Book News: "They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory"

When it comes to titles covering Civil War in Indian Territory topics, it is rare enough to get one fresh release in any given month, but getting two puts us in a Halley's Comet realm of frequency. We've already mentioned William Lees's Honey Springs, Oklahoma: Historical Archaeology of a Civil War Battlefield on the site, but another intriguing September '25 study just turned up in Michael J. Manning's They Fought Like Veterans: The Military History of the Civil War in the Indian Territory.

A pair of survey histories of the Civil War in Indian Territory have been published fairly recently, Mary Jane Warde's When the Wolf Came: The Civil War and the Indian Territory (2013) and Clint Crowe's Caught in the Maelstrom: The Indian Nations in the Civil War, 1861-1865 (2019), but neither of those fine books goes into much depth in their coverages of the various campaigns and battles fought within the borders of today's Oklahoma. It's too bad we can't get a good sample of the main text, but a look at Manning's table of contents (which can be found by clicking the "Read sample" box at the page linked above in bold) looks promising.

Unfortunately, a good chunk of what we do get with Civil War in Indian Territory book publishing has been, to put it kindly, amateurish in nature, but there are good reasons to place our trust in Manning. He spent over three decades with the National Park Service, retiring as chief ranger at Fort Donelson NB. Sharp readers might also recall that he's the author of the Blue & Gray magazine two-part series featuring the Civil War years in Indian Territory. Indeed, portions of this book were previously published in those 2011 and 2015 issues. The main narrative of this book is over 550 8.5"x11" pages, so it's pretty clear that this is not a rehash of the B&G material but something much more detailed in nature.

Booknotes: Counting the Cost of Freedom

New Arrival:

• Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War by Amanda Laury Kleintop (UNC Press, 2025).

With the destruction of slavery during the Civil War, which occurred on a timetable far more instant than gradual in nature and was without compensation to slaveowners, it has been estimated by some that half the American South's wealth disappeared. The attempts to recover that wealth in the form of monetary compensation from the government is the subject of Amanda Laury Kleintop's Counting the Cost of Freedom: The Fight Over Compensated Emancipation after the Civil War.

I've often thought that the Lincoln administration's various wartime overtures to the loyal slaveholders of the Border States, offering the prospect of compensation in exchange for voluntary emancipation, would make for an interesting book someday. This is not that. As Kleintop (who refers to loyalist claims as being distinctly different in regard to compensated emancipation) explains in her introduction, her focus is on the Confederate South, though she does necessarily incorporate some Border State politicians and politics into the mix. Between 1864 and the 1870s, Southern compensation advocates cited international precedent and the takings clause of the Constitution's Fifth Amendment to make their case for economic redress.

From the description: "After the Confederacy’s defeat, white Southerners demanded federal compensation for the financial value of formerly enslaved people and fought for other policies that would recognize abolition’s costs during Reconstruction. As Amanda Laury Kleintop shows, their persistence eventually led to the creation of Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, which abolished the right to profit from property in people."

Kleintop's narrative, which involves periods before, during, and after the Civil War, unfolds in chronological order. The first chapter "surveys the antebellum arguments and precedents for compensated emancipation in US law and the larger Atlantic world." Centering on the representative roles of Frederick Douglas, Kentucky senator Garrett Davis, President Lincoln, and slaveholding Louisiana loyalists, legalities surrounding wartime emancipation are addressed in Chapter 2. The following chapter explains the objections raised by former Confederates over the constitutional legality of uncompensated emancipation, while the congressional response (specifically the Fourteenth Amendment's Section 4) is detailed in Chapter 5. Former slaveowners continued to press for compensation well into the postwar period, and the final two chapters of Kleintop's study trace their ultimately fruitless campaign. By the author's interpretation of events, those efforts only stopped after a major strategic political shift occurred, the new attitude (expressed in parallel with southern claims that matters associated with slavery were not the leading cause for secession) being that compensation was "neither wanted nor needed" (pp. 9-10).

Review - "Reckless in Their Statements: Challenging History's Harshest Criticisms of Albert Sidney Johnston in the Civil War" by Leigh Goggin

[Reckless in their Statements: Challenging History's Harshest Criticisms of Albert Sidney Johnston in the Civil War by Leigh S. Goggin (Fontaine Press, 2025). Softcover, 12 maps, bibliography, endnotes, index. Pages main/total:vi,367/447. ISBN:978-0-9924658-7-2 $27.99]

Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston was tasked with handling arguably the most difficult situation faced by any major Civil War department commander. Appointed to head the Confederate Army's Department No. 2 on September 10, 1861, just after the Kentucky buffer zone was erased (instantly altering the strategic situation in the West), Johnston had to protect a vast front stretching from the Arkansas border with Indian Territory all the way to the wilderness invasion routes through eastern Kentucky. Worse, he had to do it without the benefit of having anything like the resources in munitions, manpower, and quality subordinate leaders needed in order to reasonably secure such a vast forward line of defense. Over the second half of Johnston's nearly seven-month tenure in that posting, which ended with the general's demise at Shiloh on April 6, 1862, the Confederate position in the West spiraled into unmitigated disaster. From then to today, many have principally blamed Johnston's own shortcomings for the catastrophic defeats of early 1862 and the permanent loss of key parts of Tennessee, including the state's two largest and most important cities, Memphis and Nashville. Others have suggested that Johnston, while he certainly made his share of mistakes just like every other early-war commander rushed into unprecedented realms of responsibility, did his best in the face of an already enormous task subsequently rendered impossible by grossly insufficient government support. Contributing to the former opinion group are the authors of many classic works underpinning the western theater historiography. Assessing the merits of their most damning assessments of Johnston's leadership is the primary focus of Leigh Goggin's Reckless in their Statements: Challenging History's Harshest Criticisms of Albert Sidney Johnston in the Civil War.

A helpful refresher, Goggin's introductory review of the divided historiography related to Johnston's generalship reveals a great many critics whose views are subsequently contested in the book. Negative portrayals of Johnston's leadership and decision-making emerged during the early-modern period of Civil War scholarship through major works from influential writers such as Stanley Horn [The Army of Tennessee (1941)], Beauregard biographer T. Harry Williams, and Thomas Connelly (Army of the Heartland: The Army of Tennessee, 1861-1862 (1967)]. Though somewhat counterbalanced by a sympathetic biography from Johnston's own son as well as Charles Roland's classic Soldier of Three Republics, the latter originally published in 1964, works strongly critical of Johnston continued to emerge throughout the twentieth century and through to the present. While Connelly's collection of "reckless statements" is by far the most frequent target of Goggin's determined challenge, the views of many others, among them B.F. Cooling, Larry Daniel, Kendall Gott, Larry Daniel, and Timothy Smith, are also scrutinized in the text.

The volume's structure discards a more traditional narrative format in favor of presenting the material as a series of chapters addressing questions (23 in total) directly associated with common criticisms of Johnston's generalship found in the literature. Going into them all is beyond the scope of a review, but a selection from the list will be discussed below. Generally speaking, each chapter begins with an introductory section that provides relevant historical background and shares critical statements and arguments from the published historiography that have shaped both popular and scholarly views of how well, or how badly, Johnston performed. That is followed by the author's hard-charging, often multi-layered, defense of Johnston's judgment and actions. The research behind them primarily based on the O.R., newspapers, and key works from the secondary literature, Goggin's arguments acknowledge some of Johnston's missteps, but their primary aim is, as the book's subtitle suggests, to convince readers that most traditional criticisms of Johnston's generalship are either greatly exaggerated or outright false (with Connelly's views and opinions forming the great preponderance of the latter).

Lest one think Goggin's approach is largely an attempt at making hay against heavily dated interpretation that has already been significantly revised, it also takes on more recent analysis, including that of one of the most respected scholars of Johnston's campaigns, Timothy Smith. Goggin's alternative to Smith's depiction of Johnston's military management style as being too meek and passive has merit, but his criticism of Smith's theory describing how Johnston's behavioral traits informed his Civil War military judgment produces some awkward moments. It is reasonable to be skeptical of historians, no matter how well informed, formulating psychological profiles of long-dead figures, but Goggin introduces some unnecessary confusion into his analysis of the shortcomings of Smith's approach. Early on, Goggin acknowledges the full extent of Smith's theory as developed in that author's 2023 study The Iron Dice of Battle: Albert Sidney Johnston and the Civil War in the West. Smith's thesis posits that Johnston processed his most significant life choices through in-depth reflection that frequently failed to pay off due to misfortune or misjudgment. In response to personal or financial disaster, Johnston then attempted to remedy the impact of those losses through acts of desperate risk-taking. Throughout the body of the book, and strikingly in the epilogue chapter (see pages 364-65), the important second part of Smith's theoretical construct of Johnston's personality and behavior patterns is seemingly passed over in favor of focusing only on the first part (how Johnston's overly contemplative "chess player" approach caused him to lose control of fluid military situations during critical times when the "poker-style game of war" needed to be played). While Goggin thoughtfully counters Smith's characterization by outlining some of the arguably bold moves that Johnston made earlier on in his tenure, the author inexplicably fails to credit Smith's behavioral theory for encompassing the boldest card-playing move of them all, the winner-take-all counterstrike at Pittsburg Landing. This inconsistent characterization of Smith's psychological profile of Johnston muddies the stronger elements of the author's case against what he terms Smith's "unusual metaphor" for explaining Johnston's mindset and actions.

In Chapter 6 ["Why did Johnston assume command of the Central Kentucky Army?"], a major defense of Johnston is Goggin's insistence that the Bowling Green high command (generals Simon Bolivar Buckner and William J. Hardee) did not possess the willingness and self-confidence necessary for independent command, which required Johnston's personal presence there whether he preferred it or not. The author's case has its strong points, but one might counterargue that part of the job of a good theater or army commander is to use his leadership and motivational skills to instill belief and confidence into wavering subordinates. In that scenario, allowing supposed weakness from Hardee and Buckner, rather than strategic/operational considerations, to determine where the theater commander placed his headquarters does not reflect well on Johnston. Goggin's overall case, reinforced at a number of places in the book, for Johnston assuming personal command at Bowling Green and remaining there throughout the twin rivers crisis is probably the best supported one in print. Some, even perhaps most, will still find it ultimately unconvincing, but the author does make it very difficult for critics of Johnston to maintain their blanket condemnation.

Aside from assailing Johnston's alleged obsession with Bowling Green and the hovering Union threat there leading him to improperly neglect the Tennessee and Cumberland river defenses, critics have also alleged that Johnston, once Union army and naval forces descended in force upon Fort Henry, erred badly in not rushing to the twin rivers front to lead his forces in person against Grant. In Chapter 12 ["Why did Johnston delegate the defense of the Cumberland River to Floyd?"], Goggin strongly argues that Johnston had valid, if not entirely compelling, reasons to remain at Bowling Green, trusting Donelson affairs to generals John Floyd (whose incompetence was not fully apparent at the time), Gideon Pillow, and newly arrived Buckner. The author offers a vigorous defense of what led Johnston to believe that Union general Don Carlos Buell's army in Kentucky was the theater's principal threat, but the fact remains that it was the twin rivers front where Union forces were actively advancing and engaging with his defensive line. What Johnston might have been able to achieve beyond saving the forces there from disgraceful surrender is open to debate, but it still seems reasonable to suggest that Johnston's proper place was to go where the actual, as opposed to threatened, fighting was located.

Johnston has also been criticized for not developing an adequate fallback plan for handling departmental defense once the outer cordon was breached. In Chapter 16 ["Was Johnston aware of the lack of fortifications at Nashville?"], Goggin does effectively defend Johnston against claims that he was caught entirely off guard by Nashville's relatively defenseless condition. As Goggin explains, the lack of fortification progress at Nashville, and the slow pace of fort development earlier on the twin rivers, was a product of dangerous regional apathy that led to insufficient resources, labor, and urgency for those projects. While all of that is true, it is also the case that it is not enough for a commander to order that those places be fortified but to ensure that such directives were followed. Sure, there were a great many obstacles in his way, but one doesn't get the impression that Johnston, from his static headquarters at Bowling Green, always did his utmost to use his departmental powers to inject impetus into necessary defense work projects located at other points under his command.

Of course, every reader of this book will eagerly anticipate questions about Shiloh. Three chapters ["Did Johnston approve the Battle Plan?,"Was Johnston or Beauregard in command of the Army of the Mississippi?," and "Did Johnston or Beauregard direct the battle of Shiloh?"] address neverending planning and leadership debates related to that great western battle. Documentation is sparse, but the author builds a strong circumstantial case that Johnston was well aware of, and satisfied with (he did nothing to alter it), P.G.T. Beauregard's battle plan. On the latter two questions, command authority was clear cut (Johnston was in charge, and Beauregard was his second in command), and Goggin cites enough critical mid-battle decisions on Johnston's part to counter assertions that he left general direction of the battle to Beauregard, who, in Goggin's view, while still ill "performed well at the rear of the army, collecting reports from the front lines, reforming stragglers, and dispatching inactive units back to the front" (pg. 350). How well the author defends the wisdom behind the Confederate attack plan, one of the most reviled battle line arrangements of any major Civil War battle, is less convincing, though still interesting. Goggin contends that the Army of the Mississippi's deployment, with each corps stacked one behind the other rather than side by side (left, center, and right) with a reserve, was not only reasonable given terrain considerations (and incorrect assumptions conveyed through poor maps) but was also deemed best for masking the army's strength (making it appear larger than it was to the enemy) and providing the means of rapid movement necessary for maintaining surprise. The contention that any formation would have immediately broken up raw troops deployed in the heavily wooded terrain, making the stacked corps formation materially no worse than any other, is plausible to a degree. Weaker is the idea that the stacked formation was advantageous in that each line would have the benefit of known units on either side of it all along the line. This supposed advantage disappears, though, when the need arises to extend the flanks of the army's front line or bring up support directly from the rear, all of which would involve close cooperation with unfamiliar leaders and units (tactical challenges that the other corps deployment plan would have mitigated). At the very least, Goggin's analysis of the army deployment plan invites readers to meaningfully reconsider what was known and unknown, from the Confederate leadership's perspective, about the battlefield terrain, the location of the enemy's camps, and the facing of the enemy's defensive front.

The level of persuasiveness spread among the great many positions that Leigh Goggin assumes in defense of Albert Sidney Johnston's brief but event-filled Civil War record, sampled in the above paragraphs, runs the gamut. However, the preponderance of answers to the questions raised by each chapter heading exhibit a degree of thoughtfulness and evidential rigor that make them formidable counterpoints to a great many firmly established views and interpretations. Even if you don't agree with the author's ultimate conclusion that Johnston "was a competent, resourceful, and responsive commander, simply thwarted by the intractable complexities of the military environment be found himself in" (pg. 366), his arguments, individually and collectively, are a force to be reckoned with. A key takeaway message might be that even though Johnston may not have made the best decisions, especially in hindsight, most are justifiable enough to at the very least effectively defend Johnston against charges of gross incompetence.

In the end, Reckless in Their Statements adds fuel to the understanding, popular among many, that no one could have succeeded in Johnston's position, and Goggin certainly supports the idea that the "multitude of geographic, meteorologic, military, political, logistic, and personnel factors beyond his control" made Johnston's task impossible (pg. 365). With that many roadblocks to any foreseeable path to success, one might reasonably conclude that only the most profound luck could have avoided the collapse of the Confederacy's western defense cordon. At the same time, though, one also cannot help but ponder how many another generals placed in the very same position might have still failed but failed less spectacularly on the battlefield and less disastrously to Confederate fortunes in the West than Johnston did.

Booknotes: The Sewards of New York

New Arrival:

• The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family by Thomas P. Slaughter (Cornell UP, 2025).

This work represents yet another example of a recently uncovered cache of letters affording us the ability to shed new light on already well-documented figures from our Civil War-era past. In this case, it is roughly 4,000 letters that were previously "buried" within William Henry Seward's massive surviving collection of public correspondence (estimated at 350,000 pages!). These recent discoveries, the product of a decade of effort from University of Rochester students and library staff, helped Thomas Slaughter recover "the inner lives of the Seward family, tracing their joys and sorrows as the nation grappled with rapid expansion and deepening divisions on its path to the Civil War."

Of course, a major part of Slaughter's The Sewards of New York: A Biography of a Leading American Political Family is devoted to William Henry Seward. From the description: "William Henry Seward, the family's most prominent member, was a state senator, governor, US senator, and secretary of state. Henry, as his family knew him, was often absent from their Auburn, NY, home, in Albany or Washington, DC, and so remained connected to the family through the long letters numbering in the thousands that they exchanged. These writings reveal Henry as a son, brother, husband, and father, as much as they show him as a politician and statesman."

That said, Slaughter positions another member of the family at the forefront of his narrative. Henry Seward's wife, Frances, "is the hub around which this family story revolves." In a wider sense, the author "explores the extended Auburn family during a half century of profound change in American homes, marriage, and childrearing."

In sum, this study "paints a rich portrait of an extraordinary family that played a key role in nineteenth-century New York and national politics." In getting there, the volume examines four generations of Millers and Sewards from 1817 to 1860. Slaughter presents their story in a way that "takes us behind the curtain of the early Victorian era's private sphere. He, and the Sewards in their own words, portray life as it was lived by the influential and powerful, but also by many who lived more private lives that are now lost to us."

Booknotes: Cassius Marcellus Clay

New Arrival:

• Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform by Anne E. Marshall (UNC Press, 2025).

From the description: "The nineteenth-century Kentucky antislavery reformer Cassius Marcellus Clay is generally remembered as a knife-wielding rabble-rouser who both inspired and enraged his contemporaries. Clay brawled with opponents while stumping for state constitutional changes to curtail the slave trade. He famously deployed cannons to protect the office of the antislavery newspaper [the True American] he founded in Lexington. Despite attempts on his life, he helped found the national Republican party and positioned himself as a staunch border state ally of Abraham Lincoln."

Clay's political support for Lincoln was rewarded with an appointment as US ambassador to Russia, a major part of that role being "to ensure that European allies would not recognize the Confederacy." Sandwiched between his important diplomatic work in St. Petersburg was a relatively brief interlude as a Union general that was, at least by my recollection, pretty unremarkable.

Of course, Cassius M. Clay is also widely remembered for being the birth name of legendary boxer Muhammad Ali (who famously rejected the family name his father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr., passed down to him).

According to Clay's new biographer, historian Anne Marshall, the reformer's abolitionist reputation is largely misplaced. More from the description: "Though often misremembered as an abolitionist, Clay was like many Americans of his time: interested in a gradual end to slavery but largely on grounds that the institution limited whites' ability to profit from free labor and the South’s opportunity for economic advancement. In the end, Clay’s political positions were far more about protecting members of his own class than advancing the cause of Black freedom."

In Marshall's view, Clay was "emblematic rather than exceptional," and her study Cassius Marcellus Clay: The Life of an Antislavery Slaveholder and the Paradox of American Reform "reveals Cassius Clay as he was: colorful, yes, but in many ways typical of white Americans who disliked slavery in principle but remained comfortable accommodating it."

Booknotes: If I Can Get Home This Fall

New Arrival:

• If I Can Get Home This Fall: A Story of Love, Loss, and a Cause in the Civil War by Tyler Alexander (Potomac Bks, 2025).

Tyler Anderson's If I Can Get Home This Fall traces the Civil War experiences of Dan Mason, an enlisted man of Company D in the 6th Vermont (with their comrades of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th regiments, part of the celebrated First Vermont Brigade) who later served as a commissioned officer (a captain) with the Nineteenth U.S. Colored Troops. Composed primarily of former slaves from Maryland, the 19th USCI began active service with the Ninth Corps in the spring of 1864, participating in the Overland and Richmond-Petersburg campaigns before transfer to the Fifteenth Corps and subsequent postwar duties in Texas.

From the description: "Drawing on Mason’s letters home to his fiancé, Harriet Clark, and on other historical records, Tyler Alexander provides a compelling account of the human cost of war and offers insight about the experiences and attitudes of those who witnessed war firsthand, including enlisted troops and officers, men and women, Democrats and Republicans, and white and Black Americans."

In Alexander's words, Mason's letters are "elegant, candid, uncensored, graphic, humorous, full of romantic longing and relationship strife, and offer a good deal of insight into the factors that compelled so many off to war and sustained them throughout" (pg. xiv). Much of the original text for Mason's correspondence along with other materials are incorporated into the narrative in large blocks.

According to Alexander, Mason's letters reveal a soldier motivated by both preservation of the Union and "antislavery convictions." More: If I Can Get Home This Fall: A Story of Love, Loss, and a Cause in the Civil War "examines how the most controversial issues of the war—emancipation, the draft, military strategy, the arming of Black troops, and Reconstruction policy—were viewed in real time by the participants who found themselves engulfed in the maelstrom of war, particularly those from a strongly anti-slavery farming community in the hills of northeast Vermont." Mason "believed in making soldiers of Black Americans," and took pride in the role he played in fostering that transformation.

Book News: Shattered Courage

How Civil War soldiers reacted to battlefield combat has always been a part of prolific military historian Earl Hess's wide range of scholarly interests. His 1997 study The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat heavily influenced our modern understanding of the ways in which Civil War soldiers experienced fighting and learned to cope with its many physical and psychological horrors and trials.

Next year's Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War (UP of Kansas, March 2026) marks a return to that area of study with a major examination of "those men who tried but failed to meet the test of battle in the Civil War." Soldier behaviors and reactions ranging from courage and cowardice to complete surrender have received noteworthy attention in a number of recent works, among them those from Lesley Gordon, David Silkenat, and the late Peter Carmichael, but Hess's upcoming volume aims to provide "the first comprehensive account of soldiers who refused to fight in the midst of combat."

Employing groundbreaking statistical analysis and "decades of research," Hess "charts the limits on combat morale" and is "the first historian to identify combat defaulters from personal accounts and official reports and to then examine their service records to discover what happened to them in the military system." The author's work also traces how both comrades and the army system in general reacted to and dealt with the phenomenon. I have to admit that I've never come across the term "combat defaulter" before (perhaps Hess coined it himself). Such men are described as being "(f)ar from heroes but not deserters," with most willing to try again the test of combat.

Review - "American Civil War Amphibious Tactics" by Ron Field

[American Civil War Amphibious Tactics (Elite, 262) by Ron Field, illustrated by Steve Noon (Osprey Publishing, 2025). Softcover, photos, illustrations, original color art, notes, select bibliography, index. Pp. 64. ISBN:978-1-4728-6316-4. $21]

Everyone can agree with the proposition that U.S. Army-Navy combined operations conducted along both the southern coastline and the continent's strategic inland waterways contributed mightily to Union victory during the Civil War. That significance makes the topic highly appropriate for inclusion in Osprey Publishing's Elite series, which traces "(t)he history of military forces, artifacts, personalities and techniques of warfare." All of those elements are prominently displayed in Ron Field's American Civil War Amphibious Tactics.

Of course, Civil War amphibious operations collectively constitute a very broad topic that can only be selectively addressed in a 64-page study. Field, a frequent Osprey contributor, nevertheless offers readers of all backgrounds a consistently interesting short narrative that touches upon a number of important campaigns and smaller operations. Along the way, Field's writing identifies a number of key military and civilian figures involved as well as specialized equipment and methodologies employed during troop landings on beaches and riverbanks. Given the vast disparity between the war's opposing sides when it came to their respective amphibious capabilities, it's understandable that the topic is addressed entirely from the Union perspective within this limited space, but it is nevertheless the case that Confederate-led combined operations efforts, which did achieve some noteworthy successes during the war, merit at least some recognition.

Amphibious operations summarized in the text include a selection of early-war events in eastern North Carolina between initial Union success at Hatteras Inlet in August 1861 and the fall of New Bern in March 1862. Smaller inland incursions that followed Union occupation of most of North Carolina's coastline are additionally described, those 1862-64 events serving as lenses through which to discuss the presence and actions of lesser-known specialized units such as the First New York Marine Artillery and the Naval Battalion of the 13th New York Heavy Artillery. Though most of the book focuses on coastal operations, the volume also touches upon the Mississippi Marine Brigade's raiding and counter-guerrilla activities in the Mississippi River Valley from 1862-64. Once it became clear that remaining heavily fortified cities and harbors in North and South Carolina could not be captured by direct naval attack alone (that recognition following the dismal failure of the grand ironclad assault on Charleston Harbor in April 1863), a Fleet Brigade of sailors and marines was formed to support shore attacks. Participation in the failed boat assault against Fort Sumter on September 8, 1863 and the campaign against Fort Fisher (December 1864-January 1865) are recounted in the book as examples of that formation's activities.

The above narrative takes pains to direct attention (within the main text as well as in photos and their captions) toward the experiences and signal achievements of numerous officers and men who might otherwise have received little exposure in the literature. It is also worthy of note that the text is accompanied by copious embedded source notes, that very welcome feature being a new, or at least relatively recent, development among Osprey titles (at least in this reviewer's admittedly limited sampling). Steve Noon's color artwork consists of vivid depictions of amphibious warfare action scenes and combat imagery as well as uniform and equipment details.

A selection of essential ships, weaponry, and equipment are featured in the book. The contributions of Norman Wiard designs, which include a multi-use 12-lb. boat howitzer that could be flexibly attached to a launch and a shallow-draft double-ender troop transport vessel (likely modeled after existing ferry boat designs) specially created for amphibious operations, are prominently displayed at many different places in the book. Methods for getting fighting men from their transports to the shore (obviously a key step in all amphibious warfare endeavors) are also described, one being the stringing together of a long line of troop-loaded surfboats behind a swift-moving steamship, the angular momentum created upon casting off the tow line helping carry the small boats to the target beach at speed.

This volume, a fine addition to Osprey Publishing's Elite series, provides readers of all backgrounds a strong introductory-level window into Union amphibious landing and support operations during the Civil War.