Review - "Yankee Commandos: How William P. Sanders Led a Cavalry Squadron Deep into Confederate Territory" by Stuart Brandes

[Yankee Commandos: How William P. Sanders Led a Cavalry Squadron Deep into Confederate Territory by Stuart D. Brandes (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). Hardcover, 7 maps, photos, illustrations, chronology, notes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xi,205/329. ISBN978-1-62190-746-6. $34.95]

It is difficult to understate the significance of Tennessee's white Unionists and their armed contributions to victory in the West from beginning to end. Taken together, they contributed to federal ranks what amounted to an entire mid-sized field army. Roughly three-quarters of those individuals (an estimated 30,000 organized fighting men) hailed from rugged East Tennessee, where the majority of the population remained fiercely loyal to the United States government. Dedicated to liberating their homes and punishing secessionists on both battlefield and civilian fronts, those men were highly motivated soldiers wherever they fought. Immediately recognizing this large wellspring of loyalism in the heart of the Confederacy and receptive to their cries for help, President Lincoln very early on in the war enjoined his military commanders to come up with a plan to succor the population through invasion and occupation. Initially conciliatory, Confederate authorities cracked down on dissent after a failed autumn 1861 uprising that included an extensive bridge-burning campaign, and later on conscription agents further drove thousands of fighting age men across the mountains and into federal recruitment camps in Kentucky. Despite continuous promises of relief, the pro-Union population could only look on in frustration over the first half of the war as logistical concerns and shifting strategic priorities repeatedly postponed federal plans for occupying East Tennessee.

Finally, in the spring of 1863 Major General Ambrose Burnside was in the process of assembling his new Army of the Ohio for a major relief campaign, the plan being to pour through the mountain gaps along the Kentucky-Tennessee border and capture Knoxville, the East Tennessee region's principal urban center. Unfortunately for the locals, that long-anticipated movement was yet again aborted, with the Ninth Corps (half the expedition's manpower) ordered to Mississippi in June to bolster U.S. Grant's army besieging Vicksburg. In the meantime, while waiting for the return of his borrowed troops and resumption of the campaign, Burnside ordered a cavalry raid into East Tennessee. The general hoped that a bold incursion there would serve as a morale boost to the population while at the same time damaging Confederate transportation and communications infrastructure in ways that would facilitate his expected follow-on campaign. The history of the resulting June 14-24, 1863 raid is recounted in full for the first time by Stuart Brandes in his book Yankee Commandos: How William P. Sanders Led a Cavalry Squadron Deep into Confederate Territory.

The man selected to lead the mission was 29-year-old Colonel William P. Sanders, a highly regarded up-and-comer in the leadership ranks of Union cavalry officers. Born in Kentucky, Sanders's slaveholding family later moved to Natchez, Mississippi. Young Sanders graduated from West Point in 1856 with a rather mediocre record, was assigned to the 2nd Dragoons in the West, and resided in California when war broke out in 1861. As Brandes relates in the book, those who knew him remarked that Sanders regularly displayed strong southern sympathies, which would not have been unusual for someone of his upbringing. What was unexpected by many what that he stayed in the U.S. Army. Given his age and social background, he might have been expected to resign his commission and 'go South' but didn't. No surviving letters share his thinking on the matter. Brandes's research did not uncover any documents within which Sanders either explained his reasoning or discussed any conflicting views on loyalty he might have held. Forced to read between the lines, the author reasonably posits that Sanders's decade removed from the Deep South and his immediate family's broken ties with the region (through marriage and geographical relocation to free state California) combined with his U.S. Army service to cement Sanders's national loyalties.

Sanders's brigade-sized command that was assigned to conduct the raid consisted of a select group of approximately 1,500 Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky men drawn from six mounted regiments. Anticipating the difficulties involved in traversing rugged mountain trails, only a single artillery section accompanied the raiders. You don't have to be a stickler for accuracy to wonder why the author repeatedly refers to Sanders's ad-hoc raiding column as being a "squadron" (which is two companies by the U.S. cavalry's organizational terminology of the period, in practice between 100 and 200 men) but it's best to not get too hung up on that particular semantic quirk.

Overall, Brandes does a very fine job of constructing a Civil War cavalry raid narrative, seamlessly weaving numerous participant and observer accounts into his text's meticulous recounting of events. In the opening stage of the raid, Sanders was gifted with good fortune when his Confederate opponents left a poorly guarded gap in their front-line screen at Wartburg. That inexcusable oversight allowed Sanders to make it all the way to the East Tennessee & Georgia Railroad and its critically important Loudon Bridge (the raid's chief objective) without any major roadblocks or fighting. Finding the huge bridge fortified and well-defended, Sanders prudently declined to attack yet was determined to press on with the raid. On June 20, he feinted against and skirted around the Knoxville defenses. Pressing beyond Knoxville, Sanders and his men destroyed the massive, state of the art bridge built at Strawberry Plains. After destroying another important bridge at Mossy Creek, Sanders sensed that the jig was up and turned back toward Kentucky. That final stage of the raid was not without incident, however, as converging Confederate pursuers and blocking forces compelled Sanders to spike and abandon his artillery and break up his command into small groups in order to escape across the mountains.

In addition to closely following the movements of Sanders and his men, the text provides a full picture of the Confederate response to the raid and the challenges they experienced in attempting to thwart it. Brandes is justly critical of Brigadier General John Pegram's failure to maintain an effective screen across his geographical area of responsibility, which included Wartburg. Generally speaking, East Tennessee department commander Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner conducted himself in reasonable fashion, having little choice but to take calculated risks as he could not afford to abandon the mountain screen in favor of concentrating overwhelming force against Sanders. As Brandes details in the book, Buckner's most disreputable action was his post-raid attempt to scapegoat Brigadier General John Frazer, the Cumberland Gap commander and the principal subordinate arguably least responsible for the most critical defect in the Confederate defensive screen.

Brandes rates the Sanders Raid a success and that conclusion is difficult to dispute. Strawberry Plains was the movement's most significant achievement, but the raiders also destroyed two other important bridges of lesser size. While Sanders was forced to abandon his artillery section and his men were largely scattered by the end of the raid, actual casualties were very low (at least by official count). The side objective of showing the flag and raising the spirits of the pro-Union population also seems to have been well achieved, as the author highlights innumerable incidents of celebratory acts and examples of cheerful assistance from friendly civilians all along the raid's path.

In assessing which factors contributed most to that success, the author's analysis offers a number of insights. As became standard practice during the war, Burnside directed that diversionary operations be conducted to confuse the enemy as to the raid's path and target, and the probes led by Col. August Kautz and Gen. Julius White fulfilled those purposes. Assisted by the aforementioned Confederate mistakes and their need to closely guard numerous fixed points, Sanders also helped his own case by employing speed and misdirection in both bypassing strongpoints and overcoming token garrisons. Information was another key to success, as civilian guides and local knowledge possessed within his own command (roughly half of the raiders were East Tennesseans) kept Sanders accurately and abundantly informed as to road/trail directions and enemy dispositions. Brandes consistently lauds Sanders's decisive and effective leadership, but he can be critical when warranted. For example, at two points Sanders endangered his own rear guard detachment by neglecting to assign a guide or otherwise mark a path for those men to rejoin the main body.

A brief epilogue describes the few months remaining in Sanders's life, including his death in action on the skirmish line during James Longstreet's Knoxville Campaign. Brandes's study is the first to truly invite a full consideration of the life and Civil War career of William Sanders. During that process, one might also ponder what might have been had he lived. Given the independent leadership displayed during the East Tennessee raid and the confidence his superiors had in his abilities (though unconfirmed by the Senate, he was appointed acting brigadier general before his death), it seems possible to imagine Sanders leading a mounted division at some point during the subsequent Atlanta, March to the Sea, Middle Tennessee, and Carolinas campaigns or during James Wilson's 1865 Raid through Alabama and Georgia.

Yankee Commandos is worthy of recommendation for a number of reasons. The past few decades have witnessed a great upsurge in the number and quality of Civil War raid histories, and Stuart Brandes's work admirably fills in one of the remaining gaps in that coverage. The volume also significantly enhances the larger Southern Unionist literature by highlighting one of the numerous notable military contributions spearheaded by the homegrown southern opposition to the Confederate experiment. Finally, a detailed, book-length account of the Army of the Ohio's 1863 campaign to secure East Tennessee is still lacking, and Brandes's study of the Sanders Raid will stand as a vital companion to such a work, if one is ever created.