Review - "Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War" by Earl Hess

[Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War by Earl J. Hess (University Press of Kansas, 2026). Hardcover, photos, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:ix,202/265. ISBN:978-0-7006-4095-9. $39.99]

With a vast body of firsthand accounts and other primary sources readily available for writers to consider, exploring Civil War battlefield heroics as well as the actions of those who simply performed their expected duties as fighting men can be a fairly straightforward process. On the other hand, investigating those Union and Confederate enlisted men, officers, and units who failed the moral and physical test of combat is much more challenging. Those combat "defaulters" were certainly recognized as a problem and their failures called out in writing by their more stalwart comrades in arms, but their particular brand of dereliction of duty has received far less attention from the publishing world at large. Naturally enough, the defaulters themselves were almost uniformly reluctant to share that aspect of their military lives. Nevertheless, historian Earl Hess has managed to compile enough primary source material to meaningfully address the many questions surrounding those Civil War officers and men of both sides who defaulted on their battlefield responsibilities. Description and analysis of that subject matter is the central aim of Hess's newest book, Shattered Courage: Soldiers Who Refused to Fight in the American Civil War.

Hess himself has already devoted a good chunk of his writing career to examining the nature of Civil War combat, his greatest single contribution to that body of literature being his 1997 study The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat. In contrast to that book's one-sided perspective, Shattered Courage takes into account both Union and Confederate fighting men. The opening chapter summarizes our current general understanding of this topic, establishing baseline context by recounting the ways in which soldiers of both sides responded to the multitude of mental and physical tests presented by the Civil War battlefield.

A unique aspect of Hess's investigation of this subject matter is his pairing of anecdotal evidence (through an accumulation of brief individual and unit-based case histories) with informative quantitative analysis. Historical evidence of battlefield defaulting is limited, but Hess believes he has compiled more than enough examples from both sides (and across all three major theaters of operation) to provide a sample roughly representative of the variety of ways in which officers, men, and entire units defaulted on their combat responsibilities. Sources that might assist with numbers data related to actual bolting from the battleline are few and far between, but a handful of spot studies from the historical record (the most useful being Confederate general Bushrod Johnson's exceptionally thorough reporting of those men from his Tennessee brigade who fled under fire at Stones River) allow the author to reference at least some groupings of reliable figures. Nevertheless, the degree to which this limited data is representative of the armies at large is worthy of further research.

In the era of tight, linear formations and crowded battlefields, those who suddenly bolted to the rear were the most obvious combat defaulters. However, a more subtle form of defaulting that Hess terms "combat reluctance" was far more common but, until recently, has eluded wider study and understanding. These men were generally able to preserve the appearances of performing the regular duties of the good soldier, but, at the same time, they minimized their exposure to battlefield danger in ways elusive enough to avoid the dreaded accusation of cowardice. On the individual level, this reluctance was expressed in a variety of ways (including behaviors such as faking or exaggerating illness, helping wounded comrades get medical attention, and, most cynically, self-mutilation), but Hess focuses most heavily on straggling, its effects, and how both sides tried (but largely failed) to positively address its widespread deleterious impact on army discipline and efficiency. One of the most interesting subsets of the combat reluctant soldier involved those individuals who seemed to sincerely want to to their duty but were betrayed by their minds and bodies at the moment of crisis. Those men, labeled "constitutional cowards," were in many cases surprisingly viewed with compassion by their more reliable comrades. Recognized by others for at least trying, such men, especially if otherwise well liked, were often kept within the unit but assigned useful non-combat tasks and duties, that being preferable to losing their services entirely through dishonorable discharge. As Hess and others have also pointed out, combat reluctance also extended to entire units and formations. As the war slogged forward from its midpoint onward, veterans of both sides gained through hard-won and repeated experience an almost instinctual understanding of what was and wasn't possible when attacking enemy positions over certain types of terrain and against advanced field fortifications. In those cases, combat reluctance came with a quiet but determined refusal to attack (employing a variety of possible excuses) or a willingness to advance a certain distance toward the enemy line but no more.

In Hess's examination of combat defaulting among individual officers and enlisted men, two common themes emerge. The first is that defaulting could occur at any phase of an individual's length of service. A common perception among readers is that enduring combat became much easier as time went on, with the first experience being by far the most trying. According to Hess's evaluation of the available evidence, this was not the case, with grizzled veterans and green officers and soldiers experiencing combat for the first time being more similar than different when it came to vulnerability to combat failure. The second common theme is that actual punishment, official and unofficial, was, given the gravity of the offense, relatively infrequent. One might presume that officer failure was taken very seriously, and it was, but Hess's examination of 98 examples of documented Union and Confederate officer failures and their personal fates, a good number of which are sampled in the text, reveals that a bolting officer had a better than one-third chance of escaping any career-damaging consequences. In Hess's view, this speaks to a military system heavily weighted toward compassion and desire to offer second chances. One suspects that the mass volunteer nature of Civil War armies and their highly political makeup had something to do with that tendency toward leniency. As was the case with most large bureaucracies, inertia played a major role in determining how accused officer defaulters were treated. Higher-ups often lacked the motivation and time necessary to put the accused through the military justice system, and, as Hess explains, it proved much easier to all involved to just allow, or firmly suggest, shaky officers quietly resign (which occurred in nearly one-fourth of the cases in Hess's sample).

When it comes to the enlisted men of both sides, Hess's research roughly estimates that during any given engagement around 10% of a regiment's rank and file defaulted in a noticeable manner. As was the case with officers, disdain directed toward these men from their comrades was in many cases tempered by compassion rooted in shared experience and the accompanying desire to give bolters and shirkers the benefit of the doubt and the chance to redeem themselves during the next battle. This combat failure among individuals was very often clear cut in nature. However, as Hess keenly observes, unit-level defaulting, while just as visible as when it occurred in driblets, tended to be considered a more opaque matter. When entire units failed, it was commonly recognized that mitigating circumstances beyond their control were involved. Even so, the manner in which units exited the battlefield directly influenced perception, although units who fled in wild disorder could still be forgiven if they quickly rallied and returned to the fight. A benefit of group failure was that individual combat failure was frequently shielded from special attention.

Given that combat defaulting seriously impaired army discipline and effectiveness, one might expect that attempts to curb it involved widespread, swift, and severe punishment. Hess's research shows that the opposite was the case, with wide-ranging reluctance to impose the heaviest punishments, execution (which was not applicable to officers, who were instead cashiered from the service) being especially rare. Hess finds that the strongest advocates for capital punishment were those at the highest levels of command (divisional commanders and above), with mercy and prosecutorial laxity most prevalent at the lowest command levels (those most closely involved in carrying out such punishment). Civil War officers, public officials, and enlisted men alike seemed to recognize that combat failure could not be cured through harsh punishment. Instead, it was determined by these men that "(c)ombat failure was a fact of military life that had to be accepted and dealt with in reasonable rather than extraordinary ways" (pg. 154). Open to interpretation is how effectively each side managed that balance.

While punishments for combat failure might have been sporadic and generally limited in severity, efforts aimed toward improving combat performance through positive means of raising fighting spirit were legion by comparison. In Hess's own words, both armies relied more on the carrot than the stick. In addition to encouragement through pre-battle motivational speeches and post-battle congratulatory orders, armies issued individual and unit badges, medals, and honors. Both well-known rewards such as the Kearny Medal and obscure ones are reviewed in the text, the latter including those that never made it into actual practice (one being General Rosecrans's idea, ultimately disapproved, for rewarding his bravest men in the Army of the Cumberland by gathering them into honor battalions supplied with the best arms the government could procure). Stitching battle honors on flags was a practice that both sides eventually adopted, and promotions for bravery were also dangled in front of soldiers to inspire them. In comparing the two sides, Hess finds distinct differences in the Union and Confederate approaches to fostering combat spirit, the former being more active, broad, and varied in its rewards programs and the latter more hesitant and disorganized in both creating and following through with national awards. Some of that difference might be attributed to priorities and resource limitations (for example, the Confederate Roll of Honor medals were never struck), but Hess's limited sample also suggests that the Confederate soldier might have been, on average, more skeptical of individual award honors and, given past experience, distrustful of the government to follow through on its promises. In the end, Hess believes that Union superiority in employing means of shaping morale and fighting spirit through rewards of all types actually had a material effect on their achieving victory, Confederate inattention to such matters having the opposite effect. Given its nebulous nature, the magnitude of that impact is debatable. Regardless, though, it certainly does appear that both sides generally preferred to primarily address fighting morale through encouraging good battlefield behavior, not by threatening them with dire punishment for failure.

International context has been a significant part of Hess's most recent scholarship. The final chapter of Shattered Courage draws clear parallels between combat defaulting in Civil War soldiers and the experiences of those who fought in other wars. Most distinctive among differences are the ways in which historians of different eras classify these men (often through continuously updated diagnostic systems) and study how soldiers respond to both the timeless aspects and the fresh challenges of the contemporary battlefield. One interesting observation is that during the transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with its evolution into far more dispersed small-unit tactical arrangements and dramatically decreased percentage of troops on the firing line in any given unit, defaulting became less visible. Hess ends the discussion with the intriguing suggestion that the Civil War, with its high literacy rates among soldiers and no system of censoring their prolific writings, might very well represent American military history's most insightful documentary laboratory for examining the phenomenon of combat defaulting. This fine study of that important yet neglected topic, with its unique focus and first of its kind qualitative and quantitative analysis, advances a strong argument in support of that possibility.

Review - "A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers" by Henry Motty

[A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers by Henry B. Motty (Louisiana State University Press, 2026). Hardcover, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:x,183/272. ISBN:978-0-8071-8615-2. $50]

Themes associated with the military, social, and psychological ties cemented between the Civil War home and fighting fronts, both North and South, have been heavily incorporated into numerous modern studies. Those who have examined those themes frequently find broad application, but there are certainly unique facets to each state's Civil War experience. Henry Motty's A Desperate Fight is distinctive in that way for its focus on one state, Confederate Louisiana, but also for the emphasis it attaches to face-to-face interactions over the more commonly explored distant ones expressed through soldier correspondence (though a full chapter is devoted to letter writing and its significance). Motty's work concentrates on the communal forces that sustained Confederate morale among Louisiana's fighting men and civilians, a key part of which were the bonds between the two groups that were formed early on in the conflict and maintained until the end. Supporting that line of investigation are a multitude of firsthand soldier and civilian perspectives gleaned from various university manuscript archives located across Louisiana along with newspaper articles and a range of published primary sources.

With initial enlistment motivations well explained in previous works, those factors are only briefly summarized for background purposes. While popular reaction to the Confederate experiment was mixed among the Louisiana populace, once war broke out, mass mobilization resulted in strong family and community support being placed behind the fighting volunteers. Reflective of Louisiana's white ethnic and cultural diversity (the extent of which was unique among the Confederate states), it is estimated by the author that, among the initial rush of men sent to Virginia as Louisiana's contribution to collective defense of the national capital, the number of volunteers who were foreign-born approached that of their native-born counterparts, and they exhibited similar communal attachments. Though one might wish for more exploration of distinctive features of the Civil War experience among unique segments of the population (such as the Cajuns of Acadiana), the book does present interesting, and sometimes amusing, accounts of encounters between Louisianians of different ethnicities, cultures, and languages.

Countless modern works have explored the vital role of women in sustaining the Confederate home front, and Motty's book applies many of those well-developed concepts and themes to Confederate Louisiana. Women were among the most outspoken defenders of the Confederate national experiment. That, and the privations and sacrifices they were willing to endure in support of the war effort, sanctified the female sex as the ideal moral representation of what soldiers were fighting for. As they did across the Confederacy, Louisiana women sewed and presented unit flags, and they, both collectively and individually, supported the troops through fundraising and through the production or donation of clothing items that the government could neither adequately nor consistently provide. Where possible, they fed hungry soldiers who were camped nearby or were passing through. Women also took care of sick and wounded soldiers in both hospital and private home settings. All of those direct exchanges reinforced connections between the home and fighting fronts and further motivated soldiers to persevere amid escalating casualties, mounting battlefield defeats, general want, and enemy occupation.

Wealthier Louisianians frequently sponsored and financed local volunteer units. That and the leadership they also provided helped bridge the gap between social classes and enhance perceptions that everyone was working together and sacrificing for the common cause. However, certain measures such as conscription strained communal spirit and heightened the class divide, although, as John Sacher notes in his excellent study of the topic, conscription was far from universally despised. Within the army it was widely praised, and most of the public admitted its necessity in keeping the army in existence. It was the law's specific measures and their implementation (for example, those related to exemptions) that drew the most criticism, and the government responded through regular revision. Nevertheless, class tensions remained. Another result of conscription, in combination with impressment of slave labor, is that it both expanded and further complicated the household, farm, and plantation management responsibilities of women, heightening interdependence between the fighting men and the home front.

Encampments, both short term and long term, were another aspect of the war that fostered communal ties. While Confederate military authorities strove to isolate camps from outside influences, in practice Louisiana Civil War camps were busy with soldier-civilian interactions. Visitation by family and friends bolstered morale and inserted, however briefly, home comforts and pleasant diversions into otherwise restrictive military life, and civilians from the surrounding area also provided opportunities for soldiers to gain access to goods, services, and delicacies that were otherwise scarce. However, as Motty notes, that physical proximity was not always mutually beneficial or popular, as local civilians were often on the receiving end of unauthorized property destruction as well as official impressment of livestock and provisions by their own protectors.

Soldiers from all Confederate states benefited from civilian generosity that helped fill the many gaps in government supplies of individual needs and wants, but that relationship were arguably even more essential in Louisiana. Uniquely divided, courtesy of the Mississippi River, between the western and trans-Mississippi theaters, Louisiana quickly fell into geographical isolation from state government administration and sustained Confederate assistance. After the city of New Orleans, the state capital of Baton Rouge, and most the Louisiana stretch of the Mississippi River fell into Union hands in close succession during the spring of 1862, much of the state's interior was laid open to federal invasion and occupation. At the time time, across the state Confederate and state government control and lines of supply and communication were profoundly disrupted. Louisiana civilians stepped into that void by providing food and clothing to soldiers on a local level. The civilian population's own needs were addressed through trade, both legal and illegal (prominent among the latter both smuggling and the illicit cotton exchange), and most Louisiana soldiers reluctantly came to recognize that home front trading with the enemy was a temporary matter of survival, not a betrayal of them or the Confederate cause as a whole. While the widespread impression that the distant Confederate government failed to provide Louisiana's defense with the resources, care, and attention that it needed and deserved may have resulted in some erosion of Confederate patriotism as the war progressed beyond its early stages, Motty amply demonstrates that soldier-civilian interdependence that developed over that same period led to the rise of home and community defense becoming the principal factor that motivated Louisiana's Confederate soldiers to keep fighting against the odds.

Campaigns and battles were another aspect of Louisiana's Civil War that bound soldiers and civilians tightly together. Battles fought inside state borders were typically small to medium-sized affairs, mostly the former, but they were numerous and, as was the case elsewhere, commonly placed civilian lives and property in the line of fire. Conventional warfare was just part of the experience, though, with the Louisiana civilian as military participant being most clearly associated with the guerrilla warfare that erupted across the state as Union land and naval forces penetrated into the interior from early 1862 onward. Addressing that side of conflict, Motty's book adds Louisiana context to what modern scholarship has called the "household" war.

The inextricable interdependence between the home and fighting fronts of both sides during the American Civil War has been well established in the modern scholarship, but Henry Motty's A Desperate Fight: The Lives of Louisiana's Confederate Soldiers meaningfully expands that literature through both illuminating specificity at the state level and recognition that many distinctive elements within the broader theme exist across the board that are worthy of discrete examination.

Review - "Texan in Blue: Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan of the First Texas Cavalry, USA" by McCaslin & Stewart

[Texan in Blue: Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan of the First Texas Cavalry, USA by Richard B. McCaslin and J. Wayne Stewart (Texas State Historical Association, 2025). Paperback, maps, photos, illustrations, appendix section, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:viii,119/189. ISBN:978-1-62511-090-9. $29.95]

While upwards of 70,000 men joined Confederate forces during the Civil War, an estimated 2,000 Texans volunteered instead to serve in the Union Army, the majority of those enlisting in the First and Second Texas Cavalry (U.S.). For a variety of reasons, both regiments struggled mightily to fill their ranks to regulation strength, and the First only reached its full complement after the Second was merged into it in September 1864. Though some of its activities are fairly well documented within a number of modern campaign studies, the First Texas Cavalry still lacks a dedicated regimental history of its own. Among prominent Texas Unionist leaders, Edmund J. Davis (the First's colonel and later a brigadier general) is the subject of a 2010 biography by Carl Moneyhon. Another general officer, Andrew Jackson Hamilton, was appointed military governor of Texas by President Lincoln. Authored by John Waller, Hamilton's only book-length biography was published way back in 1968 by Texas Western Press. Another noteworthy Texas Unionist military officer and political figure is Francis Asbury Vaughan. His life, Civil War service, and postwar political career are explored in Richard McCaslin and J. Wayne Stewart's biography titled Texan in Blue: Captain Francis Asbury Vaughan of the First Texas Cavalry, USA.

The book opens with discussion of Vaughan's early life, and the migratory movements of his extended family are also surveyed, the common emphasis being on southern geographical and cultural roots. When the Civil War broke out, everything in Francis Vaughan's family background suggests that Confederate service was most likely to be in his immediate future, but that did not turn out to be the case. A record of antebellum voting patterns is absent (and it is not revealed in the book, if such information exists, who Francis voted for in the 1860 presidential election), but the slaveholding Vaughan family had a kinship network located across multiple southern states. As historian Charles Grear explains in his book Why Texans Fought in the Civil War (2010), it was that kind of extended geographical family network that bound a great many Texans to the Confederate movement and inspired them to defend not only Texas but other states on the other side of the Mississippi. Most pertinent to Francis were the twenty-one brothers and cousins spread between Texas and Mississippi who joined either state or Confederate units. According to the authors, the Texas branch seemed more lukewarm toward the Confederacy than the family's Mississippi branch, but Francis was the only open Unionist among them. Nevertheless, in regard to depth of commitment, excellent recent work from Edwin Rutan and Alexandre Caillot on late-war Union recruits usefully reminds us to exercise caution before making too many assumptions about the loyalties and motives of those who weren't early-war volunteers, and the same might be true for the other side. Echoing the views of a great many fellow Southern Unionists, Francis himself described joining the Union Army as a means to "defend our famlys and our homes & our country from the roothless hands of the Rebels who would sink the Country with the honest part of the Community to the deps of Pardision for the sake of establishing an Aristocratic government" (pg. 141).

Vaughan's early-war experiences consisted of a dangerous month-long (July 1862) journey across South Texas and northern Mexico, beginning at his home in Prairie Lea (northeast of Seguin) and ending at Matamoros, his arrival at the Mexican port preparatory to a voyage across the Gulf to New Orleans. Arriving in Union-occupied New Orleans, Vaughan enlisted in the First Texas Cavalry, drilling with the new regiment and getting promoted to Second Lieutenant. All of this is detailed in Vaughan's own account as written in his travel 'memorandum,' which was transcribed from the original document by Stewart and reproduced in this volume's appendix section for readers to peruse. Vaughan's escape from Confederate patrols and his travel group's harrowing experiences in Mexico (where their reception by local authorities was at all times uncertain and potentially life-threatening) are the lengthiest, and arguably most colorful and interesting, part of Vaughan's memorandum. Unfortunately for us, Vaughan's account abruptly ends with his regimental detachment's approach to Galveston by sea in January 1863, everyone onboard initial unaware that the city had been recaptured by the Confederates on New Year's Day. While Vaughan's wartime memorandum comes to a frustratingly early end, it is a precious document given the rarity of surviving firsthand accounts of any kind from Texas Unionists.

Other sources are brought on board to assist with the volume's chapter-length summary of the remaining war service of Vaughan and his regiment in Louisiana and Texas. Subsequent to the aborted landing at Galveston, members of the First participated in Louisiana operations against Camp Moore and other sites supporting the Confederate garrison at Port Hudson. The regiment also joined other Union forces for the Bayou Teche operation, Sabine Pass, the Fall 1863 Texas Overland Expedition, and Nathaniel Banks's Rio Grande Expedition. During the summer of 1864, the First was consolidated with the Second regiment, and Vaughan was promoted to captain. Remaining active service was largely spent conducting raids in Louisiana and Mississippi before being mustered out in November 1865 while on occupation duty in their home state. It is beyond the scope of McCaslin and Stewart's book to provide more than a brief overview of the First Texas Cavalry's activities, but the quality and extent of that service, along with status as the war's premier Texas Unionist military unit, mark the First as being sorely in need of a full regimental history.

The final two chapters trace Vaughan's postwar years, from Reconstruction through his 1896 passing. Those sections, plus the Afterword, compile an abundance of information regarding Vaughan's family relationships and activities of his descendants. They also fully explore Vaughan's postwar political engagement. For more than two decades, Vaughan was active in Republican Party politics. In addition to being a delegate to the 1868 state constitutional convention, he held elective offices on a local level and secured a number of federal patronage appointments. He was also a lawyer and businessman. As noted in the book, trust and personal regard for Vaughan among his fellow Texans crossed party lines. This is evidenced by his cultivation of business partnerships with ex-Confederates and the fact that, after his death, newspapers across the political spectrum praised Vaughan's character in their eulogies.

With just a few individuals among the Civil War's Texas Unionist military and political leadership grabbing the lion's share of attention, this new biography is a breath of fresh air. While not holding the same lofty military rank or political clout of an Edmund Davis or Andrew Jackson Hamilton, Francis Asbury Vaughan, as documented in the pages of McCaslin and Stewart's Texan in Blue, nevertheless managed to establish a Texas historical footprint significant in its own right.

Review - "From Gray to Blue: Galvanized Yankees in the American Civil War" by Patrick Garrow

[From Gray to Blue: Galvanized Yankees in the American Civil War by Patrick H. Garrow (University of Tennessee Press, 2025). Hardcover, map, illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xvi,221/292. ISBN:978-1-62190-963-7. $75]

A companion volume to his 2020 book Changing Sides: Union Prisoners of War Who Joined the Confederate Army, Patrick Garrow's From Gray to Blue: Galvanized Yankees in the American Civil War strives to both redefine and expand our understanding of the "Galvanized Yankee" phenomenon of altered wartime allegiances. In his Centennial-era study The Galvanized Yankees (1963), author Dee Brown narrowly defined the term as encompassing those captured Confederate soldiers who were recruited into the U.S. Army straight from northern prisoner of war camps. An escape from the deadly health dangers and overall harsh living conditions of the camps was offered to these men in exchange for a defined period of army enlistment that was typically, but not always, served in the frontier West (where the chances of encountering former comrades in battle were minimal). Subsequent scholars and popular history writers alike have accepted and adopted that characterization ever since. However, Garrow sees that longstanding definition as being too restrictive in nature. In this volume, a Galvanized Yankee is any soldier "who first served in the Confederate army and then changed sides and joined the Union army" (pg. x). So added to the POW cohort are those who completed their Confederate term of service and subsequently enlisted in the Union Army as well as those who deserted Confederate service and later wore the blue uniform. In addition to bringing more motivational factors into play, the scale of numbers involved also increases from the thousands into perhaps tens of thousands through Garrow's examination.

Previous research, including Garrow's own, has made it clear that the overwhelming preponderance of Union soldiers who switched sides did so out of sheer desperation born of the miserable living conditions inside overcrowded and under-resourced Confederate POW camps. With northern facilities exhibiting many of the same problems, Confederate prisoners often shared similar motivations. However, Garrow's more expansive definitional approach and his broader research into Union and Confederate service records, regimental histories, pension records, and newspapers move additional motivational factors to the fore. One is money. Without further access to Confederate army pay, which was consistently in arrears and constantly devalued anyway, mid to late-war prisoners, especially those with increasingly destitute families of their own to support, were attracted by the financial prospects of stable pay in U.S. dollars and even enlistment bonuses. Latent unionism (or simply anti-Confederate feelings) among conscripted Confederate soldiers also led many of those individuals to switch sides when the opportunity arose. According to Garrow, perhaps the most significant yet least appreciated factor was the growing sense among many that the Confederate government had broken faith with its volunteer soldiers, in terms of both the direction of the war and promised support for them and their families, and was no longer deserving of loyalty and sacrifice.

After providing brief summaries of the living conditions within the camps that many of these individuals came from and the respective role each camp assumed in the recruitment of Galvanized Yankee units, the book profiles a selection of units that, in part or in whole, were composed of galvanized (or, as others put it, "whitewashed") recruits. These are the Twenty-Third and Sixty-Fifth Illinois, Ahl's Battery (aka First Delaware Heavy Artillery), First Connecticut Cavalry, Third Maryland Cavalry, First Florida Cavalry, Second North Carolina Infantry, Eleventh Ohio Cavalry, and, most significantly, the First through Sixth United States Volunteer Infantry. As one comes to realize, this group of unit selections—consisting of company and battalion-sized augmentations to existing northern regiments, new regiments raised locally within Confederate states (the assumption being that sizable numbers of Confederate deserters or those with expired enlistments joined them), and full regiments of former prisoners destined for the western frontier—together paint a strong representative picture of the types of Galvanized Yankee units that existed, their range of duties, and their areas of service. For each, Garrow explores recruitment and organization (with emphasis, of course, on the galvanized elements), outlines a basic demographic profile (state of birth, prewar occupation, etc.) of the recruits, and traces a fairly detailed account of the unit's military service. Also rather heavily emphasized in the unit histories are selections of medical case histories. That information is more anecdotally descriptive than thematic in nature but, to an extent, does speak to the lingering effects of the unhealthy conditions at the camps. Some indication of local civilian reaction to the presence of Galvanized Yankees in their midst is also of interest. For example, given the events of the previous ten years, the intensely negative reaction of Kansas newspapers to having their streets policed for a time by ex-Confederates of the Third USVI is easy to fathom.

There are some research limitations that hindered the author's efforts to dig deeper into the subject and provide the kinds of engaging and informative firsthand accounts that color the more standard Civil War unit histories. Understandably, some otherwise good resources for obtaining Civil War soldier information (such as newspaper obituaries) were reluctant to mention galvanized service. According to Garrow, prisoner accounts from Galvanized Yankees are exceedingly rare, and only a single dairy from one of those individuals (John C. Riggs of the Fifth USVI) is known to exist.

As mentioned above, Dee Brown's The Galvanized Yankees is a classic of the Civil War literature, but it is dated at this point, and Garrow offers some revisionist engagement with Brown in addition to his own study's expanded definition and analysis. As an example, Brown's study claimed that only one officer attached to the six USVI regiments (Capt. John Shanks, Co. I/Sixth USVI) had previously served in the Confederate Army, and it spends an entire chapter on that person's story, but Garrow's research identified more examples from the First, Fourth, and Sixth regiments.

In the end, the question arises as to whether organized units composed of Galvanized Yankees were worth the U.S. government's effort and expense. The record was mixed. Often, the soldiers were not trusted by officers, either those within the unit or those leading regiments that served alongside them in the field. Many of the units profiled in the book suffered from outrageous levels of desertion (as much as 50+%), the combination of that and disease dwarfing actual combat losses far more than was the case with the typical Civil War regiment of either side. What was behind that could be traced to a number of things, one being the three-year enlistment terms of some units organized very late in the war. With leading galvanized units not being necessarily an attractive prospect, officer quality could also be mediocre. Indeed, many of the galvanized units were not seen as reliable enough for front line combat and were relegated to rear area duties. Others did come to be relied upon to carry out important tasks. For example, the Second North Carolina suffered significant losses fighting in the eastern part of the state, and Garrow credits the First Florida Cavalry for becoming a principal stabilizing force in the often chaotic borderland between Florida and Alabama. Ahl's battery, which had a desertion rate far below other galvanized units and lost few men to disease or disability, is rated as the most successful unit in the study, but the gunners also had a comparatively cushy position as Fort Delaware camp guards during the entirety of their 1863-65 term of service. At the end of each unit treatment, Garrow rates the unit as being either successful or unsuccessful. Though a concrete set of criteria for differentiating between successful and unsuccessful galvanized units is not developed, it does seem to be the case that those units operating on the messier fringes of the conflict, where conventional manpower was at its most scarce, are often judged to have been the most successful. Shorter enlistment terms helped, too, particularly with desertion rates. Indeed, it is Garrow's studied opinion that the roles of the USVI soldiers as western frontier security troops and wagon train escorts filled a critical need for the United States at a fraught period of transition.

The postwar lives of a few individuals are profiled in an epilogue to offer readers a sense of the variety of social receptions they experienced upon returning home, but, as Garrow explains, broader analysis is beyond the scope of his study. Undoubtedly, many Galvanized Yankees were ostracized by their home communities and others were accepted depending on circumstances. The author's suggestion that the mass desertion that occurred within the late-war Confederate Army may have, at least to some extent, softened the home population's overall judgment of these men is an interesting point worthy of consideration.

Patrick Garrow's From Gray to Blue significantly widens and deepens our understanding of those Confederate soldiers who decided to switch sides during the Civil War and fight for the Union. While the contributions of Galvanized Yankee units to Union victory were relatively limited in scope, a strong case is made that they nevertheless assumed important military roles at a number of different times and on a variety of fronts.

Review - "Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas" by Jim Burnett

[Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas by Jim Burnett (Texas A&M University Press, 2025). Hardcover, maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, appendix section, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xii,253/320. ISBN:978-1-64843-273-6. $35]

During the Mexican, independent nation, and early statehood periods of its history, Texas, with its vast amount of economically useful land but having only a small population positioned to develop it, was an inviting place for enterprising American citizens and foreign immigrants alike. An abundant source of the latter were the populous German states of Central Europe, immigrant passage and administration handled by aid ventures such as the Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas (to which a fee was paid by immigrants in exchange for those services). Attracted by the prospect of free land along with access to a modest dwelling and other means of becoming quickly self-sufficient within organized Texas Hill Country colonies populated by fellow Germans, large numbers of individuals and families left behind centuries-old roots for opportunities they could only dream about in their land-restricted ancestral lands. One of those risk-taking families was that of Johan (later anglicized to John) and Johanette Stengler, who, along with seven children from Johanette's current and two previous marriages (surnames Krantz and Hankamer), left their home in the village of Dietz in the fall of 1845, arriving in the port of Galveston only two days after independent Texas was formally annexed by the United States on December 29. The Stengler family's immigrant story, with central focus on the Civil War period, is the subject of Jim Burnett's Saltgrass Prairie Saga: A German American Family in Texas.

Scholarly works tasked with publishing a notable body of historical correspondence generally come in two types. The first and most common variety is to reproduce the letters in full, organize them into chapters, and contextualize them via deeply researched introductory passages, bridging narrative, and footnotes/endnotes. The other method, the less common one and the one employed by Burnett, is to incorporate the most meaningful and informative portions of the letters into a broadly researched narrative, oftentimes supplemented with extensive block quotes of particularly noteworthy firsthand material. Each style has its merits, and Burnett's value-added enhancement of the letters through material gleaned from other primary and secondary sources is seamlessly executed.

Upon landing at Galveston after a long ocean voyage, the Stenglers were immediately confronted with a conundrum of life-changing (even life-threatening) proportions. While the German immigrant aid society that brought them to Texas was generally well-organized, its end-stage resources were taxed by both funding limitations and the Texas interior's primitive infrastructure. There was no immediate means of transportation available for the Stenglers to travel with their possessions all the way to the colony's faraway location, where it was also the case that a deadly epidemic was currently raging. Faced with those challenges, John and Johanette reluctantly made the decision to abandon their free land claim in the colony and instead settle on rental property in the Saltgrass Prairie region of SE Texas. In that part of Liberty County, accessed by lake boat travel, there existed good land for farming and cattle raising along with bountiful wood and fresh water resources. Even though there were few Germans in the area and none of the family members spoke English, the gamble paid off as the Stenglers prospered in farming and ranching, eventually owning their own property and assimilating into the local culture through economic exchange and intermarriage.

With the preponderance of the Civil War-era coverage of German immigrants in Texas centered on the pro-Union Germans of the Texas Hill Country, Burnett's detailed portrait of a single Saltgrass Prairie German immigrant family is noteworthy for contrasts in both allegiance and geography. As presented by Burnett, the Stenglers's words don't reveal much in the way of political engagement and nothing on the great slavery questions of the day, so one might surmise that their support for the Confederacy was grounded in localism and determination to protect their substantial and hard-won property gains from expected Union invasion threats.

Eventually, John Stengler himself, five sons, and a son-in-law served in the Confederate Army or with Texas state troops, all surviving the war and none deserting. Most went into the mounted Company F of Spaight's Battalion, which originated in Liberty County and was primarily involved with mobile coastal defense. Philip Caudill's Moss Bluff Rebel: A Texas Pioneer in the Civil War (2009), which doubles as both Company F captain William Berry Duncan biography and unit history of Spaight's Battalion, is arguably the best single source on the battalion's Civil War activities. Interestingly, neither the Stengler nor the Hankamer name appears in its index, their absence making Burnett's study one of even more signal importance in further documenting the unit's highly peripatetic wartime history.

Walker's Texas Division (the "Greyhounds of the Trans-Mississippi") is often cited as marching the greatest total distance and, less charitably, fighting the least amount of any comparably sized Civil War formation. Burnett describes Company F in similar fashion, likening most of its Civil War service as a chess match of back and forth marching between Galveston and western Louisiana accompanied by relatively little actual fighting. The men of the company were more fortunate than their fellow Texans of Walker's division, however, in rarely venturing more than 100 miles in any direction from their SE Texas homes. The heaviest combat that Company F was engaged in was during the Battle of Bayou Bourbeau, fought during the time when they were temporarily attached to Baylor's Regiment in Louisiana for eight months in 1863 before returning to Texas the following spring. As Burnett describes in the book, most of Company F's more static service time was devoted to dull garrison duties and guarding isolated points of strategic importance (such as bridges) from enemy naval incursions and guerrilla attacks by local Unionists.

With letters both to and from Stengler's Liberty County homestead surviving, Burnett's narrative also includes a great deal of information about the home front experience. Thirteen years her husband John's senior, Johanette struggled running the farm without the working presence of her husband and sons. Like most southern households, hers also had to deal with scarcities of goods and services stemming from the exigencies of war and ever tightening naval blockade. Extended family helped, and Company F's frequent proximity also meant that serving menfolk were able to obtain short leaves of absence from the army for needed farm and ranch work. The Stengler's family network also benefited from the shooting war not directly visiting their doorsteps, though there were constant worries about roaming Confederate deserter bands and Unionist guerrilla encounters.

Burnett's narrative also extends well into the postwar period. While the Stengler-Krantz-Hankamer clan survived the war intact and managed to rebuild and expand their Saltgrass Prairie farming and cattle ranching concerns during Reconstruction, they were visited in 1877 by a devastating smallpox epidemic that killed a great many close and extended family members, including Johanette herself and numerous Wilborns and Hankamers. Nevertheless, the family persevered and its ongoing Texas legacy (which includes Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business) is revealed in the final chapter.

Saltgrass Prairie Saga's numerous contributions to Texas's state and Civil War history are of a conspicuous nature. In addition to providing a fresh angle through which to view the mid-nineteenth century German immigrant experience in Texas, Burnett's study also offers new perspectives on both the Civil War in Southeast Texas and the operations of one of that region's longest-serving and most well-traveled Confederate local defense units. Highly recommended.

Review - "Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital" by Larry Daniel

[Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital by Larry Daniel (University Press of Kansas, 2025). Hardcover, 3 maps, photos, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xviii,267/359. ISBN:978-0-7006-4010-2. $49.99]

Over the past four decades or so, a flood of western-themed Civil War books authored by professional and avocational historians alike has strongly challenged the eastern theater focus of previous generations and progressively redressed imbalances in content and interpretation. At this point in time, even many obscure corners of the Trans-Mississippi Theater have received strong attention in the literature. While military history book sales and publishing still reveals widest reader interest in the epic contest between the Union Army of the Potomac and the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, it can no longer be maintained that the war's western theater is still neglected or un(der)appreciated. But how did contemporary Civil War Richmonders, whose attention was naturally absorbed to a great degree by the war fought on their own doorstep but who nevertheless closely followed the many military events and disasters occurring elsewhere, see the West as events there were unfolding? That is the overarching theme of Larry Daniel's Richmond Views the West: Politics and Perceptions in the Confederate Capital, which revisits a well-studied chain of decisions and events spanning the entire war but does so from a freshly targeted point of view.

For the purposes of his study, Daniel defines the Confederate "West" as the Trans-Mississippi (Arkansas, Texas, and most of Louisiana) and Heartland (Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, most of Georgia, and the cis-Mississippi slice of Louisiana) regions together. That vast West also takes into account the Missouri and Kentucky state governments in exile (each officially recognized by the CSA with political representatives integrated into both houses of the Confederate Congress).

An inescapable factor that greatly affected Richmond's knowledge and perceptions of the war in the West was the extreme distances involved. In discussing state of the art mid-nineteenth century communications, it is commonly expressed in the Civil War literature how far the telegraph and railroad went in tempering the twin tyrannies of time and distance. However, Daniel's study amply demonstrates how persistent that challenge was for the Richmond government when it came to not only the very distant and isolated Trans-Mississippi Department but the far better connected western theater as well. Communications were slow and unfounded rumor rife, with the fastest and most accurate (at least in the near term) news coming from northern newspapers. It could take many weeks for accurate information about the progress and results of a major western campaign or battle to reach the capital. For example, as Daniel explains, for more than a month after Fort Donelson the Davis government and the country at large did not know with any degree of truth how many soldiers surrendered there. These vast gaps in transmitting critical information played a major part in hindering the central government's ability to react in reasonable and timely fashion to rapidly evolving strategic situations, be they opportunities for successful countermoves or responses to disaster. Fragmented and outright false information that reached Richmond from the West also affected how Davis's high-level military appointments were perceived, be they ones drawing mixed opinion such as Joseph E. Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard or near universally despised ones such as John C. Pemberton and Theophilus Holmes. A particularly interesting surprise was how highly, and for how long, Richmond elites championed Missouri's Sterling Price for bigger and better command roles in the war.

On the other hand, when information from distant western military operations did arrive swiftly it was often wildly inaccurate, proclaiming great victories that were in fact either abject defeats from beginning to end or battles ultimately lost after promising initial tactical success (the latter including key battles such as Fort Donelson, Shiloh, and Stones River). Inevitably, crushing confirmation of western defeats arrived at Richmond in due time, leaving one has to wonder whether the repeated emotional rollercoaster was far more damaging to popular morale than if the bad news was accurately (or even semi-accurately) conveyed from the outset.

Cultural factors also figure into Daniel's discussion. In some ways similar to how the French historically drew heightened cultural distinctions between Paris society and life in the surrounding regions, easterners (as represented by Richmond social and political society) viewed the West at large as the frontier when it came to cultural attainment. This affected how westerners, including President Davis and his wife, were received in the capital, at least when it came to social interaction. Less clearly outlined for the reader are what effects alleged eastern cultural chauvinism had on the perception and direction of the war in the West from Richmond. One does wonder, though, how much of the persistent high regard Richmonders held for Missouri's Sterling Price, a general no modern historian rates higher than mediocre, was based on his Virginia roots and upbringing.

In creating his narrative detailing how the faraway western war was seen and interpreted from Richmond, Daniel samples widely. In addition to the words and actions of Confederate president Jefferson Davis, his cabinet, and the West's elected representatives, Richmond newspapermen, government workers, and civilians add their own perspectives. Some very well-known individuals figure prominently throughout the book as representative opinions and attitudes for or against the Davis administration's handling of the western theater. These include senior War Department clerk John B. Jones for his government insider knowledge and Judith Maguire and Edmund Ruffin for their keen-eyed observations from the civilian sphere. Freshest voices are found in the words of a great many Trans-Mississippi and Heartland elected officials from both houses of the Confederate Congress who are centered in this narrative but not featured much at all in other general histories of the war. The discordant personal and political behavior of too many of those individuals hindered Richmond's response to Union inroads in the West. Davis's revolving door series of War Department cabinet secretaries largely enter into Daniel's discussion in the context of their personally frustrating lack of autonomy when it came to the decision-making process. However, it is also claimed that George Randolph, who briefly occupied the position from March to November 1862, packed the War Department with fellow Virginians, many of whom were relations, creating a bureaucratic bloc that continued to exert Virginia-centric influence long after the secretary himself resigned from office.

In a rare moment of critical self-reflection, Jefferson Davis came to realize that his initial national cordon defense strategy was unrealistic for defending the vast West, but by late 1862 the damage was already done and it was disastrous (perhaps fatal). That and the focus on defending fixed strategic points against combined Union army and naval might, a risky practice culminating in the twin catastrophes of Vicksburg and Port Hudson in July 1863, was allowed to persist for far too long. In Daniel's view, western politics and politicians played a large part in this. Petty jealousies, internecine squabbling, and fervent opposition to presidential policy was a part of both sides during the Civil War, but Daniel contends that the Confederacy's western gubernatorial, House, and Senate demagoguery and parochial political culture contributed to a highly damaging hamstringing of Davis when it came to strategic freedom in allocating limited military resources where they could do the most good for the war effort at large. Fierce divisions within the Richmond capitol press over the direction of the war in the West, often expressed with rhetoric profoundly antagonistic toward the administration, also contributed much in the way of making it more difficult for Davis to make strategic and personnel-related decisions divorced enough from political considerations to remain militarily sound.

In tracing the path to Confederate defeat in the Civil War's western and trans-Mississippi theaters, Larry Daniel's Richmond Views the West follows a familiar pattern and narrative of events, but, in framing its view of those circumstances and decisions involved with them exclusively through a distant lens situated at the seat of power, this study offers a unique perspective deserving of standalone treatment. That the Richmond government based its distant direction of the war in the West on a partial and all too often warped understanding of personalities, places, and events there adds another persuasive element to the litany of other factors that together drove a progressive western collapse that ultimately doomed the Confederate national experiment.

Review - "Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865" by Damian Shiels

[Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 by Damian Shiels (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). Hardcover, illustrations, graphs, tables, biography appendix, endnotes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,176/314. ISBN:978-0-8071-8370-0. $50]

Typically, scholarly studies of Irish American contributions to the Union armed forces during the Civil War possess a very selective geographical (ex. the urban Irish of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston) and unit focus (most prominently the famed Irish Brigade). Thus, it is high time for revisiting the big picture with a proper investigation of Irish volunteer demographics, motivations, beliefs, and attitudes that are more representative of the whole. A powerhouse study housed in a compact and highly accessible package, Damian Shiels's Green and Blue: Irish Americans in the Union Military, 1861–1865 succeeds in doing just that.

In researching this project, Shiels consulted an abundance of primary sources while also thoughtfully engaging with the secondary literature (including influential recent works from Catherine Bateson, Ryan Keating, Christian Samito, and Susannah Ural), but the gamechanger was his access to the recently digitized widow's pension files housed at the National Archives. The author's extensive review of those records (first used in creating his 2016 book The Forgotten Irish) unearthed a treasure trove of letters written by or for Irish soldiers during the Civil War, all being supporting documentation to bolster widow or dependent claims. Kept by the government in the files were 1,135 letters (singly or in bunches) from or for 395 soldiers along with almost three hundred additional supporting letters from other sources. That body of wartime letters provides invaluable information on 568 Irish American soldiers, an unprecedented gathering for investigation of this sort. Additionally, in bringing together individuals from 260 units raised from 22 states and districts, this large sample represents by far the widest breadth of Irish volunteer service yet studied. An appendix also compiles brief biographical profiles of those individuals featured in the main text. 

The volume begins with an informative summary of eighteenth-century immigration and settlement patterns from Ireland to the United States, noteworthy for the concentration of Irish immigrants into northern urban centers east and west. There is also some brief background on pre-Civil War Irish contributions to the armed forces, which included disproportionate enlistment in the antebellum Regular Army and a heavy presence in the U.S. Navy.

Early-war enlistment dominates the pension records, with almost three-fourths of the correspondents volunteering before the end of 1862. The overwhelming majority were drawn from the working class (92% were either farm laborers, unemployed, or worked in blue-collar occupations). As expected, the eastern states dominate, with just over 40% of the sample coming from New York alone. Just over a third were born outside the Emerald Isle to Irish parents in the U.S., Canada, or the U.K, and the average age of the Irish American enlistee was over a year and half younger than the average age of the Union volunteer overall. As the author explains, his finding that nearly two-thirds of these volunteers were single was expected given that Irish men tended to marry later than other ethnic groups.

In terms of what Irish American soldiers wrote about their soldier experience, Shiels finds that they expressed themselves in the straightforward, non-sentimental descriptive manner that was much the same across the lower classes of all white ethnic groups. Their written reactions to combat, marching, and camp life also closely matched others. One noteworthy difference among Irish volunteers was a higher than average desertion rate, which the author primarily attributes to the exceptionally precarious financial position of Irish families (a distinction from other ethnicities that's well explained in the book).

The commonly accepted total of Irish who served in the Union Army is, in round numbers, 150,000 men, but Shiels reveals why that figure should be considered much too low. The traditional number excludes certain geographical regions as well as the U.S. Navy and Regular Army. Including those numbers raises the total to over 180,000, and, if you add the children of Irish immigrants to the total, the author believes the best conservative estimate to be at least 250,000. Shiels feels that the implications of this are critically important, as, in addition to simply being more accurate, the amended total upends the long-held conclusion that ethnic Irish were underrepresented (which Shiels questions even when using the old numbers) in the Union volunteer forces. Instead, the revised numbers suggest that the Irish were truly overrepresented. The impact of this on assessing Irish loyalty and duty toward their new country, both of which were sullied by the Irish's heavy role in opposing conscription (especially during the infamous New York City Draft Riot of July 1863), is important to consider.

The great many acts of deadly violence perpetrated during the aforementioned civil unrest in New York City, in which a predominantly Irish mob specifically targeted black residents, has been commonly used as a reference point to gauge Irish American attitudes toward blacks in general. In addition to reminding readers that only a small proportion of New York's Irish participated in the bloody riots, Shiels's research into how Irish soldiers described their interactions with free and enslaved blacks encountered during their service reveals a complicated range of attitudes. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the vast majority of Irish soldiers deeply opposed the Emancipation Proclamation and the war's new direction, their attitude grounded in both racism and economic fears. Interestingly, Shiels's research directly challenges the viewpoint of those contemporary abolitionists (among them Frederick Douglass) who maintained that it was immersion into American society that produced Irish beliefs in black racial inferiority. Instead, Shiels's work strongly suggests that most Irish already held such opinions before they arrived on American soil.

In the arena of Irish American political identity, it is noteworthy that not a single letter in Shiels's sample expressed support for the Republican party. As the author explains, this is understandable given that party's evolution from nativist and anti-Catholic roots, and the Irish's position as the white ethnic group most vulnerable to the economic implications of emancipation and possible mass migration of freedpeople into heavily Irish urban centers. Also pointed out by the author is the Irish's generally conservative interpretation of the Constitution. Shiels does not dismiss the likelihood that many soldiers, in particular the early volunteers most personally invested in finishing the war, voted Republican in 1864 or declined to vote at all in protest of the Peace Party wing of the Democratic Party, but in his opinion it remains highly likely that the Irish cast the largest block of Democratic votes in the Union Army. Given that opposition to emancipation and Democratic affiliation in general both came to be widely viewed as evidence of disloyalty during the mid to late-war period, Shiels acknowledges that the ethnic group's voting patterns contributed mightily, and unfairly, to broad anti-Irish feeling.

Interwoven with nativist doubts about Irish loyalty were issues and perceptions related to chosen identity. From the letters Shiels examined emerged a dual Irish American identity that few among them were uncomfortable with by the 1860s, it being clear that these men were proud of their ethnic heritage but also strongly identified with being an American. Of course, those 1830s and 1840s immigrants and their children were more tightly bound to their American identity than those who arrived during the 1850s wave of new immigration. It is noteworthy that the soldier correspondents of Shiels's sample routinely elevated the Fourth of July holiday above St. Patrick's Day. Additionally, most of these soldiers did not pine for the old country in their letters home but rather expressed deep attachment to their local communities. They also more often than not preferred to get their news from non-ethnic newspapers.

Shiels challenges enduring negatives stereotypes of Irish soldiers as uninhibited rowdies and street toughs who were just as hard drinking as they were hard fighting. There were certainly large numbers of individuals in the Union Army (Irish or otherwise) who were just like that, but Shiels counters that his research reveals that the majority of Irish American soldiers, like their comrades of other ethnicities, valued duty and restraint within a generally more moderate form of what recent scholars term "martial manhood." On the matter of alcohol, the author acknowledges the significance of Irish drinking culture, but notes that all societal classes and ethnicities in the Union service struggled with alcohol abuse, and the nativist stereotyping of the Irish as exceptional offenders often led to harsher punishments than might otherwise have been imposed by officers.

Of course, any investigation into the religious identity of Irish Americans is readily confronted with the cultural dominance of the Catholic Church and its sacramental teachings. However, Shiels's research path also meaningfully encounters the much smaller Protestant Irish identity and outlook that many prior investigators tended to ignore as materially insignificant to the Irish American experience. Perhaps remarkable is that the letters he examined evinced very little in the way of sectarian division between the two groups when they served together.

In examining the crossover between identity and ideology when it comes to enlistment motivation, Shiels finds no evidence to support the popular contention that many Irish joined the Union Army primarily to gain military experience needed to free Ireland from British rule. Among the soldier correspondents, there was widespread sympathy for the Fenian Movement (the individual expression of which Shiels describes as often being "performative" in nature), but the primary focus of their attention was on the practical matter of doing their part to achieve Union victory and secure their own future in their adopted homeland. Rather than dream of returning to the "Old Sod" to free it from British imperial oppression (an aspiration that some individuals certainly did articulate), the far more common cross-Atlantic intention expressed by the sample correspondents was a determination to entice more family members and friends to join them in a reunited post-Civil War America full of promise and opportunity.

If Fenianism wasn't a major enlistment motivator, economic considerations and patriotism certainly were. The role economics played in early-war volunteerism in general has been examined at greater depth in recent years (William Marvel's detailed work being among the most pointed in tone and analysis), and it is clear from Shiels's sample group that the prospect of regular pay and other financial incentives were important considerations for the working-class individuals who formed the vast majority of Irish American volunteers. They, especially the urban workers, were especially vulnerable during the national economy's sharp late-antebellum and secession-period downturn. Whether expressed overtly or with more subtlety, patriotism was also widely expressed in the Irish soldier letters, especially from those who had spent their youth into adulthood years in the United States. Their words and sentiments related to duty and commitment to the preservation of the Union were similar to those of Union volunteers in general, and that evidence collectively reinforces the author's views in regard to the preeminence of local and national American identity over ethnic insularity.

In addition to being the first of its kind in terms of providing a comprehensive profile and analysis of Irish volunteers, Damian Shiels's deeply impressive Green and Blue ranks as one of the most important of all Civil War ethnic soldier studies. One might hope it could be used as a model for studying other large groups of ethnic volunteers such as German American soldiers, both for intrinsic value and for comparative purposes. This book is very highly recommended.

Review - "Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs" by Thomas & Matthews

[Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs by Paul A. Thomas & Matt M. Matthews (Arcadia Publishing and The History Press, 2025). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography. Pages main/total:131/160. ISBN:978-1-4671-5808-4. $24.99]

Between the implementation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the end of the Civil War, the borderland between Missouri and Kansas was transformed into a landscape of violence that all too often crossed accepted boundaries. The irregular warfare that that extended conflict between proslavery and antislavery forces spawned possessed a nature and intensity that few other bitterly contested regions rivaled, and perhaps none equaled.

Literature coverage of the most infamous episodes and crimes of the Civil War period in eastern Kansas and western Missouri still focuses most closely on the actions and individuals involved with the pro-Confederate side of the irregular war, but Union guerrillas operating out of Kansas and cutting their own paths of murder, arson, and plunder could be just as ruthless as their Missouri counterparts. As continues to be the case with those studying the Missouri guerrillas, gaps in the available source material and persistent myths passed down through generations plague those writers who want to find the truth behind Kansas's guerrillas. Freshly wading into this heavily disputatious historiographical ground are Paul A. Thomas and Matt M. Matthews, the authors of Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas: Jayhawkers and Red Legs.

With the "Bleeding Kansas" period already the subject of an expansive modern library of scholarly work, Thomas and Matthews's contextualization of the 1850s Border War that created the Kansas Jayhawker is understandably brief. For the uninitiated, they trace the historical origins of the term 'jayhawking,' which was for decades prior a fairly non-specific word used to describe acts of thievery. The terms Kansas "Jayhawker" and "Red Legs" are defined and differentiated, the latter being a subset group of the former and which came into use after the start of the Civil War. Heavily associated with looting and arson that could be indiscriminate in nature and not strongly averse to committing outright murder, Jayhawkers and Red Legs at various times drew censure from all sides, although participants themselves along with many of their home front backers seem to have proudly accepted those labels. It is the distinct purpose of the authors to avoid playing the heroes versus villains game that has plagued the Border War historiography, focusing instead on portraying these men "in a way that fairly highlights the diverse and often complex reasons that they did what they did" (pg. 18).

Thomas and Matthews frame their largely biographical study around a representative sample of six major leaders: James H. Lane, James Montgomery, Charles R. "Doc" Jennison, George H. Hoyt, Marshall L. Cleveland, and William S. Tough. Of the half-dozen, Lane and Montgomery are the two most towering figures. Content found in their chapters, which offer fine summaries of how the authors interpret their backgrounds, character, and Civil War-era activities, will be familiar to those who have read any of the multiple book-length biographies of each that have been published in recent times. Though he still lacks a full biographical treatment of his own (Stephen Starr's 1974 combined unit history and leader study Jennison's Jayhawkers remains the classic source), Jennison's level of notoriety in the areas of deadly violence and marauding was top-tier. While household names in the region at the time, the rest are fairly obscure today. Hoyt, a lawyer who insinuated himself into John Brown's legal defense, was close to Jennison and was the individual most closely associated with the Kansas Red Legs. As revealed in the book, Cleveland was little more than a criminal freebooter (earning the moniker "Phantom Horseman of the Prairie"), using the Civil War as a means for stealing horses and other forms of property. Tough was another Jayhawker who gained enough wartime notoriety to be given a nickname (the "Paladin of the Kansas Prairie") but remains little known among today's Civil War students.

A number of common threads course through the pages of all six biographical chapters. All of the half-dozen jayhawking figures featured in the study were ostensibly antislavery in disposition. Each was situated somewhere on a spectrum between the ideological true believer (ex. Montgomery and Hoyt) and the most cynical brand of 'practical' abolitionist (ex. Cleveland and Tough). Jennison's abolitionist credentials are in dispute, and the authors note that his own wife denied that he marched to the abolitionist tune. Although the chapter devoted to James Montgomery duly recounts those of his actions that would be considered war crimes, it also generously describes him as the only truly "righteous" man in the bunch.

Although freeing Missouri slaves, regardless of slaveholder loyalties, was a major objective of Jayhawker raids, it was also the case that all the men that Thomas and Matthews profile in their book were involved in very serious episodes of arson and property crimes, the latter even to the extent of robbing banks. Personal motivations ranged among inflicting 'righteous' punishment on proslavery persons to making the war pay for itself to mere cynical personal gain, with the last far too often being primary. With Missourians of all political stripes commonly deemed to be inveterate enemies, many Kansans considered cross-border plunder and robbery justified, and many Jayhawkers used Civil War conflict to amass significant wealth for themselves and their closest associates.

To varying degrees, all of these men also played a role in the worst of all war crimes, the killing of prisoners and civilians. None of the six shied away from deadly violence, and, reading the book, one gains the strong sense that psychological and emotional instability was not uncommon. In recounting specific events, the authors do address conflicting reports. One prominent example involves allegations that emerged from the sacking of Osceola in September 1861. Many secondary sources in print and on the web today maintain that nine prisoners were executed, but Thomas and Matthews have determined that the best evidence points toward period sources mistakenly conflating what happened at Osceola with prisoner killings that did occur days earlier at Morristown.

The book also makes clear that Kansas Jayhawkers and Red Legs proved capable of moving back and forth between the irregular and conventional spheres of warfare, with some of the profiled individuals effectively leading both types of units at some time during their Civil War careers. That crossover led to frequent clashes between them and their military superiors who took a dim view of Jayhawker breaches in military discipline and behavior toward enemy civilians. Nevertheless, as the book shows, arrested Jayhawkers and Red Legs who possessed valuable knowledge and experience often escaped punishment by convincing their accusers of their unique usefulness as scouts and gatherers of intelligence.

It is also unsurprisingly the case that politics was keenly involved in Kansas's notoriously factional relations between prominent Jayhawkers and high-level politicians as well as within the Jayhawker leadership. Results from such political maneuvering often proved complicated, even contradictory. For example, the authors make clear that they could find no compelling evidence to support the common view that Lane and Jennison were friends. Instead, they determine the pair to have been "bitter enemies" (pg. 40). Yet the authors also reveal elsewhere in the book that Lane co-sponsored, with Kansas's other U.S. senator, a petition that strongly urged President Lincoln to appoint Jennison a brigadier general at the very moment the war's most infamous Jayhawker was suffering in official disgrace.

Union Guerrillas of Civil War Kansas makes a hefty contribution to our understanding of those Civil War Kansas leaders who were directly involved in the irregular conflict fought on both sides of the Kansas-Missouri border. Sweeping away simplistic portrayals and partisan mythologizing, Paul Thomas and Matt Matthews's collection of Kansas Jayhawker leadership biographies reveals, using the best available evidence and reasoned conjecture, not only who those men were as individuals but how each was situated, relative to each other, within common themes associated with Jayhawker motivations, actions, and justifications of those actions. In that way, readers gain vital insights into an ideological conflict that attracted and produced, as the authors maintain, "both good and bad men who did good and bad things" (pg. 18).

Review - "Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War" by Schieffler & Stith, eds.

[Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War edited by G. David Schieffler and Matthew M. Stith (Louisiana State University Press, 2025). Hardcover, chapter notes, index. Pages:xii,271. ISBN:978-0-8071-8220-8. $45]

Beginning most prominently with 1995's Seasons of War, historian Daniel E. Sutherland has had a profound impact on the field through his exploration of the many ways in which local history enriches and expands our modern understanding of the American Civil War. Developed in another line of study headlined by 2009's A Savage Conflict, Sutherland's sweeping reinterpretation of the character, scale, and larger meaning of the war's vast irregular component has also proved to be highly influential. Additionally, as editor of University of Arkansas Press's The Civil War in the West series (now sadly defunct), Sutherland played a significant part in promoting and conveying to readers new scholarship dealing with the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi West. In appreciation of Sutherland, as person, scholar, and mentor, is the essay anthology Hundreds of Little Wars: Community, Conflict, and the Real Civil War, edited by G. David Schieffler and Matthew M. Stith.

Given Daniel Sutherland's stature as one of the leading proponents of the idea that the local experience of the Civil War was the "real war" for most of the population, this set of essays written in his honor grabs onto that central concept and branches off from it far and wide. The traditional understanding of Civil War "community" as being tied to static local geography (i.e. cities, towns, and counties) is explored in fresh directions such as temporary POW and refugee camps. Entering into other spaces (including more figurative-level ones) are those essays that address community in the context of race, gender, regular and irregular military organizations (ex. volunteer regiments and partisan ranger units), and intersections between the natural and built environments. The resulting dozen essays are organized into pairs assigned to six themed sections: (1) Regimental Communities, (2) County and Environmental Communities, (3) Border Communities, (4) Hybrid (in terms of race and demography) Communities, (5) Irregular Communities, and (6) Transnational and Comparative Communities. To get a taste of what to expect, one chapter from each pairing will be commented upon below.

Through works such as Gerald Prokopowicz's All for the Regiment and others, the Civil War regiment, always seen to have been closely representative of the community or communities from which it was recruited, has also come to be viewed as a community in and of itself within the larger structures of the Union and Confederate armies. Similar to how she approached the topic in other writings dealing with the 16th Connecticut, 11th New York, and 2nd Texas, Lesley Gordon examines issues of alleged cowardice and the quest for redemption in her essay exploring the 128th New York, a regiment that was singled out as the worst of the "Harpers Ferry Cowards"—the context being alleged misbehavior that contributed to the entire garrison's disgraceful surrender on September 15, 1862. Interestingly, Gordon finds that the men of the 128th, unlike their fellow New Yorkers of the 11th, fully redeemed themselves in subsequent campaigning, yet (unlike other Harpers Ferry regiments collared with the same label) during reunions and for the decades after the war bitterly clung to a victim mentality that remained one of the central unifying elements of their communal memory. It's a testament to the far reaching power and endurance of such accusations.

Paired with an occupation study of Virginia's Fauquier County emphasizing the local irregular conflict and gender relations between civilians and occupiers is an examination of the prison community established at Camp Ford (Smith County, Texas, located a few miles outside Tyler) from 1863-65. In it, volume co-editor Matthew Stith explores the camp's interactions with the local population along with the natural (including area wildlife of various kinds) and man-made environments. With good water and wood for shelter-building widely available and given the opportunity to forage liberally from the resource-rich countryside, Camp Ford prisoners (even after overcrowding resulting from the breakdown of the exchange system and influx of new arrivals from the 1864 Red River Campaign) experienced much lower morbidity and mortality rates in comparison with the war's more infamous POW facilities.

As developed fully in The Rivers Ran Backward, his sprawling 2016 study of the nineteenth-century West's so-called Middle Border, the essay authored by Christopher Phillips again frames that vast multi-state region occupying both sides of the Missouri and Ohio Rivers as being not a distinct line of demarcation between northern and southern identities but rather a place, a region-sized "community" if you like, of integrated economies and mostly shared political and social values. As Phillips explains, the harshest and most enduring divisions within the Middle Border were not of a longstanding North versus South nature but rather were a product of mid-1850s political violence, the Civil War itself, and postbellum politics.

Co-editor G. David Schieffler's contribution expands the concept of Civil War community to the black refugee camp, one of the largest in the South, that was established at Helena, Arkansas after the Union Army of the Southwest entered the area and set up a permanent and heavily fortified garrison in the river town. As Schieffler shows, the reciprocal relationship that developed between the army and refugees, the former providing protection, employment, and limited supplies and the latter camp and military labor, forged a community of mutual assistance. However, those benefits to the refugees were also accompanied by inconsistent policies and support, much of which was dependent upon the attitude and priorities of the military officer who happened to be in overall command of the post at a given moment. That capriciousness, the frequent abuses, and the naturally unhealthy conditions at Helena that felled soldiers and freedpeople alike in alarming numbers, together rendered uncertain both life and freedom for the refugees.

The Barton Myers essay identifies a community of similarly skilled and motivated partisan officers who led irregular units in different parts of the border and southern states during the Civil War. In addition to offering fresh recognition of obscure figures, their commands, and their activities, Myers points toward commonalities among the leaders, with many having served in conventional forces before the appeal of independent action and of engaging in local defense led them to enter partisan service. The divide between regular and irregular service was also significantly blurred, as these officers frequently returned to the conventional war by directly cooperating with regular forces. In addition to their local knowledge, most possessed aggressive streaks and a high tolerance for risk that made them effective raiders and scouts. However, as evidenced by a number of violent deaths among these men long after the war ended, those qualities valuable during wartime could also negatively impact their relations with others off the battlefield and upon their return to civilian life. As Myers makes clear, among the host of factors that scholars have developed in recent years to explain the 1862 Partisan Ranger Act's mostly disastrous outcome, the lack of strong and effective leadership from officers such as these was not among them.

As recounted by Michael Shane Powers, Confederate veterans Edward Burke of Louisiana and members of Virginia's Imboden family represented international actors forging mutually beneficial links between Gilded Age America and the country of Honduras, with the added dimension of key involvement with British sources of capital. Powers's essay is not a tale of fleeing the country to escape postwar persecution or renewal of antebellum-style filibustering activities but rather one of successful entrepreneurs expanding New South economic ties with Central America. In the 1880s, Burke and the Imbodens utilized British investment to fund large-scale mining operations, and they became instrumental figures in developing Honduran mineral extraction industries and national infrastructure. Much of their success was owed to their integration into Honduran society in ways that previous foreigners failed to do, and as experienced soldiers they also played an active part in Honduran internal conflicts in support of the legitimate government.

Certainly, you can expand the definition of a word or concept like "community" so far and wide as to run the risk of losing its value as an object of reference or study, but the larger point of these essays, that of recognizing the abundant insights that localized (even microscopic-level) points of view can offer in both isolation and in sum, certainly holds true. A handful of men dying in a remote guerrilla ambush far behind the front lines barely merits mention, but a thousand of such forgotten incidents spread across the landscape of war can have the same impact on a combatant side's friends, families, and local communities as the Battle of Gettysburg. In similar fashion, the "hundreds of little wars" that this volume touches upon and that collectively fill in the innumerable gaps and crevices between and behind the major campaigns and battles that garner the lion's share of attention were often the war for a great many of those who participated in them.

Review - "The Confederate Resurgence of 1864" by William Marvel

[The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 by William Marvel (Louisiana State University Press, 2024). Hardcover, 10 maps, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:xiii,231/336. ISBN:978-0-8071-8243-7. $49.95]

During the harsh winter of 1863-64, Confederate national morale found itself standing at yet another crossroads moment between confidence and despair. For southern armies and the home front they defended, 1863 was a tough year to say the least. In the West, the costly Confederate victory at Chickamauga in September 1863 briefly revived spirits dampened by the drawn-out catastrophe of Vicksburg, but all of that shaky optimism was dashed by the end of the year following defeat at Knoxville and the utter rout of the main body of the Army of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Across the Mississippi River, federal amphibious forces ranged up and down the Texas coast with impunity, and in Arkansas a bloody repulse at Helena was followed by Union occupation of the length of the Arkansas River Valley, including the state capital at Little Rock. In the East, national elation following the unlikely triumph at Chancellorsville (though that joy was tempered by the loss of Stonewall Jackson and heavy casualties incurred overall) was followed that summer by terrible defeat and more irreplaceable losses in Pennsylvania at Gettysburg. Even though the heavily depleted Army of Northern Virginia retained its confidence in commander Robert E. Lee and stymied Gettysburg's victors for the remainder of the year, some deemed that army's 1863 losses, particularly in officers, so crippling as to seriously impair its prospects for the coming year. Bad news also extended to the North Carolina front, which was reinforced early in the year at some strategic risk. There, the manner in which the failed attack on New Bern was bungled raised serious questions over whether anything could be accomplished toward regaining cities and territory lost in the region the previous year. Amidst all that doom and gloom, everyone in the Confederacy knew that there would be no let up in pressure by the enemy. So what steeled the Confederacy's badly shaken supporters for the even greater challenges and sacrifices that 1864 would undoubtedly bring? Seeking the answer to that question, or at least a significant part of it, is the most probing theme of William Marvel's new book The Confederate Resurgence of 1864.

It is Marvel's view, strongly developed throughout this study, that the string of Confederate military victories on land and water over a roughly ten-week period from February 20 to April 30 provided such a significant boost to both the home and fighting fronts that it sustained them through the horrendous casualties and steady loss of national territory produced by the fierce fighting between the main armies in Georgia and Virginia. Perhaps more controversially, Marvel even goes so far as to say that the widespread injection of fresh optimism into flagging spirits provided by that late-winter and early-spring "resurgence" was instrumental in sustaining Confederate resistance into the following year.

Marvel sets the stage by recounting the depths to which army confidence in eventual victory had sunk by the onset of the winter of 1863-64, which was exceptionally cold in places. That increasing despair led to a widespread surge in desertion, even in areas far from the main action. Many of those who abandoned southern ranks, both individually and in groups, took advantage of President Lincoln's shrewdly conceived amnesty proposal. Of course, the Confederacy had experienced ups and downs in national prospects and morale before, but things seemed different as 1864 arrived. Hopelessness started to pervade Confederate society, currency values approached complete worthlessness, total economic collapse seemed impending, and supplies of clothing and shoes for the army were increasingly inadequate (with little to no prospect for improvement). General Sherman's February 1864 Meridian Expedition, which started at Vicksburg and drove inland into the Mississippi heartland with near impunity, only furthered the perception that Confederate defenses were now a hollow shell. The Confederate resurgence arrived just in the nick of time.

Fine overviews of the sequence of military events large and small that form the basis of Marvel's argument and analysis, with map support, are offered. Covered are the Union expedition in Florida that suffered defeat at the Battle of Olustee, the cavalry clashes between Nathan Bedford Forrest and Sooy Smith in North Mississippi, the confrontation at Rocky Face Ridge/Mill Creek Gap in North Georgia, the abortive Butler/Wistar raid on Richmond in early February (stopped at Bottom's Bridge) and accompanying diversionary operation from the Army of the Potomac, the infamous Kilpatrick/Dahlgren Raid on Richmond, the Red River Campaign and Camden Expedition, Forrest's raids on widely separated points across western Tennessee and Kentucky (especially at Union City, Paducah, and Fort Pillow), and the Confederate recapture of Plymouth, North Carolina. These Confederate successes are discussed in both isolation and in cumulative effect. Certainly other factors were involved in sustaining hope within Confederate ranks through the rest of 1864, not least of which were having Lee in the East and replacing Bragg with Johnston in the West (the latter overwhelmingly perceived as a major upgrade), but Marvel, through surveying a wide range of contemporary primary sources, builds a strong case that the string of victories listed above produced a noticeably powerful boost to Confederate national morale and determination.

Even events that were damaging on the face of it could be widely seen as having a silver lining. In Charleston harbor, the sinking of the USS Housatonic, even though it also resulted in the loss of the attacking submersible CSS Hunley, nevertheless increased hopes that further blows could be struck against the ever tightening blockade of the southern coastline. While the relatively weak response to Sherman's incursion into the heart of Mississippi and the level of destruction wrought there was disheartening to Confederate supporters, Marvel notes that the public morale effect was largely mitigated by Forrest's manhandling of Sooy Smith's cavalry wing. Not recognizing that Sherman had already turned back by the time Forrest confronted Smith and harried him into retreat, it was inaccurately assumed by a great many within the Confederate military leadership and among the general populace that stopping Smith had compelled Sherman to give up plans for further advances toward either Selma or Mobile. Likewise, to the north, the successful Confederate defensive action at Dalton was widely perceived as repulsing a major enemy advance rather than the mostly diversionary action it really was.

According to Marvel, the period under consideration in his book also had a major political component in that it represented an interval that delivered key blows to Lincoln's presidential reconstruction plans. The administration's political initiative was an utter failure in Florida and, with Steele stripping much of his occupation forces from the Arkansas River Valley in support of his Camden Expedition, the pro-Union political position in Arkansas started to deteriorate. Abject defeat in the Red River Valley also meant that reconstruction could not be carried from New Orleans into the heart of Louisiana.

As Marvel outlines, the early-1864 Confederate resurgence also contributed to a corresponding stumble in Union self-assurance. Since modern observers lack scientific opinion data for the Civil War period, fluctuations in the value of paper currency relative to gold prices are commonly used to gauge northern confidence in the war effort and economy at a given time, and Marvel points to several events during the book's ten-week interlude that corresponded with spikes in gold demand/prices and greenback depreciation.

Drawing support from a variety of primary source materials, the quality of Marvel's main argument is vigorously developed and presented to the reader in his own inimitable writing style and tone. What's most open for debate is just how much of the strength of Confederate resistance revealed throughout the rest of 1864 can be directly attributed to that early-year window of successive battlefield victories. The least convincing part of the argument is the attempt to draw an analogy between the Confederate national mood at the beginnings of years 1864 and 1865. Marvel's suggestion that the first six months of the latter witnessed a widespread and rapid collapse because it lacked anything like the previous year's boosting victories has some merit, but one can't help but feel that much more of a gulf in military and home front starting conditions existed between the respective winters of 1863-64 and 1864-65 than Marvel concedes. Regardless, one is still able to fully appreciate the thought-provoking power behind Marvel's central thesis without necessarily agreeing with all of his conclusions associated with it.

As he readily admits in his introduction, Marvel is not the first scholar to raise the matter of this dramatic early spring revival of Confederate fortunes, but he certainly is the first author to both descriptively recount the period in comprehensive fashion and analyze the full impact of its significance. The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 offers fresh thinking and a powerful new way to assess the events of that pivotal Civil War year and beyond.