In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Book Reviews113 World War saw naval bombardment as an indispensable preliminary to invasion . The blockade was now almost 100 per cent successful. Both sides had had their heroes and their villains. Gallantry and sympathy are easier to assign to the South than to the North. Certainly most of the blockade runners were brave and dedicated men. As for the profiteers, we have had them in every war; they need no epitaph. On the part of the North the tenacity of the blockaders and the daring and will to risk of Admiral Porter are pre-eminent. Mr. Carse conveys the excitement, the hazard, the monotony, the privation, and the derring-do of the participants effectively. Romantic figures like Rebel Rose and Belle Boyd, Confederate women spies, the feeling of individual participants like the young Confederate officer, James Morris Morgan, and Colonel Lamb's wife, and pictures of life in the Confederacy and in the British ports fill the book. The flavor of the book is slightìy Southern, but I suspect this is because it is easier to write about Count Von Luckner or the Virginian, Captain Wilkinson, than it is to arouse much enthusiasm for the feelings of the skipper of a blockading vessel who might be at sea sixty days in the worst kind ofweather without a single call to general quarters. Our sympathies are generally with the fox. However, the book does convey very vividly, through the eyes of the participants, as well as by conventional historical description, the nature of this aspect of the Civü War. I may add that I found Mr. Carse's style a little too sparse for my tastes. Too many sentences, one after another, ran along subject-verb-object, subject-verb-object, subjectverb -object. But in its description of individual engagements as well as in its appraisal of the tactics of both sides, the book represents a valuable addition to our knowledge of that war which has now usurped in the minds of thepublic the interest once accorded to the Revolutionary War, and in his painstaking attention to detafl Mr. Carse has given us a graphic picture of one of the major causes of the final defeat of the Confederacy. Samuel M. Fahr Iowa City, Iowa. A. P. HiU: Lee's Forgotten General. By William Woods Hassler. (Richmond : Garrett and Massie. 1957. Pp. xiv, 249. $3.95.) a. p. htll is not a forgotten general. Neglected by biographers, yes; but the man who lived in the dying words of Lee and Jackson has never been forgotten. When HiU's monument was dedicated in 1892, only Lee, Jackson, and Albert Sidney Johnston had been so honored; and visitors to Battle Abbey all view the Hoffbauer mural where Hill stands at Lee's right hand, the most conspicuous figure in the group next to Lee himself. Yet this is HiU's first biography. The Dictionary of American Biography allots approximately nine pages to Lee, three each to Jackson and Stuart, two to Longstreet, one and one-half to A. P. Hill; and in his Foreword to Lee's Lieutenants Douglas Freeman writes four and one-half pages and mentions sixteen names (Ashby, Trimble, Winder, Smith, Magruder, Pender among 114CIVIL WAR history them) before he mentions A. P. Hill. Confederate lore has built up Lee, Jackson , and Stuart, whüe Hill has slipped, possibly, I hazard, because his statue is located out on Hermitage Road, while the Big Three dominate Monument Avenue. Lee, of course, has become the Father Image of the Confederacy. Hill lived longer, fought more, and died as heroically as either Jackson or Stuart. Also, he outranked Stuart and succeeded Jackson. It is high time he had a biography. One difficulty has been the lack of documents. Somebody needs to find in some Culpepper attic a battered old trunk of A. P. Hill papers. We have no edition of his letters, an almost necessary first step toward an adequate biography. Mr. Hassler has done his best with what is avaüable in official documents, old newspapers, materials in the coUections of the Virginia Historical Society and the Confederate Museum; and he makes good use of published Civü War history. Still, we need...

pdf

Share