It is commonplace for authors introducing a book on the American Civil War to remind their readers that the war was the bloodiest in American history; that no event had a more profound impact on the course of American history; and that the scars of that war can still be found more than a century after the famous meeting of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. Because the war was all of this and much more, it has continued to fascinate historians from that day to the present. That fascination has produced a huge outpouring of books – at least fifty thousand volumes according to one estimate – on the subject of the war. Why have I decided to add to that total? To answer that question, let me explain just how I became a “Civil War historian.”

It was early September 1983. I was at that time a professor in the economics department at the University of California at Riverside. Carlos Cortes, chair of the history department at Riverside, and I were sitting in my office discussing what he had earlier described as an “interesting possibility.” Owing to an unexpected resignation, Carlos explained, the history department had an opening for a historian of nineteenth-century America. The department had voted to explore the possibility of offering me the position.