Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River. (Book Reviews).

Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River. By Earl J. Hess. Great Campaigns of the Civil War. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, c. 2000. Pp. xvi, 252. $32.00, ISBN 0-8032-2380-3.)

Many Civil War campaign histories can be classified in the "drum and trumpets" category: that is, books that focus on famous leaders and battles with little political, social, or cultural context. Such books frequently drown readers in trivial military minutia with no real sense of the war's larger complex questions and lasting legacy. Recently, however, the University of Nebraska Press began publishing a series of Civil War campaign histories that tries to be different, mixing traditional narrative with the most current scholarship on war and politics. These two new works by Earl J. Hess and Anne J. Bailey, the third and fourth books in the series, cover key engagements in the western theater in 1862 and 1864. Both demonstrate not only how good campaign histories can be, but also how fresh and insightful integrated military history should be.

Earl J. Hess's Banners to the Breeze covers campaigns in Kentucky, northern Mississippi, and Tennessee in the summer, fall, and winter of 1862-63. These were critical months for the Confederacy, as its armies in the East and the West embarked northward on invasions. During the first part of the year a string of western defeats had stunned and disappointed southerners. By the summer, Confederates hoped to regain momentum in their quest for independence with aggressive advances into the upper South. In the East, Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia struck out beyond Virginia into Maryland to replenish his army and stir Confederate sentiment in that state. In the West, Confederates tried to regain territory lost to the Union and claim Kentucky for the South. Instead, defeat followed defeat, and Hess concludes: "Never again would [the Confederate army] have such a good chance to save the West" (p. 176).

Hess devotes half his book to the Kentucky campaign, a campaign that the author affirms was the longest of the entire war and resulted in a Confederate retreat to Tennessee. He then shifts his focus to Mississippi, where armies under Ulysses S. Grant and William S. Rosecrans battled Confederate forces led by Earl Van Dorn and Sterling Price. Confederate losses at Iuka and especially Cornith cast a shadow on southerners anxious for good news to counter Lee's retreat from Maryland. Cornith also set the stage for Grant's advance down the Mississippi. The final third of Banners to the Breeze is set in late December 1862, with Lincoln about to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. Hess describes how Rosecrans's blood-soaked victory at Stones River countered the gloomy aftermath northerners felt after Fredericksburg, but for the Confederacy, this defeat only compounded the sense of impending doom.

While Hess offers sound assessments of all the essential figures in these campaigns, his treatment of Braxton Bragg is especially worth noting. Hess praises Bragg's administrative skills and work ethic and observes that at the start of the Kentucky campaign, Bragg was bold and ambitious. But after Perryville and his resulting failure to hold central Kentucky, Bragg lost his nerve and never again regained it in battle. Still, Hess observes that Bragg should not be faulted for failing to keep what the Confederacy never really possessed--that is, Kentucky itself.

Anne J. Bailey's Chessboard of War moves ahead two years to focus on fighting in Georgia and Tennessee. Bailey, who shares the editorship of this series with Brooks D. Simpson, pairs two campaigns not normally examined together: Sherman's March to the Sea and Hood's advance into Tennessee. Her writing is crisp and clear as she considers questions of military strategy and leadership and issues of politics and race. She offers unblinking critiques of William T. Sherman, George H. Thomas, and John Bell Hood, as well as riveting stories of suffering civilians, desperate southern troops, and vengeful Federals.

Unlike Hess, Bailey does not see the Confederacy as doomed in the West after 1862. She notes that Lincoln worried as late as September 1864 that a military defeat in Georgia would cost him the presidential election and bolster the Peace Democrats. In Virginia, Lee and Grant were at a stalemate, and a Union defeat in the West might have been enough to convince northerners, tired and weary of war, to give up this long, costly struggle. Confederates too might have been bolstered by victories in Georgia and Tennessee. Instead, the Confederacy experienced a series of demoralizing setbacks when Hood ventured northwest into Tennessee and Sherman went southwest, journeying toward Savannah. These two simultaneous campaigns left the Army of Tennessee nearly destroyed and the Georgia countryside deeply scarred, its civilians shaken and bitter.

Bailey includes an extensive discussion of the role of black troops and slaves. She records the anger Confederate soldiers exhibited when they realized they faced former slaves in battle, and the stinging resentment white Union officers and men felt toward black troops and refugees. She also describes the stern resolve of black soldiers to prove themselves in combat, despite the terrible losses they endured the few times they did participate in battle. At Nashville one Alabama officer witnessed the slaughter of black troops mowed down unmercifully by Confederates and recalled, "[T]hey came only to die" (p. 160).

These volumes are remarkably concise, running between 200 and 250 pages. Yet they are also expansive, with multiple maps and illustrations, complete endnotes, indexes, and up-to-date bibliographical essays. Maybe this series signals the end of narrow and vapid battle histories and the beginning of a new trend toward careful analysis, broad coverage, and fine writing. It is enough to make one want to beat a drum and blow a trumpet.

LESLEY J. GORDON
University of Akron