Booknotes: Duty Beyond the Battlefield

New Arrival:
• Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920 by Le'Trice D. Donaldson (SIU Press, 2020).

From the description: Duty Beyond the Battlefield: African American Soldiers Fight for Racial Uplift, Citizenship, and Manhood, 1870–1920 "locates the often overlooked era between the Civil War and the end of World War I as the beginning of black soldiers’ involvement in the long struggle for civil rights. Donaldson traces the evolution of these soldiers as they used their military service to challenge white notions of an African American second-class citizenry and forged a new identity as freedom fighters willing to demand the rights of full citizenship and manhood."

Author Le'Trice Donaldson "also interrogates the association between masculinity and citizenship and the ways in which performing manhood through military service influenced how these men struggled for racial uplift. Following the Buffalo soldier units and two regular army infantry units from the frontier and the Mexican border to Mexico, Cuba, and the Philippines, Donaldson investigates how these locations and the wars therein provide windows into how the soldiers’ struggles influenced black life and status within the United States."

The book also looks at prominent individuals who had opposing ideas of what it meant to be a "military race man" (defined as a soldier "concerned with the uplift of the black race who followed the philosophy of progress"). In doing so, Donaldson "contrasts the histories of officers Henry Flipper and Charles Young, two soldiers who saw their roles and responsibilities as black military officers very differently."

The book argues that, over this fifty year period under consideration, "military race men laid the foundation for the “New Negro” movement and the rise of Black Nationalism that influenced the future leaders of the twentieth century Civil Rights movement."

Review - "Bull Run to Boer War: How the American Civil War Changed the British Army" by Michael Somerville

[Bull Run to Boer War: How the American Civil War Changed the British Army by Michael Somerville. (Helion & Company, 2019). Softcover, photos, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:331/380. ISBN:978-1-912866-25-0. $44.95]

Michael Somerville's Bull Run to Boer War: How the American Civil War Changed the British Army begins with a critical review of American military historian and Basil Liddell Hart protege Jay Luvaas's The Military Legacy of the Civil War (1959) and that work's enduring influence on the study of how European military professionals perceived the American Civil War. Though Luvaas's views, which were rooted in looking backward from the carnage of the Great War, were somewhat modified over time, his general conclusion that the major European armies all failed to heed the lessons of the Civil War echoed throughout the literature for decades and was still firmly anchored in the pages of the 1988 2nd edition of his book. In addition to challenging Luvaas's conclusions, Somerville's wide-ranging reassessment, which focuses exclusively on the British response to the Civil War, also properly situates British observations in the military context most appropriate to their time. Thus the book's outlook is distinctly late-Victorian, bounded by the Second Boer War (1899-1902) rather than the Great War that abruptly altered the army's longstanding traditional role from fighting distant colonial campaigns to remodeling itself on the mass conscript armies of mainland Europe.

Perhaps only a handful of British military observers are household names among today's Civil War readers, but Somerville notes that British officers flocked to see the conflict in great numbers (in the three figures), and he provides an informative survey of their activities and written observations. Unfortunately, only a few of these firsthand witnesses actually wrote formally about their experiences, but the fact that most seemed to have been either adventurous Guards officers or officers of the more technical ordnance and engineering branches is suggestive of main areas of British interest. In discussing the men, Somerville is persuasive in finding them neither dismissive nor uncomprehending of what they saw. Exposed to few true surprises, they were primarily concerned with seeing in person the practical applications of newer technologies and weaponry. Of course, in exercising their own personal judgment, individual and cultural biases were frequently in play, but these officers largely achieved what they set out to do.

Given that Britain was an island nation with a strong navy and traditional strength in the area of combined operations, it is natural that they would have an interest in harbor warfare and defenses. Fixed obstructions, armored batteries, and floating mines were not novel to the experiences of British officers, but they were greatly interested in seeing for themselves how such tools were used at this unprecedented scale. Union manufacture and deployment of heavy rifled artillery was another main concern, though mainly as a new data point be evaluated alongside their own extensive ordnance testing (the latter results of which they tended to favor in part due to their conclusion that U.S.-made fuses were greatly inferior to British-manufactured ones). In the end, what British artillery specialists saw of massive-bore, lower-velocity Union siege guns tended to reinforce their own view that smaller-bore, high-velocity artillery was the preferred option for reducing forts and earthworks. Though British engineers were generally unimpressed with American fortification designs, supporting defensive measures, particularly wire entanglements, became significant objects of interest.

In the area of small arms, Somerville considers mostly false the popular view that the British Army was too slow to adopt the breech-loading, repeating arms that many Civil War units (mostly cavalry) used to fine effect. Instead of seeing mere hide-bound conservatism as the culprit, the author finds that the authorities had very practical reasons (including safety, reliability, and logistics support) for holding off on the mass distribution of magazine-fed rifles. They had the same defensible wait and see attitude when it came to machine guns, which in their early forms were less than mobile and prone to malfunction. Like the Americans, the British saw those guns as most useful in occupying fixed positions guarding bridges, defiles, and forts. When it came to single-shot breech-loading rifles, the British already had several cavalry regiments outfitted with them before the Civil War, and their army-wide adoption of breech-loading rifles actually preceded the U.S. Army's by a couple years. Thus, Somerville more persuasively sees American ordnance developments as not revolutionary but rather part of a larger trans-Atlantic pattern of arms innovation that British observers were keen to review and incorporate into their own processes of evaluation.

The tactical and strategic evolution of cavalry is another source of alleged British failure to heed the lessons of the Civil War. Indeed, Luvaas considered American cavalry firepower and tactics revolutionary, with dismounted fighting and strategic mobility replacing outmoded mounted shock forces employed in close support. Somerville holds a contrary view on the matter, seeing Civil War cavalry as greatly influencing British thought. Commonly defining American cavalry as not true cavalry (or even mounted rifles) but rather mounted infantry, some British leaders saw the great potential of adopting what they learned of Sheridan's command in Virginia in 1864-65 as a model for enhancing British colonial control of India through replacement of infantry with smaller numbers of mounted infantry. Strong proponents of heavy cavalry being used in its traditional shock role still remained for many decades, but even the more conservative cavalry leaders eventually became convinced through study of the Civil War, contemporary European conflicts, and their own experiences in places like the Sudan, that British cavalry needed more firepower to maintain its presence on the modern battlefield. Of arguably more explicit influence, but much less commonly approached in discussion than matters of tactics, was the strategic-level influence of Civil War cavalry. The British, the Prussians, and especially the Russians in the 1870s all recognized the value in using independent cavalry to perform behind-the-lines attacks on enemy railroads and lines of communication. The vast increase in the size of late-Victorian national armies that led to battle zones resembling long, continuous fronts also convinced the British that using cavalry to screen marches and seek enemy flanks was more important than ever.

Somerville is also skeptical of claims that the British Army disregarded ACW lessons when it came to infantry tactics, firepower, and field works. Well cognizant of what increased firepower and range meant to current and future battlefields, while also appreciating that ultimate success required forward movement in spite of newfound defensive capabilities, British authorities were most impressed with how late-war ACW commanders (particularly General Sherman around Atlanta) were able to use trenches on the offensive. As the author keenly points out, in primarily attributing widespread late-war use of hasty field entrenchments to the need to protect armies in close contact for extended periods of time rather than as a response to increased firearms lethality, British writers such as Charles Cornwallis Chesney anticipated Earl Hess's interpretive work on the matter by many decades. Independent of Civil War manuals, British officers recognized that tactical movements would have to be sped up in response to modern firepower, and, like prominent American officer and theorist Emory Upton, realized that future survival and success on the battlefield required extended lines, more open order formations, and increased delegation of initiative and responsibility to lower-level commanders. Many British writers repeatedly cited the exceptional nature of the American war, with its wilderness fighting conditions and its application of supposedly unique national characteristics, to discount the relevance of many alleged lessons from the Civil War, but that does not mean that they weren't still seriously considered.

Given that Union authorities basically abandoned military ballooning by 1863, it might seem odd at first glance that Somerville devotes so much space in the book to the Civil War's aeronautical legacy. However, he points out that some British historians have directly traced the origins of the Royal Flying Corps (later the RAF) to the British response to Civil War ballooning. The section also serves as a useful case study of the British Army's review and procurement process when it came to new technologies.

In the broadly approached final chapter, the author demonstrates how British study of Civil War employment of railroads and telegraphy reinforced their own views on the current and future values of those modern advancements in movement and communications. On a strategic level, the British military establishment also closely studied the Civil War's mass mobilization of national industrial resources and manpower, in the latter case coming to the conclusion that an adaptation of the U.S. volunteer system was preferable to Prussian-style conscription for creating an imperial manpower reserve. The author also addresses claims that a stubborn British quest for decisive battle ignored abundant contradictory evidence offered by Civil War armies. He counters this common criticism with the reasonable contention that it should be tempered somewhat by recognition that the Victorian British Army was most often matched against numerically superior colonial foes over whom quick and decisive victory was required.

Ironically, Somerville envisions combined operations as perhaps the largest gap in British appreciation of the lessons of the Civil War. Even though, as mentioned above, the British singled out the Charleston harbor campaign for special attention, they nevertheless failed to apply their observations to improving their own formal forms of land and naval cooperation (the author cites Alexandria in 1882 and Gallipoli in 1915 as primary examples of poor interservice coordination).

When rich volumes of historical material are to be had on any given topic (which seems to be the case here), it unfortunately becomes all too easy for authors to cherry pick sources to support a given thesis. However, to Somerville's credit, one of his study's great strengths is its in-depth sampling and analysis of the full range of British views on nearly every major topic under discussion. The author is almost certainly correct to argue that too much criticism of the British military is unfairly rooted in negative post-WWI commentary. In addition to pointing out that tremendous advances in twentieth-century firepower necessarily clouded the value of many teachings drawn from 1860s warfare, Somerville makes a powerful case that British late-Victorian intellectual engagement with Civil War lessons was significant and sustained.

While not wholly satisfactory in nature, Somerville's answer to the important question of why British forces were seemingly so unprepared for the Boer wars if they had indeed learned a great deal from earlier conflicts is a compelling one. Lacking an institutional authoritative body tasked with continuous study (something on the order of the German General Staff) the British Army primarily addressed change on an individual or "interest group" level. So with this in mind, it is the author's view that it is misguided to generally ascribe responsibility for particular Victorian-era failures and disasters to an alleged sorry state of the British Army as a whole. At least according to Somerville, many of these unfortunate events are better understood as being the result of poor tactical decision-making from local commanders.

The truth is that all major armies of the period struggled mightily to cope with the dilemma of how to conduct successful offensive operations in a modern battle arena swept by incredible defensive firepower. By the end of the 1800s, all branches of the British Army (infantry, cavalry, and artillery) had accepted that firepower decided the battle, and Somerville's study offers abundant evidence that British assessment of what the American Civil War could teach in these areas was neither ignorant nor unresponsive. Even so, the author extends a cautionary note to his revisionism, admitting that British integration of relevant operational lessons from the Civil War, though deserving of being viewed in a much higher light, were still far from complete by the end of the Second Boer War.

In the end, Michael Somerville's Bull Run to Boer War is highly persuasive in making that case that the Civil War's role in reshaping the British Army to meet the challenges of the next century, though limited in scope, remains greatly underestimated in both popular and professional historical writing. Somerville's work certainly contains more than enough intellectual heft to force us to freshly question many traditional interpretations related to the matter. This book is very highly recommended reading for all students of the American Civil War as well as those concerned with the half-century of British Army development that preceded its involvement in the Great War.

Booknotes: Tennessee Civil War Monuments

New Arrival:
• Tennessee Civil War Monuments: An Illustrated Field Guide by Timothy S. Sedore (Quarry Books - Indiana UP, 2020).

Following his Virginia and Mississippi volumes (the latter released mere weeks before this one), Timothy Sedore's Tennessee Civil War Monuments: An Illustrated Field Guide is the third of what will presumably be an extensive tour of public monuments across the South. It "reveals Tennessee's history-laden landscape through the lens of its many proud monuments. War monuments have been cropping up since the beginning of the commemoration movement in 1863, and Tennessee is now home to 400 memorials. Not only does Sedore provide commentary for every monument―its history and aesthetic panache―he also explores the relationships that Tennessee natives have with these historic landmarks."

Also organized by region (in this case West, Middle, and East Tennessee) and county, the Tennessee register includes a black & white photograph of the monument, dedication date, GPS coordinates, copy of the inscription in caps, physical description, and author commentary. Because the state hosted a number of major western battles, much of book is composed of battlefield monuments.

Booknotes: Christopher H. Tebault, Surgeon to the Confederacy

New Arrival:
• Christopher H. Tebault, Surgeon to the Confederacy by Alan I. West (McFarland, 2020).

From the description: "Among the top physicians of the Confederacy, Christopher H. Tebault distinguished himself as a surgeon during the Civil War. Recognized for his medical contributions after the war, he was nominated Surgeon General of the United Confederate Veterans, a position he used to compile the history of Confederate medicine, advocate for veterans and contribute to Southern literature. A staunch "Lost Cause" proponent, he also fought Reconstruction policies and the enfranchisement of former slaves."

Alan West's Christopher H. Tebault, Surgeon to the Confederacy holds claim to being the "first biography" of the doctor. It is pretty much a full biography, covering much more than the Civil War years. In fact, only one chapter discusses Dr. Tebault's Civil War career, which started with his 1862 med school graduation and assignment to the 21st Louisiana. The rest of the book covers his postwar medical practice in New Orleans and the many other activities referenced above.

In addition to using Tebault's own extensive writings as general source material, West also compiles an informative collection of some of Tebault's more important articles related to Civil War medicine. Organized at the back of the book in an appendix of sorts, they discuss Confederate vaccination, medical resources, hospitals, and the effects of New Orleans's wartime drainage system on the health and mortality rates of the city.

Coming Soon (March '20 Edition)

*NEW RELEASES* Scheduled for March 2020:
• Atlanta's Fighting Forty-Second: Joseph Johnston's "Old Guard" by Roberts & Clark.
• The Cornfield: Antietam's Bloody Turning Point by David Welker.
• War and Peace on the Rio Grande Frontier, 1830–1880 by Miguel Ángel González-Quiroga.
• Obstinate Heroism: The Confederate Surrenders after Appomattox by Steven Ramold.
• Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War by Cody Marrs.
• North Carolina Troops 1861-1865: A Roster, Volume 21: Militia and Home Guard ed. by Brown & Coffey.
• The Irish Brigade: A Pictorial History of the Famed Civil War Fighters by Russ Pritchard.
• Andersonville Raiders: Yankee versus Yankee in the Civil War’s Most Notorious Prison Camp by Gary Morgan.

Comments: Again, next month won't be a big one for new releases. Nearly twenty years since the publication of his Chantilly book, the return of David Welker is interesting. I've posted about the Roberts & Clark, Quiroga, and Ramold books before. The release of the Pritchard book is strategically timed to the week before St. Patrick's Day. Getting down to militia and home guards usually means your epic series is winding down, so perhaps the North Carolina roster project is nearing completion. Finally, my mental image of the Andersonville "Raiders" who preyed upon their fellow prisoners is heavily influenced by what I saw on the TNT mini-series way back when. The description of Morgan's book clearly states that a revisionist view of men and events will be presented.

Booknotes: A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time (paperback edition)

New Arrival:
• A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time: Julia Wilbur's Struggle for Purpose by Paula Tarnapol Whitacre (Potomac Bks, 2020 pb ed.).

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War, Julia Wilbur was a middle-aged abolitionist and former teacher. Seeking a more active role in events, in late 1862 she left the family farm in New York and went south, spending "most of the next several years in Alexandria devising ways to aid recently escaped slaves and hospitalized Union soldiers." Using Wilbur's "diaries and other primary sources" as its basis, A Civil Life in an Uncivil Time is a narrative of this "second chapter of her life," when Wilbur dedicated herself to "improving conditions for African Americans who had escaped from slavery and creating a meaningful life for herself."

Author Paula Tarnapol Whitacre "describes Wilbur’s experiences against the backdrop of Alexandria, Virginia, a southern town held by the Union from 1861 to 1865; of Washington DC, where Wilbur became active in the women’s suffrage movement and lived until her death in 1895; and of Rochester, New York, a hotbed of social reform and home to Wilbur’s acquaintances Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony."

During the war, "Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents of a Slave Girl, became Wilbur’s friend and ally. Together, the two women, black and white, fought social convention to improve the lives of African Americans escaping slavery by coming across Union lines."

The hardcover first edition was published in 2017, and this is the newly released 2020 paperback version.

Review - "The Civil War in the South Carolina Lowcountry: How a Confederate Artillery Battery and a Black Union Regiment Defined the War" by Ron Roth

[The Civil War in the South Carolina Lowcountry: How a Confederate Artillery Battery and a Black Union Regiment Defined the War by Ron Roth (McFarland, 2020). Softcover, maps, photos, illustrations, notes, appendices, bibliography, index. Pages main/total:ix,157/196. ISBN:978-1-4766-7710-1. $35]

The pair of army organizations under consideration in Ron Roth's The Civil War in the South Carolina Lowcountry: How a Confederate Artillery Battery and a Black Union Regiment Defined the War are the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery (BVA) and the First South Carolina. Raised in and around the Beaufort District Sea Islands of South Carolina, the units shared a common geographical origin, but that is where the similarities ended. A prewar militia battery, the BVA was led by Capt. Stephen Elliott, Jr. (and from mid-war onward by Henry M. Stuart), and its ranks were largely filled with recruits from the wealthy and enthusiastically secessionist families of the Beaufort area. By contrast, the slave population of St. Helena Island and beyond would be a major source of manpower for the First South Carolina, the first black combat unit organized by Union forces during the war. Though they never confronted each other on the battlefield, the subjects of this dual unit history can certainly be regarded in many ways as symbolic representations of the war's opposing goals and ideologies.

The early parts of the book offer readers a vivid portrait of the polar extremes of Sea Island society during the decades preceding the Civil War. The lucrative cotton plantation economy, close familial connections, and extreme form of States Rights politics that produced the officers and men of the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery are informatively discussed, as are the Sea Island slave experiences that led so many of those men to eagerly volunteer for Union Army service with the First South Carolina.

Unlike many other Confederate South Carolina units that were sent off to faraway fighting fronts, the men of the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery had the good fortune to remain near their home district for almost the entire the war. Roth's text provides a fine summary and assessment of their military service, which ranged from a narrow escape from the Port Royal Sound disaster during their first major action to small hit-and-run attacks along the coast (including their 1863 ambush and capture of the USS George Washington) to pitched battles at Second Pocotaligo/Coosawhatchie (1862), Honey Hill (1864), and Averasboro (1865). The battery was a mainstay of the mobile defense of the Charleston & Savannah Railroad for much of the war, and it occupied key positions in the main Confederate battle line at both Honey Hill and Averasboro. After its guns contributed heavily to the repulse of superior Union forces at Honey Hill, the BVA was roughed up in the intense fight over the first of three Confederate lines at Averasboro. The battery was in reserve at Bentonville and surrendered near war's end with the rest of Joe Johnston's army at Bennett Place.

While recent publication of the first volume of John Saucer's exhaustive An We Ob Jubilee: The First South Carolina Volunteers^* has stolen some of Roth's thunder, the books share common themes and this more scaled-down effort nevertheless provides a solid introductory history of the regiment's origins and participation in South Atlantic coastal operations. The First South Carolina's long, drawn-out 1862-63 path to official organization was demonstrative of the great difficulty in raising black troops without the full cooperation of higher authorities. Though the regiment did not fight in any major battles, it can still be recognized as an important pioneer. As Roth recounts, the First's solid performance in a series of amphibious expeditions and other small actions played no little part in raising the public profile of black troops and suppressing popular prejudice regarding their usefulness as soldiers.

Through alternating chapters the unit histories unfold in parallel. With the BVA and First South Carolina never meeting each other in the field, their narrative paths mainly intersect postwar. The book discusses at some length the permanent loss of plantations owned by former BVA officers and men, which were seized by the authorities on the pretext of failure to pay past taxes and auctioned off. Many of these plum agricultural parcels were purchased by freedmen, who also gained a measure of political power during early Reconstruction. Beyond that, the book lacks a discrete section that brings everything together and fulfills the title's promise of explaining precisely how these two units in particular "defined the war." Of course, many among the target audience can readily draw their own set of conclusions, ones that would more likely than not mirror the author's own. Nevertheless, it is a curious omission given the theme's prominent place on the cover. Then again, as is often the case in publishing, the author may not have been entirely responsible for the wording of title and subtitle.

While the bibliography is not particularly large, it does contain a favorable range and proportion of published and unpublished primary source types. The volume is well illustrated, and the battle maps depicting the BVA's position in each major action exhibit fine detail. In another useful feature, the appendix section includes name rosters for both units.

As indicated above, the BVA portion of the dual unit history is the more exceptional of the two, but the book as a whole is certainly worthy of recommendation as a useful contribution to the study of nineteenth-century Beaufort District society and Civil War history.


* - Saucer, John. An We Ob Jubilee: The First South Carolina Volunteers. Charleston, SC: America Through Time, 2019. In addition to Saucer's book, interested readers should also be referred to Wise, Rowland, and Spieler's authoritative 2015 masterpiece Rebellion, Reconstruction, and Redemption, 1861-1893: The History of Beaufort County, Volume II.

Booknotes: The Damnedest Set of Fellows

New Arrival:
• The Damnedest Set of Fellows: A History of Georgia's Cherokee Artillery by Gary D. Fisher and Zack C. Waters (Mercer UP, 2020).

Fisher and Waters's The Damnedest Set of Fellows: A History of Georgia's Cherokee Artillery "tells the story of one of the finest artillery batteries in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. Fighting in almost every major battle in the war's Western Theater, their first baptism of fire occurred at Tazewell, in East Tennessee. Later, they battled at Champion Hill in the Vicksburg Campaign, at Missionary Ridge and Tunnel Hill near Chattanooga, and throughout the Atlanta Campaign. Later, they fought upon the snowy fields of Nashville, and finally at Salisbury, North Carolina..."

Resaca is probably the first battle that comes to mind for many readers when the Civil War service of the Cherokee Artillery (aka Van Den Corput's Battery) is mentioned. There they were deployed well forward of the Confederate main line of defense and were swamped by a Union assault. Unmanned and stuck in no man's land when the attackers withdrew, some of John Geary's men dug through the lunette's earthwork embrasures during the following night and dragged away the guns (4 Napoleons) with ropes. According to an online piece from Stephen Davis that I read to refresh my mind regarding this episode, these were the only guns lost by the Army of Tennessee under Johnston in North Georgia. The unit demoralization from this event led to a rash of desertions, but in less than two weeks the battery received a new complement of Napoleons and was back in the fight for the rest of the war.

The book also covers the postwar activities of some of the men, and a detailed roster is included in the appendix section. Western Confederate battery histories are rare birds, and I'm looking forward to reading this one.

Booknotes: The Second Colorado Cavalry

New Arrival:
• The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains by Christopher M. Rein (OU Press, 2020).

Formed in late 1863 by consolidating the Second and Third Colorado infantry regiments (the Third having never been able to raise even close to a full complement), the Second Colorado cavalry regiment is perhaps best known to Civil War students for its counterguerrilla activities in Missouri and its participation in repelling Sterling Price's Confederate campaign that reached the western part of the state in the fall of 1864. However, its military duties during and after the Civil War also extended much further west, when the troopers were assigned to patrol the overland trails and stage routes in Kansas and Colorado.

Christopher Rein’s The Second Colorado Cavalry: A Civil War Regiment on the Great Plains is "the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West." In discussing the origins of the unit, Rein's study also extensively covers the 1862-63 activities of the Second Colorado infantry in New Mexico and Indian Territory before the October 1863 consolidation in St. Louis.

From the description: "Composed largely of footloose ’59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion."

The Second Colorado Cavalry "offers us a much-needed history of the “guerilla hunters” who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely “agents of empire” who successfully transformed the Central Plains." I'm really looking forward to reading this one.

Book News: The War for Missouri, 1861-1862

As I've mentioned before on more than one occasion, one of my dream projects (to be undertaken by someone else, of course) is a comprehensive history of the Missouri State Guard. In Jim McGhee et al.'s Sterling Price's Lieutenants you'll find an exhaustive look at the Guard's officer corps (along with some organizational history) and Carolyn Bartels (The Forgotten Men: The Missouri State Guard) and Wayne Schnetzer (More Forgotten Men) have both done yeoman work compiling a list of guardsmen who served, but no one has yet attempted a full study of the MSG's extensive early-war operational history. Available soon, however, will be a more limited work of potential interest along these lines.

Currently scheduled for an April release is Joseph W. McCoskrie's The War for Missouri, 1861-1862. The brief description seems to at least suggest that the major focus of the study will be the MSG. Though the format limitations of the series to which it belongs means the treatment can't be much more than an overview, I have hopes that it will possess more than few points of interest and look forward to reading it.

It also reminds me that I still need to pick up a copy of the author's 2017 book The Civil War Missouri Compendium: Almost Unabridged (with Brian Warren). "(A) chronological overview of more than three hundred of the documented engagements that took place within Missouri's borders," it sounds like a useful companion to Bartels's The Civil War in Missouri Day by Day, 1861 to 1865.

Booknotes: The Better Angels

New Arrival:
• The Better Angels: Five Women Who Changed Civil War America by Robert C. Plumb (Potomac Bks, 2020).

From the description: "Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, and Sarah Josepha Hale came from backgrounds that ranged from abject enslavement to New York City’s elite. Surmounting social and political obstacles, they emerged before and during the worst crisis in American history, the Civil War."

Robert Plumb's The Better Angels: Five Women Who Changed Civil War America "traces these five remarkable women’s awakenings to analyze how their experiences shaped their responses to the challenges, disappointments, and joys they encountered on their missions. Here is Tubman, fearless conductor on the Underground Railroad, alongside Stowe, the author who awakened the nation to the evils of slavery. Barton led an effort to provide medical supplies for field hospitals, and Union soldiers sang Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” on the march. And, amid national catastrophe, Hale’s campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday moved North and South toward reconciliation."

All five lived remarkably long lives (the youngest died at 85), and the later chapters cover postwar activities and lasting legacies. Another identifies and discusses ten "critical characteristics" the author believes set them apart from their contemporaries and allowed them to further their goals amid challenging social and political environments.

Booknotes: Decisions at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House

New Arrival:
• Decisions at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House: The Eighteen Critical Decisions That Defined the Battles by Dave Townsend (UT Press, 2020).

Decisions at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House is the seventh volume in UT Press's rather stimulating Command Decisions in America’s Civil War series. With multiple titles released every year, there's no sign that the series is slowing down (a Tullahoma installment will soon follow this one). The book also marks the arrival of another new contributor. As far as I can tell, this is Dave Townsend's first Civil War book (his author bio, a masterstroke of modest succinctness, only states that he's "a retired engineer").

Giving that SCH directly followed the Wilderness fighting, it makes sense to combine them in a single volume. Following the established format, Decisions at The Wilderness and Spotsylvania Court House "introduces readers to critical decisions made by Confederate and Union commanders throughout the two costly meetings. Dave Townsend examines the decisions that prefigured the action and shaped the course of each battle as it unfolded. Rather than a linear history of the battles, Townsend’s discussion of the critical decisions presents readers with a vivid blueprint of the battles’ developments. Exploring the critical decisions in this way allows the reader to progress from a sense of what happened in these battles to why they happened as they did." The decision analysis is presented by Townsend in three phases: the Wilderness (8 decisions, including pre-campaign), transition to SCH (4 decisions), and the battle of Spotsylvania Court House (6 decisions).

While all authors closely adhere to the general series framework established by the Spruills, there are varying styles and features, and it will be interesting to see what Townsend will do. It does appear that he has reinvigorated the tour sections a bit. Also, his conclusion section sorts the decisions by how well they achieved the intended result. This is new, I believe, and perhaps a good feature for future volumes to adopt. Of course, delving more into these matters will have to await the actual review.

Review - "The Battle of Hurricane Bridge, March 28, 1863: With the Firmness of Veterans" by Philip Hatfield

[The Battle of Hurricane Bridge, March 28, 1863: With the Firmness of Veterans by Philip Hatfield (35th Star Publishing, 2019). Softcover, maps, photographs, chapter notes, appendices, index. Pages main/total:xviii,224/303. ISBN:978-0-9965764-7-5. $19.95]

On March 28, 1863, four companies of the 13th West Virginia Volunteer Infantry occupying an earthen fort overlooking a bridge spanning Hurricane Creek squared off against ten companies of dismounted Confederate cavalry (two detached battalions of the 8th and 16th Virginia cavalries) under the command of Brigadier General Albert Gallatin Jenkins. The garrison refused a summons to surrender and after five hours of long-range firing the Confederates pulled back and continued on to their original destination of Union-held Point Pleasant. Countless military actions of scale similar to this one occurred during the Civil War, and receiving any kind of book-length coverage often depends on a prospective writer having a deep personal connection to place or subject. That is clearly the case with the origins behind The Battle of Hurricane Bridge, March 28, 1863: With the Firmness of Veterans, its author Philip Hatfield having spent a good portion of his youth in and around Hurricane, West Virginia.

One can argue with solid justification that Hurricane Bridge does not really deserve 'battle' status (even the local historical marker calls it a skirmish), but most readers by now are probably beyond getting too bent out of shape over such distinctions. Clearly the upgrade makes the book more noticeable, but Hatfield also largely succeeds in making the case that both the fight and the larger operation that it served are worthy of closer study. On March 18, 1863 Jenkins's command started from Dublin, Virginia on what would be an arduous journey of some 200 miles to the lower Kanawha River Valley. The Hurricane Bridge garrison was directly in the path of Jenkins, who was targeting the supplies, horses, and cattle supposedly located at the Ohio River town of Point Pleasant. According to Hatfield, the operation also served as a useful diversion to help clear the way for the Jones-Imboden Raid. On the other hand, the connection might be more incidental than planned, and the most complete modern study of that larger and much better-known operation (Darrell Collins's The Jones-Imboden Raid) does not even reference Hurricane Bridge in its index.

Hatfield's use of events surrounding Hurricane Bridge as illustrative of the 'inner war' that existed in the more hotly contested and alternately occupied parts of western Virginia is appropriate and informative. Both Union and Confederate forces that fought at Hurricane Bridge had local men in their ranks, and the book documents the abuse that area civilians of all political persuasions suffered during the months preceding the battle. After briefly losing control of much of the river valley in 1862, federal forces were firmly back in charge by the time of Jenkins's raid, and one of the bridge garrison's primary tasks was to protect the local pro-Union population from marauding guerrillas and raiding Confederate cavalry. Interspersed throughout the narrative are a great multitude of military and civilian biographical sketches, so the book possesses a heavy genealogy and local history flavor.

Hatfield informatively and persuasively addresses a number of longstanding debates related to the fight. The location of the fort has traditionally been a source of some contention among researchers. In placing the fort on the west bank of the creek atop a nearby hill overlooking the bridge, the author cites supporting archaeological evidence combined with documentary sources that orient the earthworks as being dominated at long range by higher ground to both east and south. Challenging those that have chastised the Confederate commander, who lacked artillery, for fighting at Hurricane Bridge at all, Hatfield reasonably points out the danger to Jenkins of leaving a active enemy force in his rear and astride his main line of communication. On the other hand, Jenkins, who wisely declined a direct assault in favor of long-range sniping, should have known that taking the fort without artillery was a losing proposition if the enemy kept their nerve. Finally, some writers have suggested Jenkins failed primarily because his dismounted cavalrymen were not trained in infantry tactics and many were armed with shotguns. Hatfield convincingly dismisses these arguments with evidence showing that Jenkins, in anticipation of the expedition, had requisitioned hundreds of infantry rifles (more than enough to fully outfit his ten companies) and drilled his men in infantry tactics for weeks prior to leaving his camps.

Other author interpretations seem to occupy shakier ground. Citing his own examination of Union muster rolls and morning reports, Hatfield believes that the Union commander, Captain Johnson, significantly undercounted his available defenders. Unfortunately, his own strength table located in the chapter notes, which has math/typo problems of its own, does not strongly support this view. The author's claim that the Confederates liberally employed imported long-range Whitworth rifles in the firefight is also unconvincing. Given the very limited number of extremely costly Whitworth rifles that passed through the blockade during the war and how they tended to be distributed, it's difficult to believe that they could have been present in substantial numbers in Jenkins's small cavalry command operating far from the main fighting fronts. According to the leading expert on the sharpshooters of Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy's best armed and equipped force, there were at most one or two Whitworths awarded to the best marksmen of each sharpshooter battalion.

After covering the Hurricane Bridge fighting, the book goes on to satisfactorily address Jenkins's failed attack on Point Pleasant on March 30 and the retreat of the Confederate forces. A brief account of another action that occurred at the bridge the following December is also provided. With none of the Point Pleasant raid's operational goals achieved and with high casualties incurred (Jenkins lost up to 20% of his strength), the whole affair was a complete failure from the Confederate perspective. In the end, the Union hold on the lower Kanawha was only reinforced.

Though the book unfortunately does not contain a bibliography, the chapter notes indicate that the author relied heavily on primary sources. Supplementing the text are a great number of photographs, mostly adequate maps, and a substantial appendix section containing orders of battle, a selection of Union and Confederate company muster rolls, and a Union casualty table for Hurricane Bridge.

In addition to being an interesting and useful exploration of a local civil war in many ways similar to that experienced by citizens of other deeply divided border regions, Hatfield's study offers the first truly comprehensive examination of one of western (soon to be West) Virginia's more obscure mid-war military operations. Anyone interested in Civil War West Virginia military history and society will benefit from reading this book.

Book News: Vicksburg Besieged

I've mentioned the upcoming Vicksburg Besieged (Volume Seven in SIU Press's rebranded Civil War Campaigns in the West series) more than once in passing, but the official description has now been fleshed out enough to give us a good idea about its content. The third of five planned Vicksburg Campaign installments, it follows The Vicksburg Campaign, March 29-May 18, 1863 (2013) and The Vicksburg Assaults, May 19-22, 1863 (2019). The contributor list to Vicksburg Besieged includes series editors Steven Woodworth and Charles Grear along with Andrew Bledsoe, John Gaines, Martin Hershock, Richard Holloway, Justin Solonick, Scott Stabler, and Jonathan Steplyk. Together their essays examine:

• "the role of Grant’s staff"
• "the critical contributions of African American troops to the Union Army of the Tennessee"
• "both sides’ use of sharpshooters and soldiers’ opinions about them"
• "unusual nighttime activities between the Union siege lines and Confederate defensive positions"
• "the use of West Point siege theory and the ingenuity of Midwestern soldiers in mining tunnels under the city’s defenses"
• "the horrific experiences of civilians trapped in Vicksburg"
• "the failure of Louisiana soldiers’ defense at the subsequent siege of Jackson"
• "the effect of the campaign on Confederate soldiers from the Trans-Mississippi region"
• "how the Confederate Army of Mississippi and residents of Vicksburg faced food and supply shortages as well as constant danger from Union cannons and sharpshooters"


Also, let's take a moment to briefly revisit the original list of planned series titles and see how things are going so far (the links are all to my reviews):

1. The Shiloh Campaign (2009)
2. The Chickamauga Campaign (2010)
3. The Chattanooga Campaign (2012)
4. Vicksburg: Mississippi Blitzkrieg, May 1863 [Presumably, this is the retitled The Vicksburg Campaign, March 29–May 18, 1863 (2013)]
5. The Tennessee Campaign of 1864 (2016)
6. The Vicksburg Assaults, May 19-22, 1863 (2019)
7. Forts Henry and Donelson
8. Vicksburg Besieged (June 2020)
9. The Kentucky Campaign of 1862
10. Vicksburg: To Chickasaw Bayou
11. The Atlanta Campaign from Rocky Face Ridge to Oostenaula: The Battle of Resaca
12. Vicksburg: Grant's Winter Endeavors
13. The Atlanta Campaign from the Oostenaula to the Etowa: Dallas, New Hope Church, 14. and Pickett's Mill
14. The Atlanta Campaign from the Etowa to the Chattahoochee: The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain
15. Iuka and Corinth
16. Peachtree Creek
17. The Battle of Atlanta, July 22, 1864

With seven titles published and three years at most between releases, that's pretty steady progress. Hopefully, the skipping over of Henry & Donelson is only temporary.