Book Snapshot: "Armies in Gray: The Organizational History of the Confederate States Army in the Civil War"

I first posted about US Army Command and General Staff College professor Dan Fullerton's Armies in Gray: The Organizational History of the Confederate States Army in the Civil War way back in 2016. Still in print today, it was published in 2017 and, aside from a couple of reviews, seems to have promptly disappeared from larger notice. I don't recall seeing it in any bibliography yet. My own attempt at getting a review copy was unsuccessful, but patience paid off a year and a half later when I found a warehouse deal on it for a fraction of the $200 list price (and it wasn't even damaged).

A massive tome at 1,350 pages, Fullerton's Armies in Gray is essentially an attempt to recreate for Civil War students and researchers the organizational evolution of the entire Confederate Army at quarterly time stamps. With yearly intervals missing too much in the way of momentous organizational change and monthly intervals far too static and unwieldy, quarterly snapshots in time seem to hit the sweet spot. The order of battle resources that form the backbone of the book's own series of OBs are the usual suspects (chief among those the Official Records, Crute, and Sifakis) along with supplemental first-person accounts and unit histories. Sifakis's books have a bit of a hit and miss reputation, and presumably the author did as much cross-checking as was reasonably possible given the scale of the project.

Order of battle presentation employs the standard descending-org arrangement, beginning with military departments at the top and progressing all the way down the organizational tree to component regiments/battalions/batteries at the bottom. Numbers data is most consistent at the department, district, sub-district, army, corps, and division levels. Strength estimates for brigades is spotty and generally absent below that, although many small garrison post strengths are provided. Number of guns and tube types for batteries are also not part of the process. Independent local and state forces are excluded by design, but orders of battle for non-Confederate militia organizations that directly cooperated with Confederate forces in the field (ex. the Missouri State Guard) are attached. A volume index was likely omitted due to space concerns.

Each quarterly order of battle is extensively annotated at multiple formation levels. For those, hefty explanatory endnotes, a single one of which can run a thousand words or more, discuss that quarter's organizational changes and area(s) of operations (often with numbers and dates sprinkled within). Source information and reliability is also part of the endnote discussion.

This is definitely one of the jewels of my home reference library. I might be reading too much into it, but there seemed to be at least some suggestion of the possibility of producing a Union Army companion volume. Given that Armies in Gray took ten years to research, though, I can only imagine how much time (and how many volumes!) would be involved with repeating the same process for an Armies in Blue.