Review - "New Fields of Adventure: The Writings of Lyman G. Bennett, Civil War Soldier and Topographical Engineer, 1861–1865" by M. Jane Johansson, editor

[New Fields of Adventure: The Writings of Lyman G. Bennett, Civil War Soldier and Topographical Engineer, 1861–1865 edited by M. Jane Johansson (University of Tennessee Press, 2024). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xxiv,298/399. ISBN:978-1-62190-861-6. $39.95]

Big picture investigation of Civil War military engineering has drawn increased attention from scholars over the past quarter century. Given the viewpoint expressed in his book Engineering Victory: How Technology Won the Civil War (2016), Thomas Army is arguably the most vigorous proponent of the idea that the vast disparity between North and South in the areas of formal engineering education, practitioner pools, technology, and resources was a primary (and even perhaps the key) factor in Union victory. While Army's case is compelling on a number of levels, it is also clear through studies such as Larry Daniel's Engineering in the Confederate Heartland (2022) and Saxon Bisbee's Engines of Rebellion: Confederate Ironclads and Steam Engineering in the American Civil War (2018) that impressive feats of military engineering effort and skill were not entirely beyond the limited capabilities of the South. Examples of relatively recent works focusing on military engineering's role during specific campaigns are Earl Hess's excellent series of books published between 2005 and 2018 that cover field fortifications in the eastern theater and the western theater's Atlanta Campaign. Justin Solonick's Engineering Victory: The Union Siege of Vicksburg (2015) is equally insightful. Histories of specialized engineering units have also emerged during this time, two examples being Mark Hoffman's "My Brave Mechanics": The First Michigan Engineers and Their Civil War (2007) and Patterson's Independent Company of Engineers and Mechanics 1861-1865 (2020) by Charles Bogart.

Scholarly editing and publication of the writings of Union engineers is another major feature of this expanding body of literature. Correspondence from one of the war's most celebrated military engineers can be studied through Paul Taylor's My Dear Nelly: The Selected Civil War Letters of General Orlando M. Poe to His Wife Eleanor (2020). Also in 2020, University of Tennessee Press published A Volunteer in the Regulars: The Civil War Journal and Memoir of Gilbert Thompson, US Engineer Battalion (edited by Mark Smith) through their Voices of the Civil War series. Another Voices title of similar vein is the subject of this review, M. Jane Johansson's New Fields of Adventure: The Writings of Lyman G. Bennett, Civil War Soldier and Topographical Engineer, 1861–1865. Johansson's volume possesses the added distinction of being the rare military engineering volume centered on the Trans-Mississippi theater, not only Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas but the Great Plains and Mountain West as well.

Married at the end of 1859 and a father by the outbreak of the Civil War, Connecticut-born Illinoisan Lyman Gibson Bennett derived the bulk of his personal income from surveying, an in-demand skill that would place him in good stead during the coming conflict. He enlisted in the Thirty-Sixth Illinois, and by the fall of 1861 found himself in Rolla, Missouri, a town located at the terminus of the Southwestern Branch of the Pacific Railroad. Rolla's location made it one of the state's most strategically important posts, and Bennett's surveying skills were immediately put to use in the construction of Fort Lyman and in mapping the surrounding countryside. Johansson very aptly describes Bennett's writing style as being similar to a "travelogue." Indeed, Bennett's engaging prose combined with his lengthy and highly detailed descriptions of physical distances between points of interest, the weather, the natural landscape (and its most prominent geographical features), habitations, and developmental improvements are a prime feature of all of his writings and serve as a veritable goldmine of historical information for today's readers and scholars. Perhaps only the late John Bradbury, the foremost expert on Civil War Rolla, could have told us for certain, but it seems likely that Bennett's extensive diary of this period is the most notable single source behind our knowledge of the critical early-war period in and around that center of transportation and military occupation. Significantly, unlike so many other Civil War diary, letter, and journal writers, Bennett was also very willing to 'talk shop,' detailing for readers the instruments he used and processes he followed for accurately estimating distances, laying out fortifications, and platting out the countryside for military use.

Soon, Bennett's engineering skills brought him to the attention of higher ups, and after a brief hospital stay in St. Louis he returned to active service, rejoining his regiment as it crossed into northwest Arkansas with General Samuel Curtis's Army of the Southwest. In addition to describing the increasing levels of devastating observed during his march to the front, during which he was also detailed to lead a side expedition, Bennett also offers very extensive eyewitness accounts of the battles of Bentonville and Pea Ridge. In hailing Bennett's account of his experiences during the Battle of Pea Ridge, Johansson is certainly not exaggerating the depth and significance of it as one of the most enlightening ones written by a soldier serving in the ranks. His regiment, the Thirty-Sixth Illinois, was a key contributor to Union success in the highly consequential Oberson's Field sector on March 7, 1862. There, its skirmishers essentially decapitated the Confederate high command in that area of the sprawling battlefield by killing in close succession generals Ben McCulloch and second in command James McIntosh. An admirer of General Franz Sigel, Bennett also vividly describes his regiment's participation in the March 8 counterattack that routed the Confederate army and produced, by many accounts, Sigel's best day as a Civil War general. After the battle Bennett formally joined Curtis's staff and performed topographical engineering duties during the army's long march across northern Arkansas.

Returning to St. Louis to finalize his maps, Bennett became bored with department headquarters desk work and received a commission to raise troops in northwest Arkansas. His two-part memoir "Recruiting in Dixie," written in the 1870s, vividly recounts his dangerous entry and recruitment adventures in that guerrilla-infested part of the state, where anti-Confederate "Mounted Feds" enlisted and fought in large numbers. While tall tales of enemy atrocities abound, readers nevertheless gain a clear sense of the societal breakdown that occurred in a mountainous region where lethal violence was common on and off the battlefield and household neutrality impossible to maintain. Bennett eventually was promoted to major of the Fourth Arkansas Cavalry (US), and his writings offer useful firsthand perspectives on operations in the area. Hand in hand with those accounts are rather sharp opinions of the region's backwardness (at least in comparison to his own views of elevated civilization). Citing what he felt to have been "unjust prejudice against northern officers" (pg. 232), Bennett resigned his commission near the end of 1864.

In 1865, Bennett returned to the war, this time as a civilian contract engineer. As his diaries reveal, Bennett surveyed battlefields from the recently concluded Price Expedition as well as government lands in eastern Kansas. Those intimately familiar with the atlas to the O.R. will immediately recognize the former. In a remarkable journey spanning, by Johansson's estimate, two thousand miles, Bennett then followed the overland trail across Nebraska and into Colorado (with a detour to observe the territory's gold fields). He also was sent on a mission to survey fortifications at Fort Laramie in Wyoming, Dakota Territory. Though those journeys were full of danger from Indian raids, extreme weather, and frontier privation, Bennett's typical curiosity and colorful travelogue style of writing remained intact. Finding no need to return to the Bennett material already well covered by another scholar [see David Wagner's Powder River Odyssey: Nelson Cole's Western Campaign of 1865 - The Journals of Lyman G. Bennett and Other Eyewitness Accounts (2009)], Johansson's examination ends in April 1865.

Johansson's professionalism in compiling, arranging, and editing the Bennett writings is exemplary. She puts her own considerable primary and secondary source research to good use in the volume's illuminating chapter introductions, the epilogue, and endnotes. The notes provide consistent source and background information on persons, places, and events described in Bennett's writing while also offering corrections to Bennett's factual mistakes. Johansson also makes sure to include as many of Bennett's surviving maps and drawings as possible, noting that copyright precluded reproduction of the artwork Bennett produced for his "Personal Reminiscences," one part of which was the aforementioned "Recruiting in Dixie."

Bennett's Civil War writings and Jane Johansson's expert editing of them for scholarly publication should draw interest from a broad range of readers, among them those concerned with the major military campaigns of the Trans-Mississippi West, the role of military engineering in both the conduct and historical documentation of those campaigns, and the hardships and military contributions of the Unionist minority in Arkansas. This fresh Voices of the Civil War series title is very highly recommended.