Booknotes: The Tennessee Campaign of 1864

New Arrival:
• The Tennessee Campaign of 1864 edited by Steven E. Woodworth and Charles D. Grear (SIUP, 2016).

This latest volume in the well regarded Civil War Campaigns in the Heartland series from Southern Illinois University Press contains 14 essays, including the previously unpublished campaign diary of Patrick Cleburne (edited by Lee White) that I briefly mentioned on the site a while back.

"Contributors explore the campaign’s battlefield action, including how Major General Andrew J. Smith’s three aggressive divisions of the Army of Tennessee became the most successful Federal unit at Nashville, how vastly outnumbered Union troops held the Allatoona Pass, why Hood failed at Spring Hill and how the event has been perceived, and why so many of the Army of Tennessee’s officer corps died at the Battle of Franklin, where the Confederacy suffered a disastrous blow. Essays on the strained relationship between Ulysses S. Grant and George H. Thomas and on Thomas’s approach to warfare reveal much about the personalities involved, and chapters about civilians in the campaign’s path and those miles away show how the war affected people not involved in the fighting. An innovative case study of the fighting at Franklin investigates the emotional and psychological impact of killing on the battlefield, and other implications of the campaign include how the courageous actions of the U.S. Colored Troops at Nashville made a lasting impact on the African American community and how preservation efforts met with differing results at Franklin and Nashville."