Review - "United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration" by R. Gregory Lande

[United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration by R. Gregory Lande (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:vii,219/253. ISBN:978-1-4766-9584-6. $39.95]

R. Gregory Lande's United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration is a descriptive and quantitative survey of cases prosecuted by the judicial arm of the Union military services.

Though the process employed in creating a statistically significant sample is not fully detailed, there is enough explanation in the author's introduction to leave the reader confident that the sample is representational in composition. At 5,000 cases, its size is certainly impressive. Sample breadth includes cases involving regular and volunteer officers and enlisted men of all three major services (Army, Navy, and Marine Corps), medical personnel, black and white servicemen, and individuals from every state. Proportions also strike one as being suitably representative, with largest sample contingents hailing from the states of New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and the majority of army cases involving infantrymen followed in descending order by cavalry, artillery, and engineer defendants.

There are a lot of criticisms leveled against how military justice was handled during the Civil War, but Lande sympathetically reminds us that the American military courts, being tasked with maintaining the delicate balance between keeping the overall discipline and effectiveness of the Union Army from unraveling while also respecting the cherished civil rights of its individualistic volunteer citizen-soldiers, had a very difficult job to perform. After providing a very brief big-picture summary of court-martial law and practices, the book is organized around four major groupings of common offenses. Naturally, those sections begin with the two most prevalent charges, unauthorized absences of various kinds and alcohol-related offenses, the former encompassing "desertion, absence without leave (AWOL), leaving a duty area without permission, overstaying a pass, failure to repair, and straggling" (pg. 28). Military charges associated with the third group of charges—the "violent misconduct" explored in Chapter 4—include "assault, murder, mutinous conduct, rape and other sexual crimes, threats of violence, marauding, manslaughter, maltreatment, pillage, plunder, and torture" (pg. 129). The final chapter is reserved for the "subordinate military crimes," among them theft, forgery, consequential criticisms, malingering, gambling, and medical malfeasance, that were prosecuted by general courts-martial on a less frequent basis.

Each of the above chapters, and their subsections where applicable, start with numbers analysis of each charge's sample prevalence among the three major services. Conviction rates are also highlighted. Case summaries, ranging in length from just a few paragraphs to several pages, form the bulk of each chapter. These collections of examples drawn from the sample group demonstrate to readers the range of offenses within a given category along with insights into prosecutorial practices, defense strategies, types of sentences, post-conviction reviews, and trial misconduct. In places Lande also engages with the published scholarship, pointing out where his findings agree with or clash against the work of earlier researchers. Rather than being placed in footnotes or endnotes, the volume's source notes are embedded within the main text.

By representing all three services in his sample, Lande sheds light upon a number of noteworthy interservice differences among both court processes and prosecuted offenses. For example, in addition to its own officers, the U.S. Navy employed civilian lawyers and U.S. attorneys in their cases while all Army courts-martial were conducted solely by uniformed officers (the suggestion being that the Navy was more progressive in its legal processes). Data on specific offenses also frequently points toward stark differences between the services. In just one example, the large preponderance of unauthorized absence convictions for army officers were for AWOL offenses with desertion a distant second, while the direct opposite was the case for naval officers. Some of the widest interservice disparities defy easy explanation, and, in those cases, one wishes the author had more often attempted to explore possible reasons behind them.

While differences ranging from slight to truly striking abound between the services, there were significant commonalities, one being the shared preponderance of multiple charges attached to most Army, Navy, and Marine Corps court-martial cases. Another was the similarly high conviction rate (guilty verdicts were roughly 84 percent in the Marine Corps, a bit lower than the Army's nearly 88 percent and the Navy's 91 percent). Also, for many offenses, it was often generally the case that sentences increased in severity as the war progressed.

The volume ends rather abruptly, without a summary or conclusion chapter within which the author might have shared his own general thoughts on how effectively United States military courts enforced and maintained armed forces discipline. Given all the labor and thought that Lande has devoted to the subject, it would have been interesting to read his own views in regard to whether the evidence supports longstanding criticisms that Civil War-era court-martial practices and outcomes were too arbitrary in dispensing justice and unnecessarily draconian in their punishments. Even without that, though, the volume still serves as a very useful survey and reference guide to the numbers and practices involved in the Civil War military justice system.

Booknotes: Sherman's Other Army

New Arrival:

• Sherman's Other Army: The Second Army of the Ohio 1863-1865 by Michael J. Klinger (Little Miami Pub, 2023).

The first iteration of the Union Army of the Ohio (1861-62) was dissolved during the major transition period between the mixed results of the 1862 Kentucky Campaign causing its commander, Don Carlos Buell, to fall out of favor and the appointment of William S. Rosecrans to lead the successor Army of the Cumberland. In anticipation of the long-awaited (and frequently aborted) campaign to seize control of East Tennessee, the Army of the Ohio was revived in 1863 under the leadership of Ambrose Burnside. Its infantry strength was composed of Ninth and Twenty-Third Corps, though Burnside was forced to await the return of the former from Vicksburg.

Earl Hess authored the most recent (and only major) military account of the Confederate campaign to reverse Burnside's achievements in the region and just this year a fine study of Union cavalry operations in East Tennessee was published inside Dennis Belcher's The Cavalry of the Army of the Ohio: A Civil War History, but we still do not have a single volume designed to represent a comprehensive history of the Army of the Ohio's successful capture of Knoxville in 1863 and occupation of the region surrounding it. Michael Klinger's Sherman's Other Army: The Second Army of the Ohio 1863-1865 is not that book, but it does devote a significant portion of its just under 300-page narrative to those operations.

After describing the 1863 organization of the second Army of the Ohio, Klinger recounts the aforementioned operations in East Tennessee, the army's integral role in the 1864 Atlanta Campaign, and the Twenty-Third Corps's part in both the Franklin/Nashville Campaign and 1865 denouement in North Carolina. In our brief email exchange, the author hinted that his book contains some unique observations related to Spring Hill and Franklin.

The volume is heavily illustrated. Klinger reproduces from other publications a large collection of battle maps, encompassing actions both large and small. Two organizational tables are provided, and period and modern photographs are sprinkled about. Bibliography and chapter notes feature published primary and secondary sources, marking the study type as one of synthesis.

Released last year, Sherman's Other Army is only available direct from the linked publisher plus a few select outlets. I can't find the email to confirm, but I seem to recall that the author told me that copies can be obtained from one or more of the relevant NPS bookstores.

Booknotes: Robert E. Lee’s Reluctant Warrior

New Arrival:

• Robert E. Lee’s Reluctant Warrior: The Life of Cavalry Commander and Railroad Businessman, Brigadier General Williams Carter Wickham by Sheridan R. Barringer (Fox Run Pub, 2024).

I'm not sure how close we are filling out the full roster of modern biographies associated with Lee's cavalry brigade commanders, but retired NASA engineer Sheridan Barringer has spent the past decade doing his part to fill in the remaining gaps. His prolific work commenced with 2016's Fighting for General Lee: Confederate General Rufus Barringer and the North Carolina Cavalry Brigade, and that was followed by Custer's Gray Rival: The Life of Confederate Major General Thomas Lafayette Rosser (2019) and Unhonored Service: The Life of Lee's Senior Cavalry Commander, Colonel Thomas Taylor Munford, CSA (2022). His latest contribution is Robert E. Lee’s Reluctant Warrior: The Life of Cavalry Commander and Railroad Businessman, Brigadier General Williams Carter Wickham.

Wickham's extensive public life embraced military service, politics, and postwar industry. From the description: "Williams Carter Wickham fought bravely for the south as a Confederate cavalry officer, finishing the war as a brigadier general. He also steadfastly opposed secession, believing that it was illegal. From a prominent Virginia family, he was a natural leader in the field and, late in the war, Confederate Congress. He rose from the rank of captain and after the war broke with his fellow generals by joining the Republican Party, urging compliance with Reconstruction. He became an organizer of railroad improvements and expansion, becoming leader of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and served in the Virginia State Senate."

In similar vein to the Munford book that preceded it, Barringer's Wickham study is a full biography. Though naturally the bulk of the book deals with Wickham's Civil War military career, additional chapters address his family history, early life, postwar activities, and death in 1888. The book has nine maps covering Wickham's battlefield exploits from First Bull Run through to his late-war entry into politics. During his active service he was elected to the Confederate Congress, and Wickham left the army (his resignation having been officially accepted in early November 1864) to take up his seat.

Booknotes: High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac

New Arrival:

• High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor by Edwin P. Rutan II (Kent St UP, 2024).

It is a common enough suggestion in both the popular and scholarly literature that the Union Army of the Potomac's late-war volunteers were highly mercenary in motive (taking advantage of the high enlistment bounties offered by local, state, and federal governments) and far more prone to shirking and deserting than their presumably more patriotically motivated veteran comrades. When they did go on the offensive against Lee's hardened veterans in 1864-65 they were so unreliable that they were next to useless—expensive to feed, clothe, and equip but through their bad conduct on the line were more dangerous to their comrades around them than they were to the enemy. What few seem to ask is whether all, some, or none of those longstanding assumptions and damning opinions (which began during the war itself) are actually supported by hard evidence. Edwin Rutan's fresh examination of the topic in High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac: Reclaiming Their Honor seeks to set the record straight on the matter.

In Rutan's view, perspective has been skewed by a number of factors. For instance, "historians have relied on the accounts of 1861 and 1862 veterans who resented these new recruits who had not yet suffered the hardships of war, and they were jealous of the higher bounties those recruits received. The result, he argues, is a long-standing mischaracterization of the service of 750,000 Union soldiers."

The author adopts a systematic approach to his reexamination of late-war Army of the Potomac recruits. More from the description: "Rutan argues, using combat-effectiveness methodology, that they were generally competent soldiers and indispensable in defeating the Army of Northern Virginia. He also examines the issue of financial motivation, concluding that the volunteers of 1862 may have been more driven by economic incentives than once thought, and 1864 recruits were less driven by this than typically described. Thus, Rutan concludes that the Union “high-bounty” men do not deserve the scorn heaped on them by early volunteers and subsequent generations of historians."

In the end, Edwin Rutan's High-Bounty Men in the Army of the Potomac "offers a much-needed correction to the historical record, providing a more balanced assessment of the “high-bounty” replacements in the Army of the Potomac." Looking forward to reading this.

Review - "Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War" by Kenneth Burchett

[Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War by Kenneth E. Burchett (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,256/334. ISBN:978-1-4766-9465-8. $49.95]

Kenneth Burchett's The Battle of Carthage, Missouri: First Trans-Mississippi Conflict was published back in 2012. While it is unstated whether the author has any current plans in place to go forward from that point in time and address the Battle of Wilson's Creek and beyond, his current research and writing project goes back to the very beginning and addresses in two volumes the historical events that led up to that July 5 running battle around Carthage fought between Union volunteer forces and the Missouri State Guard. The first of the pair is the recently released Massacre at St. Louis: The Road to the Camp Jackson Affair and Civil War. The second book, Nathaniel Lyon's River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union, is scheduled to follow sometime next year.

The military aspects of Union general Nathaniel Lyon's 1861 campaign in Missouri are well established in the literature, as are the social and political contexts that inform them. The early chapters of Burchett's book follow in those footsteps by (a) considering Missouri's complicated part in the antebellum period's growing sectional schism between North and South, (b) recalling the ways in which 1850s "Bleeding Kansas" radicalized regional and national politics, (c) reminding readers how the heavy and sustained influx of German immigrants into Missouri during the decades immediately leading up to the war transformed the social and political structure of the state, and (d) tracing the development of the desire on the part of many Missourians to counter extremism by crafting a unique Western identity distinct from purely sectional entanglements. Even though political moderation was still the order of the day after the contentious 1860 election put the first Republican president in the White House, polarizing elements on both ends of the spectrum sought to influence and guide Missouri's course of action in response to southern secession. Burchett covers all of that and more over the first third of the book, expanding his reach further afield than most in also exploring more generally the impact of slavery on the continent since Colonial times.

As is the case with essentially every book covering this period, secession-sympathizing Governor Claiborne Jackson and the politico-military alliance between Lyon and the unconditional Unionist Blair family form the principal antagonistic structure of the narrative. Burchett's descriptions of the character and motivations of each of those agents will be broadly recognizable to those already steeped in the relevant literature, though one might have wished the author had made more explicit exactly where the Jackson-related "(p)reviously unpublished materials," as touted in the publisher's description, were incorporated into the narrative. Perhaps it is made clearer somewhere in the notes.

Biographers and popular observers alike tend to explain Nathaniel Lyon's rash employment of military solutions to every problem by emphasizing his almost messianic fanaticism in defense of the perpetuation of the Union and constitutional self-government as he saw it, the principal enemies of those things in Lyon's mind being slavery and secession. Burchett's impression of Lyon is much like those that came before him, although he does rate the spiritual practice of mesmerism as having a stronger place in the officer's outlook on life (the source being Ashbel Woodward's 1862 biography of Lyon). If memory serves, Lyon's most recent biographer, Christopher Phillips, does not make much of that.

Of course, the physical location that drew the most attention from opposing sides in Missouri was the U.S. arsenal at St. Louis. Estimates of the number of shoulder arms collected there at the time are wildly variable, somewhere between 20,000 and 60,000 muskets and rifles. Assessing the many different claims made during that time and ever since, Burchett (in step with most modern research) favors the lower end of the spectrum.

It was tradition for some of the older state militia companies to hold a muster at St. Louis, but the greatly larger 1861 affair was unusual for its size and time of year. All political persuasions on the issue of secession were present in the militia ranks (and a large number of Unionist officers and men defected early on, leaving around 700 men at Lindell's Grove when Lyon advanced upon it). Most ominous to those who might have supposed it an innocuous gathering, the Southwest Battalion and its component artillery battery were summoned to the encampment to join a core of five companies of pro-southern Minute Men. Burchett properly infers, one thinks, that the common knowledge of the immense strength of Lyon's command in combination with the much improved defenses of the arsenal rationally precluded further thought of either direct assault or siege. It seems reasonable to suggest that the encampment was maintained as a means of counterbalancing federal control and influence in the city.

One factor that is suggestive of Jackson and militia commanding general Daniel Frost abandoning hope of capturing the arsenal was the detachment of the militia's best trained and armed unit, Joseph Kelly's Washington Blues company. Kelly's company left the encampment with a large store of powder and munitions to distribute among newly formed caches dispersed throughout the state's interior. Lyon, of course, could only guess their underlying motives. Burchett holds Lincoln administration dithering (primarily the very odd and disruptive decision to relieve then reappoint loyal U.S. general and political moderate William S. Harney, whom Lyon and the Blairs viewed as an untrustworthy ideological enemy, as head of the Department of the West) to have played a major role in creating unnecessary confusion and fostering tragedy. As the author suggests, Harney's impending return likely played a key part in expediting Lyon's determination to march upon the militia encampment at Lindell's Grove.

State provocations also played an instigating role. As Burchett explains, the aid that the Confederacy sent to the Missouri Militia did more harm than good. The donated war material itself was practically useless yet its mere presence in the encampment only bolstered politico-legal cover for Lyon's proposed actions. As explained in the text, Lyon's legal advisors pointed out that the impulsive officer could act against the state's lawfully assembled state militia body by serving camp authorities with a writ of replevin for the return of munitions illegally seized earlier from the Baton Rouge arsenal.

When Lyon did finally act, he displayed uncommon organizational skills. At this earliest of moments when all of the volunteers were green recruits with only rudimentary training, Lyon's multi-column march from the arsenal to Lindell's Grove (as meticulously retraced in the book) proved to be a marvel of coordinated precision. Burchett even goes on to suggest that the planning and execution of the march revealed a mind capable of considerable tactical genius. While there is no detailed map provided of the area between the arsenal and Lindell's Grove, the author makes the complicated movement more comprehensible by superimposing marching routes and unit positions over 1870s street maps of the city. Burchett's highly positive assessment of Lyon's initial plan and its execution, however, is quickly downgraded during the post-surrender pause. In a decision that the author deems to have been a "callous military blunder" (page 231), Lyon, who had clearly witnessed the growing crowds of angry and fearful civilians pressing against his men, opted to march the prisoners directly through the gathering unrest. In the author's view, one of Lyon's biggest mistakes was not planning ahead for contingency. By Burchett's understanding, the self-assured Lyon simply assumed the captured militiamen would accept paroles and disperse, so when they didn't he was forced to improvise. That led to lengthy delays, the most unforeseeable one being Lyon getting kicked in the chest by an aide's horse. That alone stopped proceedings for a period of time some estimates placed at nearly two hours. As a result, the civilian crowds got larger and more volatile.

The entire truth can never be known for certain, but Burchett does what he can to determine where, when, and by whom initial and subsequent bursts of violence occurred. Gamely attempting to bring some narrative order to what was erupting chaos that produced a mass of conflicting eyewitness accounts, Burchett vividly breaks down the sequence of events as best and as fully as he can. Shooting clashes broke out at the front, middle, and rear of the column (in that order), with the federal troops (nervous and angry at the constant stream of taunts and insults hurled from the crowd) firing warning shots first at the front. It was at the rear where the greatest tragedy unfolded. There, Lyon's men responded with deadly force to a flurry of pistol shots. According to Burchett's interpretation of the sources, the largest concentration of pistol fire came from a group of men situated around a construction site. The reply, principally from the Second and Third regiments, was to fire indiscriminately into swirling, panic-stricken crowds of predominantly unarmed men, women, and children. Claims that officers ordered their men to fire volleys into the crowd were hotly disputed by eyewitnesses. It appears that many of the volunteers intentionally aimed high. Though the author opines that that might help account for the high proportion of head shots inflicted, those isolated acts also spared the citizenry from an even greater casualty list. Order was quickly restored by Lyon and his chief subordinate John Schofield, and it was all over in minutes. However, the damage was done.

Later chroniclers along with contemporary partisans offered a range of different casualty figures, many of which are sampled in the text. When it comes to the death count, the best official figures from county coroner records are twenty-five civilians (including three women and at least five individuals under sixteen years of age), three of Lyon's volunteers, and three of the captured militiamen. Noting that the coroner report only counted the dead discovered on or just after the day of the event, Burchett's research strongly suggests that at least twenty more fatal gunshot victims emerged later. These persons were either discovered deceased in public spaces days later or passed away from their wounds at home over the ensuing days and weeks. Thus, Burchett suggests a grand total of at least fifty dead and many more wounded. Though the word is provocatively placed in the title, the book itself avoids entering the quagmire of what constitutes a "massacre" and whether the tragedy in St. Louis should be properly considered one.

In stark contrast to the arguably overlong prologue sections of the book, the weighty consequences of the bloody Camp Jackson Affair are relegated to a comparatively brief epilogue. Some of the lingering violence across the city is mentioned, but one might wish for a more thorough examination of events there along with detailed assessment of the popular mood in St. Louis during the days and weeks following the May 10 clash between soldiers and civilians. In an important turn of events, previously successful legislative opposition to Governor Jackson's desire to expand, reorganize, and arm a new state army (what would become the Missouri State Guard) under his own personal control melted away once news of the mass civilian deaths in St. Louis spread. Additionally, Lyon's rash application of military force drove a great many pro-Union men into the opposing camp. In the author's view, Lyon's actions in charge of Union forces in Missouri compared unfavorably with how fellow pro-Union civilian and military leaders in charge of Kentucky handled that key Border State's difficult governor and large pro-secession minority during the same period. It's a brief consideration worthy of further development, though it's derailed by the incredible summary statement on page 256 that "(n)ot a single Civil War battle took place on Kentucky soil" (a mistake so out of character that one might charitably assume it to have been a mental block of some sort that escaped correction in final editing).

Massacre at St. Louis's background chapters arguably drag a bit, but the narrative picks up handsomely over the final two-thirds, where fresh pieces of information abound in regard to the arsenal itself, the dramatic capture of the Missouri Militia at Lindell's Grove, and the tragic mass shooting of civilians that followed it. Indeed, while it may be the case that the Civil War context of those places and events will be broadly familiar to readers, the historical geography and details associated with them are presented in Burchett's book at unprecedented clarity and depth.

The volume ends with the pending return of General Harney to a city in turmoil. Presumably, Burchett's next volume, Nathaniel Lyon’s River Campaign of 1861: Securing Missouri for the Union, will pick up directly from there.

Booknotes: Kidnapped at Sea

New Arrival:

• Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White by Andrew Sillen (JHU Press, 2024).

From the description: "David Henry White, a free Black teenage sailor from Lewes, Delaware, was kidnapped by Captain Raphael Semmes of the Confederate raider Alabama on October 9, 1862, from the Philadelphia-based packet ship Tonawanda. White remained captive on the Alabama for over 600 days, until he drowned during the Battle of Cherbourg on June 19, 1864."

Andrew Sillen's Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White "is the first book to focus on White's actual life, rather than relying on Semmes and other secondary sources."

More from the description: "In a best-selling postwar memoir [Memoirs of Service Afloat, During the War Between the States (1869)], Semmes falsely described White as a contented slave who remained loyal to the Confederacy. In Kidnapped at Sea, archaeologist Andrew Sillen uses a forensic approach to describe White's enslavement and demise and illustrates how White's actual life belies the Lost Cause narrative his captors sought to construct."

Booknotes: United States Military Justice in the Civil War

New Arrival:

• United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration by R. Gregory Lande (McFarland, 2024).

Opposing Civil War armies were filled with individualistic and often unruly volunteers loath to give up their hard-won rights and protections under the nation's unique republican system of government in order to become European-style military automatons. In order to instill and maintain discipline, it was necessary to develop a military justice system that balanced societal expectations of civil rights with the collective needs of the military. Opinions vary as to how well that necessary compromise was addressed in the Union Army. From the description: "While some scholars have criticized the Union military courts as arbitrary and excessively harsh, others have defended it as a necessary means of maintaining order in the face of unprecedented challenges faced by the Union."

R. Gregory Lande's United States Military Justice in the Civil War: Court-Martial Practices and Administration draws on "extensive primary research" to present a "compelling narrative based on a statistical analysis of 5,000 Union military trials, court records, historical legal publications, and insights from contemporary historians." "Offering a balanced perspective on the struggle between maintaining discipline and protecting the legal rights of service members," Instead of taking the more common approach and focusing on the U.S. Army system of justice, Lande's fresh overview takes in account all branches of the service. His book "analyzes the relationship between alcohol misuse and misconduct, covers the differing approaches to sexual misconduct across the services, and exposes the uneven and sometimes unfair application of military justice."

In addition to chapters covering alcohol's influences and various violence-related offenses, chapters addressing prosecutions over unauthorized absences and the category of "subordinate military crimes" [defined as "theft, forgery, consequential criticisms, malingering, gambling, and medical malfeasance"] are also included.

Coming Soon (October '24 Edition)

Scheduled for OCT 2024¹:
• Warriors for Liberty: William Dollarson & Michigan’s Civil War African Americans by Jack Dempsey.
• Holding the Political Center in Illinois: Conservatism and Union on the Brink of the Civil War by Ian Iverson.
• Freedom Was in Sight: A Graphic History of Reconstruction in the Washington, D.C., Region by Masur & Clarke.
• Kidnapped at Sea: The Civil War Voyage of David Henry White by Andrew Sillen.
• Courage and Compassion: Sisters of Mercy in the American Civil War by Paula DiAnn Marlin.
• The Mexican-American War Experiences of Twelve Civil War Generals ed. by Timothy Johnson.
• The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai ed. by Dianne Ashton, w/ Melissa Klapper.
• Samuel "One-Armed" Berry: Shaker, Teacher, Ruthless Civil War Guerilla by Bryan Bush.

Comments: Re: early releases, the Sillen, Dempsey, Iverson, and Masur/Clarke books are already out.

¹ - These monthly release lists are not meant to be exhaustive compilations of non-fiction releases. They do not include reprints that are not significantly revised/expanded, special editions not distributed to reviewers, children's books, and digital-only titles. Works that only tangentially address the war years are also generally excluded. Inevitably, one or more titles on this list will get a rescheduled release (and they do not get repeated later), so revisiting the past few "Coming Soon" posts is the best way to pick up stragglers.

Booknotes: Abraham Lincoln on Screen, Third Edition

New Arrival:

• Abraham Lincoln on Screen, Third Edition: Live-Action Portrayals on Film and Television by Mark S. Reinhart (McFarland, 2024).

Abraham Lincoln is one of the most written about individuals in human history, and his presence on the home and theater screen is no less prodigious. From the description: "President Abraham Lincoln is the most frequently portrayed American historical figure in the history of the film and television arts, appearing onscreen as a character in more than 250 productions since the birth of the motion picture medium."

Of course, the popular fascination with Lincoln still continues to this day, with new film, streaming, and television content coming out on a regular basis. First published in 1999, with an updated expansion in 2009, this new third edition of Mark Reinhart's Abraham Lincoln on Screen "provides commentary on all new screen works produced in recent years, including Steven Spielberg's award-winning 2012 film Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role."

The chapters in this reference guide, which covers the period from 1908 to today, are largely organized by decade. Information provided for each program includes title, director, cast list, release date, and running time. The accompanying text discusses "each work's historical accuracy and artistic merits." The amount of text coverage ranges from just a few paragraphs for the more obscure features to several pages for the more significant movies and television events. Still photos from the screen are also sprinkled about. Filling over 350 7"x10" pages, this is a very substantial reference compilation, arguably the IMDb of Lincoln.

Booknotes: A Tempest of Iron and Lead

New Arrival:

• A Tempest of Iron and Lead: Spotsylvania Court House, May 8-21, 1864 by Chris Mackowski (Savas Beatie, 2024).

This is the third major Spotsylvania battle study, with William Matter's If it Takes All Summer: The Battle of Spotsylvania published in 1988 and Gordon Rhea's The Battles for Spotsylvania Court House and the Road to Yellow Tavern, May 7-12, 1864 in 1997. Nearly three decades (wow, it's hard to believe it's been that long already!) have passed since Rhea's work was released, so the topic is arguably due for a fresh look.

For most readers, what first comes to mind when the subject of Spotsylvania is raised is the horrific fighting at "The Bloody Angle," most recently the subject of Jeffry Wert's excellent book The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers' Struggle for Spotsylvania's Bloody Angle (2022). But there is much much more to the battle.

From the description: "The fighting launched a score of new place-names and events that would sear themselves into the American consciousness, such as Spindle Field, Upton’s assault, the Mule Shoe, the Bloody Angle, and the Harris Farm. The casualties exacted at Spotsylvania exceeded those of the Wilderness by thousands. The fighting severely tested the offensive capabilities of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Southern army, just as the defensive posture his men embraced would, in turn, test the limits of Federal endurance."

That the great battle was fought so soon after the horrors of the Wilderness shook up the established pattern of campaigns in the East. More: "Even the march itself was unprecedented. For three years the armies had fought battles and disengaged after each one. That pattern changed on the night of May 7. Instead of leaving the Wilderness to regroup, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant led the Federal army southward, skirmishing with Confederates all the way. “There will be no turning back,” he had declared. He lived up to his word. By dawn on May 8, the armies had tussled their way ten miles down the road and opened another large-scale fight that would last until May 21."

A former Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park historian, Mackowski's new treatment of the battle is derived from his "meticulous knowledge of the landscape and familiarity with primary source materials, earned over nearly two decades." The text is supported by 21 maps. A lot of recent map sets, even those attached to otherwise top-notch works, have skimped on tree lines and other terrain features critical to understanding the battle, but that is not the case with these excellent-looking renderings created by cartographer Edward Alexander.

Review - "The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864" by David Powell

[The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864 by David A. Powell (Savas Beatie, 2024). Hardcover, 19 maps, photos, footnotes, orders of battle, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xvi,545/623. ISBN:978-1-61121-695-0. $39.95]

Given the vast scale of opposing forces and the high military and political stakes involved in the western theater's central conflict of 1864, full-length standalone coverage of the Atlanta Campaign's many large battles has taken a puzzlingly long time to gather steam. The only military history students more dismayed by a similar degree of longstanding neglect are 1862 Peninsula Campaign enthusiasts! Thankfully, the floodgates are now wide open, and the past decade and a half have been a godsend for those seeking the most cutting edge understanding of the May-September 1864 chain of events between Dalton and Jonesboro. Oddly enough, the new battle histories released during this grand revival, with its multiple major works from prime contributors Gary Ecelbarger, Earl Hess, and Robert Jenkins, have frequently come in pairs. Ecelbarger opened the ball in 2010 with a fine history of the July 22 Battle of Atlanta, and since then there has been another July 22 book, a Kennesaw Mountain battle history, two Ezra Church studies, and a pair of volumes covering the Battle of Peach Tree Creek (with another addressing its lead in) released. Most recently, the controversial "Affair at Cassville" was thoroughly examined in a groundbreaking book published earlier this year¹. Smaller works of various kinds have also been produced in recent times, and additional major works touch upon the campaign through other angles such as biography and field fortifications.

Of course, when it comes to single-volume military histories of the campaign, Albert Castel's 1992 tome Decision in the West: The Atlanta Campaign of 1864 still sets the standard. In perhaps the most exciting development to date, David Powell, best known for his monumental multi-volume study of the 1863 Chickamauga Campaign, has been applying the same level of research, descriptive detail, and keenly informed analysis to an 1864 Atlanta Campaign project of unprecedented scale. A hefty five volumes are planned, the first of which, The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864, is the subject of this review.

Studies of this kind routinely begin with descriptive assessments of the strengths and weaknesses of each side's high command leadership and army organization. With knowledge of the personalities involved in the decision-making process, it is clear that no one save U.S. Grant himself was higher on the list than William T. Sherman was when it came to preferred candidates for leading the great western army group. However, from a dispassionate point of view, Powell suggests that George Thomas's record up to that time might have made him the objective (or at the very least safest) choice. There's certainly merit in that. On army group organizational matters, Powell is justifiably critical of the decision to eschew a wholesale, streamlined reorganization of Union forces in favor of simply combining three existing departments, with each field army component being of greatly different size and varying in support apparatus. Beyond that awkward arrangement conferring unnecessary additional layers of command and logistics management upon the army group as a whole, the individual army commanders would also have to attend to their more distant departmental administration duties. Of similarly haphazard organization was the mounted arm of Sherman's army group, which lacked a unified command structure and was unevenly distributed among the three armies. On the Confederate side, there was friction and loss of confidence from the start between Army of the Tennessee commander Joseph E. Johnston and Confederate president Jefferson Davis as neither could agree on an offensive versus defensive stance in the theater. Davis could not understand that his western army simply did not have the transportation resources necessary to conduct offensive operations, and, as expanded upon below, Johnston's overly passive approach to the upcoming campaign offered equally unrealistic prospects for success.

Powell also fully explores the implications of the military maneuvering in North Georgia prior to initiation of the main advance in May. Winter events that preceded the spring offensive are typically glossed over in the Atlanta Campaign literature, but Powell describes them in great detail. While the Union probing advances achieved nothing of tactical significance on the ground, they did confirm the strength of the Confederate forward positions in North Georgia and, much more important, kept Johnston from detaching heavy reinforcements for service in the heart of Mississippi, where forces there were opposing Sherman's Meridian Expedition.

Snake Creek Gap was the earliest of the campaign's great what-ifs, with critics of Army of the Tennessee commander James B. McPherson (including Sherman himself) lamenting the young major general's failure to enter Resaca and destroy the critical rail bridge located nearby. Powell correctly presents the situation as being much more complicated than that, with a lot of blame to go around. First, those who argue that McPherson, an innately cautious personality, could have just waltzed into Resaca are clearly misinformed, as nearly 6,000 Confederate infantry defended the post by the time McPherson's van arrived. Never ordered to grab and hold Resaca, McPherson was directed by Sherman to cut the railroad then safely withdraw to the mouth of the gap and await support. Powell argues strenuously and convincingly that it would not have been in McPherson's nature to exceed his orders nor did he have the troops necessary to simultaneously storm and hold Resaca, guard the army trains well to the rear, and block the several roads between the gap and Resaca that led down from the north into his army's rear. That doesn't leave McPherson entirely off the hook, though. The strongest charges leveled against McPherson in the book, that he did not even attempt to seriously damage the railroad north of Resaca and did not make any kind of effort to employ Judson Kilpatrick's cavalry division forward, are compellingly drawn and supported, even after taking into account the cascading effects of another cavalry general's dilatory absence (to an extent, Kilpatrick had to fill in for Theophilus Garrard's late-arriving division). Generally speaking, McPherson and Sherman were both guilty of not positioning the available cavalry to the best effect, with the former taking his cues from the latter. In Powell's final estimation of what most went wrong on the Union side, Sherman erred greatly in not providing his and Grant's beloved protege with enough troops to ensure the assigned task could be completed and the unexpected dealt with, and orders for Joseph Hooker's Twentieth Corps to join McPherson were a day late.

On the other side of the equation, it has been alleged that Joe Johnston was surprised by the presence of McPherson's army at Snake Creek Gap and even that the Confederate commander was unconscionably unaware of the gap's existence. Powell forcibly demolishes any support for the latter claim, but he does justifiably contend that Johnston was indeed unduly surprised by Union passage through Snake Creek Gap and that the blame for it must go to both Joseph Wheeler and Johnston himself for failing to occupy the gap. As Powell keenly observes, Wheeler heavily overcommitted his forces to the Dalton front and Johnston, who devoted his mental energies to the defenses of Dalton and Rome while also personally directing some of his army's cavalry affairs, was similarly neglectful in his duty toward the security of the Snake Creek Gap approach to Resaca.

As he always does, Powell combines operational and tactical narrative seamlessly, his style of presentation and detail-levels more than satisfactory in both areas. Of course, the amount of micro-tactical discussion in this hybrid study can't match that found in a standalone battle tome, but there is more than enough of it selectively reserved for the most momentous events. The Snake Creek Gap, Resaca, and Lay's Ferry sequence receives the most consistently detailed treatment, which is important as the Battle of Resaca has never really received the full attention that it deserves, the previously standard history being Philip Secrist's slim volume². Along the way reminding us that Resaca produced more than 8,000 casualties, Powell's intricate account restores its status as a major battle of considerable import. Indeed, the amount of fine detail lavished upon Resaca in the book bodes well for hopes that future volumes in Powell's series will provide the same reader rewards when it comes to other big clashes similarly awaiting their own turn amid the current sharp upsurge in Atlanta Campaign battle history publishing.

Powell interrupts his discussion of the final stages of the Resaca fighting with a concise yet highly revealing summary of Sherman's logistical preparations for the campaign. In that chapter, Powell effectively explains the pathway through which those talented logistical planners and managers (with immense resources at their disposal) made possible the army group's ability to cut loose from the railroad and achieve wide sweeping maneuvers across rugged, barren geography in ways that its opponent could not match. However, that is not to say that Union superiority in wide maneuver left Johnston bereft of opportunities of his own. It is common enough for critics to point out Johnston's repeated failure to use his central position astride the railroad to mass local superiority against some portion of Sherman's host, which tended to advance on a broad front leaving its river-crossing spearheads vulnerable on occasion to getting caught mid-stream. In addressing this particular phase of the campaign, Powell certainly agrees with eminent Army of Tennessee historian Thomas Connelly that the overly defensive Confederate commander missed a golden opportunity to maul McPherson's vanguard near Calhoun.

Powell's handles the "Cassville Affair" in a pair of late chapters. Powell agrees with Robert Jenkins (as previously mentioned, the author of a book fully dedicated to the topic) that Johnston's version of events, as recorded after the war, was faulty and misleading. Powell is also entirely in accord with the most important aspect of the mystery, the fact (grossly underemphasized in nearly all accounts) that, even if John Bell Hood's corps was not distracted by encroaching Union cavalry and attacked as planned from its flanking position on the Confederate right, there was no substantial Union force present there to damage or destroy. In the informed judgment of both writers, Sherman failed to take the offered bait on that sector of the battlefield, and that stroke of fortune essentially rendered the morning phase of the day's controversies immaterial (beyond it being a source of mutual friction within Hood and Johnston's previously harmonious relationship).

The book's 19 maps are a solid number, with only a few gaps in expected coverage. You won't find the kind of all-pervasive, regimental-level map detail found in the most diehard volumes entirely dedicated to single battles, but that quality is present on a selective basis in Powell's book. Generally speaking, the map content matches the scale and level of detail presented in the accompanying text.

Though President Davis himself, who repeatedly urged Johnston to take the offensive (and, once he did, would be reinforced), possessed an unrealistic perspective on the capabilities of the western Confederacy's principal field army, Johnston proved equally incapable of coming up with a viable alternative strategy for the campaign. As Powell's account of the first weeks in May clearly shows, that did not change as the campaign progressed through its earliest stages. Erroneously maintaining that his army was outnumbered two to one, Johnston completely ceded the initiative to Sherman, believing his only two options were to either take up a strong defensive position (and hope Sherman would attack it head on) or wait for Sherman to commit a gross blunder that could then be exploited by a devastating counterstroke. It was a strategy entirely dependent upon best wishes. As Powell and others have pointed out, the overall disparity in numbers was never as grave as Johnston liked to proclaim, and at one point Sherman held only a roughly 9:8 edge in manpower. Simply hoping that his opponent would pull a Burnside at Fredericksburg was no plan at all, and, as the opening weeks of the campaign clearly demonstrated, Johnston was not audacious enough or flexible enough to take advantage of openings given him nor was he informed as well as he should have been about either the landscape around him or the positions of the opposing chess pieces on it³. Johnston and cavalry chief Wheeler were also no Lee and Stuart when it came to obtaining and processing intelligence. Johnston ultimately electing to retreat whenever and wherever confronted with a difficult operational dilemma would form a running pattern of command behavior first established during the period covered in this book. It was a self-defeating pattern set by Johnston that failed to pay its supposed attritional dividends, further emboldened his Union opponents, demoralized his own army, and eroded already shaky confidence in his leadership.

In The Atlanta Campaign - Volume 1: Dalton to Cassville, May 1-19, 1864, David Powell's ambitious pentalogy has gotten off to a rousing and fully satisfying start. On to Volume 2!

Additional Notes:
1 - Students of the Atlanta Campaign are fortunate that the quality matches the quantity of these battle studies. In chronological order of release (with links to CWBA reviews posted at the time):
• The Day Dixie Died: The Battle of Atlanta (2010) by Gary Ecelbarger.
• Kennesaw Mountain: Sherman, Johnston, and the Atlanta Campaign (2013) by Earl Hess.
• The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood's First Sortie, July 20, 1864 (2014) by Robert Jenkins.
• To the Gates of Atlanta: From Kennesaw Mountain to Peach Tree Creek, 1-19 July 1864 (2015) by Jenkins.
• The Battle of Ezra Church and the Struggle for Atlanta (2015) by Hess.
• Slaughter at the Chapel: The Battle of Ezra Church, 1864 (2016) by Ecelbarger.
• The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood's First Effort to Save Atlanta (2017) by Hess.
• July 22: The Civil War Battle of Atlanta (2023) by Hess.
• The Cassville Affairs: Johnston, Hood, and the Failed Confederate Strategy in the Atlanta Campaign, 19 May 1864 (2024) by Jenkins.
2 - Philip Secrist's The Battle of Resaca: Atlanta Campaign, 1864 was originally published in 1998 and reissued in paperback in 2010 (see the site review of the latter edition). The book offers a fine summary of the fighting on May 14 and 15 as well as an interesting discussion of battlefield archaeology at the site.
3 - Indeed, numerous critics condemn Johnston for his apparent lack of knowledge about the terrain and road networks between Dalton and Atlanta beyond a very narrow corridor encompassing both sides of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. It is a point well taken, although, as Powell suggests, it might be a bit overblown.

Review - "The Cavalry of the Army of the Ohio: A Civil War History" by Dennis Belcher

[The Cavalry of the Army of the Ohio: A Civil War History by Dennis W. Belcher (McFarland, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, OB charts and tables, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:viii,326/389. ISBN:978-1-4766-9232-6. $49.95]

It is generally agreed upon that Union cavalry forces navigated the early Civil War period in an unfavorable position. By traditional understanding, during the first two years of the war federal mounted forces suffered from strategic neglect and widespread inferiority in organization, leadership, quality of horseflesh, and even numbers. However, by dint of great supporting effort both behind the lines and at the fighting front, blue troopers, gradually equipped with superior firepower, an organized remount system, and benefiting from the emergence of a strong stable of experienced and gifted leaders, finally achieved rough parity with their foes by the war's midpoint. With Confederate cavalry worn down by steady attrition in all phases and a failing national war effort overall, the pendulum swung even further during the latter stages of the conflict, and by the end of the war Union cavalry, east and west, reigned supreme. Of course, that arc of progression is an oversimplification, but according to prolific western theater cavalry historian Dennis Belcher it largely holds true for the Union Army of the Ohio's mounted arm, which was composed of units from Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and even Pennsylvania.

Belcher's The Cavalry of the Army of the Ohio: A Civil War History represents the first comprehensive treatment of the topic. Given the lack of continuity involved, after all the Army of the Ohio had two distinct lives (1861-62 and 1863-64) and arguably a third iteration, researching the subject and attempting to organize and write a cohesive history of it was a difficult task. As explained by the author, the process was rendered even more challenging by the existence of numerous wide gaps in the available source material.

At its heart, the book is a remarkably thorough organizational and operational history of mounted forces attached directly to the Army of the Ohio (and to a lesser extent the military department as a whole). The sheer breadth of military actions described in the volume, from tiny company-sized skirmishes all the way up to major battles. will impress novice and expert readers alike. Those discussions are not allowed to exist in a vacuum either, as the context of each confrontation, large or small, is typically explored at suitable depth. Documenting the progress of larger campaigns and battles from a cavalry-centric perspective also gives coverage of even the most well-trodden ground a fresh sheen. As was the case with Belcher's sister study of the Army of the Cumberland's cavalry, the narrative is richly supplemented with orders of battle, strength and casualty tables, maps, and illustrations. Inserted into the text at regular intervals, the detailed cavalry order of battle charts in particular are essential aids in piecing together which units were present at a given location and moment in time. Fighting events deemed too small to merit their own discussion in the main text are helpfully compiled into reference tables placed nearby.

As quickly becomes apparent while reading Belcher's narrative, mounted forces attached to the army and department of the Ohio during the early war period generally operated in a dispersed fashion, defensive rather than offensive in stance and reactive rather than proactive in movement. Most regiments were relegated to either rear-area security (guarding important railroad communications against up and coming Confederate raiders such as John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest) or fulfilling traditional scouting and screening duties at the front. The earliest-formed regiments spent their time primarily in Kentucky and Tennessee, major points of involvement being Wildcat Mountain, Mill Springs, the Army of the Ohio's march on Nashville and to Shiloh, and the "Siege" of Corinth. In addition to those larger and more well-documented events, a host of smaller and more obscure engagements and skirmishes are described in the text. As Belcher relates, results in the field were generally mixed during the balance of 1861 and first half of 1862, but important structural improvements were in the offing.

The book traces the origins of offensive capability in the cavalry to post-Corinth movements of the Army of the Ohio and subsequent developments that led to the belated concentration of mounted regiments into multiple brigades. Critics of the measured pace of Army of the Ohio commander Don Carlos Buell's advance across northern Alabama toward Chattanooga often seem to underappreciate the logistical limitations involved. Incessant Confederate raids against Buell's lines of supply and communication proved to be a major problem. Indeed, Belcher explains that the lack of cavalry, in both numbers and organization, to oppose those rear-area raids played a major part in delaying his march (including a critical two-week halt). Buell repeatedly asked his superiors for more cavalry, but, as Washington responded, there were none to be had from elsewhere. New units would have to be recruited. By the time additional brigades (which would be able to finally go on the offensive against rear area threats to the railroads) could be employed, it was already too late to secure control of the Gateway to the South. Stop-gap measures such as creating mixed-arms brigades (with cavalry providing the mobility and infantry the firepower) and rushing newly raised cavalry regiments into the field without adequate arms and training had predictably mixed, and frequently atrocious, results. As Belcher clearly outlines in the book, 1862 would very much be a critical catch-up year for the mounted forces of the Army of the Ohio.

The book's in-depth coverage of Union mounted operations during the 1862 Kentucky Campaign notes both lingering problems in the cavalry arm and hope for the future. In the end, Belcher credits Buell's newly formed cavalry division with playing a major part in repelling the Confederate advance. Contributions included the capture of an entire Confederate cavalry regiment by McCook's Brigade, a screening of Buell's movements successful enough to keep his Confederate counterpart from correctly divining his intentions, and other noteworthy events. In the lead-up to Perryville and during the climactic battle itself, Gay's Brigade displayed a mixed record, fighting well at the front line but proving negligent in relaying critical intelligence information to the infantry it was supporting. To the south on Lebanon Road, McCook's Brigade led the advance of Crittenden's Corps but was unable to penetrate the enemy screen. On the whole, things were getting better, but further improvements were still necessary. As emerged during the Buell court of inquiry, the cavalry's chain of command was still a confused and internally miscommunicated mess. Nevertheless, as the Army of the Ohio was dissolved with Buell's dismissal and its cavalry folded into the new Army of the Cumberland led by William Rosecrans, the roots of the strong performances of federal cavalry brigades during the Stones River Campaign had their foundation in incremental improvements made over the previous summer and fall.

While the Army of the Ohio was not formally reborn until 1863, the balance of 1862 witnessed a number of operations by Department of the Ohio cavalry, most notably (and as detailed in the book) Carter's Raid into East Tennessee and the Union response to Morgan's Christmas Raid. With the dissolution of the Army of the Ohio, it was left to scattered cavalry units back in Kentucky to guard Rosecrans's rear and combat a new series of Confederate raids into Kentucky and East Tennessee. According to Belcher, sources suggest that at least five provisional brigades were organized during this time and the efficiency displayed by those involved in opposing Morgan's Great Raid of June-July 1863 proved that some strong measure of parity with Confederate cavalry in the West had finally been accomplished. Coincidentally or not, this is the exact same moment in time that the eastern theater Union cavalry proclaimed that it had achieved the same qualitative and moral edge against J.E.B. Stuart's celebrated troopers.

When the new Army of the Ohio finally advanced into East Tennessee in August 1863 and captured Knoxville against little opposition, it was primarily through the cavalry-heavy Twenty-Third Corps. After capturing the city, the cavalry spread out over a large area of occupation, frequently coming into contact with the enemy. In addition to detailing the most important aspect of the mounted arm's contributions to the successful campaign, Belcher provides comprehensive lists of a great many minor actions. By any estimate, the dispersed cavalry of Burnside's army did the lion's share of the fighting in occupied East Tennessee that fall and early winter. During the Confederate attempt to recapture Knoxville, the cavalry also had a large impact on the flow of events. Among other episodes, Belcher details their key role in winning the "race to Campbell's Station" and Colonel William Sanders's stiff rear guard delaying action before Knoxville that cost him his life.

An argument could be made that the Army of the Ohio cavalry's prodigious, but largely behind-the-scenes, labors in East Tennessee rank highest among its many contributions to the Union war effort. In recounting at length numerous engagements of which the cavalry fought front and center, including an abundance of obscure small actions that even many informed students of the Civil War in this region will likely not readily recognize or know only in passing, Belcher builds a strong case that the cavalry of the Army of Ohio performed its best and most valuable service during a highly active six-month period beginning in September 1863. During that time, the cavalry operated at corps strength (nearly 9,000 troopers with even more units added as time went on) over a large geographical area, constantly battling and skirmishing with the enemy under some of the war's most challenging environmental and logistical conditions (so much so that obtaining sufficient remounts was a widespread and persistent problem).

In January 1864, the Army of the Ohio received yet another new commander, General John Schofield, and for the upcoming Atlanta Campaign he would have the controversial George Stoneman as his cavalry chief. When readers think of the role of the Army of the Ohio's cavalry during the Civil War, it is likely that this campaign most often comes to mind. Unfortunately, by a combination of factors (including Sherman's widely documented inability to get the best out of his army group's large mounted forces), the ways in which the campaign unfolded did not display the cavalry's improved performance and stature at their finest. According to Belcher, much of that was due to what happened during General Samuel Sturgis's short tenure as Army of the Ohio cavalry chief, during which longstanding issues went unresolved and there was massive turnover in divisional and brigade leadership. As revealed in the book, the general "disarray" in the cavalry's organization, leadership, and condition extended through the early months of 1864 (when lack of remounts continued to plague the army). All of that left the mounted forces directly attached to the Army of the Ohio poorly prepared for the upcoming rigors of the four-month Atlanta Campaign. While the more disastrous deep raids conducted beyond Atlanta garner much of the attention and largely reflect poorly on the decision-making and priorities of the higher echelons of command (including Sherman, but Stoneman in particular), Belcher convincingly maintains that the veteran regiments continued to operate at a high level, most notably during the earlier stages of the campaign.

Upon the successful conclusion of the Atlanta Campaign, the cavalry's association with the Army of the Ohio ended, but Belcher's narrative continues to follow the noteworthy services of the old regiments through the balance of the war (much of the focus being on the Nashville Campaign). As demonstrated throughout the book, the evolution of the cavalry attached to the Army of the Ohio largely paralleled wider trends and developments across the western theater, the end stage of which was embodied in James Wilson's celebrated lightning campaign through the heart of the Deep South during the waning moments of the war.

The author of a major biography of Union major general David Stanley, an organizational history of the Army of the Cumberland's mounted arm, a unit study of the Chicago Board of Trade battery, and a trio of deep studies detailing cavalry operations during the Stones River, Chickamauga, and Nashville campaigns, Dennis Belcher has quickly become one of the leading authorities on Civil War cavalry in the western theater. Admirably weathering the prodigious challenge of taking an inherently fragmented topic and instilling a coherent order of progression to its history, The Cavalry of the Army of the Ohio only enhances Belcher's growing reputation. Highly recommended.

Booknotes: Yankees in the Hill City

New Arrival:

• Yankees in the Hill City: The Union Prisoner of War Camp in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1862-1865 by Clifton W. Potter, Jr. (McFarland, 2024).

When it comes to Civil War Virginia, the Richmond-area military hospitals and POW facilities naturally dominate the discussion of those topics, but Lynchburg, with its railroad connections and relative isolation from advancing Union armies and cavalry raiders (at least until the latter stages of the war) also proved an ideal location. Indeed, the city was one of the Confederacy's primary hospital centers.

From the description: "With three railroads and a canal passing through the city, Lynchburg, Virginia, was a major hospital center during the Civil War, far from the remote battlefields. A transit camp where Union soldiers remained before being paroled or transferred to another prison opened in June 1862 at the Fair Ground, just outside the city limits. Upon arrival, the sick and wounded were assigned to one of the 32 hospitals regardless of the uniform they wore."

Clifton Potter's Yankees in the Hill City: The Union Prisoner of War Camp in Lynchburg, Virginia, 1862-1865 is a "complete history of this Union POW camp in Lynchburg: the context of its founding, its operations, and its fate after the war." Like other military detention facilities throughout the South, the number of prisoners at Lynchburg quickly exceeded both expectations and capacity, and by June 1862 the prisoner population had already expanded six-fold. At mid-summer there were 5,000 men held there. According to Potter's research, the administrator of the camp, Col. George Gibbs, was exceptionally proficient with making the most of his limited resources. Potter estimates that the death rate there was "roughly 1.56 percent" under Gibbs's watch (pg. 7), a pretty impressive figure that included wounded individuals.

More from the description: "Union POWs who died were buried in the City Cemetery by the local funeral service, which also carefully recorded their personal data. Local ministers daily performed burial services for all soldiers, regardless of their race or the color of their uniforms, and all their expenses were paid by the Confederate government."

The first appendix consists of a register of Union POW deaths at Lynchburg between 1862 and 1865. Record data includes name, unit, date and location of death, detailed burial plot info, and cemetery number. Chapter Five of the book covers the 1864 campaign and battle of Lynchburg, and a corresponding appendix lists Union casualties suffered during those events from May to June 1864. In a cool little detail of the kind I've never encountered before, every source listed in the bibliography has attached commentary discussing its content and significance.

The final chapter covers the camp's post-war history and current state of historical memory attached to it.

Booknotes: Lincoln's Rise to Eloquence

New Arrival:

• Lincoln's Rise to Eloquence: How He Gained the Presidential Nomination by D. Leigh Henson (Univ of Ill Pr, 2024).

Combining disciplined self-education, ambitious drive, and natural intelligence, Abraham Lincoln was one of those gifted men able to successfully rise above presumed limitations of humble beginnings. His public oratory, seamlessly alternating between being folksy in popular appeal and striking in formal political and legal expression, was an essential tool in Lincoln's political arsenal. What was behind its development is the focus of D. Leigh Henson's Lincoln's Rise to Eloquence: How He Gained the Presidential Nomination.

Presented in two parts, the first addressing Lincoln's early Whig career and use of language to "gain distinction in Congress" and the second his 1850s rhetorical duels against both Stephen Douglas and slavery, Henson's study "examines Lincoln’s pre-presidential development as a rhetorician, the purposes and methods behind his speeches and writings, and how the works contributed to his political rise."

As outlined by numerous Lincoln experts, Lincoln's rhetorical power was rooted in multiple sources. More from the description: "Lincoln’s close study of the rhetorical process drew on sources that ranged from classical writings to foundational American documents to the speeches of Daniel Webster. As Henson shows, Lincoln applied his learning to combine arguments on historical, legal, and moral grounds with appeals to emotion and his own carefully curated credibility."

When it comes to analyzing the structure of Lincoln's rhetoric, other works of recent vintage—such as those from David Hirsch and Dan Van Haften that have deconstructed Lincoln's words and speeches using principles of science and math (specifically geometry)—come to mind. Henson "also explores Lincoln’s use of the elements of structural design to craft coherent arguments that, whatever their varying purposes, used direct and plain language to reach diverse audiences--and laid the groundwork for his rise to the White House."

Lincoln’s Rise to Eloquence "follows Lincoln from his early career through the years-long clashes with Stephen A. Douglas to trace the future president’s evolution as a communicator and politician."