A Tour Guide to the Civil War (review)

316CIVIL WAB HISTOBT The last thirty-five years of Howard's life were an anti-climax. To the end, he remained the good Christian. His great faith in the potential of aD people found expression and lasting memorials in his enormous effort on behalf of Negro education while commissioner, his life-time service to Howard University, and in the establishment during the 1890*8 of Lincoln Memorial University to provide higher education for the mountain folk of Kentucky and Tennessee. From young manhood to old age Howard's sensitive New England conscience had tried to keep humble a proud spirit that yearned for public esteem. It seems harsh that his biographer should likewise hold him accountable to other-worldly standards and apologize for the "unpleasant trait of desire for recognition." This austerity can be pardoned the scholar who in this volume has firmly established General Howard's integrity and his outstanding service to the nation. LaWanda Cox Hunter College A Tour Guide to the Civil War. By Alice Hamilton Cromie. (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965. Pp. xxv, 372. $7.95 cloth; $2.95 paper.) The second playing of the Civil War, this time produced in wide screen and living color but still a pale reenactment of the original, is finally over. The battlefields of Shiloh, Vicksburg, and Pea Ridge have returned again to their verdant tranquility. Appomattox Court House no longer resounds to the hurried footsteps of conquered and conqueror. Once more the "cast of thousands" has returned to peaceful labors and the bones of Union and Confederate dead he in the blissful solitude they deserve. Within the last four years millions of words have been written about the Civil War. Motion pictures, television plays, local pageants, and poorly restaged battles have delved into every corner of that ill-bred conflict When a new volume on the Civil War appears persons are wont to say, "Who needs it?" In the case of Mrs. Cromie's Tour Guide to the Civil War we amateurs, who evince only a normal amount of interest in the struggle, need it. Before 1961 there were those of us who thought of the conflict as merely a series of complicated maneuvers progressing nowhere but somehow ending with reunion of the nation. Now, four years later, we still may not know the grand strategy of the war or why it was fought or who really won it, but we have become a little more aware of some of the names and places that figured so prominently a hundred years ago. Among my clan are many who like to visit these scenes of great adventure . For us the Tour Guide is ideal Arranged by states, then alphabetically by town and site, the Guide offers an easy reference to things to see. To set the scene each state is introduced by a concise generalization of its history. One wishes, however, that an index had been included for we who are not experts (or Civil War nuts, as Mrs. Cromie's husband puts it) would BOOK REVIEWS317 not know, for instance, that the home of General Stephen D. Lee could be found in Columbus, Mississippi, should we desire that information without having to peruse the entire volume. Mrs. Cromie's tendency to include unrelated facts sometimes to the exclusion of more pertinent information is the only other major fault of the book. Why, for instance, is the Fetterman Massacre Monument which commemorates an 1866 Indian fight near Sheridan, Wyoming, included? Why the Gothenburg, Nebraska, Pony Express station and many others equally without Civil War connection? While errors of omission and fact are noticeable one should not be picayunish with a work of this sort. Forgiveness should be allowed those errors in direct proportion to the number of facts involved, for it would be well nigh impossible to have a factually correct book of this nature. Mrs. Cromie is the first to admit this and makes no alibis in advance. Some of the entries are delightful. Mrs. Cromie has made an effort to include, here and there, bits of information from contemporary letters and diaries. For instance, New York's Ehnira prison is brought vividly to life by quoting an escaped South...