“FROM ANTIETAM TO APPOMATTOX WITH UPTON’S REGULARS – – A Civil War Memoir from the121 st New York Regiment by Dewitt Clinton Beckwith”, Edited by Salvatore G. Cilella, Jr.McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, Jefferson, North Carolina: 2023, 240 pages, 7” x 10”,softcover, $49.95. Visit, www.mcfarlandpub.com.Reviewed, highly recommended as one of the rarest of all Civil War memoirs, by Don DeNevi“Takes us into the ranks of a regiment that experienced incredible adventures . . . rich indetails”, Chris Mackowski, Editor-in-Chief, “EMERGING CIVIL WAR”.“Detailed, lively, accurate, and complete”, John Hennessy, Chief Historian at Fredericksburg andSpotsylvania National Military Park.The original 53 installments of what you will read henceforth, provided you have thebravery, the courage, to get past the horrible early and later horrors of one of the threebitterest wars in American history, appeared between July 1893 – July, 1894, one installment aweek for an entire year. Like this column, occasionally, lack of time permitted fact checking, andeven proofreading of incorrect grammar or spelling before submission. Yet, in Beckwith’s case,this reviewer is in slight disagreement with Walt Whitman who wrote in “Specimen Days &Collect”, page 80 (2012), “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernalbackground, the countless minor scenes and interiors of the secession war; and it is best theyshould not. The real war will never get in the books.” I feel Dewitt Clinton Beckwith comes as
close to being an advanced motion picture camera, sound and all, recording the true best and
worst imagery, as other great writers in world history have of their own wars. Furthermore, ifyou are a deadly serious student of the American Civil War, or desire to be one, follow everyword, every line, every paragraph of exemplar Salvatore G. Cilella, Jr.’s entrancing 19 pageIntroduction, especially his riveting, “A Personal and Professional Journey”, 2 ¼ pages, thensynopses of who the 121 st New York Volunteers were, the Civik War and its aftermath, how the121 st wrote its own history, who, really, Beckwith as a historian was, Beckwith, at first known as“the Fabulist”, then General Emory Upton’s star, followed by Beckwith the civilian andpolitician. What adds enormously to our reading and understanding is the book’s collection ofamazing crystal-clear photographs.Remember that Dewitt was only a raw teenager at the beginning of the bloody journey andits sights, equal to those of the Holocaust and its unimaginable cruelties, left him stunned andappalled. He witnessed nearly all the historic Eastern Theater engagements from Antietam toAppomattox, including an unsuccessful stint with the 91 st New Yorkers in Florida in 1861.McFarland says, “He describes in excruciating details his various Tom Sawyer-like adventureswith the VI Corps of the Army of the Potomac, recounting death, disease, loss and ultimateelation at Lee’s surrender, as well as outrage over Abe Lincoln’s assassination.”If, buff, you’ve been focusing your reading hours on the flood of superlative new World WarII titles from our other favorite military publishers, Casemate, Schiffer, and Osprey, yes, load upon all they produce, take a few dozen hours to read this McFarland masterwork for an in depth
understanding of the saddest war yet known to mankind.
