Book Reviews

Book Reviews — January 2019

Originally published January 2019 · pp. 36–42

Not Just Another Lincoln Assassination Book Lincoln’s Final Hours: Conspiracy, Terror, and the Assassination of America’s Greatest President. By Kathryn Canavan. Photos, notes, index, bibliography, 248 pp., 2018. University Press of Kentucky, www.kentuckypress.com. $19.95 paperback. Reviewed by Joseph Truglio

Lincoln’s assassination is perhaps the most studied and written-about aspect of his life. One wonders what new information can be uncovered in yet another book.

In a relatively short volume the author presents a unique take on various events leading up to the calamity, the event itself and the aftermath. The story unfolds in 25 chapters, each covering a particular aspect. An epilogue presents short biographies of major participants. At only 183 pages of text we get a broad overview rather than a typical micro-managed presentation. An ample bibliography gives readers good sources for further research. I found this to be a unique effort in the plethora of Lincoln books. It seemed to me to be targeting an audience of novice students. It is simple in style and the information is not cluttered with detail. I must admit I did garner several nuggets of information, particularly about the Peterson family. It does have appeal to the more seasoned student. Overall, I found this to be a worthy effort—easy to read and full of information. I highly recommend that you get a copy for a young student and put him or her on the path to discovering a defining moment in American history. Joseph Truglio, of Manchester, N.J., is president of the Phil Kearny Civil War Round Table.

Ideas of Citizenship Change in the Crucible of the Civil War Civil War News book reviews provide our readers with timely analysis of the latest and most significant Civil War research and scholarship. Contact Stephen Davis, Civil War News Book Review Editor. Email: [email protected].

The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America. By Erik Mathisen. Images, notes, bibliography, index, 240 pp., 2018. University of North Carolina Press, www. uncpress.org. $34.95 cloth. Reviewed by Tim Talbott

Who qualifies as a citizen? How is citizenship determined? Can one lose citizenship? If so, how does one get it back? How closely related are the ideas of loyalty and citizenship? The answers to these questions continue to evolve in American politics and society. However, few if any periods in American history had a greater impact on who is considered a citizen and what that means than the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Legally recognized citizenship has presented obstacles to traditionally marginalized individuals over the years. For example, at one period in American history only white property-owning males had citizenship status. And even then, elements of citizenship remained fuzzy as far as state-versus-nation loyalty and sovereignty. Obviously, citizenship has come to include many different groups of people in the years since the Civil War. However, much of that change had its foundation in the crucible of the conflict. In The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves, and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America, Erik Mathisen uses the Mississippi Valley as his geographical area of focus. That region is an excellent choice due to all of the change it experienced during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Although Mississippi was the second state to secede, there were pockets where loyalty to the United States remained strong, and it was home to individuals who were unwilling to claim allegiance to the newly formed Confederacy. This situation presented intriguing issues. Among those that did side with secession, the author examines the murky world of whether one’s greater loyalty was to the state of Mississippi or to the emerging Confederate nation. On the surface this may seem one and the same, but various issues arose that hardened those lines and often made for difficult situations for many. Mathisen explains that this era brought previously unavailable opportunities for African Americans to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States. By fleeing their owners and entering Union lines, either to provide labor or enlist as soldiers when finally allowed to do so, they opened new doors toward citizenship. Blacks would ultimately use their loyalty during the Civil War as a leverage point in Reconstruction’s initial years. The formerly enslaved, especially those who had fought in USCT regiments, demanded recognition as citizens as reward for their service and sacrifice. Those demands were realized in the form of Constitutional amendments (14th & 15th), which in turn bred resentment among former Confederates. One area that Mathisen could have probed further is the idea of fluid allegiances and what those meant in terms of one’s citizenship. It would make for fascinating analysis to examine those areas of the Mississippi Valley that were initially under state and Confederate control but fell to Union occupation, and how residents’ loyalty followed prevailing authority. It would have been equally intriguing to examine how those who exercised a fluid allegiance during the war were later received in their home communities during Reconstruction. The Loyal Republic is a well-researched, thought-provoking, and timely work that makes one reexamine preconceptions of loyalty and citizenship and how we came to our current understanding of those terms. With Americans presently debating hot issues like immigration reform, entitlement rights, voter regulation and other citizenship-related concerns, it is important to understand the history of citizenship and how it has evolved over time. Joining other important works such as Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles from Slavery to the Great Migration (2003) and Paul Quigley’s Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848–1865 (2011), The Loyal Republic is a significant addition to the growing list of scholarship on this topic. Tim Talbott is the Director of Education, Interpretation, Visitor Services, and Collections at Pamplin Historical Park and the National Museum of the Civil War Soldier in Petersburg, Va. He is currently researching the various combination of elements that led to emancipation.

Leftward from Appomattox Reconstruction: A Concise History. By Allen C. Guelzo. Photos, notes, index, 180 pp., 2018. Oxford University Press, www. oup.com/us. $18.95 hardcover. Reviewed by William Harris Bragg

For quite some time a brief, balanced history of Reconstruction has been needed—a short, judicious monograph that synthesizes previous scholarship to the satisfaction of objective historians, but also remains accessible to the educated general public. Although this is not that book, it will probably enjoy respectable sales—for it is indeed concise, as well as inexpensive and handsomely packaged. But, alas, this title will also no doubt be widely adopted as a college text, since it features scholarly trappings and (most important for university assignment) exceptionally correct political ideology. Guelzo’s book appears three decades after the publication of Eric Foner’s revisionist classic, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (1988). Like most revisionist Reconstruction historians since the late 1980s, Guelzo belongs to what may now be termed the Foner school of Reconstruction historiography— university scholars who have followed Foner’s lead in attempting to obliterate the Dunning school histories of the early 20th century. There is a pleasing symmetry to the idea of Dunning and Foner schools—both take their names from eminent Columbia University professors linked with Reconstruction history. And the Foner school (building on previous revisionist works) has now enjoyed a three-decade ascendancy. This period is comparable to the inaugural thirty-year span between William A. Dunning’s first major Reconstruction title in 1897 and 1927, by which year all of the Dunning scholars’ Southern State Studies had been published. In opposing the Dunningites, Guelzo and the other Fonerites applaud Congressional Reconstruction, celebrate Radicals of all sorts, display conspicuous hostility toward the conquered white South, and ensconce the freed slaves at the valorized center of their accounts. Unlike the Dunning school’s first three decades---which saw other interpretations published, as well as spirited attacks from various historians—the Foner school has received practically unanimous peer approval and has been imitated repeatedly. Nonetheless, as a 30th anniversary recapitulation of Foner school Reconstruction orthodoxy, Guelzo’s book seems malapropos, even beyond the lèse-majesté of competing directly with Foner’s 2015 abridgement of his school’s 1988 urtext. That opus, whatever else might be said of it, rested on monumental print and manuscript research at widespread repositories. In comparison, Guelzo uses only readily available printed primary sources and secondary works and makes no pretense of doing more. Such an approach works best when the author steeps himself in an abundance of such sources and displays his mastery of them. But there is often something of a dilettante’s view to Guelzo’s survey, a suggestion of sources glanced at hastily and sometimes read and quoted carelessly. And, despite its brevity, the book is neither tightly focused nor closely edited. Mistakes are frequent. For examples, in a sampling of erroneous references to Georgia alone, Guelzo has the Empire State reconstructed twice rather than its record three times and makes its scalawag Republican governor a carpetbagger (or, to use Guelzo’s euphemism, a “missionary of free labor”). One of the book’s many images of white-on-black atrocities (five appear on the dust jacket alone) comes from an 1872 memoir of abolitionist-turned-planter Charles Stearns: a crude sketch of election-day skullduggery in Columbia County, where it happened (and showing accurately the county seat structures of the time) is wrongly ascribed to Taylor County, some 130 miles distant. Additionally, readers are told that in Mitchell County “five cases of Henry rifles were used by local Democrats to attack a Republican rally in Camilla, killing nine”—a gross mischaracterization of the incident, as well as a misreading of the source. But at least this source can be located through its endnote, unlike an 1867 letter written by novelist and Georgia native Augusta Jane Evans, quoted for displaying her “gendered disdain” for the free-labor North. Although his works principally proclaim Guelzo to be a diligent miner of the Lincoln Lode, he nonetheless cannot be charged with unfamiliarity with the period’s major sources; this book actually marks the third time Guelzo has published a brief history of Reconstruction. His earlier surveys appeared in two differently titled but textually similar 1995 and 2012 accounts of the Civil War and its aftermath. In both books the war receives the lion’s share of coverage, but the briefer Reconstruction sections are suitably Fonerite. For the new book, the two earlier narratives have been recast, although all three surveys feature one favored metaphor: the transformation of Revisionist arch-villain Andrew Johnson from the “Moses” of the freed people into their “Pharaoh.” In the freshest interpretation of his latest book, Guelzo imagines Reconstruction as a “bourgeois revolution,” a tentative and poorly developed concept that nonetheless imports into the book both class analysis and the vital word “revolution.” This coinage also allows the author to share his image of what the South’s post-Civil War period should have been: “a Unionapproved narrative of triumphant embourgeoisment.” Obviously, Guelzo concurs with Foner’s assertion that “Even more than most historical endeavors, writing the history of Reconstruction has always been a political task as well as a scholarly one.” In fact, so conspicuously does Guelzo belong to the left-leaning Foner school that many of David Donald’s comments regarding Foner’s 1988 book serve just as well for Guelzo’s 2018 offering. Both books “overidealize the black community” and are “so lacking in sympathy for all Southern whites that their problems receive none of the thoughtful analysis and sympathetic understanding … [given] to issues that confronted blacks. Readers … will not understand that most ex-Confederates were not involved in the lynchings, terrorism, and Ku Klux Klan vigilantism … to which [the author] devotes so much attention. Instead, they lived hardscrabble lives, attempting to restore a region devastated by war.” Nonetheless, Guelzo occasionally declares his independence from Foner—he returns the beginning date of Reconstruction to 1865 from Foner’s 1863, and his narrative organization is more strictly chronological than Foner’s. But two chronological disruptions occur. First, legal and constitutional issues receive their own chapter late in the book, rather than being effectively integrated within the text, as in Guelzo’s two earlier looks at Reconstruction. Second, the author unaccountably delays description of the South’s chaotic, devastated postbellum condition until his third chapter, covering March 1867-May 1868, and thereby delays giving context for white Southerners’ thoughts and actions during the two years after Appomattox. Moreover, where the conquered white South is concerned, Guelzo seems even more ruthless than others of the Foner school. To bring the South into acceptability, he toys with such ideas as implanting “a New England-style high type of culture” in the region, and of assuring Union loyalty by importing workers and voters from the North. But, in particular, Guelzo wishes on the region’s population a more stringent and prolonged period of military rule. Had the former Confederacy been kept longer under heavy heel, he argues, Reconstruction would not have been “overthrown, subverted, and betrayed.” Guelzo further contends that the victorious North’s unwise leniency toward the fallen Confederacy was repeated disastrously in later centuries, when the United States failed to impose “lengthy and expensive occupations” on Germany after the Great War and on Iraq after the two Gulf Wars. With this comparison, Guelzo highlights his opinion of the defeated South’s wickedness. In the three decades between Foner’s and Guelzo’s books on Reconstruction, little has changed in the ruling academic left’s view of America’s postbellum period. And there seems little reason to hope for a detached and responsible account of Reconstruction to emerge in the next thirty years— particularly since Guelzo’s presentist, fully politicized study has now been issued by the world’s largest university press. William Harris Bragg, of Gray, Georgia, wrote the Introduction to a new (2017) edition of Reconstruction in Georgia by C. Mildred Thompson (one of Dunning’s students). His publications center on the U.S. Middle Period. Among them, De Renne (1999), traces a Savannah planter family through the Civil War and Reconstruction. “The Junius of Georgia Redemption: The ‘Nemesis’ Letters of Thomas M. Norwood” (Georgia Historical Quarterly, Spring 1993) deals with the 1871 collapse of Radical rule in Georgia.

A Sailor’s Visit to Ford’s Theatre to see President Lincoln Turns to Horror I Held Lincoln: A Union Sailor’s Journey Home. By Richard E. Quest. Illustrations, maps, 224 pp., 2018. Potomac Books of the University of Nebraska Press, www.nebraskapress.unl.edu. $24.95 hardbound. Reviewed by Frank J. Williams

With over 2,200 books about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln among 16,000 books and pamphlets published about the sixteenth president, one wonders if there is anything left to say about him. The answer is, of course, “yes.” The stories about participants of the Civil War continue to fascinate and interest us. This is the first time that a sailor’s visit to see Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre has been published. Union Navy Lt. Benjamin W. Loring limped, from war wounds, to Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, to see President Lincoln attend Our American Cousin. This evening would turn into an expected horror. Looking to the presidential box, Loring saw the Lincolns and another couple enter the box after the play had started. At about 10:15 p.m., Loring heard a gunshot. He looked toward the presidential box and saw a man (later identified as John Wilkes Booth) jumping from the balcony to the stage. He exited out by the rear of the theatre. Climbing into the box, Loring helped Lt. William Flood move the President to the floor. Loring cut Lincoln’s tie to help his breathing. Loring, with three others, carried Lincoln from the theater to the Petersen House across the street, where Lincoln was to die at 7:22 the next morning, April 15th. Having enlisted in the United States Navy in 1862, Loring commanded a gun division aboard the USS Galena during the battle of Drewry’s Bluff. In 1863 he participated in the naval assault on Fort Sumter. He was promoted to lieutenant and was given command of the USS Wave. On May 6, 1864, Loring and his crew were attacked by Confederates when the Wave was powerless due to lack of coal. After fending them off, Loring was forced to surrender his vessel. He and his crew were sent to Camp Groce, a prisoner of war camp in Texas. Loring and his men faced abuse and starvation. On his second attempt, using false passes, Loring escaped. After a grueling 25-day journey across Texas, wearing a stolen Confederate uniform and surviving on dry corn, he finally made his way to a Union gunboat in Louisiana Loring then learned after reporting to the Washington Navy Yard in Washington that his reputation had been destroyed because of his surrender of the Wave. He set about describing his ship’s dilemma and lack of coal to Admiral Farragut. He obviously convinced his commanding admiral; he received a new command as head of the “Naval Rendezvous” at the Washington Navy Yard. The war appeared over when General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia. Loring learned that President Lincoln would be attending Ford’s Theatre and he purchased a ticket to attend. He was hoping to enjoy an evening’s entertainment—only to serve his country again by administering to its fallen chief magistrate. Frank J. Williams is founding Chair of The Lincoln Forum.

Publishing the Civil War-era diary of a soldier, politician, or civilian who witnessed “the late unpleasantness” is a tradition that dates back over a century or more. Some have become classics, such as the daily journal of Union soldier Elijah Hunt Rhodes. Renowned civilian diaries include those penned by New York attorney George Templeton Strong and Confederate socialite Mary Chesnut. Many, if not most, however, offer the reader little in the way of thoughtful insight, with the diarist’s entries generally nothing more than mundane comments on the weather or the food at hand. That is hardly the case with the diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham— an educated and highly observant twelve-year-old Georgia lad when his diary begins in June 1860. That this diary remained unpublished for so long is a story unto itself and is explained in the publisher’s preface. It represents the first-ever published diary of a male teenage civilian—North or South—who experienced the entire Civil War. For the most part, Leroy’s thoughts and observations were either from within his bedroom or outside in his small, custom-made wagon in which a family slave pulled him around. LeRoy Gresham was the son of a wealthy slaveholding family in Macon, Georgia. Per the 1860 census, his father owned ninety-three slaves and two plantations totaling over 1,700 acres.

Important New Diary from Well-Educated Southern Boy The War Outside My Window: The Civil War Diary of LeRoy Wiley Gresham, 1860–1865. Edited by Janet Elizabeth Croon. Illustrations, maps, footnotes, source notes, index, 480 pp., 2018. Savas Beatie, www.savasbeatie.com. $34.95 hardback. Reviewed by Paul Taylor

As a consequence of that affluence, young Gresham had access to the best of everything Southern culture could offer. This reality is apparent in everything he sees and records. Yet the one thing LeRoy could never obtain was good health. He was practically an invalid, his leg having been crushed in 1856 when a collapsing chimney fell upon him. Worse, it was an injury that never properly healed. Only a few years later he contracted the illness that would eventually prove fatal, which we now know was a form of tuberculosis (also popularly known at the time as “consumption”). As his seven-volume diary opens, his father had made plans to take young Gresham to Philadelphia to seek the best possible medical treatment. It was a trip that would prove fruitless. Macon was an important Confederate depot, allowing LeRoy to witness and record all of the various troops that came and went. Yet until the time of General William Sherman’s “March to the Sea” in late 1864, LeRoy’s Civil War was somewhat distant, something to be read about in the papers, and young Gresham was indeed a voracious reader of anything he could acquire. As he read of the distant battles and politics, his remarks display confidence—and perhaps a youthful naiveté—in the Confederate cause, yet also a mature skepticism about newspaper accuracy. Nevertheless, it is his astute observations on his family’s travails and his slow physical decline that are engaging. As for the contentious slavery issue, LeRoy wrote matter-of-factly. Unfortunately for the modern reader, he offers no eloquent rumination either defending or disparaging the South’s chattel slavery system. Though he routinely mentions his family’s slaves by their first names, it is apparent that he viewed the institution simply as a given, a mere fact of Southern life that was all he knew. LeRoy’s last entry was on June 9, 1865, just weeks after the final Confederate surrender and only nine days before his death on June 18 at the age of seventeen. Editor Janice Croon—a professional genealogist and former educator—does an excellent job of annotating and editing the diary. For example, the author’s thrice-daily temperature records have been judiciously edited while Croon’s footnotes (far superior to endnotes for reading ease) are plentiful and place Gresham’s remarks in full context. As a result, a reader somewhat unfamiliar with the Civil War could easily understand and enjoy this book. The extras provided in this book are first-rate. In addition to Gresham’s diary, a “dramatis personae” section identifies all close and distant relatives, friends, family slaves, politicians and soldiers mentioned in the text. Dennis A. Rasbach, MD, has provided a superb medical foreword and afterword, in which Gresham’s tuberculosis is placed in full historical perspective and how modern science diagnosed young Gresham’s disease. Hundreds of Civil War books are published each year. While many may be well-researched and written, only a small number are truly important in that they significantly advance our understanding of the rebellion or offer the reader something unique or previously unknown. This work is one of those relative few. It has set a new bar for publishers and editors with regard to publishing any Civil War diary that may come to light in the future. Gresham’s diary is an amazing primary source document that, unbeknownst to its author at the time, slowly chronicles his own demise while concurrently documenting the Confederacy’s collapse. As such, I highly recommend this book. Paul Taylor is an award-winning author of seven books pertaining to the Civil War era. His newest book is titled “The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War, published by Kent State University Press.

Attorneys at War Uncivil Warriors: The Lawyers’ Civil War. By Peter Charles Hoffer. Annotations, 231 pp., 2018. Oxford University Press, www.oup.com. $29.95 hardcover. Reviewed by John Foskett

History professor Peter Hoffer’s new book Uncivil Warriors is an efficiently-written examination of the influence which lawyers exerted on the Civil War from its genesis to its denouement. The book nicely fulfills its promised scope in one sense but falls short in another. Mid-nineteenth century America was a nation in which lawyers occupied a prominent place in the social/political fabric. Living in a country which was founded in 1787 as a “nation of laws,” men of ambition flocked to the legal profession unconstrained by any requirements of formal education as a condition for admission to the bar. It is in this context that Hoffer analyzes the ways in which the Civil War was as much a contest of competing legal principles as one of sectional wills and differences and of military combat. He addresses his topic chronologically, beginning with the debate over the legality of secession. What follows covers the roles of, and differences between, the opposing cabinets; struggles over the writ of habeas corpus in wartime, centered on the litigation of Ex Parte Merryman; legal disputes arising from the Union blockade of Southern ports; development of the “Lieber Code” (General Order 100) to regulate the treatment of prisoners of war and non-combatants; and Lincoln’s proclamation of

A Comprehensive, Scholarly Look at Imported Arms European Arms in the Civil War. By Marc Schwalm and Klaus Hofmann. Footnotes, index, 192 pp., 2018. Mowbray Publishing, www.gunandswordcollector.com. $34.95 hardcover. Reviewed by Joe Bilby

It is no secret to those of us with more than a passing interest in the Civil War that European firearms were heavily used by the Union army in the first half of the conflict. Because the Confederacy, lacking an industrial base, never developed a viable firearms manufacturing industry, the South used them throughout the conflict. In their new book European Arms in the Civil War, Marc Schwalm and Klaus Hofmann provide us with a comprehensive and scholarly look at those imported arms, using original sources from both sides of the Atlantic. The authors, both from Germany, provide a unique assessment of the European arms development, manufacturing, and supply system of the era, using European records prior researchers did not have access to. They note that while many original documents were unfortunately destroyed as companies dissolved and the World Wars took their toll, they have nonetheless discovered some very interesting surviving material. Although much excellent work has been done on British firearms of the Civil War era in recent years, continental European research has lagged until now. Schwalm and Hofmann provide a much needed view of the sales of arms to the combatants in America from a European perspective, detailing what was going on internally in countries such as Belgium, a sort of catchall for weapons reconditioning and export. They also address the confusing German situation. The country was not yet unified and there were numerous German principalities mostly copying Prussian arms developments but often adding their own small details. These in turn can establish a weapon’s origin and aid in a determination as to whether it actually saw service in America. The authors’ primary source research is outstanding and includes exhaustive footnotes plus period reports and data on arms in both Union and Confederate service. European Arms in the Civil War should be on the bookshelf of every serious Civil War weapons scholar, as it provides information unavailable elsewhere. I heartily recommend it. Joe Bilby writes the regular “Black Powder, White Smoke” column for Civil War News.

A Patch Over One Eye Fighting for Atlanta: Tactics, Terrain, and Trenches in the Civil War. By Earl J. Hess. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index, 391 pp., 2018. University of North Carolina Press, www.uncpress.org. $45 cloth. Reviewed by Stephen Davis

As with his previous history of the battle of Peachtree Creek, in this volume Earl Hess demonstrates impressive research, strong writing, and a talent for weaving a tight narrative. Weighing down this product, though, are occasional myopic lapses and superficial scholarship. Let me give a few examples. When Johnston’s army was outmaneuvered at Dalton by McPherson’s flanking march through Snake Creek Gap on May 9, the author avoids a major question of the Atlanta Campaign: why did Johnston leave Snake Creek Gap undefended? He only refers to “the negligence of someone who had failed to identify Snake Creek Gap as an important point.” Really, Professor—why dodge an important controversy? Almost two decades ago, I wrote—after having driven to Montgomery to see them personally—that Confederate Brigadier Henry Clayton had in his cache of maps one that clearly showed all the passes through Rocky Face Ridge (including Snake Creek Gap). If a brigade leader knew of this topographical vulnerability, why didn’t the army commander? Thirty miles to the south, at Cassville, “Confederate troops along the intended line began to dig in with a will on the afternoon of May 19,” as Hess writes. Johnston’s army gave up its Cassville line that very night of May 19-20. Hess fails to explore the observation of Sgt. Rice C. Bull, of the 123rd New York, who examined the Rebel works a few days after they had been abandoned: “They were the finest we had seen up to that time and it must have taken much labor to build them….they must have been constructed prior to the start of the campaign.” Bull’s speculation goes to the heart of historians’ discussion of whether before Sherman’s advance Joe Johnston had determined to retreat from Dalton to Atlanta (really!? C.S. engineers digging in at Cassville before the army got there!?). That Hess misses the opportunity to address Bull’s diary—which he cites elsewhere—shows that the author has a patch over one eye. At New Hope Church on May 25, Peter Stewart’s men built “log breastworks,” Hess writes, overlooking Albert Castel’s statement that in their works the Confederates used tombstones from the church cemetery nearby. Castel doesn’t cite his source, but I believe it is the diary of Robert Patrick, 4th Louisiana, who wrote that “the tomb-stones, the Sheds, the railing around the graves were all torn away.” Professor Hess cites Castel in his endnote, but without mention of tombstones in his text. If he wishes to be the go-to-authority on Civil War fortifications in Georgia, given his previous books on entrenching in Virginia, I’d advise him to dig a little deeper (pardon). Reference should have been made to Castel’s and Patrick’s statements. On the other hand, the author has commendably found, at Augusta State University, a copy of the circular issued to Southern troops on July 5 to explain the peculiar nature of Shoup’s Chattahoochee River defense line. Lt. Thomas Mackall, on Johnston’s staff, only refers to the “printed circular” that informed the men on how the works should be manned and defended; “men better pleased,” he noted. The text of this important document, which is not in the OR, should henceforth be quoted in the Atlanta Campaign literature. In his text on the fortifying around Atlanta I also find grounds (again, pardon) for complaint. Hess persists, as I noticed in his earlier books on the battles of Peachtree Creek and Ezra Church, in creating his own names for Atlanta’s Confederate works, in contravention to the names usually used in the literature. He even capitalizes “Atlanta City Line,” as if that were the standard name for the perimeter of earthworks constructed by Confederates in 1863–64. Rather than this academic arrogance, I wish he had used a term like “Grant-Presstman line,” referring to the C.S. engineers (Capt. Lemuel P. Grant and Lt. Col. S. Wilson Presstman) who oversaw its construction (as in Petersburg’s Dimmock line, named for Capt. Charles H. Dimmock). The author, as usual, produced his own maps, which are serviceable, but rather crude (trench lines resemble railroads). A most serious defect is Hess’ practice of not providing mileage scales on any of them—an elemental expectation. As for his drawing of Captain Grant’s line, I would have preferred reproduction of the original map possessed by the Atlanta History Center (note to UNC Press). …which brings us to Wilbur G. Kurtz, known here as the guardian angel of Atlanta’s Civil War history. Had Hess consulted the voluminous Kurtz Papers at the AHC (he fails to cite them in his bibliography), he would have learned that in the 1950s Kurtz wrote the texts for the hundreds of historical markers lining Atlanta’s streets today. His tablet on Howell Mill Road, for instance, titled “Outer Defense Line,” has given students of the campaign an accepted name for the Confederate fortifications erected during Johnston’s last days as army commander. Instead of using this term, Hess invents his own, “Peach Tree Creek Line,” which not only does one not see elsewhere in the literature, but which is topographically errant (the Confederate line was a full mile south of Peachtree Creek). When the author writes that Lt. Col. B.W. Frobel reported to Hood’s army on Aug. 4, 1864, for “specific duty unknown,” it becomes evident that Hess has not come upon Frobel’s memoir, published in Scott’s Monthly Magazine in 1868, in which he writes that he reported to Hood as no less than Assistant

Engineer-in-Chief for the Army of Tennessee, second only to Maj. Gen. Martin L. Smith. From these instances, one may sense my disappointment with Professor Hess’ new work. Let us hope that with his next one, he offers cognoscenti material that we may deem of true value. Steve Davis’ next book, Flawed Image: Confederate General John B. Hood in 1864, will be published later this year by Mercer University Press.