A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865. (Book Reviews).

A Great Civil War: A Military and Political History, 1861-1865. By Russell F. Weigley. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, c. 2000. Pp. xxx, 612. $35.00, ISBN 0-253-33738-0.)

Using his own family's connection to the Civil War as a point of departure, Weigley, a respected military historian, presents a highly readable, balanced account of the conflict beginning in the secession winter of 1860-61 and continuing to the final Confederate surrenders in the late spring of 1865.

Weigley confidently and forcefully states his opinions, some of which are conventional and some controversial. Among the former is his assessment that the rifle-musket was the key factor in Civil War tactics, rendering infantry assaults futile and bloody. Among his more controversial opinions is his approval of Abraham Lincoln's spring 1862 decision to divert troops from George B. McClellan's offensive toward Richmond in order (as the president hoped) to trap Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, and his assertion that Daniel E. Sickles may actually have been justified in moving his corps into the notorious salient that became the scene of the second day's fighting at Gettysburg.

Some of Weigley's assessments affirm long-held beliefs that many modern scholars are now disputing. Most striking in this category is his defense of Joseph E. Johnston and that general's Fabian policy of avoiding battle. "If there was any way for the Confederacy to win the war," Weigley writes, "it was by such strategy as Johnston had employed ... to trade space for men and time.... But the Confederacy should have employed this strategy of erosion from the outset of the war" (p. 363). He maintains that Johnston would not have surrendered Atlanta without a fight.

Curiously, in view of the foregoing opinion, Weigley also asserts that the eastern theater was the more important and ought rightly to have been accorded higher priority by both governments because only the eastern theater offered the possibility of a quick victory. This is puzzling because quick victory for the Confederacy could have come only through the sort of aggressiveness displayed by Robert E. Lee, not Johnston's endless retreats, and if space was to be traded for time, the conclusion is inescapable that in Virginia the Confederacy had very little space to trade without immediately disastrous consequences. On the other hand, a quick Union victory in the East would run afoul of another portion of Weigley's interpretive scheme, namely his well-founded conclusion that Civil War armies were all but indestructible on the battlefield and that therefore the concept of the truly decisive battle was almost a chimera in this conflict. This he attributes largely to the tactical effects of the rifle-musket, but whatever its cause, the phenomenon rendered a high-priority quest for quick Union victory in the East a questionable undertaking.

Another throwback is Weigley's extremely harsh depiction and judgment of William T. Sherman's operations during the last year of the war. Contrary to recent scholarship, Weigley treats noncombatant immunity as a principle of long-standing and solid foundation in Western military history and finds Sherman's punitive Georgia and Carolina campaigns to be questionable in terms of the laws of war. Going further, he labels Sherman's policies "deliberate terrorism" (p. 393), notwithstanding the very different sort of phenomenon indicated by the word in its modern usage.

Some of Weigley's other judgments fall into the midst of ongoing scholarly debates in which there is no clear-cut consensus. For example, he takes the side of those who do not like Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston. On the other hand, he is quite favorable toward P. G. T. Beauregard. Indeed, he carries these preferences to the point that, in his account of the battle of Shiloh, he attributes Beauregard's failures to Johnston and Johnston's successes to Beauregard. In the same category falls Weigley's approval of the federal government's issuance of greenbacks not only as a necessary means of financing the war (a point on which there is general agreement) but also because the greenbacks "enhanced Federal power" for "intervention in the management of the economy" and were to become "an active weapon of the twentieth-century national state" (p. 207). Whether this is a positive thing or not depends on one's opinion of "enhanced Federal power" or the benefit of another "active weapon" for "the twentieth-century national state."

Arguments aside, Weigley's text includes a surprising number of errors of fact. He states that Albert Sidney Johnston graduated from West Point in 1822 and George B. McClellan in 1842, when those officers' respective dates of graduation were 1826 and 1846. The Shiloh Church that gave its name to the battle appears as Baptist rather than Methodist in Weigley's account (it was in fact the latter), and the troops holding Shiloh's famous Hornets' Nest he attributes to the divisions of Prentiss, Wallace, and Sherman, rather than Prentiss, Wallace, and Hurlbut. Weigley reports the CSS Tennessee sunk at Mobile Bay, though in fact it surrendered (and remained afloat). These are minor errors, each one insignificant in itself, but disturbing in their number. Weigley also gives Confederate secretary of war James A. Seddon full credit for "persuading" Jefferson Davis to appoint Joseph E. Johnston to a western theater command in the fall of 1862 (p. 258), but in fact that appointment had already been discussed approvingly by Johnston and Seddon's predecessor, George W. Randolph, prior to the latter's resignation. And Weigley characterizes Braxton Bragg as Davis's "close friend" (p. 316); although a common error, the two were not really close at all and had been on hostile terms before the war.

While these errors are regrettable, they also point up the fact that Civil War history is an extremely specialized subfield of military history, with a vast literature of its own. As such it presents peculiar challenges for the general military historian who essays to write Civil War history. Nonetheless the field needs the keen insights afforded by the broader perspective that general military historians bring to their studies. Civil War specialists should therefore welcome Weigley's fascinating, profound, and thought-provoking look at that conflict.

STEVEN E. WOODWORTH
Texas Christian University