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Clyde C. Walton, then head of Special Collections at the University of Iowa library, had been the impetus behind the March 1955 appearance of Civil War History. He got the quarterly journal going on a regular basis. In the summer of 1956, Walton left Iowa to become State Historian of Illinois in Springfield. Yet he continued to edit the journal. As the years passed, Walton had increasing difficulty handling two jobs simultaneously. Subscriptions barely kept the magazine in existence.

Early in 1959 Walton resigned as editor. University of Iowa officials began a nationwide search for a replacement. I was among the nominees. Starting with the September 1958 issue, I had been writing a bibliographical column, "The Continuing War, while pursuing doctoral studies at Emory University. Richard B. Harwell, a nationally respected Civil War historian, as well as a librarian at Emory, pushed my candidacy for the editor position. So did Ralph G. Newman, a Chicago book dealer and a widely respected name in the Civil War field.

By late spring 1959, I was interviewing for two small-college teaching positions when the director of publications at Iowa called and asked me to interview in Iowa City. The town and the townspeople were extremely nice. Moreover, the editorial position paid considerably more than a teaching job--a fact that looms large when one is fresh out of graduate school with a wife and two small children. I quickly accepted the offer and, in August 1959, went to work in Iowa.

Enough articles were in hand for the September and December issues. I quickly contacted friends Grady McWhiney, William B. Hesseltine, Glenn Tucker, and Cecil D. Eby Jr. They kindly offered chapters of books on which they were working. That gave me the foundation for my first issue in March 1960.

Financially, Civil War History had continued on shaky financial grounds. Subscriptions were low. Even though the journal was one of a kind in America, no substantial promotion had been done on a national scale. Director of Publications Carroll Coleman basically gave me a green light to do whatever was necessary to increase circulation. I began seeking speaking engagements anywhere and everywhere. The journal offered discount subscription rates to Civil War Round Tables that ordered in a bloc. I attended historical society conventions and distributed fliers. We advertised whenever the budget permitted. Subscriptions promptly increased and rose steadily throughout my two-year editorship. More attractive covers, with original sketches of some subject in the issue by staff artist Dale Ballantyne, gave Civil War History a facelift.

In the journal's tenuous beginnings, it had been an outlet for laymen as well as for professionals. Many unsolicited manuscripts arrived in a steady stream. The overwhelming majority focused on battle strategy and tactics. Too often the writers were not trained historians. Their common approach was the assumption that if a wartime account was in print, it was truthful and accurate. One such submission, returned the day of its arrival in Iowa City, contained scores of footnotes, all from one source: the Official Records. In all of those 130 volumes of individual reports, dispatches, and observations, rarely does one find a statement such as "I made a mistake." (Personal memoirs can be even worse.)

My feeling from the start was that the quarterly should be a scholarly voice in the field. Slowly and, I hoped, subtly, I looked more to academics for contributions. We also sought a well-rounded coverage of military, political, social, and economical topics. A notes-and-queries section, which answered what usually were genealogical and/or minute questions, was allowed to expire. Increasingly I called on professional historians to review books. I also initiated a "Book Notes" section to encapsulate volumes worthy of notice but not deserving of a full-length review. The journal also published an annual bibliography of works published during the year.

The intent of each issue was to have something that would appeal to the full range of Civil War buffs. Yet I was also aware that areas of socio-military history had long been overlooked. I therefore conceived the idea of devoting one issue yearly to a specific theme. Finding qualified writers for these projects was always difficult, but persistence triumphed. The December 1960 issue treated solely of wartime religion. Railroads were the theme of the September 1961 magazine.

By far the most popular of those special issues dwelt on Civil War prisons. The University of Wisconsin's William B. Hesseltine (with whom I developed a close friendship) wrote the foreword; articles concentrated on Elmira, Andersonville, Rock Island, and other compounds. That one issue was reprinted several times in the years that followed.

It would be tactful to say that no one article stands tallest in my two-year reign as editor, but one does. The 1950s was the time when the writings of Bruce Catton called attention to the literary and historical goldmines that unit histories could be. Many historians, stimulated by Carton, began pursuing regimental and brigade chronicles (including this writer, who produced the first modern brigade history with a study of Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson's so-called "foot cavalry"). In that atmosphere, and at the 1959 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, Houghton Mifflin book representative Matthew Hodgson presented a paper entitled "Bampson of Bampson's Legion: An Informal Study of Confederate Command." It purported to be an overview of the 9th Texas Partisan Rangers. It was so humorously written that one tended to laugh more than to reason about the "facts." The regimental leader, Alpheus Tuesday Bampson, was an aristocratic ne'er-do-well who bent every facet of life to get ahead. His subordinate officers were a collection of foreign mercenaries. The regimental adjutant, The McPheeters of Egg and Mugg, had an unchallenged record for sheep stealing and breaking the peace in Olde Scotland. Chief of Bampson's artillery was Lum Chu Fung, dimunitive in size, incapable of managing the English language, and in charge of the unit's single six-pounder that was a relic of the War of 1812. Another officer of note was the soldier of fortune, Capt. Augustus Schwarzburg. Pre-Civil War battles all over the world had left numerous marks on the good captain: he was missing an eye, an ear, his right arm, left heel, right leg, plus suffered impairment from "a grievous machete wound in the posterior in an affray near La Paz."

By the time Hodgson finished these descriptions--and one looked carefully at the "group portrait" of the officers done by Iowa staff artist Dale Ballantyne--most readers saw this article for what it was: a colossal and hilarious parody. Yet even when Bampson came to a spectacular end at the 1864 Battle of the Crater (when he "was blown higher, and remained aloft longer, than any other in Confederate service"), some readers still remained convinced that everything in the article was true. Not even an editorial disclaimer at the end of the essay had full effect.

A half-dozen queries came to me from ladies who wanted information on Bampson's Legion for use in applications for membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Page references to the Bampson piece appeared in a number of books treating of the Trans-Mississippi theater. The crowning achievement for the article occurred when Charles E. Dornbusch compiled his multivolume and monumental Military Bibliography of the Civil War (New York, 1961-87). There, listed as a source for the 9th Texas Cavalry, is the Hodgson article.

Some of our essays during 1960-62 generated ongoing discussion. Darrett Rutman wrote the first scholarly article alleging that Andersonville's Capt. Henry Wirz had been railroaded to the gallows by vengeful Union authorities. James A. Huston's "Logistical Support of Federal Armies in the Field" was a breakthrough on the subject. Ralph Wooster's examination of changing interpretations over the secession of the lower Southern states, Richard Current's analysis of who fired the first shot in the Civil War, and my own scathing essay on Union treatment of prisoners of war at Elmira, New York, were but a few of the more provocative contributions.

By the autumn of 1961, circulation of Civil War History had quadrupled. We were two issues ahead in number of manuscripts accepted for publication. Having made a practice of personally indexing the 1960 and 1961 volumes, I also had compiled a cumulative index for the first five volumes of the journal. It appeared as a separate issue.