William Howard Russell's Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861-1862 (review)

Abstract

2Ó2CIVIL WAR HISTORY with the army and hope of promotion, and his affection for his family. Despite the particular interest that comes from Shaw's association with the 54th Massachusetts, many of his letters have the same interest as collections of Civil War letters written by more typical officers. It was not as a writer but as a doer that Shaw was extraordinary. While these letters are probably as close as we will ever get to Robert Gould Shaw, they leave us still with the mystery of what made this one white man, who wrote like a self-satisfied snob and whose mother transformed his memory into that of a martyr, willing to lose his life leading black men in a cause of which he rarely spoke but with which he should always be remembered. Reid Mitchell Princeton University William Howard Russell's Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861-1862. Edited by Martin Crawford. (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992. Pp. Ii, 252. $40.00.) Martin Crawford, who previously published a study of the London Times from 1850 to 1862, has edited the private diary and select letters of William Howard Russell, the Times war correspondent who reported the American struggle from March 1861 to April 1862. After thirteen months of increasing frustration and vilification by portions of the American press, Russell departed Washington with the firm conviction that the refusal by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to permit the journalist to follow the Union army to its new position on the James River unconscionably denied him the ability to report adequately on military operations. The Lincoln administration, unhappy with the editorial position of the Times, had determined to chastise the British newspaper by encumbering its correspondent and keeping him from the front. Civil War students are familiar with Russell's comments on Washington and the Union war effort, first published in 1863 in two volumes in My Diary North and South. Subsequent editors of his diary have reduced the work's length, excising Russell's observations on Washington society, the diplomatic corps, his several side trips outside Washington, and his digressions on American history, where Russell was not always surefooted. Martin Crawford's rendition of Russell's private diary, that is the text from which the correspondent prepared his manuscript for publication, runs to 233 pages, with the diary entries interspersed with select letters to thirteen different correspondents. The correspondence comprises about 61 pages, or 26 percent of the total text. The longest and most reflective letters are addressed to John T. Delane, Times editor from 1841 to 1877, and to Mowbray Morris, manager of the London newspaper during Russell's stay in America. Crawford 's selection of letters is not fully explained except by an assurance that they supplement the private diary. Why these and not others? No letters to BOOK REVIEWS263 the correspondent's long-suffering wife Mary are included, nor is an explanation offered for the absence of these or other possibly revealing sources. The diary and letters presented here are useful windows allowing one to peer into the mind of the famed and maligned (as the diary shows) British writer. In spite of the public outcry to the contrary, Russell was a stalwart for the Union cause. The Northern howl against him arose from his description of the Federal retreat from the Bull Run battlefield and from an August 10, 1861, Times article describing insufficient Union preparation for offensive warfare. Yet his diary entries show Russell referring to the Union as "our side" (September 6, 1861) and in later entries to Confederate forces as "the enemy." Russell had to remind himself that officially he was neutral; yet it is clear that he believed Northern victory essential: "The South can never be anything but a source of trouble & hostility if independent & the true policy is to let the quarrel run its course in neutrality" (November 29, 1861). The private diary also reveals the personal life of the weary reporter and, in this reader's mind, dispels the frequent aspersions by some (for example, on the book's dust jacket) that Russell was "vain and pompous." His diary shows him mixing well with Americans...