Campbell Brown's Civil War: with Ewell and the Army of Northern Virginia.

Edited with an introduction by Terry L. Jones. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001. Pp. [xvi], 414. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2703-5.)

Campbell Brown was a southern aristocrat from the antebellum planter class, a proud example of the men who led the South into civil war in 1861. Born into a wealthy Tennessee family and educated at Georgetown College, he was also the cousin, stepson, and aide to one of the Confederacy's most famous (and controversial) generals, Richard S. Ewell. Those privileges endowed him with both the literary upbringing and the personal access that permitted him to write insightful commentary on the Confederate high command during the momentous years of the Civil War.

In this volume the veteran Civil War historian Terry L. Jones of the University of Louisiana at Monroe has gathered, for the first time, Brown's letters, memoranda, and diaries and woven them into a single coherent narrative. The work is admirably annotated by Jones, which helps provide a thorough explanation of the numerous events and personalities mentioned by Brown. In his introduction and concluding chapter, respectively, Jones provides the context for Brown's early development and postwar years; much of the latter period was taken up by a seemingly endless war of words to defend the reputation of General Ewell for his failure to take Cemetery Hill on the first day of the battle of Gettysburg.

Brown's description fluidly follows the fortunes of the Army of Northern Virginia from the battle of First Manassas in 1861 until just before the final surrender at Appomattox Court House in 1865, when he was taken prisoner and sent to a Union military prison in Massachusetts. In between, Brown frequently made incisive comments on the major military campaigns in the eastern theater of the war, including Shenandoah Valley, the Seven Days, Second Manassas, Gettysburg, and the wearing operations of 1864 that ended with the siege of Richmond. Brown kept a diary throughout the Gettysburg campaign that provides a particularly rich source of material on that still-controversial offensive into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863. The impression that comes through most clearly to this reviewer is that Brown and his extended family seemed to treat this extended foray into the North as more of a grand foraging and shopping expedition than a military offensive. In a lengthy appendix, Jones gives the verbatim text of Brown's 1863 pocket diary (along with other wartime memoranda), which provides a veritable shopping list for items that war and the Union naval blockade had denied even wealthy southerners: muslin, stockings, shoes, buttons, collars, handkerchiefs, toothbrushes, silk, and riding gloves seem to have all been in short supply to Confederates by 1863. In addition to dry goods purchased directly from "Yankeeland" merchants, Brown also noted that Ewell's soldiers had liberated thousands of cattle and more than ten thousand barrels of flour. It is enough to make one wonder how Lee's army managed to make it back to Virginia after Pickett's Charge.

JAMES K. HOGUE

University of North Carolina at Charlotte