il War News book revie sis of the latest and arship. Contact email:
392 page, full-color Civil War Artillery Pr – The Half Shell Book. For more information
and how to order visit the website ArtillerymanMagazine.c
for the standard editi GIA’S CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS In Honor of a F Gould B.
memorials to the transcription of upon them, and ca information about and the organizat them. These works eloquent inscript nation’s profound soldiers’ bravery pay homage to the they fought.
XV Corps in Georgia and the Car Soldiers From ExperienceThe Forging of Sherman’s Fifteenth Army Corps 1862– 1863. Eric Michael Burke. Maps, Endnotes, Bibliography, Index. 338 pages. Louisiana State
The XV U.S. Army Corps was one of the north’s finest units American Civil War. Established in 1862, it was attached for th duration of the war to the Army of the Tennessee. Despite havin
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 histor at the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center. In this book he focuse the corps’ beginnings. Most me in the corps were “westerners, what we would today call “midwesterners.” They were not spi and polish like their eastern counterparts. Many were bluecollar workers, whose skills proved to be a major asset ove time, especially on engineerin projects. Some regiments were influenced by the Zouave style 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 illn alone between January and Apri of 1863, more than they had lo 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 on how the XV Corps became an elite fighting force, it al 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 heav losses and repulses early on tha eventually resulted in Sherman and his men developing a tendency to avoid frontal assaul by all possible means. Sherman’s command of the corps only furthe strengthened his close bond with Grant which ultimately led to Sherman commanding the Army of the Tennessee and the Militar 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 t 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 action 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 Carniva of Destruction – Sherman’s Invasion of South Carolina.
of Aldie, Middleburg, and Upperville. By Robert F. O’Neill. Illustrated, maps, notes, appendices, bibliography, index, 319 pp. Potomac Books.
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 operation 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 Gettysbur their mounted units performed light cavalry’s traditi 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 protec the army’s flank and screen its movements. These opposing objectives resulted init 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 Jun 17 at Aldie, Va., when Pleasonto pushed his troopers west on Hooker’s instructions.
Union commander, wanting to resolve conflicting reports on t whereabouts of Lee’s infantry an June 2023
artillery, directed Pleasonton t 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 Confedera defending the Ashby Gap and Snickerville pikes west of the village. Mounted and dismounted fighting characterized the actio In the end, Stuart’s men retired west to Middleburg while the Yankees held Aldie. The Federal movemen 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 th three battles; it is evident in pages. The book is characterized by impeccable research, astute profiles of regimental, brigade, and division commander graphic combat details, and soun judgment of the engagements’ importance. The well-written narrative is graced by many clea 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 th depth of research and its breadt of detail. Small but Important Riots will stand as the best, if definitive, book on the subject 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.
The Weaker Sex in War: Gender and Nationalism in Civil War Virginia. By Kristen Brill. Photos, notes, index, 206 pp., 2022. University of Virgini
At the Sept. 17, 1897, dedication of the North Carolina monument in Winchester 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 surroundin how Southern women supported the Confederacy customarily centered around their roles cari for the wounded, offering sons and husbands for military servic or gathering supplies. While Confederate women certainly contributed to the Confederacy in the aforementioned ways, scholarship in recent years by s 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 thi burgeoning historiography. Brill, a lecturer in American history at Keele University (United Kingdom), rely on a substantial cache of primary material, reve the myriad ways middle and planter class white women in
Virginia helped strengthen the Confederacy and influence its political landscape. Central
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 interaction with Confederate officials and fundraising efforts to support t purchase of ironclad vessels for Confederate navy, but developed tactics to coerce donations. Through an arrangement with Blanton Duncan, a printer and “political organizer,” newspaper throughout Richmond published the names of prominent donors. Brill correctly notes that while these notices appropriate recognized those w contributed, it also proved a powerful mechanism to “expose those in the community of means not contributing to the cause” a therefore shame them into doing so. Sharp analysis of Greenhow and Boyd underscores the valuable role Confederate women played in the Confederacy’s bid receive international recognitio While both, as the author assert “carved out new and influential diplomatic relationships with… British as well as French leaders on both sides of the Atlantic,” Brill carefully argue that they were only part of the Confederacy’s strat to gain foreign recognition. Highlighting the ways in which Confederate women w 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’ history of the HNCW is superb, but the author’s exploration of tensions between it and the Unite 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 the “needy widows, wives, sisters and daughters of Confederate soldiers.” This discussion adds another intriguing layer to studi of Confederate memorialization. Those interested in the ways a portion of Virginia’s Confederate women exerted politi influence, were utilized by Confederate officials to cultivat 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 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.
Military Analysis of Confederate Command in the Trans-Mississippi
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.
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 office 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. Willi 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 tha merits wide readership. Geise explains how, early in t war, the lack of a unified chain
command hampered Confederate war efforts in the Trans-
Mississippi West, especially in Arkansas and Missouri where multiple commanders held sway
in overlapping territories, ofte bickered, and generally failed t coordinate their efforts. Geise
Invaluable American Historical Reference 1809–1866
faults poor staff work by the Wa 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 feeb Holmes would prove to be, as Geise rightly notes, one of Davi biggest military blunders of the war. Holmes made Little Rock, Ark., his departmental headquarters. Although titularly in charge of 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 a military commander. Some of Kirby Smith’s organizational efforts proved successful, but his attempts to control cotton exports and forei 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 difficultie
of communicating across the vast expanse of the department
command structure. With Kirby Smith in overall
command, Rebel forces achieved some success in military operations, in particular Richar
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 fallin out with Taylor, a fractious but accomplished general in a department replete with generals who had failed in the East. General Sterling Price abortive cavalry raid into Missou 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 beautifull 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 ne where the character is introduced The four maps are large and easily decipherable. This book will appeal to reade interested in the war in the Tran Mississippi Theater, in general, and in military organizational an 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
multiple topics, including Yale’s Confederate alumni and South
Carolinians in the war. He’s a past president of the Houston CWRT.
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,
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 paperba (8.5" x 11") is divided into eig 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, da of key events, and published Union, Confederate, and private documents (letters, speeches, articles, public laws, resolutio 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 th text. The eight chapters cover the periods 1809–1850 (The Formative Years); 1851-February
Civil War New 520 Folly Road, Sui Charleston, SC 2
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
(Victory and Aftermath, So Many Loose Ends). Each chapter’s contents are eclectic and absorbing. Writers range from the well known (Lincoln, Davis, Freder 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 (Edmu 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 wel as professional historian. Albe pricey, it is highly recommende to those with special interest in Abraham Lincoln, his presidency, the era leading up the Civil War, the Civil War er itself, the slavery question, a emancipation.
CAPT Joe Derie is a longtime Civil War buff with a special interest in Civil War naval his and the Civil War in the West. is a retired USCG officer and a licensed officer of the Merchan Marine, currently self-employed as a marine surveyor and marine accident investigator in Portland, Ore.
