Book tv is on twitter and facebook and we want to hear from you. Tweet us, twitter. Com booktv or post a comment on our facebook page. Facebook. Com booktv. Welcome to authors voice, you are watching house divided. A program on authors voice signing network. This program is dedicate today books about Abraham Lincoln, the civil war, the u. S. Presidency and general americana. Now, while we are live, send in questions, please send in your questions for our author. Please tell us who you are and where youre from because we want to know who is asking questions and you can do that by click on the send in a comment button, theres a button on your viewer that you can click on. Theres another button that says order books now, that may be the most important button on your computer today because authors voice and house divided is a bookselling network. We can do that because you buy the books. The publishers consent authors because you buy the books. 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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 pla