Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS267 in and out of the narrative, always the judge of her husband's actions, often his sharpest critic. Through Braxton Bragg, McWhiney also brings new insights into the war in the West. Like Thomas Connelly in his excellent study, Army of the Heartland, McWhiney views the action across the Alleghenies as of unusual significance. From their descriptions of Confederate actions in the "Heartland," one might readily conclude that it was the lack of leadership in that remote theater that really sealed the fate of the Confederacy. There the patterns of war were both primitive and modern, directed by generals who showed little genius for their profession and a President who found it difficult to turn his eyes away from Richmond. It is with the general, however, that McWhiney is at his best. Always the focus is on Bragg, involved in the great game of war, searching for glory without really understanding or appreciating its meaning. Successful as an army organizer in Florida soon after Fort Sumter, courageous in defeat as a unit commander at Shiloh, pathetic as the leader of the Army of Tennessee on its abortive invasion of Kentucky, a failure as a combat commander at Perryville and Murfreesboro—these are some of the marks of the man. Jefferson Davis could hardly expect field success from officers like Braxton Bragg, yet there were no others who offered more hope. To many students of the Civü War General Braxton Bragg is as much myth as reality. Thomas Connolly and now Grady McWhiney have dispelled much of the myth in their important studies and from their writings one also sees more clearly the stark tragedy of the Confederacy. Braxton Bragg was an important actor in this tragedy, and McWhiney has made him an understandable character in the drama of that tragic war. In clear, crisp, readable style, this biography wül rank with the best of Civil War scholarship. Robert Hartje Wittenberg University Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War. Edited by Harold Hyman. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969. Pp. xiv, 326. $7.95.) No one statement can possibly summarize this useful set of essays. The theme, which is exactly given in the subtitle to the volume, presents particular difficulties. For it is at once an important and yet an artificial theme. Because of its importance, much work has already been done, and some of Hyman's essayists have been forced to considerable reliance on previous scholarship, which they synthesize skillfully and garnish with fresh thinking. Because the topic is artificial, a forcing upon several foreign histories of a single question that is peripheral to 268CIVIL WAR HISTORY them—a perfectly valid and demanding exercise, by the way—the project has at times a feeling of being put together. The uses and the successes of the essays, then, are many, widely differing, and sometimes incidental . I wül take the liberty of dealing with them impressionistically, and seizing on the things I especially like. The longest essay, H. C. Allen's "Civil War, Reconstruction, and Great Britain," touches of necessity on a great number of issues. The essay is at its most intriguing when it ranges into certain matters of little interest to earlier scholars, who were concerned mainly with how the British lined up behind the antagonists at war. The essay tells us, for example, about some British observers of American politics who were disturbed at the anomalous situation of a divided sovereignty within the republic and thought they discerned, in the self-assertion of Congress during Reconstruction, the coming to being of a system more on the British order, with the President responsible to a legislature in which sovereignty was gathered. Then there was the vision of an enlightened Anglo-Saxon imperialism, the great victorious republic marching with the mother country. And Reconstruction stimulated an extensive discussion of race. The first part of David H. Pinkney's "France and the Civil War" buüds on studies by Margaret Clapp, Lynn Case, and W. Reed West; the second section, dealing with economics, is a fine summary of work in the field. The most interesting section gauges the effect of the war on French...