Here Come the Rebels! (review)

BOOK REVIEWS187 for another, the style is not as lucid or crisp as it might be. Some of the technical language and procedure should have been simplified, and a table of Confederate conscription laws for ready reference would have made the narrative easier to follow. Still this is a good litde book, and if it can stimulate interest and research in the overlooked field of Civil War conscription it will have performed a signal service. Eugene C. Murdock Marietta College Here Come the Rebels! By Wilbur Sturtevant Nye. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965. Pp. xvi, 412. $7.95.) The initial reaction upon encountering this book might easily be: "Oh no! Not another campaign compendium that missed the Centennial!" A dozen pages should suffice, however, to convince the reader that this is no ordinary straggler from the ranks of an army in retreat. For Colonel Nye, combining prodigious research, a sharp eye for terrain, a mastery of detail, sound military judgment and a vigorous prose that is sure to engage the reader, has produced an unusual book about a neglected phase of the war. Instead of following the customary practice of treating all maneuvers in the Gettysburg campaign as a brief prelude to a dramatic battle, this author writes of a variety of movements—not all of them known nor until now understood—as a military invasion. For him the high watermark obviously is not a cluster of trees still standing on Cemetery Ridge, but the site of an obscure encounter between some Virginia cavalry and units of the New York State National Guard at Oyster Point, almost within spitting distance of the Harrisburg defenses. Here Come the Rebels commences as a routine campaign study. Colonel Nye has some interesting things to say about the quality of military intelligence in 1863 and how this should have been evaluated by the Union commanders. His descriptions of the cavalry battles that took place between the Blue Ridge and the Bull Run mountains are sufficiently detailed to delight any buff: the account of Brandy Station necessarily is brief, but Aldie, Middleburg and Upperville are re-created in sufficient detail to document the emergence of a new type of cavalry leader in the Army of the Potomac. Ewell's capture of Winchester is presented as a model military operation; Stephenson's Depot, on the other hand, loses none of its confusion although the battle is reported in elaborate detail. Once Lee's troops splash across the Potomac, however, this ceases to be a campaign history and becomes rather a narrative of the invasion. The Army of the Potomac evacuates the pages and deteriorates into a series of blurred blue columns inching hesitantly northward; Meade relieves Hooker without any fanfare or explanation and his generalship receives no attention whatever. (Meade, in fact, is mentioned on only five 188CIVIL WAR history pages in the entire volume.) The reader's attention is fixed instead upon the measures taken by the Pennsylvania authorities to resist invasion—the efforts of General Couch and Governor Curtin to raise and equip forces to meet the emergency, the planning and construction of the Harrisburg defenses, and the flow of militia, national guard and even the Invalid Corps to the threatened area. The story henceforth becomes a series of incidents involving all kinds of people caught up in this invasion and the impact of the invasion upon the inhabitants of Pennsylvania. In this context the battle of Gettysburg is only an epilogue. As a career officer and onetime chief of the Army's Historical Division in Europe, Colonel Nye is eminendy qualified to pass judgment on military decisions and actions at every level. He is clearly impressed with Stuart and advances some good arguments for the conduct of the Confederate cavalry commander in the Gettysburg campaign. He has some rather harsh comments on Stuart's counterpart, Pleasanton, which, on the basis of evidence presented in this book, would appear to be justified. He is able to reconstruct the thoughts of the chief actors and therefore to explain the basis for their actions, and the book does not exist that offers a more meticulous attempt to correlate what happened then with what remains...