In 2011, Jack Dempsey published Michigan and the Civil War: A Great and Bloody Sacrifice, an award-winning study of Michigan’s contributions to saving the nation during the greatest crisis in our history as Americans. In 2015, he and Brian and James Egen published Michigan at Antietam: The Wolverine State’s Sacrifice on America’s Bloodiest Day, an in-depth study of the role Michiganders played during the war-changing Antietam campaign of 1862.
Fast-forward four years to 2019 and Dempsey’s latest release,
This work is the first-ever full-length biography of one of Michigan’s great heroes and one of the Civil War’s most unsung generals. Williams’s Civil War correspondence has, since publication in 1959, been frequently quoted by major works and preeminent historians. Williams’s key roles at Cedar Mountain, Antietam (including with the Lost Order), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Atlanta Campaign, the March to the Sea, and the final saga of the March through the Carolinas, have never been appreciated or recounted. His deliverance of formerly enslaved during the March to the Sea has never been highlighted. The story of his private life, growing up in New England, graduating from Yale law school, moving to Detroit as a young man and taking up civic and militia service, suffering personal loss, culminating in being stricken with a fatal illness while serving as Congressman in the U.S. Capitol, has never been told.
This thoroughly researched and well-written book, with vivid and insightful descriptions of the fighting under Williams’s command, includes four appendices – a reference guide to Williams’s official reports on battles such as Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, a detailed charting of Williams’s multiple Corps commands, and two poignant speeches, his Farewell to his Division on June 6, 1865, and the other to the Society of the Army of the Cumberland at the Detroit Opera House in 1871.
Complete with 45 photos and maps, Michigan’s Civil War Citizen-General Alpheus S. Williams will be a welcome addition to libraries everywhere.
What the critics are saying:
“Jack Dempsey is pretty much the popular voice of history in Michigan”
“Excellent biography”
About Alpheus:
Detroit’s Alpheus S. Williams was one of the greatest of Civil War citizen-generals. A century and a half after the conflict ended, his life story still awaits proper scholarly and popular treatment. He published no autobiography. He is the subject of no modern biography. A selection of his wartime letters first appeared in print in 1959, thanks to the WSU Press. In 1995, the University of Nebraska Press published a reprint adding only an introduction. Both volumes lack a bibliography. Neither includes the non-military letters he wrote to his daughters, a subject now eagerly sought by the professional historian and the interested reader.
Williams served in both Eastern and Western Theaters, from 1861 to the end in 1865, experienced bloody battles including Antietam and Gettysburg, the campaign to take Atlanta that gave impetus to the 1864 reelection of Lincoln, culminating in the infamous “March to the Sea” and the final Confederate surrender in the East. He led his Division up Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House during the famous Grand Review in May 1865. Without his involvement in the famous “Lost Order” episode and during the battle, Antietam would not have been the Union victory that enabled issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite four years of unremitting loyalty to the Union and outstanding service in the field, he was never promoted beyond his initial rank. Being a citizen-soldier, not a West Pointer, was his shortcoming.
His civilian life was no less interesting. His professional experiences included lawyer, businessman, newspaper editor, diplomat to Central America, candidate for Governor, and elected Member of Congress. His wife Jane, daughter of Detroit pioneer Charles Larned, died prematurely, leaving him to raise four children with no mother. Williams himself fell fatally ill in the U.S. Capitol. The tragedies that marked his life did not end in death, for he never received the recognition he deserved.
