Book Reviews — October 2019

Originally published October 2019 · pp. 36–42

Contact Stephen Davis, Civil War News Book Review Editor. Email: [email protected].

Looking at the Work of Sherman’s Cameraman Significant Civil War Photographs: Atlanta Campaign. By Stephen Davis. Introduction, bibliography, index, 126 pp., 2019. Historical Publications, LLC, www.historicalpubs.com. $19.95 softcover. Reviewed by Gordon L. Jones STEPHEN DAVIS 100 SIGNIFICANT CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHS : ATLANTA CAMPAIGN

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This is just the kind of Civil War book I want: super-clear photographs, crisp captions that tell me what I want to know, all in a handy and affordable format. And, it’s an author you can trust: Stephen Davis, master of what he aptly terms “Barnardiana,” the study of George N. Barnard’s 1864 photographs of Atlanta and the Atlanta Campaign. Even if you’re an old Civil Warrior and think you’ve seen it all, ponder this question: if you had to choose 100 photographs of the Atlanta Campaign, which ones would you pick? Davis starts by breaking down all the available images (Barnard produced well over two hundred) into thematic chapters. So you have portraits of the generals (not made by Barnard), Confederate fortifications (why the U.S. Army hired Barnard in the first place),”War Scenes” (the campaign north of Atlanta), followed by “Federals in Atlanta,” “City Scenes,” and “Wrecking Atlanta.” Among many nuggets in these pages, don’t miss the “less familiar view” of Barnard’s iconic “Destruction of Hood’s Ordnance Train.” It’s less familiar because it’s never been published before. My favorite chapter is in the middle of the book: “Barnard Under the Microscope.” Here Davis draws on the work of Bob Zeller, Garry Adelman, Ken Denny, and many others whose careful dissections of the high-resolution scans produced by the Library of Congress in the mid-2000s revealed hidden and quite telling details of otherwise taken-for-granted scenes. Do you know how we can date Barnard’s images of occupied Atlanta? By reading the dated concert notices pasted on the buildings, of course. Do you know why a lone African American soldier sits in front of the slave market on Whitehall Street, reading a book? Neither does anybody else, but there he is with corporal’s stripes and a U.S. Model 1861 rifle-musket. If you think it’s hard deciding which images to include, try captioning them in half a page (it’s one image per page). Davis’s captions are pithy and cut right to the cool details. For example, that’s not just any horse under General Sherman, it’s “Duke.” Or, “Joe Wheeler earned his nickname, ‘Fightin’ Joe, ‘fightin’ Indians.” By the way, the names of those U.S. officers in front of the Windsor Smith house (view #1) are known today only because a copy of the photograph was discovered in the 1940s with the names on the back, probably written by one of the officers. For those who worry that we can’t get the next generation interested in the Civil War, buy this book for your kids. Even better, this is just the first in a series – the next volume is Charleston. Gordon L. Jones is Senior Military Historian at the Atlanta History Center.

The Perfect Scout: A Soldier’s Memoir of the Great March to the Sea and the Campaign of the Carolinas. By George W. Quimby. Edited by Anne Sarah Rubin and Stephen Murphy. Notes, maps, bibliography, index, 224 pp., University of Alabama Press, www.uapress.ua.edu. $29.95 cloth. Reviewed by Paul Taylor

The published memoirs of Civil War soldiers exist by the hundreds if not thousands, yet this work stands unique in that it is one of only a handful written by a man who served as a scout in either army. These were the uniformed men formally assigned to their respective armies who utilized stealth and speed as they gathered enemy intelligence, generally on the flanks or even in the rear of the march. Meanwhile, their columns utilized advance guards or pickets toward the front. These activities separated scouts from spies who may have assumed secret civilian or military identities as they pretended to work for one side, while secretly feeding intelligence to the other. This is the important groundwork that author and Union scout George Quimby (1842–1926) sets out to convey to his readers. On occasion, though, that distinction became blurred. In Quimby’s case, he explains how he often rode into enemy territory wearing Confederate grey as a ruse to gain the locals’ trust or to slip past Confederate pickets. Left unsaid is that had he been captured by the Rebels in such attire, he most likely would have faced an immediate hanging. Readers will learn via the Introduction that Quimby first enlisted in 1862 with the 32nd Wisconsin Infantry and served in that regiment in western Tennessee and near Vicksburg before marching toward Georgia. The core of this book, however, is

Quimby’s recollections as a scout in General William T. Sherman’s army during the legendary 1864 “March to the Sea” and 1865 Carolinas Campaign. Quimby’s memoir is certainly captivating for his war recollections. In one instance, for example, he details his disagreement with General Sherman’s recollections over a particular incident in the latter’s Memoirs. Even better are Quimby’s homespun accounts of his impressions and stories of contact with enemy soldiers, white civilians—especially trying to flirt with angry Southern women—and African American slaves. The author kept his personal politics out of his story; nonetheless, an element of sympathy shines through toward the hardscrabble Southern farmer who had little time to focus on war but merely wanted to feed his family. Quimby had low regard for the infamous “bummer” who “liberated” hams or chickens from the poor; however, his disapproval was less so when the homes of wealthy Southerners were plundered. Also enlightening are his tales of capturing Confederate scouts and pickets—often only briefly, for these men would consistently try to escape. Those butternut-or grey-clad clad men were always treated with respect by Quimby for he and his men knew that if—and when—the tables were turned, they wanted to be treated in a similar manner. Quimby wrote his memoir around 1901 and it is filled with derring-do and hilarity. His explanation as to how he and his fellow scouts would give fake commands in loud voices when the enemy was near-–in the hope that their adversaries would think they were leading a much larger force­—will certainly bring a smile to any reader’s face. As Professor Anne Sarah Rubin points out in her illuminating Introduction, this memoir indeed reads more like an adventure novel than a dry retelling of names and dates. Such books written from memory long after the fact should generally be taken by the reader with a grain of salt; however, in this case, we are told that Quimby’s neatly typewritten manuscript often referred to other historical evidence to support his version of events. Though family lore often told of Quimby’s Civil War exploits, it appears the typed memoir lay dormant and unseen until 1990, when Stephen Murphy (the husband of Quimby’s great-great-granddaughter) found it in three legal-sized folders while cleaning out the house of his wife’s recently deceased father. Civil War students everywhere should be thankful that Mr. Murphy made his fortuitous discovery. Paul Taylor is an award-winning author of seven books pertaining to the Civil War era. His new book is titled “The Most Complete Political Machine Ever Known”: The North’s Union Leagues in the American Civil War, recently published by Kent State University Press.

Two Years of Adversity and Exhilaration Blue-Blooded Cavalryman: Captain William Brooke Rawle in the Army of the Potomac, May 1863-August 1865. Edited by J. Gregory Acken. Notes, index, 352 pp., 2019. Kent State University Press, www.KentState UniversityPress.com. $49.95 cloth. Reviewed by David Marshall

William Brooke Rawle was born into a privileged Philadelphia family. As a nineteen-year old he finished his studies at the University of Pennsylvania in May 1863 and within two months had participated in the battles of Brandy Station and Gettysburg with the 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry. Instead of attending his college graduation, fighting the Army of Northern Virginia’s cavalry on July 3 in East Cavalry Field turned out to be the “supreme moment” of his life. The young man gave up a refined, cultured life of wealth and luxury for two years of adversity, challenge, and exhilaration. The 3rd Pennsylvania Cavalry was organized during the summer of 1861. Its second commander, Colonel William Averell, imparted Regular Army responsibilities and practices to the volunteers and prepared them for the burdens they would face. Averell appointed many officers who had prior military experience, but many did not. Rawle and the sons of many other prominent Philadelphia families such as the Newhalls, Stilles, Treichels, and Wetherills were commissioned as officers into the regiment. J. Gregory Acken makes an excellent point that many of the enlisted veterans did not accept these appointments and viewed Rawle and his colleagues as unqualified men who had prevented the advancement of more capable individuals from the ranks. Following the Gettysburg Campaign, Brooke Rawle and the Third Pennsylvania would serve with the Cavalry Corps of the Army of the Potomac through the spring of 1864, fighting partisans and guerillas in northern Virginia and seeing action during the Bristoe Station and Mine Run campaigns of late 1863. Their fighting involvement stopped prior to the Overland Campaign. These men went on to provide security for Union General George Meade and his headquarters staff, escorting prisoners, gathering up stragglers during combat, arresting deserters, and guarding large herds of cattle. A painstaking diarist and letter writer, Brooke Rawle documented almost everything that he observed in 150 well-written letters sent home to his family over the twenty-seven months he spent in the Union army. 136 of these letters are included in this volume. The letters, augmented by Rawle’s diary entries, provide a captivating and richly comprehensive eyewitness account into the life of a regimental cavalry officer during the last two years of the Civil War in the eastern theater. The typescript duplicate of the diary, completed in 1898, contained 154 single-spaced, single-sided pages and was entitled “Diary of Service with the Army of the Potomac.” Most of the correspondence was written to Rawle’s mother; however, once he wrote one of his sisters and advised that his letters needed to be kept private. Though the lieutenant participated in a few important and deadly battles, rarely were any specifics from the fighting mentioned in the communications home. While Rawle wrote a great deal concerning his military service, he left no record of why he joined the army. Sadly, he never mentions how the political and military events of the war influenced him or his opinion of anything prior to enlisting in 1863. Additionally, he remained quiet on slavery. However, during his postwar life, he wrote histories of several prominent Philadelphia families and a study of the cavalry fighting on the Union right flank at Gettysburg on July 2-3. Acken’s use of numerous photographs and George Skoch’s excellent maps are most effective and helpful. While an expensive volume, Blue-Blooded Cavalryman is well written and tells much about the life of a Northern cavalry officer in the last two years of the war. David Marshall teaches high school history in Miami.

Stories of Famous and Not-So-Famous Confederate Ironclads Confederate Ironclads at War. By R. Thomas Campbell. Maps, photos, illustrations, endnotes, index, appendix, 276 pp., 2019. McFarland, McFarlandBooks.com. $49.95 softcover. Reviewed by Gould Hagler

The CSS Virginia, which battled the USS Monitor in the Civil War’s most famous naval engagement, was but one of 34 ironclads built by the Confederacy and one of 25 put into service. Some never fired a shot at the enemy; some, like the Virginia, saw temporary success and wreaked havoc, at least for a while. Most were well-armed with rams as well as guns. They punched hard, and could take a punch too. Only one Confederate ironclad was sunk by the enemy. From the James River to the Mississippi and the Red these ungainly craft fought with tenacity in the South’s effort to break the blockade and to keep its inland waterways free of the enemy. In Confederate Ironclads at War, R. Thomas Campbell capably tells the story of these ships, the men who built them and the officers and crews who sailed them into action. In fourteen chapters, each of which stands alone as the history of a single ship or a squadron, Campbell tells how these ships were constructed; how the builders struggled to do their work in the face of dire shortages of every kind; how the workers somehow made repairs after breakdowns and battle damage; how the ships struggled to maneuver with woefully underpowered engines; and how, on rivers and in coastal waters from Virginia to Louisiana, the crews slugged it out with their foe. Everybody who reads this review knows about the March 1862 battle in Hampton Roads, but many, I am sure, are far less familiar with the history of the Albemarle, the Louisiana, the Tennessee, and the many other ironclads featured in Campbell’s account. Excellent diagrams show us how the ships were designed. We learn a great deal about the industrial enterprises responsible for the work. Many readers will meet officers with whom they were not previously acquainted, like Comdr. James Johnston and Comdr. Isaac Brown, and become more familiar with the likes of Adm. Franklin Buchanan, Comdr. James Bulloch and Lt. Catesby ap Roger Jones. Campbell draws on many primary sources as well as secondary material. His own narration is supplemented by interesting passages written by the men who built the ironclads and who officered them in battle. Campbell, who has written and edited several other books on the Confederate Navy, points out that as the war progressed the authorities realized that their “behemoths were in no way seaworthy and could not challenge the Union blockade.” They focused instead on smaller, more nimble ironclads to protect their rivers and harbors. Still, they did not give up completely on ocean-going ironclads. The CSS Stonewall, built in Bordeaux, managed a stormy Atlantic crossing in 1865. Arriving in Havana on May 11, the ship’s captain, Thomas Jefferson Page, learned that he was too late. Page refused generous surrender-terms offered by an old friend commanding a U.S. ship in the same harbor. Instead, he sold the vessel to the captain-general of Cuba for the sum of $16,000. The officers and crew were paid off by the proceeds of this sale. An appendix lists the officers and crewmen assigned to six of the more significant Confederate ironclads. There is no glossary of naval terms, so landlubber readers, like this landlubber reviewer, must keep a dictionary on hand for words like keelson, sponson, holystone, and kedge. Gould Hagler is a retired lobbyist living in Dunwoody, Ga. He is a past president of the Atlanta Civil War Round Table and the author of Georgia’s Confederate Monuments: In Honor of a Fallen Nation, published by Mercer University Press in 2014. Hagler speaks frequently on this topic and others related to different aspects of the Civil War and has been a regular contributor to CWN since 2016.

An Approachable Look at the Battle of Antietam for Beginners and Novices Visual Antietam Vol. 1 Ezra Carman’s Antietam Through Maps and Pictures: Dawn to Dunker Church. Edited by Brad Butkovich. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, index, 230 pp., 2018. Historic Imagination LLC, www.historicimagination.com. $19.95 paperback. Reviewed by Claire Affinito

In Visual Antietam Vol. 1: Ezra Carman’s Antietam Through Maps and Pictures: Dawn to Dunker Church, editor Brad Butkovich attempts to present a new look on the battle of Antietam with “an emphasis on visual context.” However, he fails to provide anything new or unique to this highly scrutinized battle. The main text is composed of Ezra Carman’s famous manuscripts on the Maryland Campaign. Butkovich accompanies Carman’s text with 63 images and 26 maps. This is the first in a series of three books that follow the chronological order of the battle. Volume One focuses on the first four hours of the battle that begins with the Union advance at dawn and ends with the fighting around the Dunker Church. All three volumes combined will trace the beginning of the battle to its conclusion. Carman was the legendary early Civil War historian. As a veteran of the battle and “historical expert” for the Antietam Battlefield Board, his text is widely accepted as the most complete and accurate account of the battle. Carman used after-action reports, regimental histories, and correspondence from hundreds of veterans. His text is revered by Antietam historians. However, Butkovich’s use of Carman’s text fails to provide a new or unique perspective. Past historians have provided richer and more indepth evaluations of Carman’s text. The most thorough of these is Tom Clemens’ The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. Clemens’s three-volume masterpiece provides an annotated and edited analysis of Carman’s work that is an invaluable source for Antietam historians. Visual Antietam takes Carman’s text in a different direction. Butkovich picks and chooses chapters of Carman’s work that only focus on the events of the battle. He keeps the text in its original form without all but the basic notes or corrections. It seems Butkovich’s intention was to create a volume that could be carried onto the battlefield. He does succeed in making the book small and compact. However, in doing so, he loses some of the explanation and clarification that are necessary to truly understand Carman. Therefore, if you are a serious historian who wants a detailed look at Carman’s text and the battlefield, this book is not for you. However, I would recommend it for a more casual observer of Antietam or those who will be taking a trip to the battlefield and want a portable companion guide. The most valuable sections of Visual Antietam are its maps and images. The maps are Butkovich’s own and are impressive in their detail. Each of the 26 maps includes topographical and terrain details including elevation, crops, and fences. These details are overlaid with troop movements down to the regimental level. Along with these maps, there are 63 images including photographs taken by the author on the battlefield. The author’s images provide the reader with a good understanding of the terrain and view of the battlefield today, which is very useful to readers both on and off the field. Together the maps and the images allow the reader to visualize the battlefield. However, these great assets have a major drawback. In the paperback edition that I reviewed, all the maps and images were in black and white. This is a major detriment to such a noble endeavor. Butkovich’s goal in Visual Antietam of bringing the battle to life is lost with the absence of color. His maps are highly detailed and this feature at times becomes lost. Likewise, some of his photos are dark and hard to see. Bradley Gottfried’s The Maps of Antietam contains similar maps in color. Therefore, the utility of the book is diminished with the absence of color. Overall, if you are a longtime historian of Antietam this book is not for you. You can find the major components of this book in greater detail elsewhere. If you want comprehensive and easy-to-read maps of Antietam, Gottfried’s The Maps of Antietam is for you. If you want an in-depth look at Ezra Carman’s manuscript of the Maryland Campaign, see Tom Clemens’ The Maryland Campaign of September 1862. However, if you are a casual or novice historian on the battle of Antietam, Visual Antietam is worth your while. Claire Affinito graduated in May 2019 from Shepherd University with her bachelor’s in history. She is currently an education intern at Antietam National Battlefield.

Grant’s Masterpiece: The Vicksburg Campaign The Decision Was Always My Own: Ulysses S. Grant and the Vicksburg Campaign. By Timothy B. Smith. Notes, index, 249 pp. 2018, Southern Illinois University Press, www.siupress. com. $34.50 cloth. Reviewed by Greg Biggs

Historian Tim Smith has once again penned a wonderful work that takes a look at the Vicksburg Campaign, but not in the typical manner of a campaign or battle study (the latter he has done with his excellent book on Champion Hill). Rather, he makes an examination of how Union General Ulysses S. Grant looked at the problem of taking the city and how he made his decisions to do so during the campaign. Smith organizes the book into eight chapters, each one focusing on a specific decision Grant made. These decisions and their outcomes are somewhat explained in the Introduction and Prologue where Smith compares Grant to a four-year college student with West Point being the freshman year in his military growth. The classroom of the Mexican and Civil War battlefields took care of his three other “college” years quite well, the whole point being that West Point graduated officers with more of an engineering background than tactical/strategic background and that the better graduates would grow in their respective commands. That Grant was able to do what he did at Vicksburg, a ninemonth campaign covering no less than six attempts to take the city, is a real testament to his abilities as a military commander along with his ability to be flexible on the battlefield and operationally. Smith correctly labels Grant a Clausewitzian commander rather than a Jominian one (pretty much the rest of the Civil War commanders) despite the fact that Grant had never read a word of the Prussian theorist. Upon assumption of command of the Department of Tennessee in October 1862, Grant wrote his boss Henry Halleck, asking what was expected of him and his new command. After not being prohibited to begin an offensive, Grant did just that, thus showing one of his prime attributes as a commander. Smith delves into this—covering Grant’s proposed lines of advance, his corresponding supply problems, and manpower needs for a successful offensive. All this culminated, however, in the defeat Grant suffered in December when Confederate cavalry raiders smashed his railroad line of supply and Sherman was repulsed in his thrust down the Mississippi River. Despite this, as Smith shows, Grant displayed talent in getting multiple columns moving into Mississippi in a coordinated manner. Within the Vicksburg Campaign Grant had to deal with his own subordinates (some of whom he liked and some he did not, McClernand being at the fore of the latter), his logistics, Confederate movements and reinforcements, his own family (son Fred and wife Julia attended him during the campaign), as well as writing mounds of paper to his superiors in terms of reports and daily communications. Smith’s book offers plentiful examples of each and how Grant dealt with them. Yet when things seemed to go against him, Grant just dug in his heels and figured out a different way to get things done. Halleck got testy as time wore on but Lincoln, seeing the bigger picture, wrote Grant, “I know that you can judge these matters there much better than I can here,” showing well how officials in Washington rarely understood realities in the field. How Grant dealt with McClernand takes up a fair bit of Smith’s account. Grant changed his opinion from good (“McClernand performed his job with much skill and without loss”) to bad, and when McClernand finally got on Grant’s nerves for too long, he was able to fire him. The work culminates with how Grant dealt with the captured Confederate garrison of some 30,000 troops as well as how he made sure his own rear was protected from Joe Johnston’s Confederates. Grant also had to deal with superiors who balked at the proposed parole of the large Rebel army. Halleck, somewhat a thorn in Grant’s side to this point in the war, complimented him with a telegram comparing his victory to that of Napoleon at Ulm. This is a fine study of Grant and how he tackled the Vicksburg dilemma. It is well researched and written and uses often the words of those involved to move the story along. Smith’s analysis is even-handed. If you ever had doubts as to Grant’s ability as a commander or perhaps thought him overrated, this book should shatter those conceptions. Grant was the pinnacle of Civil War commanders, Vicksburg was his masterpiece and Tim Smith nails it. Greg Biggs, of Clarksville, Tenn., has studied military history from the Spartans to today. His main interests include the Napoleonic Wars, Civil War and World War Two and tanks/armor. He is also a recognized authority on Civil War flags. Greg lectures across the country to roundtables, museums and other history groups and conducts Civil War tours for history groups and staff rides for the U.S. Army.

Contributions of Civil War Chaplains In God’s Presence: Chaplains, Missionaries, and Religious Space during the American Civil War. By Benjamin L. Miller. Photos, notes, bibliography, index, 268 pp., 2019. University Press of Kansas, www.kansaspress.ku.edu. $39.95 hardcover. Reviewed by Sean A. Scott

The Civil War impacted countless aspects of everyday life, including religion. In this clearly written study Benjamin Miller applies the concept of spatial theory to illuminate continuity and change in religious practices from the antebellum era to the war. Chaplains, and to a lesser extent civilian missionaries sent to visit the troops, served as catalysts that helped transfer religious meaning from “static physical spaces” of churches at home to battlefields, camps, hospitals, and prisons. In essence, “by their presence” chaplains brought “dynamic sacred spaces” to these war settings. The book provides a valuable collective portrait of the duties and daily experiences of chaplains. Of course, the methods and messages of these religious leaders changed little from their prewar work among their congregations. Preaching outdoors or in makeshift chapels shared similarities with antebellum revivalism. Encouraging Bible reading and prayer, admonishing men to resist temptation and shun sin, and winning converts through personal testimony and exemplary living remained a constant theme of pastoral work whether at home or in the army. However, the war posed challenges that created new opportunities and reshaped religious practices. Most Protestant chaplains set aside denominational differences and cooperated with each other to promote a shared faith. Preaching for each other, uniting to perform baptisms and observe communion, and soliciting soldier memberships in non-sectarian churches exhibited a degree of ecumenism that foreshadowed postwar shifts in the religious landscape. Some Union chaplains ministered to black soldiers or freedmen, providing a glimpse of racial equality that leaders of some denominations briefly pursued during Reconstruction before segregated churches, oftentimes favored by both blacks and whites, became the norm. Miller also maintains that hospitals and prisons, new spaces of religious activity for most clergy, “proved to be the foundation for Northern and Southern civil religions that came to fruition in the postbellum era.” Imprisoned chaplains defiantly prayed for their respective armies and presidents in earshot of their captors, and hospital chaplains observed days of national thanksgiving or publicly mourned Lincoln’s death. But far from originating a patriotically imbued faith, these activities, as documented in Richard Carwardine’s Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (1993) or my own A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War (2011), merely carried on a long tradition of blending religion and politics that characterized both northern and southern churches across most denominations throughout the sectional crisis and during the war. Diaries, personal correspondence, Union chaplains’ hospital reports, and postwar reminiscences furnish a solid source base for this study, although incorporating the abundance of chaplain letters from religious periodicals could have yielded additional insights. Miller offers a balanced description that considers Protestant, Catholic, Union, and Confederate examples to form his assessment of the valuable contributions of chaplains. Ample anecdotal evidence confirms that some men who served as Civil War chaplains were impostors, hypocrites, or otherwise unfit for their duties, but most of their rank more readily deserved one Confederate soldier’s commendation for being “a sincere and hard working Christian.” Anyone interested in the religious history of the war should enjoy Miller’s fine addition to this growing literature. Sean A. Scott, assistant professor of history at the Indiana Academy for Science, Mathematics, and Humanities, is writing a biography of chaplain and postwar carpetbagger missionary Nelson L. Brakeman of the 21st Indiana Volunteers.

Total War for Resources War Stuff: The Struggle for the Human and Environmental Resources in the American Civil War. By Joan E. Cashin. Notes, works cited, index, 258 pp., 2018. Cambridge University Press, www.cambridge.org. $24.99 paperback. Reviewed McMillan by

John

Martin

In the last several years Civil War scholarship has seen a surge of studies focused on the war and its relationship with the environment. In his 2001 article for the National Humanities Center, environmental historian Jack Temple Kirby called for the connection of Civil War and environmental studies. Since then, historians from both fields have answered the call. Organized thematically and divided into seven chapters, Joan E. Cashin’s War Stuff is a valuable contribution to this growing Civil War subfield. Building on the work produced by Megan Kate Nelson’s Ruin Nation and Matthew Stith’s Extreme Civil War, Cashin combines the themes of these two books to grow our understanding of how consuming the Civil War was for resources and civilians. As Cashin’s subtitle indicates, the book focuses on the human and environmental resources available to both armies during the war. Furthermore, it illuminates the tensions between military and civilian relations. Union and Confederate armies’ attitudes towards civilians, their habitats, food and timber, and ineffective policy on attaining those resources made the Civil War “a ‘total’ war, in that it involved the complete exploitation of human and material resources.”

Cashin further contends there was no early war period of cooperation between the armies and civilians. “From the beginning, both armies practiced ‘hard’ war because of failures of supply and discipline.” The “total” war waged by both armies destroyed the South’s human and natural resources. Important to the book’s contribution, and persuasively argued, is that Confederate armies were as guilty as their Union adversaries for the destruction of southern resources. The book’s final chapter discusses this notion with greater depth. In it, Cashin explores how the destruction of the South’s resources affected the way Southerners understood the war. Throughout War Stuff, Cashin urges that soldiers put their needs for resources over anything else. Necessity trumped policy. Early in the war, both armies adopted the Articles of War, written in 1806, that aimed to regulate actions between soldiers and subordinate civilians to the military. Later in the war, each side implemented new official policies for civilian-military relations: Union General John Pope’s and Secretary of War

Edwin Stanton’s General Orders in July and August 1862 and official Confederate regulations in January 1863. Even with these policies, Cashin contends, both armies “proved willing to exploit civilians for their own purposes, regardless of what policy might say…[and] had little impact on the behavior of soldiers on the ground.” A central aspect of the book is its analysis of antebellum notions of communalism towards other whites and stewardship of resources. These attitudes were vital to life and culture in the North and South in the pre-war decades. Ideas of communalism and stewardship, however, were shattered by the conflict as armies took advantage of available resources and civilians continually looked towards their survival. One element of human resources, however, is glaringly absent from War Stuff. Slaves proved to be valuable resources to both armies. Whether they provided Union armies with intelligence or built Confederate fortifications, each side had a vested interest in South’s enslaved population. More inclusion of this group would provide a deeper analysis of the South’s human resources. Still, Cashin has produced a meticulously researched and eloquently written book. Underscoring the strained military-civilian relationship between both Union and Confederate armies, War Stuff illuminates how devastating and total the American Civil War was. John Martin McMillan is a Ph.D. student and graduate teaching assistant in the Department of History at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. His master’s thesis examined the role of the natural environment on the early military campaigns in West Virginia during the summer and fall of 1861.