Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record ed. by Kenneth L. Alford

Abstract

Reviewed by: Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record ed. by Kenneth L. Alford Robert Wooster Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record. Edited by Kenneth L. Alford. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. Pp. 864. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-87062-441-4.) "The purpose of this volume is to help make war-related Civil War records pertaining to Utah Territory more accessible," explains editor Kenneth L. [End Page 1005] Alford, professor of church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University (p. 15). The present collection, buttressed by an essay emphasizing Utah's strategic importance to the wartime American West; an overview of the publication of The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (70 vols. in 128; Washington, D.C., 1880–1901); and appendixes describing Utah's territorial borders, military geography, and military units serving there, achieves that goal. Scholars familiar with the Official Records will have less need than will their less-seasoned counterparts for the 504 records included from that series in the primary documents reprinted here. Additional records of events for the Second California and Eleventh Ohio Cavalry regiments are taken from the less accessible Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (100 vols.; Wilmington, N.C., 1994–2001). Most useful to academics are the remaining materials, featuring thirty documents from the Territorial Militia Records in the Utah State Archives. Thirty-nine additional orders, letters, and news reports were located in the Salt Lake City Deseret News, and the same number come from the Union Vedette, a newspaper published at Camp Douglas. Another four documents appear in the annual reports of the commissioner for Indian affairs for 1862 and 1863. Five others come from the Brigham Young Office Files, housed in the Church History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Two were located in the U.S. congressional serial set. From the National Archives come ten documents from the post returns of Camp Floyd, Camp Douglas, and Fort Bridger, as well as twenty from the Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General. Edward W. Tullidge's The History of Salt Lake City and Its Founders (Salt Lake City, 1886) has supplied four documents. One, authenticating Abraham Lincoln's authorization for Brigham Young to raise and equip one hundred short-term volunteers to protect the mails, was found in Volume 5 of The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953). A letter signed by nearly three dozen officers in an unsuccessful effort to save territorial governor Stephen S. Harding from removal by his Mormon critics is taken from C. V. Waite's The Mormon Prophet and His Harem; or, An Authentic History of Brigham Young, His Numerous Wives and Children (Chicago, 1868). Civil War scholars will find especially useful several documents from the Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, which detail the allegations by two officers and a surgeon that numerous officers and civilians had been disloyal during the secession crisis, and the refutations of those charges by Colonel Philip St. George Cooke, Captain John Gibbon, and Lieutenant Wesley Merritt. Reprinted materials from the Deseret News reveal little-known details relating to the Bear River Massacre (1863), and documents from the Territorial Militia Records, the Brigham Young files, and the Union Vedette shed light on army-Mormon jealousies. As Alford acknowledges, Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record is by no means an exhaustive collection of documents relating to Civil War Utah. All save two of the archival materials reprinted from the Letters Received by the Office of the Adjutant General, for example, come from 1861. Such is understandable, given the byzantine system army bureaucrats used to organize that collection, now housed in Record Group 94, but the failure to [End Page 1006] incorporate additional materials from this source, along with others housed in the National Archives, limits the book's real usefulness to a fairly narrow range of scholars. Robert Wooster Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association