about the last year of the Civil War?

In reading about the last year of the war, I was struck by just how bitter, cruel, and vengeful it was compared to the first two years of the war, which I have covered in my Stonewall Jackson biography, “Rebel Yell.” So I thought it might be interesting to choose that time period. I researched the subject and found that no one had done a “final year” book since Bruce Catton’s “Stillness At Appomattox” 60 years ago. There had been books about 1861, and about April 1865, and about Grant vs. Lee, but no book that took that time period and tried to get a handle on it. Also Catton’s book covered the war exclusively from the point of view of the Army of the Potomac. I go farther afield to include Sherman’s campaigns.

What is your book's biggest contribution to Civil War scholarship? What does it make us rethink or reevaluate about the period?

My contributions have mainly to do with how I look at the war, the angles and perspective taken. I have read many books about the Overland Campaign, for example, but none of them look at Wilderness/Spotsylvania as the worst medical disaster of the war, which it was. Instead of doing a bullet-by-bullet account of the fighting, I am looking at what was happening behind the lines in Fredericksburg and Belle Plain and elsewhere. My hero is Clara Barton. It’s an entirely different way of looking at the campaign. Another main focus on Overland is the idea of men digging for protection. I see the entire campaign as an evolution of digging, and what digging did to Grant’s strategy and to warfighting tactics. This too is a different way of looking at Overland. I won’t keep going with examples, but this is the way I approached the research. I am not offering heretofore unreported movements of this or that brigade or division in the morning of Day 1 in the Wilderness. Gordon Rhea is definitive on that. What I hope I am offering is a different and interesting way of looking at the war.

You started your narrative of 1864 with Fort Pillow after your introduction which I though was interesting. Why did you choose to start your story there, especially since most of the book focuses on the eastern theater of the war?

Fort Pillow to me is the great emblem of the profound change that had taken place in the war. The things it stood for—Lincoln’s shift from a war about union to a war of black liberation, the enormous changes wrought by the presence of black troops in the Union army—actually meant that what Grant and Lee were fighting for in that eastern theater were not the same things that armies had fought for in the first part of the war. Ft. Pillow showed the seismic shift. In many ways the book itself is about the meaning of Fort Pillow.

I found your interpretation of the Overland Campaign very interesting, especially since I used to work on the Wilderness and Spotsylvania battlefields. Typically, Grant’s movement there is seen as forward pressure after stalemates to keep Lee fighting in his new war of attrition, a new style of continuous combat not seen in the early years of the war. You interpret it more as a failure of Grant’s statement that he would “fight it out on this line” all summer and a goal of attacking Richmond instead of Lee. Could you explain your interpretation of Grant’s movements a bit more?

It's interesting how many people have trouble with this idea. It seems so clear to me. Grant did fully intend to fight it out and very much along that “line,” meaning a line closer to Spotsylvania than Richmond. He had the men and materiel to do it. But what happened in the first two battles was that battle-fighting strategy changed. Lee dug in and then Grant dug in and then everyone was dug in and it became extremely apparent very quickly that frontal assaults were not going to work. Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor proved this out. And if anyone really needed any more proof than that, Petersburg showed what happened if you “fight it out on this line.” You were going to be mired in trenches. So instead of fighting it out with a dug-in Lee, Grant went back to the old tactic of threatening cities, threatening real estate. I am not criticizing Grant for doing this. I do not think less of him. He is my personal hero. But he would have been stupid to keep throwing men at Lee’s breastworks. The charge at Cold Harbor proves this beyond a doubt.

I appreciated that you didn’t end your narrative with the more typical end points of Lee’s surrender or Lincoln’s assassination. Why did you choose to close the story of the war with Clara Barton and Andersonville instead?

I was just so taken with her story, first as a solo practitioner of battlefield nursing, and then as one of the few people who undertook to find all those missing men. The whole thing was heartbreaking. Andersonville was heartbreaking. But I loved the uptick—there was something uplifting about the establishment of that cemetery, about finding the lost men.

About the Author:

S.C. Gwynne is the author of New York Times Bestsellers “Empire of the Summer Moon” and “Rebel Yell.” He is a former senior editor at Time Magazine and Executive Editor at Texas Monthly. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife, the artist Katie Maratta, and their two dogs.