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

Book Reviews123 Waterloo in The Charterhouse of Parma; there are passages in Major Small's book reminiscent of that. It is interesting to note Major Small's estimates of his superiors-^not their müitary capabilities so much as their relationships with the men they led. In particular the Major did not care for O. O. Howard, whüe he much admired Richard Coulter. In his summation he declares devastatingly that "Howard, cold, selfish, and inordinately vain, would go to a soldier's tent and pray with him, and perhaps write a letter home for him; but Coulter would swear at a man, send him something to eat, and permit him, when exhausted, to ride Coulter's own horse." Major SmaU's diary, entitled The Road to Richmond, and edited by Harold Adams Small, his son, was originaUy published by the University of California Press in 1939, and the present edition, in paperback, appeared in 1957. It can be recommended heartily; Civü War reading is seldom better. A diary the Major kept whüe a prisoner of war is also included; its limited effect when compared with the memoir itself is testimony to the limitations of diaries. Louts D. Rubin, Jr. Hollins CoUege, Virginia. A Rebel War Clerk's Diary. By John B. Jones. Edited by Earl Schenck Miers. (NewYork: Sagamore Press. 1958. Pp. xiv, 545. $7.50.) as a senior clerk to aU five C.S.A. Secretaries of War (Walker, Benjamin, Randolph, Seddon, and Breckenridge), John Beauchamp Jones, ex-editor of die Southern Monitor, made good use of his unique vantage point and his newsman's training to compfle a day-by-day journal of the war years, official and private, in Richmond. Published in two volumes by Lippincott in 1866, Jones's classic now sells for about thirty dollars—when it can be found. A second edition, published by the Old Hickory Bookshop in 1935, was edited by Howard Swiggett, who added historical notes and an exceUent introduction . Now Earl Schenck Miers—author of recent books about Sherman, Grant, Lee, and Lincoln—has pared away much of Jones's repetitious trivia and presents a 200,000-word, single-volume edition for the general reader. With an air of scholarly amusement, Miers adds a few, too few, editorial notes [in brackets within the text] to correct Jones' factual errors and to point out his more important misinterpretations, but unfortunately there are no ellipses to show where there have been deletions from the complete edition, and of course nothing could be done about Jones's pedestrian style. It is probably unfair to blame Jones's lackluster prose for not sharing the grace of Mary Boykin Chesnut's urbane Diary from Dixie, for the war clerk's dutiful aim was to be factual about the bushels of officiai papers that crossed his desk. But if he plods, Jones is usually temperate and accurate in reporting, from his limited viewpoint, the whole C.S.A. scene and effort—and this is his great value today. When he is not temperate, when he boasts and waves the flag, he is pathetic. But when he is not accurate, he is still interesting, 124CIVIL W AR HISTORY very much so, for then there is in the reader's mind a dramatic tension between Jones's partisan or mistaken conclusions and our own present knowledge of thefacts. After ChancellorsviUe, for example, when the suspenseful reader knows that Lee is swinging north with 80,000 and that Stuart is darting into Pennsylvania, Jones grinds out local trivia, unaware that epic Gettysburg is imminent. Lee sends not one line to the Secretary of War for over two weeks, and not until July 5 does Richmond learn even that there has been a battle. Then the omniscient reader watches, alternately impatient and sympathetic, as Jones strains to make out the meaning of his ragged news. As the withdrawing Lee remains silent and the dispatches from Vicksburg are sickeningly clear, the significance of that catastrophic week, east and west, finaUy begins to jeU for the war clerk. Thereafter his dogged, credulous hopes and glum yearnings are painful to see. Even a year after Gettysburg, for example, Jones writes with...

pdf

Share