Book Reviews — June 2023
Originally published June 2023 · pp. 34–36
XV Corps in Georgia and the Carolinas Soldiers From ExperienceThe Forging of Sherman’s Fifteenth Army Corps 1862– 1863. Eric Michael Burke. Maps, Endnotes, Bibliography, Index. 338 pages. Louisiana State University Press, www.lsupress. org. $50.00
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Reviewed by Tom Elmore
The XV U.S. Army Corps was one of the north’s finest units in the American Civil War. Established in 1862, it was attached for the duration of the war to the Army of the Tennessee. Despite having Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman as its first two commanders, the corps went through a lot of growing pains during its early days. Author Burke holds a PhD in
History from the University of North Carolina and is a historian at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center. In this book he focuses on the corps’ beginnings. Most men in the corps were “westerners,” what we would today call “midwesterners.” They were not spit and polish like their eastern counterparts. Many were bluecollar workers, whose skills proved to be a major asset over time, especially on engineering projects. Some regiments were influenced by the Zouave style of fighting of rapid movement and firing. As one can imagine, life was often hard when the unit was stationed in Louisiana and Mississippi as Grant tried to capture Vicksburg. Food was sometimes scarce, the weather was unbearable, and they often had trouble finding drinkable water. Disease was a constant problem. The corps lost a staggering 5,000 men from illness alone between January and April of 1863, more than they had lost in battle up to that point. But the corps learned from their experiences and by the time Maj. Gen. Francis Blair, Jr. took command during the Chattanooga, Tenn., Campaign, the corps had evolved into a veteran corps, famous as the “Diabolical 15th.” While the focus of the book is on how the XV Corps became an elite fighting force, it also shows how Sherman evolved
as well. The Sherman who first took command of the corps was an aggressive fighter, not the cautious general he was by war’s end. This resulted in heavy losses and repulses early on that eventually resulted in Sherman and his men developing a tendency to avoid frontal assaults by all possible means. Sherman’s command of the corps only further strengthened his close bond with Grant which ultimately led to Sherman commanding the Army of the Tennessee and the Military Division of the Mississippi. Though the writing and the research is quite good, the book would have been helped if the author had spent a little more time on what was going on behind the scenes in terms of organization and personal conflicts among Sherman’s top generals and less on the battles. Some background on the major figures within the corps would have been useful. Also, photos and illustrations would have been nice. Nonetheless, this book a refreshing change since most of what has been written about the XV Corps deals with their actions in Georgia and the Carolinas. Anyone with a strong interest in the western theatre of the war will enjoy this book. Tom Elmore wrote about the XV Corps in his 2012 book A Carnival of Destruction – Sherman’s Invasion of South Carolina.
Years of Research Pays Off
Small but Important Riots: The Cavalry Battles of Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville. By Robert F. O’Neill. Illustrated, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index, 319 pp. Potomac Books. Potomacbooksinc.com 2023, $36.95. Reviewed by Jeffry D. Wert
A significant aspect of the six-week Gettysburg Campaign was the operations of the opposing cavalry commands. Engagements between mounted troops and/or infantrymen began within a week of the campaign’s outset at Brandy Station on June 9 and at its end on a Maryland bluff above the Potomac River on July 14. These cavalry operations were highlighted by Jeb Stuart’s controversial “ride” and the Federal cavalry’s continuing emergence as a fighting force. As the Army of Northern Virginia and the Army of the Potomac moved north along parallel routes toward Gettysburg, their mounted units performed light cavalry’s traditional roles of reconnaissance and screening. In the campaign’s early days, the Army of the Potomac’s commander Joseph Hooker ordered his cavalry chief, Alfred Pleasonton, to locate the Confederates. In turn, Robert E. Lee directed Stuart to protect the army’s flank and screen its movements. These opposing objectives resulted initially in three clashes in Loudoun Valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west and the Bull Run Mountains to the east. The first engagement came June 17 at Aldie, Va., when Pleasonton pushed his troopers west on Hooker’s instructions. The Union commander, wanting to resolve conflicting reports on the whereabouts of Lee’s infantry and
artillery, directed Pleasonton to undertake reconnaissance toward Harper’s Ferry, Winchester, and Berryville. When the Yankees entered Aldie, they encountered Stuart’s Rebel horsemen, whose duty was to protect the Blue Ridge gaps, shielding their comrades moving in the Shenandoah Valley. For Stuart and his troopers, their tactics meant giving ground slowly while buying time. The engagement at Aldie followed this pattern, with the Confederates defending the Ashby Gap and Snickerville pikes west of the village. Mounted and dismounted fighting characterized the action. In the end, Stuart’s men retired west to Middleburg while the Yankees held Aldie. The Federal movements continued toward the Blue Ridge, resulting in engagements at Middleburg on June 19, and at Upperville on June 21. With each clash, the fighting involved more units and the combat increased in duration and intensity. Stuart’s veterans ultimately accomplished their mission although Pleasonton’s horse soldiers fought with a prowess and tenacity similar to Brandy Station. This fine book, written by one of our foremost historians on cavalry operations in the East, is the best work on Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville. The author, Robert F. O’Neill, has devoted years of study to the three battles; it is evident in these pages. The book is characterized by impeccable research, astute profiles of regimental, brigade, and division commanders, graphic combat details, and sound judgment of the engagements’ importance. The well-written narrative is graced by many clear maps prepared by Julie Krick. Other historians have devoted a chapter or more to Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville in their works on the Gettysburg Campaign. No previous study, however, matches this book in the depth of research and its breadth of detail. Small but Important Riots will stand as the best, if not definitive, book on the subject for a long time. It is recommended without reservation. Jeffry D. Wert is author of the award winning book The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers’ struggle for Spotsylvania’s Bloody Angle. Publishers Note: See page 6 for an article on Middleburg and Upperville.
Significant History of Southern Women in Virginia
The Weaker Sex in War: Gender and Nationalism in Civil War Virginia. By Kristen Brill. Photos, notes, index, 206 pp., 2022. University of Virginia Press, www.upress.virginia.edu. $35. Reviewed by Jonathan A. Noyalas
At the Sept. 17, 1897, dedication of the North Carolina monument in Winchester’s Stonewall Confederate Cemetery, Rev. James Battle Avirett used his keynote address as an opportunity to thank the Shenandoah Valley’s Confederate women for “all” they did “in the hospital… [and] on bended knee” in prayer. Until recent decades the popular narrative surrounding how Southern women supported the Confederacy customarily centered around their roles caring for the wounded, offering sons and husbands for military service, or gathering supplies. While Confederate women certainly contributed to the Confederacy in the aforementioned ways, scholarship in recent years by such notable historians as Stephanie McCurry and Angela Esco Elder has highlighted additional ways Confederate women influenced the Confederacy and were impacted by it. Kristen Brill’s excellent study about middle and planter class white women who supported the Confederacy in Virginia further enriches this burgeoning historiography. Brill, a lecturer in American history at Keele University (United Kingdom), relying on a substantial cache of primary material, reveals the myriad ways middle and planter class white women in Virginia helped strengthen the Confederacy and influence its political landscape. Central
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to Brill’s thought-provoking history are examinations of various organizations, including the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, Ladies Defense Association, and Richmond’s Home for Needy Confederate Women, personalities such as Rose O’Neal Greenhow, Belle Boyd, and Sally Tompkins, and the Richmond Bread Riot. Each of the above-mentioned lenses affords much insight into the ways that Virginia women exerted influence. For example, the author’s examination of the Ladies Defense Association, organized in Richmond, during March 1862 and presided over by Maria Gaitskell Clopton, reveals the organization wielded power not only through its interactions with Confederate officials and fundraising efforts to support the purchase of ironclad vessels for the Confederate navy, but developed tactics to coerce donations. Through an arrangement with Blanton Duncan, a printer and “political organizer,” newspapers throughout Richmond published the names of prominent donors. Brill correctly notes that while these notices appropriately recognized those who contributed, it also proved a powerful mechanism to “expose those in the community of means not contributing to the cause” and therefore shame them into doing so. Sharp analysis of Greenhow and Boyd underscores the valuable role Confederate women played in the Confederacy’s bid to receive international recognition. While both, as the author asserts, “carved out new and influential diplomatic relationships with… British as well as French leaders on both sides of the Atlantic,” Brill carefully argues that they were only part of the Confederacy’s strategy to gain foreign recognition. Highlighting the ways in which Confederate women were victimized and suffered “at the hands of the Union military,” including through “print culture and political speeches,” proved another method Confederate officials employed in their attempt to cultivate support. This emphasizes the book’s main premise that powerful middle and planter class women impacted the Confederacy in varied and significant ways, but the Confederacy never hesitated to use images of Confederate women as “the weaker sex” for
the Confederacy’s benefit. While much of Brill’s excellent study focuses on the war years, the volume’s final chapter, arguably the finest in the book, explores the oft-neglected Home for Needy Confederate Women (HNCW) in Richmond. Chartered in 1898, the HNCW operated until the Commonwealth of Virginia ceased funding it in 1989. Brill’s history of the HNCW is superb, but the author’s exploration of tensions between it and the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the early twentieth century is fascinating. At a time when Confederate monuments were erected throughout the former Confederacy with great frequency, HNCW’s president Elizabeth Lyne Hoskins Montague, condemned the “lifeless stone monuments.” Montague abhorred the monuments, not because they represented the Confederacy, but because she believed the money utilized to build them could have been put to better use in caring for the “needy widows, wives, sisters, and daughters of Confederate soldiers.” This discussion adds another intriguing layer to studies of Confederate memorialization. Those interested in the ways a portion of Virginia’s Confederate women exerted political influence, were utilized by Confederate officials to cultivate nationalism, and the intricacies of postwar commemoration will find Brill’s prodigiously researched and cogently argued study an excellent resource. Jonathan A. Noyalas is director of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute in Winchester, Virginia, a professor in Civil War Era Studies at Shenandoah University, and founding editor of Journal of the Shenandoah Valley During the Civil War Era. He is the author or editor of fifteen books including most recently Slavery and Freedom in the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War Era, published by the University Press of Florida.
Invaluable American Historical Military Analysis of Confederate Command in the Trans-Mississippi West Reference 1809–1866 The Confederate Military Forces in the Trans-Mississippi West, 1861–1865: A Study in Command. By William Royston Geise. Edited by Michael J. Forsyth. Maps, photos, bibliography, index, 240 pp., 2022. Savas Beatie, savasbeatie. com, hardcover, $32.95. Reviewed by Harrington
C.
Michael
Most Civil War books focus on battles or leaders. Departing from the norm, this book chronicles the development of Confederate command structures in the Trans-Mississippi West from start to finish. Military operations are mentioned only as they relate to organizations and command structures within the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department– Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, the Indian Territory, and western Louisiana. Both the author and editor were career U.S. military officers turned Civil War historians, giving them keen professional insights into the book’s subject matter. The book began about fifty years ago as the late Col. William Geise’s doctoral dissertation. Rather recently, a Civil War researcher stumbled across the manuscript and passed it on to publisher Ted Savas. Savas convinced Col. Michael Forsyth to bring the work to publication. The result is a unique study that merits wide readership. Geise explains how, early in the war, the lack of a unified chain of command hampered Confederate war efforts in the TransMississippi West, especially in Arkansas and Missouri where multiple commanders held sway in overlapping territories, often bickered, and generally failed to coordinate their efforts. Geise
faults poor staff work by the War Department in Richmond for the divided command and resulting military inefficiency. In mid-July 1862, President Davis appointed his crony, Gen. Theophilus Holmes, as department commander, despite Holmes’ lackluster performance in the Seven Days battles. The choice of the near deaf and feeble Holmes would prove to be, as Geise rightly notes, one of Davis’ biggest military blunders of the war. Holmes made Little Rock, Ark., his departmental headquarters. Although titularly in charge of the entire department, Holmes made no attempt to exercise command beyond Arkansas. Holmes’ hands-off approach worked well enough with the highly competent Gen. Richard Taylor in Louisiana and the rejuvenated Gen. John Magruder in Texas, but it failed miserably in other districts. The command situation in the department improved materially when Davis replaced Holmes with Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith in July 1863. With the Trans-Mississippi cut off from the Eastern Theater by the fall of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, Kirby Smith soon evolved into a “viceroy” of a “virtual principality,” to quote Geise. From his headquarters in Shreveport, La., Kirby Smith created a de facto western War Department, plus a plethora of both military and civil bureaus and agencies, all intended to bring some semblance of order to his sprawling department. Richmond, however, declined to appoint a shadow Secretary of War in the West and instructed Kirby Smith to fulfill that function as part of his duties as military commander. Some of Kirby Smith’s organizational efforts proved successful, but his attempts to control cotton exports and foreign trade defeated him. His quixotic venture into foreign policy with the French in Mexico also came to naught. During his nearly two years in the Trans-Mississippi West, Kirby Smith improved the command structure in his department, although difficulties of communicating across the vast expanse of the department precluded a totally unified command structure. With Kirby Smith in overall command, Rebel forces achieved some success in military operations, in particular Richard
Taylor’s defeat of Gen. Nathaniel Banks in the 1864 Red River Campaign. Against Taylor’s advice, Kirby Smith decided to lead an expedition into Arkansas rather than allow Taylor to pursue Banks with the bulk of his command. The result was Kirby Smith’s stunning defeat at Jenkins’ Ferry, and his falling out with Taylor, a fractious but accomplished general in a department replete with generals who had failed in the East. General Sterling Price’s abortive cavalry raid into Missouri in late 1864 effectively ended Confederate military operations in the Trans-Mississippi West. For all its resources, the Trans-Mississippi Department proved ancillary to the Eastern Theater. As the Confederate war effort petered out beyond the Mississippi, Kirby Smith’s department likewise melted away. During April and May 1865, several of Kirby Smith’s district commanders surrendered their commands, making Kirby Smith’s formal surrender of the entire department on June 2, 1865 a fait accompli. Geise’s prose is lively; and his analysis is convincing. In preparing the manuscript for publication, Forsyth updated Geise’s impressive but preInternet research, and he expanded Geise’s footnotes without drowning them in minutiae. Like Savas Beatie books generally, this one is beautifully crafted. The double-spaced text is easy on older eyes. Notes are helpfully placed at page bottoms. Each of the 20 photos of major characters appears in the text near where the character is introduced. The four maps are large and easily decipherable. This book will appeal to readers interested in the war in the TransMississippi Theater, in general, and in military organizational and command structures, in particular. I thoroughly recommend it. C. Michael Harrington is a retired lawyer, mainly resident in Houston. He’s authored several published articles on South Carolina soldiers, and he’s lectured to Civil War organizations in Houston on multiple topics, including Yale’s Confederate alumni and South Carolinians in the war. He’s a past president of the Houston CWRT.
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Abraham Lincoln and His Times: A Sourcebook on His Life, His Presidency, Slavery and Civil War. Compiled and edited by Thomas J. Ebert and Allen Carden. List of documents, appendix, bibliography, footnotes, index. 461 pp., 2022, McFarland and Co., www. mcfarlandpub,com $125.00. Reviewed by Joseph A. Derie
Abraham Lincoln and His Times is “a one-of-a-kind hybrid reference work that combines chronology with almost 400 primary source papers to contextualize Lincoln’s life within his historical era.” The oversized paperback (8.5“ x 11“) is divided into eight chapters covering Lincoln’s life and eras from 1809 until 1866, shortly after his death. Each chapter begins with a detailed introduction by the compilers and editors and then proceeds chronologically through the era covered, giving Lincoln biographical entries, dates of key events, and published Union, Confederate, and private documents (letters, speeches, articles, public laws, resolutions, etc.). For ease of reference and research there is a list of the documents contained in each chapter. The appendix is some 34 pages of biographical sketches of personalities mentioned in the text. The eight chapters cover the periods 1809–1850 (The Formative Years); 1851-February
26, 1861 (Sectionalism and Political Ambition); February 27, 1961–April 11, 1861 (The Presidency Won, the Union Shattered); April 12-December 31, 1861 (War Begins); 1862 (The Year That Transformed America); 1863 (No Turning Back); 1864 (War Weariness and Uncertainty); and 1865-1866 (Victory and Aftermath, So Many Loose Ends). Each chapter’s contents are eclectic and absorbing. Writers range from the well known (Lincoln, Davis, Frederick Douglas, Grant, Lee) to those only well known to Civil War history buffs (Mary Chestnut, John B. Jones, Edmund Ruffin) as well as to the obscure (Edmund Dargan, William D. Shipman). Important documents include those promulgated by the U.S. and Confederate Congresses, Lincoln and Davis’ inaugural addresses, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution. Other documents are more obscure such as the American Party Platform for 1856, the National Union Party Platform for 1864, and the Articles of Agreement between Texas and Santa Anna, May 14, 1836. Abraham Lincoln and His Times is heavily researched and documented by the editors and is an especially valuable resource for the amateur as well as professional historian. Albeit pricey, it is highly recommended to those with special interest in Abraham Lincoln, his presidency, the era leading up to the Civil War, the Civil War era itself, the slavery question, and emancipation. CAPT Joe Derie is a longtime Civil War buff with a special interest in Civil War naval history and the Civil War in the West. He is a retired USCG officer and a licensed officer of the Merchant Marine, currently self-employed as a marine surveyor and marine accident investigator in Portland, Ore.
Photographs from the Original Article
Captions and credits appear in the article text as originally printed.