Wandering to Glory: Confederate Veterans Remember Evans' Brigade.

Wandering to Glory: Confederate Veterans Remember Evans' Brigade. Edited by DeWitt Boyd Stone Jr. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2002. Pp. xx, 331. $34.95, ISBN 1-57003-433-8.)

As in most entities with a consciously hierarchical organization, reputation was a pervasive force in the Confederate army. Units and officers who fought aggressively or who skillfully managed their political situation were usually assured promotion and assignment to the most critical fronts, while those with poor reputations often landed in the most unappealing posts. For most of the war, Brigadier General Nathan George Evans's brigade of South Carolinians seems to have been among the latter. Using extended excerpts from diaries, letters, and postwar reminiscences, chemist and science educator Dewitt Boyd Stone Jr. has compiled an interesting account of the so-called "Tramp Brigade" (p. xvii).

Organized in the summer of 1862, Evans's brigade marched against John Pope and George B. McClellan, fought at Jackson, Mississippi, with Joseph E. Johnston, spent a season along the Carolina coast, and ended the war in Petersburg's trenches. The book's wartime sources suggest a unit in discord. Evans garnered little respect from subordinates or superiors and may have had a drinking problem. Three of the brigade's commanders were court-martialed. P. G. T. Beauregard, citing the brigade's "evident lack of discipline and instruction," sought to replace Evans (p. 145). After a review in March 1863, W. H. C. Whiting described the brigade as "in worse condition than any I have ever seen" (p. 274). Only in the war's last year did the unit find combat glory, suffering half of all Confederate casualties at the Battle of the Crater and playing a key part in the April 1865 assault on Fort Stedman.

Stone meticulously documents the unit's movements and the biographical details of individual members, and he supplements his descriptions with many fine maps and photographs. In a book built so heavily on reminiscences, however, Stone devotes surprisingly little space to the (often striking) differences between the wartime and postwar accounts or to the circumstances of postwar politics and society that shaped veteran's recollections. These accounts, mostly produced between the late 1880s and 1916, sought to vindicate the brigade's mixed reputation by framing its history in the familiar language of Lost Cause mythology. Veterans recalled United States soldiers as "fighting for dollars and cents" rather than out of patriotic duty, contrasted the "courage and sacrifice" of the South against the North's "overwhelming numbers and powerful material resources," and celebrated the "faithful Negroes" owned by the brigade's members while condemning the "division of drunken Negroes" they battled during the Crater's chaotic hours (pp. 12, 116, 196, 216).

Despite the limits of its postwar analysis, Stone's volume is a useful case study and documentary source for exploring the issues raised in works such as J. Tracy Power's Lee's Miserables (Chapel Hill, 1998), Judith N. McArthur and Orville Vernon Burton's A Gentleman and an Officer (New York, 1996), Charles Royster's The Destructive War (New York, 1991), and Gaines M. Foster's Ghosts of the Confederacy (New York, 1987).

LLOYD BENSON

Furman University