The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command (review)

280CIVIL WAR HISTORY Mathew Woodruff was a frontiersman by adoption, "intelligent but not well-educated," and a devotee of the Union. As a sergeant in the 21st Missouri Infantry, he participated in all of the major campaigns of the western theater. In June, 1865, following a furlough home, this veteran of twenty-two rejoined his regiment for occupational duty along the Gulf coast of Mississippi and Alabama. The dark and lanky sergeant began a diary as he returned to duty. The journal spans the remaining period of 1865 only, yet it is a unique and revealing chronicle of life in the victorious Federal forces. Skimpy entries notwithstanding, A Union Soldier in the Land of the Vanquished is a veritable indictment of misconduct against the occupying Army. Woodruff made numerous references to general lawlessness among the soldiers, to desertions, beatings, and widespread drunkenness . At one point he wrote: "Boys are all on a protracted drunk & have been all day Capt. included." He considered southerners as incorrigibles proverbially guüty of "barefaced Treason uttered in the strongest terms," and deserving nothing less than the hangman's noose. Professor Boney's annotations are far more voluminous than the diary itself . A full index enriches the whole. As a final note of interest: on June 3, 1866, with but weeks left to serve, Woodruff himself deserted from the army. One of the most original and respected units of the Civil War was the midwestern brigade of Colonel John T. Wilder. Mounted infantrymen armed (at their own expense) with the revolutionary Spencer Repeating Rifle, these troops went far in neutralizing Confederate calvary superiority in the West. At Hoover's Gap, Chickamauga, Chattanooga , Atlanta and Selma, Wüder's "Lightning Brigade" demonstrated a new concept of warfare that permanently altered cavalry tactics. Glenn Sunderland's study is factual but unexciting. The text is more concerned with movements and battles than with the human element of war. An imcomplete bibliography reflects for the most part reliance on well-known printed sources. It is useful to have this detailed chronology of the Lightning Brigade. Yet if as much attention had been given to emotions and feelings as to actions and fighting, the result would have been a better tribute to one of the North's proudest units. James I. Robertson, Jr. Virginia Polytechnic Institute The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command. By Edwin B. Coddington . (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968. Pp. 866. $15.00.) More books have been written on the battle of Gettysburg than on any other military operation in American history. The chronicles of the Pennsylvania campaign started coming out during and immediately after the three-day battle of July, 1863, and have been pouring forth steadily ever since. book reviews281 It was thought by many that a standard account that would hold up through the years had finaUy been attained with the appearance in 1897 of John M. Vanderslice's Gettysburg Then and Now. Although a useful and detailed story, Vanderslice's was topped in 1913 with the publication of Jesse Bowman Young's The Battle of Gettysburg: A Comprehensive Narrative. As good as Young's work was, it, too, failed to remain the definitive one for posterity; for, in 1958, appeared Glenn Tucker's excellent study, High Tide at Gettysburg, which many Civü War specialists expected long to remain the unexcelled, authoritative work. Tucker's account is still a good one, but now it, too, has been improved upon as the single-most detailed and comprehensive study with the appearance of the book here under review, written by the late Edwin B. Coddington, The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command —truly a masterly effort resulting from many years of travel, research , and writing. Of the 821 pages of text in Coddington's volume, 221 are notes ( located , unfortunately, in the back of the book). And these notes indicate the impressive depth and breadth of the author's research. Little has escaped his attention, and—as, for example, in the papers of John B. Bachelder—he has actually been able to ferret out new and little known or used primary sources. This helped Coddington to write not only the most thorough account between two...