Just start with the war’s leadership: Generals U.S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, who together packed a one-two punch for which the Confederacy had no answer, are both Ohioans, as is top cavalry Gen. Phil Sheridan.

But so are two of Lincoln’s top Cabinet members, Edwin Stanton and Salmon P. Chase. Bissland describes Stanton, the secretary of war, as “short, pudgy, myopic and asthmatic ... a brilliant lawyer known for his bad temper” but whose wartime power nearly equaled Lincoln’s.

Chase, the secretary of the treasury, was nursing a voracious appetite for Lincoln’s job but he performed his own brilliantly, even so.

But don’t stop with the state’s military and political leadership.

“To fight this war came the citizen-soldiers — in one Midwestern state alone, Ohio, 300,000 men, roughly one of every 10 citizens,” Bissland points out in the introduction to his book. “Another 450,000 came from Ohio’s sisters, Indiana and Illinois, meaning these three raw-boned relatively young and still-developing states by themselves supplied a fourth of the Union’s soldiers.”

Bissland’s publishers told him “this is probably the best book they’ve published, and maybe the most important.”

Ohio-based Orange Frazer, a medium size regional publisher, “is a very high quality outfit,” he noted. “They probably have more than 100 books in print.”

Bissland admits he has devoted pretty much every waking moment for the past three years to the writing of this book.

A New Englander who has lived in Ohio since 1976, he holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Cornell University, a master’s in American history from the University of Massachusetts, and a Ph.D. in mass communication studies from the University of Iowa along with doing postgraduate work at Brown University.

The majority of his career has been spent as a journalism professor at Bowling Green State University, during which time he has authored, co-authored or edited several earlier books, including “Bountiful Ohio: Good Food and Stories” and “Long River Winding: Life, Love, and Death Along the Connecticut.”

“I thought of myself as a human interest writer and I enjoyed teaching feature writing most,” a skill that is most evident in “Blood, Tears and Glory.”

Unlike some Civil War enthusiasts who obsess on tactics, “I use human interest stories as a vehicle for teaching larger ideas.”

 Bissland believes the Civil War was “the most important event in American history since the Revolution. The Revolution gave us our freedom; the Civil War determines how much freedom we should have.”

He also provides a mass of evidence that “the outcome of the war was shaped in the Western theater. The real Civil War took place west of the Appalachians” and there were more Ohioans fighting in the western theater than any other state.

 Among all the states, Ohio supplied the third highest number of soldiers. Only New York and Pennsylvania sent more, and they were much more highly populated.

The western armies took care of the problem in the west and finally headed east to squeeze Lee’s Army and end Virginia’s bloody stalemate, all despite the fact that the western armies “tended to dangle on the end of the supply line” and were regarded with disdain by their eastern counterparts.

In the book readers can follow the fate of particular Ohio regiments, like Opdyck’s Tigers, and individual soldiers, including some from Northwest Ohio, whose war ended forever in places like “Bloody Shiloh” or the Andersonville POW pen.

About 36,000 Ohioans died in the war, a horrific proportion of those fighting. “The modern equivalent would be 3,000 to 4,000 deaths from Bowling Green alone!”

The book also brings to light the massive contribution of Ohio women and African-Americans by telling the more obscure stories of Ohioans like Lucretia Garfield, wife of a future U.S. president who was off fighting, or country lawyer Jacob Bruner of Antwerp, who was pleased to lead a troop of African-American soldiers of the 9th Louisiana into battle but who died at a place called Milliken’s Bend in “one of the bloodiest small engagements of the war.”

By war’s end, Blacks were about 12 percent of the entire Army.

A final point the book makes is “how horrible war is. At the beginning of the war people were so exhilarated,” said Bissland. But that changed forever, as did much about America itself.

By KAREN NADLER COTA
Sentinel Lifestyles Editor