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In some of the most cases, recent books, signed books may still be available to you. Now my name is bjorn skaptason. And i am going to be your host today. We are streaming live from the Abraham Lincoln book shop in chicago. Since 1938, this shop has been dealing with historical books, autographs, photographs, anything pertain to go lincoln and the civil war and u. S. Presidency. Please visit our shop. Please visit our website at alincolnbookshop. Com. We are going to bring you other shows in the near future. Shows for children, lady byrd and friends for children in the romance, mysteries, we have wonderful fantasy syfi coming up. Its everything. Which brings us to our guest today in the second half of todays house divided program. I would like to introduce you to thomas army. Abraham lincoln yes, there is. Family vacations. Tom divided history at Wesley University in middle town connecticut. He studied with professor wallace, studied the civil war, received a bachelors and masters degrees and went to long career in education. 19year in boarding school. That would probably be an hour of discussions there. We could probably talk more than an hour about that. He went back to finish ph. D at university of massachusetts. Since 2012 adjunct professor of history at Valley Community college in danielson, connecticut. The book, engineering victory, how Technology Won the civil war. This is toms first book and congratulations. Thank you. Congratulations. He lives in vernon, connecticut with his wife virginia, published by Johnson HopkinsUniversity Press. We thank them for producing it and helping to get tom here, 369 pages, wonderfully illustrated. The price is 49. 95. If you wished to order a signed edition, please do so. Tom, welcome to Abraham Lincoln book shop. Thank you so much for having me. Lets just start at lets start before the beginning. Okay. Why engineering . What brought you to this topic . Why did you want to write a book about engineering in the civil war . My interest in engineering came as a result of exploring interests in Technological Advancements and innovation. I have always been fascinated about that. I am not a scientist. Didnt do particularly well in science in school but certainly in the last 10 to 15 years as i watched the development of American Science in biotechnology, in nanotechnology, medicine, even in construction and architecture and everything that touches our lives, i became fascinated with the subject. Recently i visited a World War Ii Museum up near massachusetts where i had a chance to play with enigma machine which was made famous by the german army, looks like a typewriter but was wired as a result of some remarkable Electrical Engineering and unless you had those codes you couldnt crack the enigma machine, of course, a famous movie was made about it. It reinforced my interest in engineering history. In history and in engineering and so looking back on how i got started on this book, i thought, well, what was the engineering like during civil war and as i started to explore that i realized that not much had been written about it. So i decided that i would tackle this and the more i looked, the more i got interested and the more i uncovered and off i went. Well, yeah. To some extent it was an open it was an open topic to get into. Or at least people havent written a lot about it in the most recent generations. But there had been some writing here and there in the past, but this volume serve as a collective. I think you may have used the word, some updated notions of the north and the south in the civil war and another thing i find fascinated in the book, the antebellum period. It does. My general premise was to explore the critical advantage that the union had over confederate and what they use today build bridges, tunnels, repair railroads, not only required remarkable mechanical stills but also required ingenuity and innovation, the mind set was developed during the antebellum period when the north invested in educational systems to meet this growing Industrial Society. And so not only was there School Reform but there were programs like the movement beginning in milbury, massachusetts in the late 20s. Agriculture fairs were like todays home depot. People would go to these fairs and not only test the best apple pies and look at grains of wheat and discussions about fertilization but this is where local farmers and mechanics would bring their latest inventions. And so if you were a farmer and you designed a new hoe or you came up with an at earnation on the traditional shoafl, you would bring it fair. They set aside to give prices for people who would come up with these gold star inventions and so as people walked through these fairs u farmers and mechanics got their ideas and did their own tinkering. Characteristic of the north. Correct. The south was very different. This is what i tried to emphasize in my book. I want to say straight up because people have asked me about this, the book doesnt challenge the bravery or common sense knowledge of the southern soldier or the southern general. It does not do that. But what it does do is it looks at whether or not southern soldiers Like Northern soldiers were prepared in an Industrial Society to meet changing technological needs. And my answer is, no, they were not. In a plantation system which dominated the south during the antebellum period, it not only dominated the economics of the south but also the Political Landscape of the south so that plantation owners were the ones that sat in the state house of representatives and the state senates and so they not only called the shots politically, but they also had control over economic development, and in the south, the plantation economy made millions of dollars for plantation owners. Theres no doubt that men who ran successful cotton plantations were some of the wealthiest men in america. Any any belief or understanding that some form of industry was to encroach upon that was frowned upon. Right. And so and as a result of that, so was the idea of developing educational systems. And so if you look at the south in prewar years, there are with the exception of the state of north carolina, that put together a remarkable common School Reform movement. The other states did not and most local communities and states were not interested in that and some of the reasons are taxes, some of the reasons have to do with the belief that if you really wanted your child educated, you could go to a private school or be tutored. But the end result was that a large segment of the yeoman farmer class or tenant farmers in the south were not particularly well educated and they certainly well educated to understand mechanics and Machine Tools and so when the war breaks out, both sides are recruiting these men and so when these armies form and a call goes out for engineers because there just werent enough west point trained engineers to go around, the union army looked to its resources within. It looked to individual regiments, men who were not west point graduate, who worked on a railroad before and they happened to be officers in the 15th new york infantry and general mcclelland decide youre not going to be the 15th infantry, you will be the volunteer engineers and at your head captain beers or ben who has engineering background and the south had nothing comparable. Nothing like that. Theres enough operational engineering in this book to go for an entire hour or two. But i want to ask you something about education before we get into the war because theres another fight for education specially for the union army and also for the Confederate Army and thats west point. Correct. West point. West point was essentially an engineering school, in your opinion did west point live up to the expectation that they would be the leading engineers of the world . Oh, i think they did. Thats a doubleedged sword. I think people they look at the pool of west Point Engineers graduates available when the war breaks out. Some of these men had left the army and they were now working for private businesses. War breaks out, these men enlist and the split was about three fifths going to the north. Two fifths going to the south, and so people say, well, if thats the case, thats not a large discrepancy so the south must have had good west Point Engineers. The problem with that line of reasoning as i discovered was that that might have been acceptable if the army stayed the size of the u. S. Army during the mexicanamerican war. Scott moved 15,000 men to veracruz to the gates of mexico city. That was the largest army the United States had put in the field. Now all of a sudden, the the armies at gettysburg alone has 90,000 men, 75 men and, of course, there are armies in tennessee and armies out in the mississippi and 60 engineers going north and 40 engineers going south are not are not enough. So they have to rely on volunteers and as it turns out, although the west pointers to your question, although the west pointers take the lead and get the commanding posts, the volunteer soldiers perform just as remarkably as do the west pointers. Specially in the west. Specially in the west. Specially in the west and thats why i want to bring up okay. One of the people who could almost be one of the union herios heros which was josiah bissel. Well, thats a remarkable story. Bissel who has Civil Engineering background before the war, goes to Army Recruiters in august of 61 and says, i think we need an engineer regiment out west and i propose to lead one and they agree and they become the engineer regiment of the west and bissel gets attached to popes army. So the war starts, et cetera, et cetera, and now pope finds himself coming down the Mississippi River and he is interested in punching through at Island Number 10 as the union coming up from new orleans is also interested in hooking up with pope somewhere in the middle. Now, everyone knows the story that flotilla is going to be stopped at vicesburg. In one of these Great Stories of the civil war, bissel goes to pope and says i would like to explore a possibility of cutting a capable and see if we can get around the island and forcing it to surrender and so pope agrees. Bissel with soldiers goes in a row boat and they discover that the area is flooded. They see no possibility of doing this. So bissel tells the private who is with him to go back and to ask the navy, the union navy who are north of this position if they would be willing to try to blow past Island Number ten and in the meantime bissel is looking around. He stands on the morning that hes supposed to be picked up again in the row boat and standing on the opposite shore of the mississippi and looking across the mississippi and he sees what he thinks its a cut between these large trees and he decides that when the rower gets there that he will travel the cut and he discovers its an old wagon road under water and he thinks that he can push through there and actually cut a canal and to make a long story short, thats exactly what he does. They invent some ingenuous mechanical device which saws these heavy logs, trees underneath the water, they cut them out and pull them up and sure enough within eight days, the union army is sending supply barges and a few ships through the canal and they found themselves south of Island Number ten. The commander in Island Number ten, the confederate commander is so amazed by this and recognizes that hes surround that had he vunders the island. Without brilliant Engineering Campaign that did not result in bloody battle because they got outengineered. Correct. The next stop would be vicksburg. People need to read the book to find out the magnificent engineering that occurred in the vicksburg, specifically the ability of grant ability. But what i want to do is turn to another type of engineer. Okay. I want to turn to a different type of engineer. Tell us about the difference and tell us what a topo graphical engineer did. The United States had not mapped itself with the exception of the american coastline. There was a Coastal Survey group and this group was responsible for mapping the coastline of the United States and specially harbors and inlets and some topographical engineers worked for this group. When the war broke out they needed good maps, specially the union army needed good maps in the south and so the topographical engineers were assigned to do that. Now, it became much more complicated than sitting down in a table and drawing a map because you had to estimate differences, you might sometimes be working behind enemy lines. And then you had to reproduce the maps. It was one thing to have the commanding general have a reasonably accurate map of a particular area in which your army was operating, but it was another thing when you were asking core commanders or Division Commanders or regimental commanders to find farm roads so that they can maneuver their men into position so they could launch an attack. Well, the union army first discovered that it could not it had no method of reproducing the maps except by having clerks literally sit down and copy them, so by the middle of the war, the army discovered that separating the topographical engineer wasnt really working, it was insufficient, they combined the two. The topographical engineers went away. Some of them continued in this process, but going back to this idea of ingenuity and innovation, several came up with ways to reproduce maps, whether taking pictures of maps, copying the image and then reproducing them that way, there were there were several methods of doing this. By 64 then, Union Generals were able to distribute these maps to lowerranking officers and that made a big difference in the fighting. Had accurate maps. Correct. Well, you mentioned photography. I want to introduce something to the people at home. Again we are a book shop and since we are we can we have books. I want to mention the photographic document, tenvolume magnificent piece of work that was created about the time created for the cent centetenial civil war they also provided me with in some cases an image that had to try to imagine through text. Ill give you a case in point, would be permanent. So he is a railroad engineer, a west pointer, the youngest man to graduate from west point. He graduated from west point. He is 19 years old, goes into the railroad business. These are remarkable engineer, and he is brought on to be one of the chief engineers of the newly formed United States military railroad. He comes up with the idea of building a barge, trying to describe this. He builds a barge and basically on this barge the plants Railroad Tracks. And so what happens is that he also runs a Railroad Tracks right up to the edge. So now hes going to bring these massive locomotives right to the edge of the wharf where hes going to have them hauled onto these barges and hes going to be able to put for or five locomotives on these barges. He clamped them down, if in the barges are floated up river to places, for example, during mcclellan Peninsula Campaign, several of these trains, and then later on, two years later during grants Wilderness Campaign come hes going to bring these barges up to places like city point which becomes the major developed for the north. They will pull up to the tracks that are at the ends of the worse. The trains to get hauled off. This time they get pushed off front first. They get pushed off about a halfmile down the track where sidecars will connect the boxcars, and off the train goes. I mean, it really was ingenious for 1862, 186364. Nothing like it had been tried before. And in the miller book there are several wonderful photographs of this device. In fact, theres one called the general dix, that was a thing of the locomotive, the general dix being unloaded i think at aqua creek. It mightve been city point. But you can see the barge. You can see the train coming onto the wharf. And so photographs like that were hugely helpful to me. As i read his memoirs as he described this or you read sources from grant who is describing what he is doing or from the men who are involved in the construction core. Thats one thing to try to visualize it, its another thing to turn to a book like the miller volumes and flipped through the pages and actually see this. Some of the folks at home are getting to see slides from the miller volume. Really quite remarkable. And i should also say the First Edition is the ones to look at because because subsequent additions were made but the first additions were made from those original plates. The people and dont got to see some pictures of just have ever they were and they saw some pontoon bridges and this awesome blockhouses and so on. You brought up the eastern campaign. Of course he does most of his work in eastern campaign. So we have another photograph that i want to share and this is from another source but this brings us to the peninsular campaign, mcclellan said Peninsula Campaign. For those who can see it. This is a photograph reproduced by Matthew Brady society. For those of you who are interested in the photograph itself, this is a remarkable reproduction, 121 from the original glass plates. For the people who can see that, for the people who can see that at home you are actually going to see something you might not see used to in historical photographs. You might think of historical photographs as they are now because of age. They ate and the turn. At the time when i made they didnt look that way. When people had their picture made, you have much more of this beautiful dark. They look like a blackandwhite photograph. Plum or purple was the look. Here we see the famous mortars at yorktown. You see palisade set up and put up by the engineers and by the mortar men who moved this into place. This brings us to the topic of another military engineer, george mcclellan. Now, he did quite a job of engineering at yorktown, yet mcgruder bluffed him and got away. Do you think yorktown was the blunder for mcclellan . I think it was, i think a demonstrated that mcclellan was not an aggressive general. Whether or not, i mean, yes, it was a blunder, but does it mean that mcclellan at yorktown had no chance of meeting his strategic goals which were to take richmond . I dont think so. But i do think it indicates that mcclellan is going to fight a campaign with a great deal of caution, moving forward. And, of course, thats exactly what he does. You brought up some men who played a very Important Role in the Peninsula Campaign before, and that is these new york engineers. They play an important part in this book, especially in this campaign. To some extent as you told us mcclellan converted. We also see new york and this happened in some of the states, going out and recruiting an engineer regiments, engineer units, michigan and kentucky but then theres new york. Whats behind that and how effective it was . Well, i think lets back up a minute and say, during my research i came to understand that i was starting to look at mcclellan a little bit differently than i had when i started. There is no doubt mcclellan was a cautious general. There was no doubt that lincoln was justified in firing him. In fact, you could make a case that lincoln could have done this much earlier. Except of course that lincoln is worried about the political implications of doing that. Mcclellan was not a very good commander of field forces when it came to fighting. But mcclellan was a skilled administrator, and it is that skill that contributed to the growth of volunteer engineering units. Because in late october of 61 when mcclellan is beginning to get his army ready, he has a conversation with one of his lieutenant colonels, barton alexander. And theres a dialogue through letters that you can read they go back and forth between these two men. And mcclellan is concerned that there are a lack of engineer troops, and alexander suggests that volunteers would fit the bill. Because hes discovering that in some of his infantry regiments they have these skilled mechanics and toolmakers and shipbuilders that would convert nicely to military engineers. And so mcclellan gives the goahead to convert these units. And one of those units was the 15th new york. So they enlist as a volunteer infantry company, and the next thing you know they are a volunteer engineer unit. Now to the second part of the question, because i think your question really has two parts, i think the second part of the question is what is it about new york . Well, new york was one of the great, it was becoming even in the middle of the 19th century one of the great economic sectors of the United States. The erie canal built in the 1820s, 1830s, railroad development, the new York Central Railroad by 1860 was really an incredibly wellrun longdistance railroad. New york city was becoming the center of not only the United States burgeoning market economy, but it was also becoming an International Finance center. And so with this industrial growth, king pockets of areas around the state of new york that were becoming more and more focused on mechanics and trade. And so even in places as northwest as a fuego or buffalo or elmira, they were developing, they had men with mechanical skill. There was a lot of lumbering that went on in the western part of new york state. There were carpenters out in the western part of new york. And then, of course, on the coastline a new york city, shipbuilding and designing Civil Engineer projects to manage the growing city, whether it be a water system or a sewer system. You had the civilians, not west pointers, who were learning this engineering trade. Most of these, no college education. Most of them would not have had buthat we consider a high school education. Do you think the Union Commanders recognized the talent among the mechanical trade amongst their soldiers . Where they aware of this advantage . I think they do, what your question is actually an excellent one. Because i think what happened was that the professional engineers were really messed miffed by Design Professionals who were able to pull off his remarkable feats. I think thats where the difficulty was. So, yes, i think men like a grant and need and someone like when rosecrans in the western theater mead. I think they appreciated the talent. The real question what did professional engineers like james dewayne, you know, did they recognize and were they prepared to give full credit to these upstarts . And i think west pointers felt very, very threatened. And as you read official reports after campaigns, you can really see that as you read the tween the lines. After the Chattanooga Campaign and the famous cracker line, you read about the Vicksburg Campaign and to read the afteraction reports written by the engineers. They are happy to mention the men who did this work, but the men are vague and they sell the mention of volunteer engineer officers. And they always mentioned the west point regular Army Engineer officers. Its really interesting spirit very interesting the way field commanders and engineer commanders take a different view. What other things, we only have so much time left and we havent even talked about lets think, drill in on one aspect of that agency for campaign. Finally grant has to move so quickly and thats what might have some illustrations here to help us. He needs to move that army so quickly and there are so many rivers and so many bridges. And now he is a very effective pontoon train. Correct. So if you can tell us a little bit, he manages to steal a couple. Can you tell us about that pontoon train . Let me set the stage for everyone. Lee and grant had been engaged in this incredibly bloody, horrific Wilderness Campaign. And grant cannot get lee to come out from behind his entrenched positions, and it seems like, now, you have to imagine if you can pop up a map when your head and imagine that we are north of richmond and petersburg. And every time grant slides south by a little bit, its as if lee is able to read his mind. And every time grant tries to flank lee position, lee is there. So grant besides that its time for bold action. And this is a thing i about grant. The risktaking aspect of the grant is wonderful. So grant decides that hes not going to try to steal 15 or 20 miles, but hes going to try to steal 40 or 50 miles. And so he pulls off this remarkable retreat. Unbeknownst to lee. Its that one day lee wakes up and grant army is gone and lee, he doesnt know where he has gone. What grant has done is he has swung south and he is now going to cross, he is going to cross the james river and try to get beneath lees army, capture petersburg, and then easily march onto richmond. Because once he has petersburg he cuts off all the Railroad Traffic that would go into richmond. This would force lee to leave. And so the problem is that he has to cross the james river. The james river at its narrowest point, it was called with the engineers decide that its the best place to cross, is about 2000 feet long. And the james is a title river as well, and the engineers are told that to supply this move, i speak about this in my book, to put things in perspective for everyone, when youre moving the civil war armies in 1864, if you include all the men and all the cattle and all the wagon trains and medical course applies, you are talking about an army that moving from front to back passing point a would take at least four and a half days, 24 hours a day marching. I mean, these armies were huge, spread out over everywhere. And so this is a risk, and so grant reminds of the engineers that he is going to need boat traffic as well down the james as a way of bringing supplies to these armies. So the engineers are faced with 2000 feet of river, and they have to keep in mind that this going to be boat traffic. And so they begin and finally build one of the most remarkable engineering feats in the war. Certainly it is as remarkable at what is done at Island Number 10. They built a 21foot pontoon bridge 2100 feet, im sorry. But in the middle they are able to open the middle sections for river traffic. And sure enough, grants army crosses. The problem that happened was that grants lead elements tied him stumbled into petersburg, had a hard time getting organized. I know that were just kind of skimming over this, but lees army gets wind of this. I believe its general beauregard who is in petersburg, and he is able to repel these initial advances. And then, of course, lee rights and what happens is the famous siege of petersburg, but exactly. Just to get there really was remarkable. And grant does not get there without the engineers. There is so much more in this book that we could discuss, which is why you need to order the book and tom will sign it for you. I was going to ask you about that would be 15 or minutes. Or the field fortification that another scholar has made such wonderful studies of these field fortifications. Hes done a remarkable job. And so theyre so much to the start of engineering in the civil war, and theyre so much great in this book. As a subtitle tells us, how Technology Won the civil war, which means we didnt get around to talking to many confederates. No. If we even peeled off the top of that topic, you talk a little at about Southern Education and the ruling of the south prior to the war, but it certainly, and may be just a moment of your time to look at some of the most important confederate engineers, which were in my opinion, the book talks about this, played. How the africanamericans, community was forced to serve as engineers for the confederacy. Well, they were. The confederacy had the west point trained engineers, and where the confederacy excelled was in building fortifications. Th. The fortifications they built around petersburg, they built around richmond, they built around atlanta, and even around vicksburg, were highly sophisticated fortifications. But as i argued in my book, the confederacy had advance notice. They had some time to build these, and so the engineers could set out what the fortifications were going to look like, and then africanamerican slaves would be brought in to dig those fortifications, under the supervision of confederate officers. And so the black slaves were the Ground Forces for the confederacy. And, of course, the problem with that was of course that africanamericans would not offer any alternative or make a suggestion. I mean, that simply didnt happen, to doing things better. So there was no bottom up a conversation that took place, and that were bottomup conversations that took place as the union army faced on the spot challenges. Yeah, the workers in building a union for had a lot to say. Yes, especially had a lot to say when they came to a river and the pontoon train with 50 miles in the rear and they had to cross. Then they had a lot of input, and it worked out a way to do it. Well, thank you very much. Im going to ask you to get to work and signed some books for us. I would love to. What i talk to the people at home and give you the idea of some upcoming programs on authors voice. Coming up on authors voice, coming up on a house divided, this program on saturday november 12 at noon, Timothy B Smith will return to Abraham Lincoln bookshop and authors voice, its the third time weve had him here. His book is grant in fate tennessee, the 1862 battles of fort henry and donaldson. And this will go very well with tims previous book that he wrote on shiloh and on the campaign. Our friend david powell will return for the third volume of his trilogy, the chickamauga campaign. So those of you who have gotten the first two volumes, days trilogy, will want to get volume three and First Edition. And then later saturday, december 3 at noon, a terrific book by another old friend of the shop, no Andre Trudeau returns with lincolns greatest during, 16 days that changed the presidency. And along with another author with a terrific and imaginative book, mark will be here with the statesman and a storyteller, john hay, mark twain and the rise of american imperialism. Again, to put a cap on this book, engineering victory how Technology Won the civil war by johns Hopkins University press written by tommy army junior, illustrated, the cost is 49. 95 and worth every penny of it. A brilliantly written book with a brilliant story to tell us. Its not technological. Its a brilliant story. So thank you, tom. Thank you to the staff of Abraham Lincoln bookshop. Thank you to the University Press and for those he at home, join us again on house divided on november 12, and have a great day. All right, were off. Well done. Spirit it was a lot of fun. Great questions. Thank you for being here. And thank you, cspan. Spirit i came when i was four years old and my first memory was from pennsylvania being taken away from my parents and given away to an white foster them because i was away to lead the refugee camp. I