Colored Infantry in January 1864, rose to captain in that regiment and a great-great-grandfather, Jesse Beecher, who enlisted in the 112th New York Volunteer Infantry in August 1862, rose to sergeant, died of typhoid fever in April 1865, is buried in the National Military Cemetery at Wilmington, North Carolina. I did have two Civil War ancestors: a great-grandfather, Luther Osborn, who enlisted in the 93rd New York Volunteer Infantry in December 1861, rose to corporal, became a lieutenant in the 22nd U.S. Are you related to any participants in the war? James Birdseye McPherson, who was killed at the Battle of Atlanta in July 1864. To get it out of the way, you are not related to Union Army Gen. To mark the anniversary of Battle Cry’s publication, I reached McPherson at his home in Princeton to ask talk to him the war, the publication of Battle Cry and its aftermath, and the meaning of the Civil War 150 years on:
He has previously published a children’s history of the war and books about Lincoln, abolition, why soldiers on both sides fought, Reconstruction, and the battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, as well as editing and contributing to scores of other volumes on the war and regularly writing for The New York Review of Books. His most recent book, War on the Waters: The Union & Confederate Navies, 1861–1865, his 20th, appeared last year. Now retired after a long career as a history professor at Princeton, McPherson continues to publish about the Civil War. Lee and Abraham Lincoln to common soldiers writing loved ones on the eve of battle, and the myriad interpretations of an outcome that still seems not fully resolved today-appears destined to last as long as the United States remains a country. That fascination-with the Civil War’s causes and violence, its great players from Robert E.
The ongoing sesquicentennial celebration has only redoubled that flood of new material and public fascination with the war. Since then, America has devoured a seemingly endless stream of new histories, film, and documentaries about the war. The book was the blasting clap that set off the explosion of popular interest in the war that then greeted Ken Burns’s epoch-making PBS documentary The Civil War when it was released two years later. McPherson miraculously manages between to recount the origins of the war and its progress in virtually every theater of fighting through its entire four years, explain the political maelstrom that engulfed both the North and South, touch on heartbreaking stories of individual warriors, follow the machinations of government officials, and describe the military, cultural, and social consequences of the greatest cataclysm in American history, all while carrying the reader along within a brisk and vivid narrative. The book’s popularity is not hard to explain.
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