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Reviewed by:
  • Field Armies and Fortification in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861–1864
  • Edward Hagerman
Field Armies and Fortification in the Civil War: The Eastern Campaigns, 1861–1864. By Earl J. Hess. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8078-2931-5. Index. Pp. xix, 428. $45.00.

This is the first of three projected volumes in which Earl Hess will cover the history of field armies and fortification in the eastern theater of the Civil War. Hess's detailed account emphasizes field fortification while covering other categories of entrenchment as they are employed by field armies. Among other sources, the author refers to the valuable and largely unpublished studies by National Park Service historians to accompany his own extensive walking of the ground. For reasons not explained he makes sparse use of the Official Records of the Civil War. As it stands, this volume marks the beginning of the most complete record we are likely to see of how the eastern field armies used fortification.

Beyond the physical record, Hess develops several themes and theses on the use of field fortification. This space does not allow for summary let alone comment across the range of issues engaged, beyond saying that the author adds to, while not resolving, debates that will continue to engage historians. To address perhaps his major thesis, Hess concludes that the principal factor causing the expanded and then habitual use of field fortification was the shock of combat between armies in continuing and close contact. This debate introduces logical and methodological questions with respect to sufficient and necessary cause. Can a dominant factor be singled out exclusive of other factors? Or does the problem call for the analysis of a configuration of interacting factors kicking in from the antebellum period through the course of the Civil War? Hess's vigorous attempt to negate rifled infantry weapons as a factor in the evolution of field fortifications in the Civil War dovetails with Paddy Griffith's attempt to dismiss them as a factor in the breakdown of the open and direct frontal assault. Allowing that other factors contributed both to the breakdown of the frontal assault and the development of field fortification, and that Hess, Griffith, and the reviewer have contributed to their analysis, the attempt to exclude rifled infantry weapons in any configuration explaining either development remains unconvincing. Allowing for the mixed messages of antebellum thought, the firepower of rifled weapons was one of several factors weighed in a strain which saw the balance shifting from the open frontal assault to the entrenched field of battle. Again allowing for other factors, it is difficult to dismiss, as Hess does, the convergence of the general introduction of the rifled musket and greatly expanded entrenchment midway through the war. For instance, Hess in concluding that armies increasingly were driven to entrench owing to the shock of battle and to their close and continuing proximity cannot preclude rifled infantry weapons contributing to this process. In reading Hess as in reading Griffith, I have the same uneasy feeling that on this and related issues we are arguing at cross purposes when we have the stuff of synthesis. Perhaps we would benefit by sitting on a parapet together seeking common ground.

Edward Hagerman
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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