Brigadier General John D. Imboden: Confederate Commander in the Shenandoah (review)

General John D. Imboden served as an officer in his native Virginia for most of the Civil War, but he never performed at center stage. Of the major battles in the theater, he fought only at Gettysburg, and there late and away from the main action. Imboden's war unfolded primarily in the Shenandoah Valley, his life-long home, and in the adjacent mountain country. At Piedmont and New Market, and in Jackson's 1862 campaign and Early's 1864 campaign, the general played secondary roles, sometimes with moderate distinction.

Coverage of Imboden's superintendence of prisons, including Andersonville, in the deep South in 1865, makes one of this biography's more significant segments. Tucker adduces evidence of the general's strivings to cope with the staggering impossibilities inherent in caring for prisoners in a country unraveling at a breakneck pace. Imboden's correspondence with camp commander George C. Gibbs, which Tucker did not see, affords further evidence of that doomed, albeit well-intentioned, impulse—and also of Imboden's vain determination to return to his command "in the depths of the mountains" of Virginia.

On 26 April 1865, Imboden wrote of his hopes to escape to Cuba. He quickly repented of the emigration impulse and began a postwar career back in Virginia's Valley. The ex-general focused considerable energy on railroad matters, and especially on the exploitation of mineral resources. He wrote extensively postwar, but his most interesting veterans' affair was surviving a violent physical attack by General Bradley T. Johnson of Maryland in a train station in 1875.

John Imboden's life and career warrant full biographical treatment, and Tucker has done a solid job in some areas. Enough personal papers survive to allow creation of a viable sketch, unveiled with efficient prose. Tucker successfully navigates the tangled web of siblings, wives (he had five), and children, and unravels the business ventures and political initiatives that occupied Imboden before 1861 and after 1865.

The military Imboden does not emerge nearly as clearly as the civilian. Unfortunately, his military manuscripts went up in smoke in the spring of 1865. "I have not one scrap of 'war papers' in the world," he wrote to a fellow Confederate general after the war. Given that lacuna, diligent research in the rich resources of the National Archives should have been the paramount priority. The biography reflects no such material—no service records, no correspondence with the Secretary of War or the Adjutant & Inspector General, no inspection reports. The author also missed some of Imboden's own military narratives in war-date newspapers, in postwar serials, and in historical compendia.

The result is a military biography missing much of its substance. The chapter on the 1864 Valley Campaign cites about 200 sources in 82 notes. Only four manuscripts appear in all that number. Imboden's Civil War as narrated in this book is reconstituted almost entirely from printed material, much of it secondary in nature.

John Imboden's interesting life and career make for good biography. Rooting out a stronger array of manuscript sources would have made this a substantially better volume.