Confederate Generals in the Trans-Mississippi: Essays on America’s Civil War ed. by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott

Abstract

Confederate Generals in Trans-Mississippi: Essays on America's Civil War. Volume 2. Edited by Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott. Foreword by Anne J. Bailey. The Western Theater in Civil War. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015. Pp. [xxvi], 283. $64.95, ISBN 978-1-62190-089-4.) In second volume of Confederate Generals in Trans-Mississippi: Essays on America's Civil War, University of Tennessee Press continues its important work on western theater of war. Editors Lawrence Lee Hewitt and Thomas E. Schott have assembled a diverse group of authors who in eight essays examine another set of Confederate generals who toiled away in relative obscurity of trans-Mississippi during war. The editors gather these essays together both to challenge long-standing belief that West the Confederate dumping ground for men who had failed to perform well east of river and to come closer to determining how South lost Civil War (pp. xv, xix). Ironically, first two essays examine two of theater's most famous failures. Thomas W. Cutrer examines how dysfunctional relationship between Ben McCulloch and Sterling Price lost Missouri for Confederacy. Cutrer is sympathetic to practical McCulloch, who caught between contradictory messages from Richmond, about invading states that had not joined Confederacy and protecting its allies in Indian Territory, and unrealistic and bumbling Price, who eager to free his state from Union forces. Price, however, not worst Confederate general west of river. That distinction, according to Thomas E. Schott, belonged to Henry Hopkins Sibley. Schott successfully shows how Sibley's character flaws, combined with a complete failure to consider logistical obstacles, doomed ill-advised New Mexico campaign. Robert I. Girardi discredits notion that John Bankhead Magruder a failed eastern general by examining Magruder's effective work after his transfer to Texas in 1862. His success in retaking Galveston and Sabine Pass, despite alienating his troops with his ostentatiousness, did make a difference, keeping that state and its resources in Confederacy for two years (p. 95). Jeffery S. Prushankin and Jeff Kinard look at two of division commanders, Alfred Mouton and Camille Armand Jules Marie Prince de Polignac, whose service intersected during Red River campaign. Prushankin characterizes Mouton as a modest, determined soldier, who was among [General Richard] Taylor's most able and tmsted subordinates (p. …