This Cruel War: The Civil War Letters of Grant and Malinda Taylor, 1862-1865. (Book Reviews).

This Cruel War: The Civil War Letters of Grant and Malinda Taylor, 1862--1865. Edited by Ann K. Blomquist and Robert A. Taylor. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2000. Pp. xxii, 348. $32.95, ISBN 0-86554654-1.)

Editors Blomquist and Taylor have compiled a compelling collection of letters written between a west central Alabama couple separated by reluctant duty to a newly formed Confederate nation. Following Taylor's two previously edited firsthand accounts of the war, This Cruel War offers an important look at one southern family's personal, patriotic, emotional, and spiritual evolution during the Civil War.

Neither a slaveholder nor a secessionist, Grant Taylor joined the 40th Alabama in early 1862 solely to avoid the ignominy of conscription, leaving his wife Malinda to tend the family farm and raise their four small children alone. Concerned for his family's welfare, he soon began a correspondence with his wife that lasted throughout the war. Anyone who doubts the impact news from home had on the morale of the frontline soldier need only examine Taylor's growing frustration as he tries to guide Malinda through a move to a new home, failing crops, unscrupulous neighbors, greedy substitutes, the birth of a child, the burning of the family kitchen, and the death of friends and family--all from hundreds of miles away. Combined with his own declining health and growing malnutrition, Taylor gradually slips from uneasy acceptance of his military service in 1862 to depressed introspection over his own fate and that of the Confederacy by 1865.

To their credit, the editors admirably balance the integrity of the original text with the requirements of the modern reader, retaining original spelling and sentence structure while adding basic punctuation and paragraphing to ease readability. That restraint and focus, however, does not extend to the footnoting, which wavers uneasily between military history and genealogy. Rather than using notes to aid the letters in bridging the gap between battle-field and home front, the editors either ignore, poorly notate, or erroneously identify many home-front issues. For example, when Malinda attempts to have her name added to the county's poor rolls, no explanation of poor rolls, their purpose, or their operation is given. Instead, the editors tend to restrict their comments to a military account that the documents strain to support. As a result, when letters contain little or no battlefield news, footnotes turn from annotating battles and troop movements to genealogy and needlessly repetitive identifications of people and places. Even where the two spheres begin to overlap, as with Confederate conscription and substitution policies, footnoting is either misleading or erroneous, such as the assertion that the 1863 Confederate Enrollment Act called on states to raise local defense troops from "men not conscripted" rather than from men previously not eligible for conscription (p. 191).

Footnoting issues aside, This Cruel War offers important insights into the relationship between battlefield and home front, husband and wife, father and family during the Civil War that deserve further study.