The Battle Rages Higher: The Union's Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry.

The Battle Rages Higher: The Union's Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry. By Kirk C. Jenkins. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, c. 2003. Pp. xx, 452. $35.00, ISBN 0-8131-2281-3.)

Regimental history is one of historical literature's most enduring forms. In addition to drama it offers opportunity for defining the complexities of war and culture in terms of a few soldiers' experiences. Although this possibility is envisioned more often than accomplished, the potential can be realized, as demonstrated by Kirk C. Jenkins in The Battle Rages Higher: The Union's Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry, which is only the second modern, serious monograph on a Kentucky Union regiment. Jenkins uses intensive research to inform this sophisticated social and political case study and enlivens the monograph with accounts of the unit's campaigns and battles.

This blend of saga and demographics chronicling the Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry is an intriguing study of the bluecoats from this proslavery, Unionist border state. Recruited mostly from the counties south and east of Louisville, the nine hundred officers and men also included three companies of Irish and German immigrants recruitted in Louisville and the Cincinnati region. These foreign-born soldiers were thirty years old on average and formed "a strong backbone for the battle line ... grown men who would be unlikely to panic under the pressure of battle" (p. xvi). Younger comrades needed their examples of strength and character, for through bloodbaths like Perryville, Stones River, Chickamauga, and Resaca the Fifteenth Kentucky Infantry incurred the highest casualty rate in the Fourteenth Army Corps. Indeed, "only thirty-two regiments in the entire Union army lost a greater percentage of their men in battle" (p. xiii).

In addition to stolid performances in combat, these Kentuckians displayed their home state's fervent and "almost mystical attachment to the Union as a source of order and benign authority," a heritage that came out of frontier experiences and Whiggish nationalism (p. xiv). However, Kentucky contained more slaveholders in 1860 than any of the states except Virginia and Georgia and boasted a higher concentration of slaveholders than any other border state. It is not surprising, then, that when Abraham Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, most of the officers of the Fifteenth tendered their resignations. Jenkins neither excuses nor engages in presentist condemnation of such racism. Rather he shows that the regiment's Democratic leanings and officer squabbles over rank also figured in the protest against the proclamation.

Jenkins's battle descriptions are meticulous but are based largely on information the Fifteenth had at the time. This perspective approximates the chaos and tunnel vision of an infantryman's world and requires considerable background knowledge on the part of the reader. An extensive biographical roster describing each man in the unit completes this sound, multidimensional interpretation of a military community. The Battle Rages Higher merits wide notice.

JAMES RUSSELL HARRIS

Kentucky Historical Society