Giants in Their Tall Black Hats: Essays on the Iron Brigade.

Giants in Their Tall Black Hats: Essays on the Iron Brigade. Edited by Alan T. Nolan and Sharon Eggleston Vipond. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 238. $27.95, ISBN 0-253-33457-8.)

Veteran Iron Brigade historian Alan T. Nolan (The Iron Brigade [New York, 1961]) has teamed up with Sharon Eggleston Vipond to edit a collection of essays whose expressed purpose is to "provide new perspectives on the exploits and nature of the Western men--the individual human beings--who formed this distinctive and distinguished Civil War brigade" (p. xi). The volume includes an interesting mixture of scholarly experts in the brigade's history and others whose literary pursuits have led them to explore the lives of the men who donned those unusually tall black hats.

The collection is bookended by two intriguing though peripheral stories relating to the brigade. Nolan examines John Brawner's unsuccessful bid to secure government compensation for damages to his farm, which, in part, the farmer attributed to the presence of the Iron Brigade. Richard Zeitlin examines the struggles of brigade veterans to enshrine the memory of their sacrifices in a study of flag preservation efforts in the postwar years.

Most of the remaining essays review the feelings and deeds of the unit during its active service in the Eastern Theater. Kent Gramm and D. Scott Hartwig take the brigade away from the fields of Second Manassas to the bloodbath that was Antietam. Gramm is at his perceptive best when he describes how the western men dealt with the terror of struggling up the slopes of South Mountain, while Hartwig chronicles the brigade's bloodiest day in the cornfield on McClellan's right wing. Complementing these specific studies is Alan and Maureen Gaff's useful analysis of the maturation of the Iron Brigade during the fall of 1862.

Marc and Beth Storch provide useful exposure to the brigade's limited but conspicuous action in the opening of General Joseph Hooker's Chancellorsville campaign. Vipond and Silas Felton pick up the story in the following year when the unit's unique western character had been eroded by serious campaign losses and was compelled to accept new regiments from eastern states. The brigade's new composition did not, however, spare them from the tragedies that characterized the Wilderness battles, as ably recounted by Vipond. Felton examines the final months of the war and describes the supportive role that Battery B of the Fourth U.S. Artillery played in the brigade's engagements.

Interspersed among these battle narratives are two essays on command leadership. Steven Wright reveals how both the men of the brigade and General John Gibbon took the measure of each other before forging an alliance of mutual respect. Lance Herdegen does much the same in his study of how General John Reynolds, the tragic hero of Gettysburg, was indebted to the equally heroic role played by the men with their tall black hats.

The strength of this volume is in its exposure of the soldiers' stories that add flesh and blood to the body of scholarship that already exists on the North's most fabled fighting unit. Much of what is revealed has been told before by veteran observers of the brigade's history, including a few of the volume's contributors like Nolan, Hartwig, Herdegen, and the Gaffs. Nevertheless, the story is told with verve and innovation, and it constitutes a useful contribution to the growing canon of literature on the subject.

THOMAS J. ROWLAND

University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh