The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry.

The Struggle for the Life of the Republic: A Civil War Narrative by Brevet Major Charles Dana Miller, 76th Ohio Volunteer Infantry. Edited by Steward Bennett and Barbara Tillery. (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xxiv, 301. $34.00, ISBN 0-87338-785-6.)

"The Supply for Tomorrow Must Not Fail": The Civil War of Captain Simon Perkins Jr., a Union Quartermaster. By Lenette S. Taylor. (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 264. $35.00, ISBN 0-87338-783-X.)

The library of monographs and first-person accounts about the Civil War continues to grow. The books reviewed here contain the stories of two Ohio volunteers whose personal archives, only recently discovered, have inspired attractively published volumes.

The eight boxes with more than twenty thousand items that provide the foundation for Lenette S. Taylor's now-published dissertation "came to light only in January 1990," when a relative of Simon Perkins Jr. "donated them to the Summit County Historical Society" (p. xi). These papers of a Union quartermaster tell of the relatively unexamined work of the men who kept the army clothed, fed, and moving. Many of the federal records about logistics and supply were destroyed in the 1870s, after the Treasury Department completed its final auditing of accounts. Thus Perkins's papers provide "an excellent vantage point for studying the supply bureau and its officers as it, and they, actually functioned outside the confines of [Montgomery] Meigs's office in Washington City" (p. xii).

Taylor provides a highly detailed narrative about Perkins's work as a quartermaster. Even though he was only twenty-three years old in 1862, he had over ten years of business experience, honed in a wealthy, entrepreneurial family, and he was up to the challenge of heavy responsibilities. Week in and week out, he managed the delivery of supplies (shoes, boots, stockings, drawers, shirts, horses, fodder, wagons, food, whiskey)--with the help of hundreds of laborers and often through precarious transportation routes (river, rail, and overland wagon)--to soldiers on the front lines. Financing was also a frequent challenge, as the government did much of its business on credit, sometimes delaying payment for goods and services for more than a year.

Suspicions about graft and corruption inevitably followed quartermasters--one reason Perkins kept meticulous records. More than once his accounts were challenged. But Taylor makes a convincing case for Perkins's integrity. After the war he became a wealthy man, with business interests in banking, manufacturing, and real estate. But it was not so much from ill-gotten gain as from family connections and the experience he acquired during the war.

The narrative of Charles Dana Miller's experiences in the Seventy-sixth Ohio Volunteer Infantry provides more drama. Discovered and coedited by Barbara Tillery, Miller's great-granddaughter, this is a first-person narrative of a soldier who saw action at Shiloh, Fort Donelson, Vicksburg, and elsewhere. Tillery has family roots in Ohio but was raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. She writes that in 1972, when she used one chapter for a high school history presentation, she did not have much enthusiasm for "a 'Yankee' narrative" (p. ix). Then in 1994, when she reread the narrative, she concluded that Miller's story was "a rare treasure that needed to be made accessible to others who may benefit from it" (p. ix). Subsequently she met Stewart Bennett, who agreed to work with her in editing and annotating Charles Dana Miller's story.

It is not clear when Miller wrote his narrative. His editors think it could have been at the end of the 1870s or in the 1880s. Although Miller's motivation included providing a record of his regiment, his approach is personal. He remembered the moment he became addicted to tobacco (p. 47). He recalled seeing General Ulysses S. Grant, "wearing a "slouched black felt hat and smok[ing] a cigar," "plainly dressed with hardly a mark of his high rank." The general was talking to a soldier "about the horses and General Grant seemed to adapt himself readily to that kind of talk" (p. 89). Miller also noted battles, seeing friends die, sleeping soaking wet, and talking in a bantering way with Rebel prisoners on their way north.

Neither of these books will change any interpretations or provide missing details about military campaigns. They do, however, provide fans and scholars of Ohio and Civil War history with interesting stories.

ANDREW J. CARLSON

Capital University