Review - "Union General: Samuel Ryan Curtis and Victory in the West" by William Shea

[Union General: Samuel Ryan Curtis and Victory in the West by William L. Shea (Potomac Books, 2023). Hardcover, 3 maps, photos, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,299/356. ISBN:978-1-64012-518-6. $34.95]

By any measure, Major General Samuel Ryan Curtis was a successful field general. His victories at Pea Ridge in Arkansas and Westport in Missouri were both important moments of the Civil War fought west of the Mississippi. However, he could also be regarded as an unfortunate victim of that same geography. Even though Curtis proved adept at both handling armies (comparatively small as they were) and administering large military departments, his sphere of operations was largely confined to Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, and the western Plains, and whatever public acclaim he did receive at the time quickly faded after the war ended. Long without a biographical treatment commensurate with his status as one of the Union Army's best generals, Curtis has finally received his just due in William Shea's Union General: Samuel Ryan Curtis and Victory in the West.

Shea's discussion of his subject's personal life and early military, civilian, and political endeavors details the many career hats the West Point-trained Curtis wore before the coming of the Civil War. The most significant of these professional activities were the many major public works engineering projects Curtis planned or directly oversaw, some of which did not come to fruition until long after his death. The book also appropriately revives historical memory of Congressman Curtis's formative role in the creation of the first transcontinental railroad, his legislative co-sponsorship of which was interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War and his return to uniform.

Through manuscript research (including extensive use of Curtis's own far-flung archives), the O.R., and selective synthesis of the relevant published literature^*, Shea offers readers fine summaries of Curtis's campaigns and sound critical analysis of his generalship (though cartographic assistance is minimal, with only three route-tracing campaign maps included). Given the definitive nature of Shea and Earl Hess's classic Pea Ridge study, there probably isn't much of anything to add here regarding that campaign and Curtis's impressive role in its conduct, even though more than three decades have now passed since initial publication. William Rosecrans's controversial Trans-Mississippi tenure has been the target of some recent attempts at rehabilitation, but most historians of the 1864 campaign in Missouri would agree with Shea that, of the three Union department commanders involved (Frederick Steele in Arkansas, Rosecrans in Missouri, and Curtis in Kansas), Curtis's conduct shone brightest by far. His clear victory at Westport and aggressive pursuit in the face of many leadership obstacles permanently removed Price's army as a threat to federal control of Missouri and the Arkansas River Valley.

Shea's assessment of Curtis's generalship is laudatory throughout. He is persuasive in seeing, as others have, Curtis's failure to capture Little Rock in 1862 as a product of geographical and logistical limitations beyond his control rather than any particular shortcoming in generalship. Even after being forced to turn away from Little Rock, Curtis's aborted march deep into Arkansas marked a pioneering effort in living off the land (a practice that would assume much grander proportions in later campaigns) and solidified Curtis's position as one of the Union Army's most aggressive-minded commanders of the early-war period. His occupation of Helena, which was quickly established as a fortified base for supporting subsequent downriver operations, also proved significant. 

Analyzing Curtis's actions farther west, Shea cites the department commander's measured handling of Great Plains Indian violence as evidence that Sand Creek might not have happened had Curtis not been urgently recalled to Kansas in response to the Price Raid and forced to relinquish military affairs in Colorado to its governor and his appointees. It's speculation, but it's something to consider as a contingent event in the widening Plains conflicts of the Civil War period and beyond.

When Curtis's Arkansas campaign petered out in mid-1862 due to the failure of the White River resupply expedition, he had penetrated deeper south into enemy territory than any other Union general and had proved himself aggressive, highly capable, and willing to take risks—all leadership qualities desperate sought after by the War Department in Washington. So why didn't this early success, which was publicly recognized at the time, not catapult Curtis, either immediately or later on, into the higher echelon of Union Army commanders entrusted with major field commands? There was certainly precedent for Trans-Mississippi officers and generals moving on to bigger and better posts east of the river. Less proven generals such as John Pope and John Schofield were appointed to key commands, and even heavyweights such as Grant and Sheridan started in Missouri, but Curtis always remained behind to head a number of boundary-shifting departments. Indeed, his ultimate "reward" for Westport was command of the Department of the Northwest, a barely lateral (at best) career move that he accurately assessed as a shelving more than anything else.

Age undoubtedly played some factor in Curtis being underutilized. He was 56 at the start of the war, which is not old by today's standards of health and fitness (and Curtis was only two years older than Charles F. Smith, a well-respected western theater general long considered Grant's idol). Nevertheless, he was certainly older than generals found on the standard lists of Union Army greats. Sherman uncharitably declared him too old for active service, better suited for an administrative desk job. In the book, Shea reveals Curtis to be fully capable of arduous outdoor service for extended periods of time, though that vibrancy must be balanced against the general's tendency to overexert himself and require recuperative rest periods of a length that perhaps a younger man would not have required.

Though the general topic is frequently raised at various times, the narrative struggles to provide a clear picture of the extent of political sponsorship that Curtis might have had in Congress or within the Lincoln administration. Iowa was a Republican stronghold, but it could not have assured the kind of powerful political backing that a promising Midwestern general from Illinois or Ohio might have enjoyed. As has often been mentioned, operating in the most isolated of the war's three major theaters also undoubtedly hindered popular and political recognition of Curtis's achievements. As the book shows, Curtis certainly had no friend in Henry Halleck. Lincoln professed support, though its sincerity remains open to question, and the president didn't seem terribly interested in using his influence to further advance Curtis's career. When abolitionist Curtis was relieved of his command of the Missouri department by Lincoln over the general's friction with the proslavery Unionist governor, the president famously remarked that since he couldn't get rid of the governor he had to get rid of Curtis. Later, when Grant became the general in chief of the army, he did Curtis no favors. Indeed, as others have also failed to discover, the author could not find any source for the apparent antipathy Grant felt toward Curtis almost from the war's get go. Perhaps early-war competition had something to do with it, or it was another example of a Grant grudge that he held on to as tenaciously as he fought his battles, regardless of its undefinable, unjustified, or secondhand-sourced origins. Though Curtis was a West Pointer, perhaps (as Shea suggests as a possibility) his early resignation and prewar career as a multi-term Republican congressman made him more of a political general in Grant's eyes. Who knows.

The most controversial episode of Curtis's Civil War career involved allegations of personal involvement in the illegal cotton trade at Helena. Others have examined cotton profiteering among Curtis's officers, but Shea's research found no evidence of any personal malfeasance on Curtis's part. In the end, the author traces corruption allegations directed toward Curtis to designing men in the form of disappointed civilian speculators and ideologically opposed politicians and military officers (particularly the latter group). Shea concedes that Curtis displayed insufficient oversight over the entire process of cotton regulation (a rare misstep from a more typically scrupulous administrator), but laments the fact that the lengthy court of inquiry, which concluded in June 1863 finding no justification for recommending court martial proceedings, sidelined such a useful general for a year during the war's critical middle period.

Shea very lightly touches upon another matter of some controversy. Curtis was always a hardliner when it came to dealing with guerrillas, and that attitude hardened further when beloved son Henry was killed by Quantrill's men at Baxter Springs. As noted in the book, the U.S. attorney in Colorado complained about Curtis's summary execution of prisoners, but the general dismissed those legal concerns and continued the practice in Missouri with captured members of Price's command during the 1864 campaign there. An argument could be made that the issue is worthy of a deeper look than the passing mention it gets in this biography.

At the close of the conflict, Curtis stayed highly active. He cast aside the disappointment he felt with the War Department's seeming lack of due regard for his contributions to Union victory, and accepted the arduous, and rather thankless, task of traveling to the frontier to lay the initial groundwork for lasting treaties with the Plains tribes. With a nod to his prewar sponsorship of the original Pacific railroad bill, Curtis was offered, and he accepted, a lucrative position as a transcontinental railroad commissioner. He was still doing railroad work when he died (likely from a stroke) the day after Christmas in 1866. Indeed, as Shea argues, death so soon after the war ended very likely contributed mightily to Curtis's rapid disappearance from the general public's imagination. In addition to spending his entire Civil War service in the most isolated of the conflict's three primary fighting theaters, the general had no opportunity to publish his own story or otherwise participate in the many public debates that kept prominent Civil War generals in the public eye for decades. Highly celebratory while remaining judicious, William Shea's Union General is a fine biography that should go a long way toward fostering a wider recognition and appreciation of Samuel Ryan Curtis's substantial historical legacy.

Notes:
* - There are others, but mainstays included Shea's own (with co-author Earl Hess) Pea Ridge: Civil War Campaign in the West (1992)—which would take a monumental effort to supplant, Robert Schultz's The March to the River: From the Battle of Pea Ridge to Helena, Spring 1862 (2014), Howard Monnett's Action Before Westport, 1864 (1964,R-1995), and Kyle Sinisi's The Last Hurrah: Sterling Price's Missouri Expedition of 1864 (2015). Michael Banasik's Embattled Arkansas (1996) [the early sections of which examine Curtis's 1862 campaign in NE Arkansas], Christopher Wehner's The 11th Wisconsin in the Civil War (2008) [which offers good information on Cache River and cotton corruption among officers in Curtis's command], and A Severe and Bloody Fight: The Battle of Whitney's Lane and Military Occupation of White County, Arkansas, May and June 1862 (1996) by Akridge & Powers are somewhat puzzling absences from the Union General bibliography, the last perhaps even more so given the effusive back cover blurb Shea gave it.