Booknotes: More Important Than Good Generals

New Arrival:

• More Important Than Good Generals: Junior Officers in the Army of the Tennessee by Jonathan Engel (Kent St UP, 2025).

Jonathan Engel's More Important Than Good Generals "is an in-depth study of the Army of the Tennessee’s junior officers." For the purposes of this study, the "junior officer" umbrella consists of company officers (captains and lieutenants) and field grade officers (majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels). Both general officer studies (in particular, biographies) and common soldier studies can be found in abundance in the Civil War literature, and Engel's study take a fresher path by looking closely at the men who bridged that gap by providing essential leadership at the regimental and company levels.

More from the description: These "(o)fficers had a substantially different array of duties than the soldiers they commanded and the generals above them, resulting in a drastically different wartime experience. Moreover, it is not only Civil War officers who have been overlooked but also the army Grant and Sherman commanded––the Army of the Tennessee––despite the fact that it was one of the most victorious armies of the war."

When the junior officers of Union Civil War armies are scrutinized by historians it is often in the context of their motivations to fight, their political expressions, and attitudes toward essential war aims as those shifted and evolved. More: "Pushing back against the commonly accepted narrative of disillusionment among officers, Engel concludes that the Army of the Tennessee’s company and field grade officers endured the war’s trials with their moral and political ideology intact. Further, rather than becoming indifferent to the Union cause, Engel argues that the reverse was often true: officers who started off racist or disinterested in the issue of enslavement became advocates of emancipation."