A Light and Uncertain Hold: A History of the Sixty-Sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

A Light and Uncertain Hold: A History of the Sixty-Sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry. By David T. Thackery. (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, c. 1999. Pp. xviii, 321. $35.00, ISBN 0-87338-609-4.)

The Sixty-sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, raised principally in Champaign County, fought in several of the Civil War's best-known battles, including Port Republic, Cedar Mountain, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Kennesaw Mountain, Atlanta, and Savannah. Although this regimental history focuses primarily on the Sixty-sixth's military affairs, David T. Thackery also endeavors to explain the war from the perspective of the common soldier. The soldiers in the field were well informed regarding matters on the home front, and their letters to friends, family, and the local Republican newspaper kept county residents current of the Sixty-sixth's activities on the war front. Despite this interaction the soldiers often felt that, according to one correspondent, "Folks at home does not know the sufferings of a soldier's life" (p. 209). Because officers and enlisted men had lived near one another before the war and expected to do so afterwards, the Sixty-sixth became a partial extension of Champaign County's rural and small-town life. Missing and frequently an object of the soldiers' scorn, however, were the county's Copperheads, who had concentrated largely in townships populated by migrants from southern states.

Some soldiers found that their military service helped them after the war when they sought public office. Fraternal bonds forged during the war continued as soldiers joined the Grand Army of the Republic and supported one another in their pursuit for pensions. Thackery also examines the soldiers' motivation for enlisting. He does not discount ideology's importance but finds that "peer pressure and local hoopla" played an equal, if not greater, role "in sending young men to the recruiting officer" (p. xiv). Thackery used his primary sources well, but when records are scarce for the Sixty-sixth he occasionally lapses into a narrative of the corps, division, or brigade to which the Sixty-sixth belonged or relies upon records from other regiments within the brigade.

Some academic historians will be disappointed by Thackery's inadequate use of secondary sources. His account of Champaign County's local history lacks depth, and he certainly could have strengthened his book's context by using some of the numerous community studies that historians have written in the last few decades. His cursory treatment of the antebellum period begins only in 1857. Thackery argues that antislavery sentiment was strong in some townships, but he measures local sentiment by merely citing reports of underground railroad activity. The book's weaknesses notwithstanding, the state of Civil War studies would be much improved if every regiment had a student as devoted to its history as David T. Thackery.

JOHN W. QUIST

Shippensburg University