Sterling Price: Portrait of a Southerner (review)

72CIVIL WAR HISTORY Affair, the peace proposals of 1862-63, and the Mexican intervention. Throughout, Carroll's treatment of Mercier is both sympathetic and critical. He faults him for narrowly viewing America in economic terms and indicates that Mercier's reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation revealed a greater fear of the economic repercussions of freedom and an underlying racism than contempt for slavery. On the other hand, he argues that Mercier did not actually call for recognition of the Confederacy in March 1861, defends him for taking the Richmond trip, and demonstrates that Mercier originally opposed French involvement in Mexico. Joining Blumenthal and Case and Spencer, Carroll shows that the threat of French intervention in the Civil War was not as great as has been supposed. However, in stressing that Mercier, in March, 1861, only wanted discretionary authority to recognize the Confederacy at the right moment, Carroll virtually disguises the fact that he favored recognition, a point which he admits in the footnotes. Mercier's plan for a common market was both more naive and more clever than Carroll indicates. Nor does the author question, as Blumenthal has done, whether France's economic troubles were due solely to the Civil War. Finally, Carroll overstates the accuracy and objectivity of Mercier's despatches, especially regarding the Lincoln Administration. Overall, Carroll has written a sound, intelligent and useful study of Mercier's career in Washington. He has done extensive research in manuscript collections in the United States and France. The footnotes, conveniently located at the bottom of the page, are sometimes burdened with trivia or contain information that belongs in the text. In focusing on Mercier in America, Carroll's account complements the broader and more detailed treatment by Lynn Case and Warren Spencer in The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy, and it is obvious that all three historians have benefited from one another's work. Noel H. Pugach University of New Mexico Sterling Price: Portrait of a Southerner. By Robert E. Shalhope. (Columbia : University of Missouri Press, 1971. Pp. xii, 311. $12.00.) Sterling Price has long stood as one of the more intriguing of the many controversial figures within Confederate ranks. A non-West Pointer who achieved considerable acclaim during 1861 with his exploits at Wilson's Creek and Lexington, he did not fit the mold of what a "modern majorgeneral " should be by the terms of Jefferson Davis and others within the Confederate hierarchy. With outspoken audacity he contended that Missouri was essential to the Confederate cause and that with proper backing from her authorities he could secure the state and a majority of its citizenry. That support never came. Ben McCulloch and others who sought to work with Price deplored his lack of military discipline and BOOK REVIEWS73 propriety. Further, the Confederate leaders, with their defensive strategy , could never really fathom the importance of seizing the initiative that far north. Hence, Price found it impossible to capitalize effectively on his twin victories to secure the desired end of controlling his home state. By the end of 1861 he had been forced out of Missouri, and following Pea Ridge he saw his state completely abandoned by Confederate strategists except as an area for guerrilla recruiters and raiders. Following an unsuccessful struggle, in which he actively participated, to secure for him the trans-Mississippi command, Price reluctantly agreed to serve east of the Mississippi. Many, but not all of his Missouri troops went with him. His subsequent career was anything but distinguished . Yet he remained a storm center of controversy because of the reputation gained by his earlier exploits. Ultimately his career ended in fiasco during the 1864 raid back into Missouri—a movement intended merely to serve as a diversionary threat to draw troops away from General Sherman. The Shalhope study is the second on Price to appear within the past two years. Unlike that of Albert Castel, which dealt only with Price's Civil War military career, Shalhope's work is a full-fledged biography which seeks to understand the Missourian's motivations and actions against his pre-war background. Fully half of the volume deals with that earlier career. This reveals Price as Virginian, born...