Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West Richard M. McMurry Decision in the Heartland: The Civil War in the West. By Steven E. Woodworth. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008. ISBN 978-0-275-98759-6. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliographical essay. Index. Pp. xiii, 165. $39.95. Over the last three or four decades students of the American Civil War have come to realize the importance of the military campaigns that took place in “the West”—the vast area between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River (the region west of the Mississippi was then called “the Trans-Mississippi”). Many historians, in fact, now relegate [End Page 1300] the much-better-known Eastern theater (essentially Virginia) to near irrelevancy in the military history of the conflict (“the Virginia periphery,” Steven Woodworth calls it in this short work [p. xii]). It was in the West, the “heartland” region east of the Mississippi from which rivers drain into the Gulf of Mexico, that the outcome of the war was decided. The war in Virginia was a stalemate in an area where neither side could win or lose. Decision in the Heartland is a brief survey of the great campaigns in the crucial Western theater. Such a short work must, of course, ignore tactical details so that the author can concentrate on key themes. As one volume of a series (Reflections on the Civil War), this work is designed to examine what series editor John David Smith calls “pivotal aspects” of the war (p. viii). The book fulfills that purpose. The key to the war’s outcome was the Confederacy’s conduct of the war in the West. On many of the Western battlefields the Rebels outnumbered their enemy, yet they lost battle after battle. The crucial question is: why did the Confederates not achieve success in the West? While Woodworth describes the dysfunctional command structure of the Western Confederate armies, he does not offer much in the way of explaining why such a flawed arrangement came into being and, even more to the point, why President Jefferson Davis never made a serious effort to correct it. The book contains an annoying number of simple errors—none in itself very important —that an author of Woodworth’s experience and repute should not make. Some of these errors make it difficult to follow events narrated in the book. On p. 49, for example, he reverses the chronology of President Davis’s late 1862 visit to the Rebel armies in the West. On p. 104, he confuses east and west and has a battle occurring southeast of a town rather than northeast. Woodworth should also watch his pronouns. A military force was singular, or a military force were plural. It/they cannot possibly have been both. Readers whose interest is limited to battlefield tactics will find nothing of value in this book. Those concerned with matters at the operational, and even more at the strategic level will gain numerous valuable insights that will enhance their understanding of the war’s military history in general and of the Western campaigns in particular. Woodworth’s book, however, will prove most valuable to those seeking a better understanding of the war’s grand strategy and/or its geopolitical aspects and to those intrigued by the classic question why did the North win, or the Confederacy lose, the war? Richard M. McMurry Dalton, Georgia Copyright © 2008 Society for Military History