Army Of Tennessee Research Articles

Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney

Reviewed by: Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox by Caroline E. Janney Cecily Zander Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army after Appomattox. By Caroline E. Janney. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 344. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Historians have expended considerable effort in understanding how and why people go to war. Military mobilization, after all, is a topic that touches on all manner of fields—the history of ideas, politics, economics, diplomacy. What if, as historian Caroline E. Janney asks in Ends of War, historians gave the same care and attention to demobilization and to the myriad ways in which soldiers left the armies that they had once willingly (or forcibly) joined? The answer in the case of the American Civil War is that the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House was not the end of the war for thousands of soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia. The scattered and disorganized dissolution of the most important Confederate army, Janney finds, starkly revealed the devotion Confederates felt to their failed nation even after its downfall, while foreshadowing the energy that the defeated rebels poured into creating the powerful Lost Cause ideology in their telling of the war. [End Page 125] The most immediate effects of the surrender were felt in Virginia, where roads and railways were choked with defeated Confederates seeking passage home. Any soldiers not officially paroled at Appomattox were encouraged to find a provost marshal’s office and acquire a signed parole. Parole papers were especially important because they protected Confederate soldiers from being arrested or tried for treason. These documents did not, however, afford their bearers the option to pass through states that had remained loyal to the Union. This left some former rebels trapped in Virginia until the federal government clarified the conditions on which they could return home—conditions that included swearing a loyalty oath and never again wearing the uniform of the Confederate army. Not all soldiers were willing to lay down their weapons and accept a parole. Many who chose not to remain in the Old Dominion struck out for North Carolina, where they hoped to join with Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and continue their fight. Johnston’s surrender to William T. Sherman soon sundered their ambition. The final remaining option for those who would not accept a parole would be to wage a guerilla war for the survival of the Confederacy, though this quickly proved untenable; most, including the notorious raider John S. Mosby, turned themselves in to Union authorities by the end of the summer. While large numbers of former Confederates moved across the landscape, thousands of others remained stationary. For rebels who refused paroles and were captured by the United States, the war dragged on through the summer of 1865 as the Union’s best legal and military minds attempted to determine their status. It was not until President Andrew Johnson’s amnesty proclamation that Confederate prisoners of war were afforded the option to swear a loyalty oath and be allowed to return to their homes. Although more books have been written about the Civil War than almost any other subject in American history, Janney is the first to offer an examination of the legal, political, and military mire generated by the disbanding of a major army at war’s end. Not only is Ends of War destined to become a valuable resource for understanding the complex details of the transition from war to peace, but it should also become a foundational work for further study of the weeks and months between Appomattox and the beginning in earnest of Reconstruction. Joining with a chorus of scholars asking us to consider a longer Civil War, Janney’s work offers a simple premise—the war did not end at Appomattox—and with clarity and verve, she explains why the ends of war matter as much as their beginnings. [End Page 126] Cecily Zander Southern Methodist University Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood by Stephen Davis

Reviewed by: Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood by Stephen Davis Brian Craig Miller Texas Brigadier to the Fall of Atlanta: John Bell Hood. By Stephen Davis. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2019. Pp. xii, 503. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-720-8.) John Bell Hood, a prominent Confederate general during the American Civil War, has always seemed more suited for central casting than at the head of an army. Physically attractive, Hood gained fame for his meteoric rise through the ranks of the Army of Northern Virginia in 1862 and 1863 and the Army of Tennessee in 1864. Additionally, he gained notoriety among the social circles of Richmond, Virginia, during the fall of 1863, while he healed from an amputation that removed his leg only a few inches from the hip. He gained the trust of Confederate officials, from Robert E. Lee, who tasked Hood's Texans to take on numerous offensive maneuvers, to President Jefferson Davis, who gave Hood control of an army in the summer of 1864 to save the doomed city of Atlanta. In many ways, Hood seemed to be in the right place at the right time to secure his ascension through Confederate military command. Although Hood's biography has been explored on several previous occasions, author Stephen Davis, who has written extensively on the Atlanta campaign, believes a new two-volume biography of Hood is warranted because the officer deserves a fairer exploration as someone who did all he could to save the city of Atlanta. Volume 1, reviewed here, tackles Hood's childhood, his education at West Point, his service on the frontier in the 1850s, and his military command through the summer of 1864. This book's strengths are rooted in the author's exhaustive research in a cornucopia of primary sources and his strong grasp of the extensive secondary explorations of Hood's life and legacy. Additionally, Stephen Davis once again debunks wild rumors and myths about Hood, including his alleged drug and alcohol abuse that supposedly accompanied his war injuries and amputation. Unfortunately, the biography, like Hood, trips up on numerous accounts, which I will lay at the feet of both the author and his press. First, the book needs serious editing, as two chapters each run over a hundred pages in length, and the first chapter alone weighs in at 106 pages. Thus, while the biography is designed chronologically, beginning with Hood's birth in Kentucky, the unbearably lengthy chapters make it difficult to digest some new and pertinent details, from questions about where Hood had his leg amputated to questions [End Page 347] about how he ended up injured in the first place. Second, while the research is exhaustive, it is severely uneven, as some pages go by without a single citation or reference. Then, at other points, we get notes that cover several pages, with several paragraphs of information that either should be in the text itself or placed on a website for further exploration. The editors here have done a great disservice to other historians trying to glean the larger argument of the work, as many of the important elements of debate are dumped into the notes rather than made part of the text itself. When the author reaches a point of historiographical contention about Hood's career, he rarely makes his own conclusion and takes a kitchen-sink approach by laying out what every single author has said about Hood on a particular point. As the reader moves day by day and month by month through 1864, the high level of detail hides the overall significance of why Hood's failed military career matters. Finally, the author has failed to grasp the importance of the scholarship on Civil War memory, as so much of Hood's career was rooted in how he and the events surrounding him have been remembered and misremembered, and why that memory mattered so much to Hood (who took great pains to constantly correct the historical record, both during and after the war). Perhaps the author plans to take this approach in the second volume. More than likely, this review will appear after the publisher releases...

Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed by Larry J. Daniel

Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed by Larry J. Daniel

Combat Chaplain: The Life and Civil War Experience of Rev. James H. McNeilly, Army of Tennessee

More books have been written about the Civil War than any other event in American history. Of these some 60,000+ volumes, there is no shortage of diaries, biographies and studies of both legendary figures and virtual unknowns who played their unique roles in America’s most deadly war. While Lincoln books perhaps dominate the field, there is a plethora of titles on generals, unit commanders, artillerymen, infantrymen – and of late, more about key 19th century figures from wider societal perspectives. But of all the books published, perhaps some of the most ignored people, both during the Civil War and in postwar chronicling, have been the unit and regimental chaplains.

Combat Chaplain: The Life and Civil War Experiences of Rev. James H McNeilly, Army of Tennessee by M. Todd Cathey

Combat Chaplain: The Life and Civil War Experiences of Rev. James H McNeilly, Army of Tennessee by M. Todd Cathey

Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy by Earl J. Hess

Reviewed by: Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy by Earl J. Hess Andrew S. Bledsoe (bio) Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy. By Earl J. Hess. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Pp. 368. Cloth, $35.00.) Earl J. Hess's provocative new biography, Braxton Bragg: The Most Hated Man of the Confederacy, sets out to correct the historical record about the Confederacy's most controversial army commander. In taking on the South's favorite lightning rod, Hess has set a difficult task for himself. Few generals inspire as much criticism, disdain, and even outright [End Page 491] loathing as Braxton Bragg. The irascible North Carolinian's reputation for military incompetence, harsh discipline, the wanton execution of his own soldiers, and tone-deaf mismanagement of his officers dogged him during the war and has tainted him ever since. And, unlike Union luminaries such as Ulysses Grant, William Sherman, and George Thomas, all of whom have benefited from recent historiography, Bragg's defenders are a small and embattled lot, if they can be found at all. Hess is a careful historian and dutifully acknowledges Bragg's myriad shortcomings when appropriate. His verdict on Bragg is a mixed bag at best, but far from the outright condemnation of previous historians. Hess concedes that despite flashes of inspiration, Bragg made major missteps in almost every major battle and campaign. Still, Hess maintains, we have been far too unsparing in our criticisms of Bragg, and, like the general himself, Hess places much of the blame for these mistakes at the feet of Bragg's unruly subordinates and on his inept management of his public and professional image. Hess also repeatedly points out that Bragg's reputation among historians has suffered unfairly in comparison with that of other, better-regarded generals who made similar mistakes. For instance, Hess compares Bragg's serious bungling of the Confederate assault on the Hornet's Nest at Shiloh to Robert E. Lee's mistakes at Malvern Hill, complaining that "Lee was never criticized for this costly exhibition of ineptness" while Bragg faced blistering condemnation for similar errors (42). Throughout the book, Hess judiciously analyzes available evidence to overturn a number of long-held conceptions about Bragg, the most pernicious being Bragg's reputation for executing Confederate soldiers for "trivial reasons" (44). Rumors of cruelty swirled around Bragg for the rest of his career and contributed to his reputation for spitefulness and harsh discipline. Hess acknowledges that Bragg did, in fact, carry out the death sentence upon several soldiers, including a Kentucky corporal in 1862, destroying any goodwill that might have remained between Bragg and important Kentuckians like John C. Breckinridge. Hess also concedes that these killings and the unproven rumors of others began the process of breaking down public confidence in Bragg's generalship, especially among civilians who read these accounts in the papers. Yet Hess points out that Joseph E. Johnston, Bragg's successor, "was loved by his men" despite having approved "what may have been the largest execution of Confederate soldiers on a single day during the entire war" but that he, unlike Bragg, largely escaped condemnation for these killings (268). Hess chronicles Bragg's greatest successes and worst failures in detail and weaves his complex relationship with Jefferson Davis and his [End Page 492] tragicomic problems with subordinates throughout the narrative. "It is probable that no army commander of either side in the Civil War had to deal with such insubordinate corps and division commanders as did Bragg," Hess observes (279). Much has been made in the historiography of the anti-Bragg coterie among the Army of Tennessee's officer corps, and there is no doubt that the western army leadership suffered from dysfunction and infighting of Shakespearean proportions. While confessing that Bragg contributed much to the toxicity within his army's command culture, Hess blames many of these failings on Bragg's subordinates. "Bragg did not create the bad blood within the Army of Tennessee," Hess maintains. "[Leonidas] Polk did that, and he also corrupted [William] Hardee into becoming a player of his corrosive game" (279). These points about Bragg's leadership are certainly arguable, but they...

Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War by Perry D. Jamieson

Reviewed by: Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War by Perry D. Jamieson Mandy Tompkins Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War. Perry D. Jamieson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8032-2581-7, 320pp., cloth, $34.95. Part of the Great Campaigns of the Civil War series, Perry D. Jamieson’s Spring 1865: The Closing Campaigns of the Civil War relates the final campaigns of the Civil War in a concise narrative that will enable the work to be a steadfast source for anyone interested in the final months of the war. The details of the ending battles and surrenders in both the eastern and western theaters of the war will allow the average reader to easily follow the history; yet Jamieson includes enough details and valuable information that Civil War scholars will find the book useful as well. Attempting to provide a succinct history of early 1865 while also contrasting the events occurring in the two theaters of war, Jamieson acknowledges that he focuses on “planning and operations at the strategic and operational levels of warfare” rather than “tactics or more human-interest stories” (xi). His study of the operations involved from February to May 1865 displays the decisions leading generals on both sides faced and how those choices affected the overall outcome of the war. Tactics and human-interest stories are not neglected completely though, and interested readers can use Jamieson’s rich bibliography to find works that focus on these aspects. Jamieson sets the stage for the spring campaigns in chapter 1 with a summary of the winter of ‘64–’65. The siege at Petersburg along with Sherman’s march through Georgia had strongly defeated Confederate morale. Grant’s plan to combine Union forces would be the ultimate blow to Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. The next two chapters narrate the Union capture of Fort Fisher and Wilmington and the beginning stages of late warfare in the Carolinas. Jamieson does an accurate job showing the “incompetency” of Braxton Bragg as well as the events leading up to Lee’s decision to replace P. G. T. Beauregard with Joseph Johnston as commander of [End Page 334] the Army of Tennessee (29, 44). Many people believe that the Confederacy lost the war because of defeated morale and low numbers, but by discussing the struggles of the Confederate leadership, Jamieson acknowledges a factor sometimes forgotten. Chapter 4 focuses on Confederate issues at Bentonville before Jamieson switches to the eastern theater, the siege at Petersburg, and Lee’s first idea of combining forces with Joseph Johnston (93). The remaining chapters narrate the final battles of the Army of Northern Virginia and Robert E. Lee’s movement away from Petersburg to the west, ending at Appomattox Court House. With a daily decreasing number of troops under Lee’s command, Jamieson shows that Ulysses S. Grant’s pursuit would ultimately lead to a surrender. The final two chapters discuss the other Confederate surrenders, including the largest one, at Durham Station when Johnston surrendered to William Sherman (199). Ending with the smaller surrenders further west, Jamieson does a good job of wrapping up the final events of the American Civil War. Writing about such a large geographic area and several months of the war might prove daunting for some, but Jamieson manages to recount the events in an easy-to-follow account. Historians looking for extensive tactical details and intensive battle descriptions may not find the book extremely helpful, but it could be a great source to help them review the overall details of the campaigns. Other readers not interested in maneuvers and battle plans will still find the work useful as a way to more fully understand “how an unimaginably painful, and extremely crucial, American war came to an end” (xii). One of the main ideas Jamieson conveys throughout his work is how the choices generals, both Union and Confederate, made greatly affected the outcome of the war. The mistakes made at Fort Fisher, Confederate errors at Bentonville and the lack of communication between Beauregard and Jefferson Davis enabled Sherman to capture places such as Columbia and Fayetteville. Another important aspect the author focuses...

Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863 ed. by Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword (review)

Reviewed by: Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863 ed. by Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword Jonathan A. Noyalas Gateway to the Confederacy: New Perspectives on the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns, 1862–1863. Ed. Evan C. Jones and Wiley Sword. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8071-5509-7, 328 pp., cloth, $39.95 As Gen. Braxton Bragg’s army retreated from Chattanooga on November 25, 1863, Lt. R. M. Collins, 15th Texas Infantry, told a comrade that the defeat would prove “the death knell of the Confederacy.” Collins’s remarks proved prophetic, as Union success at Chattanooga opened the Deep South to Union invasion, the pressures from which contributed mightily to the Confederacy’s collapse. While historians such as Steven Woodworth, Peter Cozzens, and Wiley Sword have produced splendid studies of various aspects of the operations for Chattanooga, this volume serves as a useful reminder that much still remains to be explored. Evan Jones and Wiley Sword have assembled a fine group of scholars who in ten essays attempt “to address vacuums in the relevant literature” and “consider aspects of the battles and their aftermath that have received little, if any, previous attention” (6). Russell Bonds opens the volume with a superbly crafted essay about Chattanooga’s strategic importance as a crucial rail center and avenue of invasion. He also offers an engrossing examination of how the Confederacy could not survive militarily without control of the area’s significant natural resources used in the manufacture of such important items as percussion caps, gunpowder, and cannon barrels. Five of the volume’s essays examine various aspects of leadership. Gerald Prokopowicz examines Gen. Don Carlos Buell, who has long been scrutinized for his inability to capture Chattanooga in 1862. Prokopowicz presents compelling evidence that a variety of factors, such as logistical problems, transportation issues, and interference [End Page 466] from Gen. Henry Halleck complicated Buell’s efforts. Similarly, William Glenn Robertson illustrates that while Confederate general Leonidas K. Polk has long been lambasted for the delay in the Confederate attack at Chickamauga on September 20, 1863, and Union general Thomas Wood has been held singularly responsible for the opening of a gap in the Union line, evidence shows these indictments to be unfair. Robertson clearly illustrates that other factors, including the function of army staff officers and procedures deserve some of the blame for both errors. Moving away from exoneration, David Powell challenges the idea promulgated for decades that Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest was an “authentic genius” (60). While Powell is clear to point out that by 1864 Forrest had matured as a general, he argues that the man many regarded as a hero at Chickamauga should instead be viewed, at least in the context of autumn 1863, as immature, unable to execute orders, and unaware of how to properly gather intelligence. The final two essays on leadership constitute an insightful investigation of relationships. Craig Symonds addresses the issues of dysfunction among Bragg and his subordinate commanders and how President Jefferson Davis, despite a visit to Bragg’s command in the autumn of 1863, failed to do anything to solidify the command structure in the Army of Tennessee. Evan Jones examines another strained relationship—the feud between Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Rosecrans. Jones’s balanced assessment, while it places much of the blame on Grant for Rosecrans’s military demise, ably shows how other factors, such as the efforts of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, coupled with Rosecrans’s own missteps both during and after the conflict relegated him to “a footnote in American history” (217). David Powell’s second contribution presents an examination of how the Army of the Cumberland became the most innovative Union force as it became the first to experiment with the use of new weapons, battlefield tactics, and staff structures—things which helped influence ultimate Union victory. Wiley Sword proffers his musings on what Union victory at Chattanooga meant to the war’s outcome. Sword examines how that Union success opened the gateway to the Deep South and ably chronicles how the campaign depleted Confederate manpower and prompted the Confederacy to...

Finding Captain Dickson: The Archivist as a Researcher

Item-level description is a luxury few archivists can afford to indulge in as processing has adopted the MPLP model and eliminating backlogs has become a clarion call. But there are instances when only research done by the archivist will allow the significance of a document to be recognized and no longer hidden in a collection. An account of an incident before the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga written by Mississippi soldier Captain Thomas Hyde Dickson is one example of why there is still a place for item-level description and how the role of archivist as researcher is critical to making collections more accessible. Article Processing manuscript collections calls upon a number of skills of the archivist, such as organization, description, cataloging and research. In this era of “more product, less process,” archivists are not encouraged to dig too deeply into collections to understand them better, or to spend time identifying items of potential importance. But, occasionally, a document catches our attention, perhaps serendipitously, or because its content makes it shine like a gold nugget in a prospector’s pan, encouraging the archivist to find out a little more in order to bring the subject or creator to life, or simply to explain its presence in the collection. One example is an account of an incident which occurred days before the Civil War Battle of Chickamauga in early September 1863 witnessed by Captain Thomas Dickson of the 9 Mississippi Infantry Regiment, which was discovered while working in Special Collections at Mississippi State University Libraries. Written in pencil with corrections in ink on nine crumbling sheets of paper, Dickson’s account was found in the papers of Brodie S. Crump, a columnist for the Delta Democrat-Times newspaper in Greenville from 1946 to 1980. Clearly Crump thought it important enough to save but there was no information on who Dickson was or how Crump obtained it. The piece is striking because it relates what happened to the regiment as Confederate General Braxton Bragg maneuvered his Army of Tennessee in northern Georgia after its withdrawal from Chattanooga as Union General William Rosecrans’ Army of the Cumberland moved east. Rosecrans divided his forces and one division crossed Lookout Mountain and was nearly trapped in McLemore’s Cove on September 11 by the brigade which included Dickson’s regiment. Unfortunately, Confederate caution and miscommunication among the commanders let the opportunity slip away and the exhausted Confederate forces in the cove crossed Pigeon Mountain that night to regroup at La Fayette. A week later the two sides would meet at Chickamauga. The following is a transcription of Dickson’s account and the first page of the document can be seen in Figure 2 below. 1 MSS.654. Brodie S. Crump family papers, Box 3, Folder 9. 2 The causes of the lost opportunity at McLemore’s Cove have been extensively debated by historians. See Woodworth, Steven E. (1999), No Band of Brothers: Problems in the Rebel High Command, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, chapter 6; Woodworth, Stephen E. (ed.) (2010), The Chickamauga Campaign, Carbondale, Il.: Southern Illinois University Press, chapters 2 & 3; Robertson, William G. (Spring 2007), “The Chickamauga Campaign: McLemore’s Cove: Rosecrans’ Gamble, Bragg’s Lost Opportunity”, Blue & Gray Magazine, 23:6, 6-26, 42-50; Cozzens, Peter (1992), This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, Urbana, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 74-75; Martin, Samuel J. (2011), General Braxton Bragg, C.S.A., Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 475. The Primary Source, Vol. 34, Issue 1 1

The Chattanooga Campaign by Ed. Steven E. Woodworth, Charles D. Grear (review)

Reviewed by: The Chattanooga Campaign by Ed. Steven E. Woodworth, Charles D. Grear Carl C. Creason The Chattanooga Campaign. Ed. Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8093-3119-2, 256pp., cloth, $29.95. In April 2009, the Southern Illinois University Press began publication of the Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland series, a collection of works focused on providing fresh interpretations and analyses of the most important battles and campaigns in the West. Two books have already been released—The Shiloh Campaign 2009 and The Chickamauga Campaign 2010—and this latest volume continues the trend by providing a quality and substantial study of a decisive campaign that occurred during the third year of the war. The Chattanooga Campaign consists of ten chapter-length essays written by several previous contributors to the series. In the opening chapter, Alex Mendoza describes a “perfect storm of ineffectiveness” that plagued the First Corps, Army of Northern Virginia’s leadership in late October 1863 (18). By directing equal responsibility to Longstreet’s brigade and division commanders, Mendoza corrects the misconception that James Longstreet alone should receive blame for the Confederate defeat in Lookout Valley. Stewart Bennett’s essay focuses on the fighting in Lookout Valley as well; however, his essay details the battle through a Union lens. Although the “small [End Page 218] yet intense fights within Lookout Valley”—Wauhatchie, Smith’s Hill, and Tyndale’s Hill—have been overshadowed by the fighting on Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, Bennett’s essay establishes their significance in setting the stage for a Union victory during the campaign (48). On November 24, 1863, Ulysses S. Grant, the newly appointed commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, initiated his plan to drive the Confederates from their positions surrounding Chattanooga. The chapters authored by Steven E. Woodworth and John R. Lundberg examine William T. Sherman’s assault on Tunnel Hill, which served as the primary attack against the Confederate right on Missionary Ridge. Similar to the first two chapters, these explore the fighting from opposing perspectives—Woodworth probes Sherman’s assault and Lundberg surveys Patrick Cleburne’s defense. Both authors view Tunnel Hill as a tactical achievement by Cleburne, who remained proactive and utilized the terrain to his advantage. Correctly described in the introduction as “a tour de force of historical investigation,” Brooks D. Simpson’s essay scrutinizes the documented accounts of events that transpired on November 25, 1863 (3). Ultimately, Simpson determines two significant details regarding Union strategy that day. First, Sherman’s advance against Tunnel Hill remained the primary Union attack—not a diversion to draw Confederate troops away from the center, and second, the Union attack against the center of Missionary Ridge “was always part of the discussion, not a spur-of-the-moment decision undertaken in haste” (100). On November 24, 1863, Joseph Hooker obtained personal redemption by capturing Lookout Mountain for the Union army. As Sam Davis Elliot indicates, historians—and even Hooker himself—have viewed the capture as the commander’s greatest contribution during the campaign. Elliot’s essay argues that Hooker’s capture of Rossville Gap on the following day, which “had the potential for much greater results” than the capture of Lookout Mountain, proved equally significant (127). Justin S. Solonick’s essay examines Cleburne’s victory on November 27, 1863, at the Battle of Ringgold Gap, where once again the commander employed battlefield terrain to his advantage, this time to save Braxton Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Solonick’s essay also serves as an important assessment of the effectiveness of Civil War rearguards, units the author justifies as having “contributed to the longevity of the American Civil War” (147). In a study of Civil War–era media, Ethan S. Rafuse analyzes the coverage of events from the Union defeat at Chickamauga to their victory on Missionary Ridge within three Cincinnati newspapers. The newspapers “fulfilled their role of providing a connection between the battlefield and the home front well” (177). Charles D. Grear’s provocative scholarship on the increase of desertions by trans-Mississippi Confederates serves as an important study of the priorities and motivations of Civil War combatants. For many...

A Soldier to the Last: Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler in Blue and Gray (review)

Reviewed by: A Soldier to the Last: Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler in Blue and Gray Keith S. Bohannon A Soldier to the Last: Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler in Blue and Gray. By Edward G. Longacre. (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007. Pp. 288. Cloth, $29.95.) Despite Joseph Wheeler's significance as a cavalry commander in the Civil War's western theater, he has not been the subject of a book-length biography since John P. Dyer's "Fightin' Joe" Wheeler appeared in 1941. Edward Longacre's new biography focuses on "Fighting Joe's" career in the Confederate army and the U.S. Army in the Spanish-American War. Longacre, the author of numerous books on cavalry operations in the eastern theater of the Civil War, offers a largely objective analysis of Wheeler's military service. Joseph Wheeler has been a controversial figure among historians who write about the Confederate army of Tennessee. Some, including Thomas Connelly and Peter Cozzens, have been harshly critical. Others, such as Albert Castel and David Evans, believe he was a capable and experienced officer. [End Page 534] Wheeler, a West Point graduate who saw service in the U.S. Dragoons and Mounted Rifles before the Civil War, experienced a meteoric rise in rank during his first eighteen months in the Confederate army. After serving as an artillery lieutenant and commanding an infantry regiment at Shiloh, Wheeler led a cavalry brigade in the 1862 Kentucky campaign. During the withdrawal of Gen. Braxton Bragg's troops from Kentucky in October 1862, Wheeler and his men successfully defended the rear of the retreating southern army. Bragg, who admired Wheeler's abilities and professional demeanor, promoted the twenty-six-year-old Georgian to command the cavalry corps of the Army of the Mississippi, later the Army of Tennessee. Longacre rightfully argues that Wheeler was at his best when defending the rear of the Confederate army during its numerous withdrawals under Bragg and Johnston. Wheeler's offensive record, particularly while leading raids behind enemy lines, was mixed. (Longacre notes that Wheeler's last truly successful raid took place in April 1863.) In his introduction, Longacre claims that Wheeler did a "creditable job" keeping Bragg and his successors informed of enemy positions, movements, and intentions. The author subsequently contradicts himself by pointing out occasions during the Tullahoma, Chickamauga, and Atlanta campaigns when Wheeler's failures resulted in the Army of Tennessee being placed in dire situations. Longacre makes little effort to gauge Wheeler's popular image during either the Civil War or much later in life, when he participated in the Lost Cause celebrations of the Confederacy. Wheeler clearly didn't instill the same level of devotion in his troops as did other Confederate cavalry generals, especially Nathan Bedford Forrest, but Longacre touches only briefly on this issue. He claims that Wheeler's service in the Spanish-American War "came to overshadow his accomplishments in gray, making him . . . a hero to the entire nation," but provides scant evidence to support this assertion (xiii). While Longacre's footnotes and bibliography reflect the use of numerous manuscript collections and significant published primary and secondary sources, there are several glaring omissions. The author left untouched the antebellum U.S. Army records at the National Archives, which would have fleshed out the pre–Civil War phase of Wheeler's career and cleared up some of Longacre's questions and suppositions. Longacre also never cites Wheeler's Confederate compiled service records. He makes liberal use of the Official Records but rarely cites the printed General Orders of the Cavalry Corps or the Wheeler Papers at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. He apparently did not examine the holdings at Pond Spring, the Wheeler [End Page 535] Home in Courtland, Alabama. These oversights and others suggest that while Longacre's A Soldier to the Last is a welcome addition to the literature on Joseph Wheeler, it is far from a definitive study of "Fighting Joe." Keith S. Bohannon University of West Georgia, Carrollton, Georgia Copyright © 2009 The Kent State University Press

Our Trust is in the God of Battles: The Civil War Letters of Robert Franklin Bunting, Chaplain, Terry’s Texas Rangers, C. S. A (review)

Reviewed by: Our Trust is in the God of Battles: The Civil War Letters of Robert Franklin Bunting, Chaplain, Terry’s Texas Rangers, C. S. A Arthur R. Carmody Jr. Our Trust is in the God of Battles: The Civil War Letters of Robert Franklin Bunting, Chaplain, Terry’s Texas Rangers, C. S. A. Edited by Thomas Cutrer. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006. ISBN 978-1-57233-458-8. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xxxiii, 436. $45.00. This book tells the story of Terry’s Texas Rangers, officially known as the Eighth Texas Cavalry Regiment, an all-volunteer group of horsemen who served with Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, as seen through the eyes of their chaplain, Rev. R. F. Bunting. The editor, Thomas W. Cutrer, is a professor of American Studies at Arizona State University and an expert on the history of the western frontier. The tale that emerges from this collection of letters is all the more interesting in that their author, Chaplain Bunting, was born in Pennsylvania, possessed of a degree in theology from Princeton University, and married into a deeply abolitionist Ohio family. It would appear that Bunting fell in love with Texas early on in his [End Page 1339] career. At his request he was ordained “as an evangelist to Texas,” where for a time he did God’s work founding churches in the wilderness, before accepting the call to San Antonio. 1860 found him preaching to the largest Presbyterian congregation in the state. In the autumn of 1861, Bunting left the pulpit to serve as chaplain to Terry’s Texas Rangers. The regiment was the creation of Ben F. Terry, a successful south Texas planter and his friend Thomas Lubbock, a veteran of the War for Texas Independence. It was not part of the Texas Rangers who enforced the law on the frontier. Comprised of 1,000 volunteers, the regiment was first destined for service with Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia—Terry and Lubbock had briefly served as couriers for Longstreet’s command during the First Battle of Manassas—but en route to the Eastern theater, the Rangers were seconded to Gen. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee, where they served for a time under the command of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. Col. Terry, their commander, was killed in action in Kentucky in December 1861. The Rangers fought in all the major battles in the theater—Shiloh, Stone’s River, Chickamauga, the battle for Atlanta—and retreated with the Confederate army east and then north in the face of Gen. Sherman’s advance. In March of 1865 the Rangers formed as a regiment and made a last and successful charge against Sherman’s infantry at Bentonville, North Carolina. After Appomattox, the some 250 men who remained out of the original 1,000 made their way back to Texas. All of this was reported in Chaplain Bunting’s letters. The chaplain appears to have been the clerical equivalent of the Virginia “fire-eater,” Edmund Ruffin. When Col. Terry was killed, the chaplain exhorted the Rangers to “avenge his death upon the cowardly hirelings who would desolate our homes and destroy our sunny South, subjugate a heroic people, and perpetually enslave them for daring to be free men.” When the tide turned against the South, Bunting wrote that “There is a cause for all this…We have forgotten Him. We were looking for other sources of aid. Our rulers were anticipating foreign alliances.” Throughout the fighting, the chaplain continued to hold services every Sunday and noted that all the Rangers attended “save about a dozen who were heavily engaged in gambling.” He also lamented that there is “too much peach brandy in evidence and all are getting tight.” As the war wound down, Bunting was ready to urge drastic measures to save the Confederacy. In a letter to a Texas newspaper in February 1865, he made a case for enrolling blacks in the Confederate army, arguing that there were few reserves left, the war was being lost, and the “duty to ourselves, to the Negro, to the civilization of the continent, demands of us the immediate arming of our...

Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas (review)

Reviewed by: Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas Aaron Sheehan-Dean Inside the Confederate Nation: Essays in Honor of Emory M. Thomas. Edited by Lesley J. Gordon and John C. Inscoe. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 381.) This collection of essays honoring Civil War historian Emory Thomas reflects the topical range of his scholarship and social impact of his career. The book includes essays by former students, departmental colleagues, and fellow Civil War historians, an unusually broad assembly for a Festschrift. The themes that unite the essays–nationalism, gender, race, and memory–demonstrate the capaciousness with which Thomas approached his study of the war, and that he imparted to students and friends alike. Because of the brevity of these essays (most around twenty pages with notes), they are not all persuasive, but the strongest pieces in the collection build upon the central issues of Thomas's most important works on the Confederacy: the relationship between the state and nation and the proper way to characterize the Confederate experience and its legacy. As the volume's editors make clear, Thomas's writings put him firmly on the side of those who argue for change instead of continuity in southern history. For Thomas, the Civil War represented a fundamental disruption in southern life, evinced principally in the changes wrought upon state structure and policies. The essays here reinforce that interpretation, stressing the novel and unpredictable changes that war-making wrought upon southern life. David McGee and Brian Wills convey the early character of those changes in evaluations of North Carolina and Virginia respectively. Their essays, like Keith Bohannon's on reenlistments in the Army of Tennessee, stress the effectiveness of the Confederate and state governments at reorganizing their societies to wage war. Phillip Dillard's study of responses to the effort to enlist slaves in Confederate armies demonstrates that decisive policy shifts could produce divisions within the South, as Virginians endorsed and Texans rejected the policy of arming bondsmen. Essays by Frank Byrne, [End Page 114] Rod Andrew, and Christopher Phillips offer finer-grained studies of exactly what constituted the new Confederate identity. Byrne's exploration of the writings of D. R. Hundley and John B. Jones reveals the centrality of race and religion. Andrew's insightful analysis of the 1863 congressional elections in Georgia reveals the depth of pro-nationalistic thinking alongside a vigorous anti-Jefferson Davis movement. Phillips's essay chronicles the postwar repudiation of Unionist identity in Kentucky and Missouri where white citizens, angry over wartime emancipation, reattached themselves to a southern identity that was itself born from the Confederate experience. A quartet of essays by Jean Friedman, Lesley Gordon, Jennifer Gross, and John Inscoe demonstrate the profitability of investigating nationalism from the ground up. In particular, these essays reveal that men and women formed their associations to the Confederacy through their relationships with one another. Friedman's and Gordon's essays show how individuals worked out their attitudes toward the war, their region, and their government through give-and-take within their families. Gross and Inscoe uncover the tensions within the Confederacy, exploring the problem of state aid for widows and orphans and public reactions to Stoneman's 1865 raid in western North Carolina. Class concerns intersected with gender in unusual ways during the war, and both scholars demonstrate that poorer southern women pushed back against the efforts of social elites to define the policies and memories of the postwar South. A final series of essays, including pieces by Joseph Glatthaar, Clarence Mohr, Thomas Dyer, and Nina Silber show the difficulty of characterizing the Confederacy in the postwar period. Glatthaar and Mohr both focus on the ambivalence of Union efforts to use black men during the war. Dyer shows the unpredictable landscape that greeted African Americans in the South after the war. Silber's essay explores how Charles Francis Adams glorified the image of Robert E. Lee after the war as a way to argue against the greed, violence, and rapaciousness that characterized late-nineteenth-century America. The prospect of a New Englander using the memory of a "southern gentleman" to challenge the vigorous nationalism of the rising American...

The Great Confederate Debate

On a frigid, sleety evening in January 1864, in the hills of north Georgia where the Confederate Army of Tennessee was encamped for the winter, the highestranking officers of the army convened for a meeting. It had been called at the behest of Maj. Gen. Patrick R. Cleburne. Before his fellow officers, Cleburne read a lengthy prepared statement putting forth a startling recommendation. Given the desperate military predicament of the Confederacy, he said, and particularly the enemy's preponderance of numbers, the Rebel army should enlist slaves to fight in its ranks. The reactions of the assembled generals ranged from enthusiastic assent to incredulity and outrage. When word of the meeting and the proposal reached Richmond, President Jefferson Davis not only rejected the idea but also ordered that the subject be dropped and never discussed again in the army. Ten months later, however, with the Confederacy's prospects looking even bleaker, Davis himself resurrected the proposal and put it before the Confederate people and Congress. For the next few months, as the Rebel nation tottered toward defeat, the question of arming slaves to fight for the Confederacy dominated that nation's public discourse. Politicians, newspaper editors, soldiers of all ranks, and civilians of all stations debated it earnestly and often heatedly. This episode is well known to Civil War historians, but until now it has not been fully explored. What Bruce Levine offers is the first investigation of this complex and fascinating subject that thoroughly considers its genesis, its outcome, and its meaning.1 The issue shook the Confederate nation to its core because black enlistment was linked, both in Cleburne's proposal and Davis's, with black emancipation in some form. As nearly all professional historians of the Civil War today affirm-including Levine himself-the Confederacy's founders created their nation primarily to preserve and protect slavery. Thus, talk of emancipation challenged the very heart and soul of the Rebel cause.

Nothing but Victory: The Army of Tennessee, 1861-1865

Nothing but Victory: The Army of Tennessee, 1861-1865

The Blues in Gray: The Civil War Journal of William Daniel Dixon and the Republican Blues Daybook

Unlike Confederate units formed during the Civil War, the Republican Blues had been an existing militia organization in Savannah, Georgia, for over fifty years -- a professional fighting unit rather than an assemblage of ragtag volunteers. The Blues had served under the U.S. flag before taking up arms against it, and after the war they continued their existence in the National Guard of the reunited nation. The Blues in Gray combines the unit's daybook with the journal of company commander William Dixon to offer a day-by-day account of many facets of the war, from the drudgery of garrison duty to the horror of the battlefield. Roger Durham has interwoven the documents to provide fresh insights from a theater of the war seldom noted by historians. The Republican Blues spent three years on the Georgia coast, where they came under seven naval attacks at Fort McAllister before joining the Army of Tennessee to defend northern Georgia against Sherman. Dixon's journal allows us to follow the course of the war and share his correspondence with family and friends, while the daybook lets us observe the unit's administration. The volume also offers unusual revelations about the final months of the war, including a moving account of the retreat of Hood's army from Nashville, where barefooted soldiers left bloody footprints in the snow. With its vivid glimpses of Civil War life in both camp and combat, The Blues in Gray provides a Confederate soldier's view of the entire conflict -- not just a segment of service -- and a rich new source of primary material. More importantly, it breaks through the stereotype of Johnny Reb to show us the trials and triumphs of professional military men in theSouth.

Book Review: Training, Tactics, and Leadership in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Seeds of Failure

Book Review: Training, Tactics, and Leadership in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Seeds of Failure

Training, Tactics and Leadership in the Confederate Army of Tennessee: Seeds of Failure

Training, Tactics and Leadership in the Confederate Army of Tennessee: Seeds of Failure

Training, Tactics and Leadership in the Confederate Army of Tennessee

Training, Tactics and Leadership in the Confederate Army of Tennessee

Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks (review)

258CIVIL WAR HISTORY The book has much to recommend it. The author has done a very good job of sifting through the various regulations issued by the Confederate government dealing with the issue of staffs and shows clearly how theory quickly parted company with actual practice. Bartholomees's organizational approach overthe book's first five chapters is well taken, as it gives us a clear picture of a staff's organization and the duties of each staff officer. This is particularly important when it comes to the major task each of these officers was to some degree engaged in, namely the day-to-day administering of the army's needs. In addition, the author covers staffs at every level, from the lowest (brigade) to the highest (army). The book does have its share of flaws, especially concerning the research. Bartholomees admits in the preface that he limited his research to printed sources and secondary works. Even a short trip to North Carolina, where the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina and the Duke University Library are conveniently located within driving distance ofeach other, would have yielded much useful material. Particularly important are Sandie Pendleton's letters and Francis Dawson's papers, to name but a few. A look at WilliamWhann Mackall's papers would have allowed some briefcomparisons with the Army of Tennessee. The flaws in the research impact the book most in the chapters on staff authority and relations with the commander and the staff in battle. Bartholomees may have underestimated the role that corps staffs played in Robert E. Lee's selection of corps commanders to replace first Jackson, then later Longstreet, Stuart, and Ewell. A speculative argument to this effect can be made plausibly from the contemporary evidence. As for the staff in battle, Bartholomees tends to rely heavily on some very dubious sources, especially Henry Kyd Douglas's memoirs and those of Heros von Borcke, who truly deserves the title of the Confederate Baron von Miinchhausen. Bartholomees opens his book with the caveat that this is not for the casual reader. For the well read student of the Army of Northern Virginia, however, this book is a must, despite its flaws. R. L. DiNardo Quantico, Virginia Pretense of Glory: The Life of General Nathaniel P. Banks. By James G. Hollandsworth Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1098. Pp. xiv, 292. $34-95) He did not have a formal education or family connections. He did not have a personal fortune. Yet he became a major politician, serving first in the Massachusetts legislature and then as governor before serving in the U.S. Congress for ten terms. In Congress Nathaniel P. Banks (18 16-1884), originally a Democrat , broke with his party over the issue of slavery and its expansion. Notably, he voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1 854, even though Democratic party leaders insisted that all party members vote for the measure as a show of BOOK REVIEWS 259 loyalty. Banks did more than bolt the party; he endorsed the antislavery doctrine , later joining the Republican party. In a close vote, Banks became the speaker ofthe U.S. House in 1856 and thus was thrust into the national spotlight in the critical years just before the Civil War. His election signaled the first national victory for the Republican party. He considered a presidential run in 1856 but ultimately did not seek the top post; instead he threw his support to John C. Fremont, who lost to James Buchanan. Further, Banks's job as speaker was terminated, for the Democrats regained control of the House. Banks left the House to run for governor of Massachusetts, an election he won. However, he was getting a reputation as a man who placed expediency over principle. He waffled on too many issues. After accepting a lucrative offer from William H. Osborn, president ofthe Illinois Central Railroad, Banks moved to Chicago in i860, only to see the Civil War begin just months later. Wanting to gain political support for the war, President Abraham Lincoln offered Banks a commission as major general. Only three other Union generals outranked Banks, who even outranked Gen. U.S. Grant until...