This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga (review)

BOOK REVIEWS269 efforts to be a vital part of the Union war effort: his job was to help sustain the will of those at home. Today's reader beware. Editors Emil and Ruth Rosenblatt first brought Fisk's letters to the public under the title Anti-Rebel in a well-hewn private edition published in 1983. The University of Kansas Press is to be praised for recognizing a jewel when they see one, and for bringing this important book to a wider audience. The Brewster and Fisk letters complement each other perfectly; both make for excellent reading. Brewster's will lend themselves to broader application by historians, and they will henceforth stand as one of the best of all sources for looking inside the mind of the common soldier. Fisk's highly quotable letters will be invaluable for any study of the men or movements of the Army of the Potomac. For sheer description, they are unsurpassed. John Hennessy Frederick, Maryland This Terrible Sound: The Battle ofChickamauga. By Peter Cozzens. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 675. $39.95.) Although it was the largest battle in the western theater in terms of troops engaged and casualties, the Battle ofChickamauga has received far less study than similar eastern battles or even smaller western battles like Shiloh. Perhaps the omission stems from the fact that the Confederate victors achieved only a barren and temporary success. Perhaps the two opposing commanders, William S. Rosecrans and Braxton Bragg, were too unappealing to catch the fancy of citizens and scholars alike. Whatever the reason, Chickamauga fell into obscurity once the veterans passed from the scene. For years the only modern full-length treatment of the battle was Glenn Tucker's Chickamauga: Bloody Battle in the West (1961). Tucker was a master storyteller whose forte was the human-interest vignette rather than the close analysis of complex events and contradictory sources. For those readers content with the general outline of events spiced with countless personal stories of men at war, Tucker was sufficient; for those seeking a better understanding of how men made war in the tangled woods along Chickamauga Creek, Tucker's work was frustrating at best. Nevertheless, for thirty years Glenn Tucker held the Chickamauga field unchallenged. Peter Cozzens, a Foreign Service officer and author of an earlier study of Stones River, now offers This Terrible Sound: The Battle of Chickamauga, handsomely produced by the University of Illinois Press. Like Tucker, Cozzens devotes relatively little space to the maneuvering of the opposing armies prior to the final clash on September 18-20, 1863. Instead, he spends the bulk of the book in a brigade and regimental-level account of the action that swirled through the forest and fields southeast of Chattanooga, Tennessee. With the combined armies numbering over 120,000 combatants, there are thousands of amusing, poignant, and tragic personal stories to be found in the 270CIVIL WAR HISTORY primary source material on Chickamauga. Like Tucker before him, Cozzens is attracted to these stories and tells hundreds of them—so many, in fact, that the vignettes often shoulder aside the analysis of the action. The focus of the book thus becomes simply the personal triumphs and tragedies of men contending madly in a blood-soaked forest for little more than personal survival. There is high drama here, but little context or larger significance; the human story is everything. This Terrible Sound improves upon its predecessor in several respects. First, Cozzens includes fewer irrelevant digressions than Tucker. Second, although his sequencing of nearly simultaneous events sometimes falters, Cozzens presents a generally more coherent account of the action than does Tucker. Finally, Cozzens's massive research effort far surpasses Tucker's. Nevertheless, This Terrible Sound is not the last word on Chickamauga. Cozzens found many new sources, but he failed to investigate fully the pivotal event of the battle, the disastrous withdrawal of Thomas Wood's Federal division from the line on September 20. Nor, for that matter, did he discover the reason for Confederate general Sterling Wood's hasty departure from the Army of Tennessee following the battle. Even more troubling, the text is littered with errors of fact, not all...