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The Journal of Military History 67.4 (2003) 1296-1297



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Staff Officers in Gray: A Biographical Register of the Staff Officers in the Army of Northern Virginia. By Robert E. L. Krick. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8078-2788-6. Photographs. Appendixes. Pp. xiv, 406. $45.00.

Staff officers, whose work in many ways provides the means by which armies operate, are often given little credit by their contemporaries and even less attention by military historians. Typical Civil War staff officers were often barely tolerated by combat officers who resented taking orders from them or dealing with their regulations. Even the rank and file generally blamed them for real or imagined shortages or defects in rations, clothing, supplies, and ammunition, or for delays in pay. Staff officers were sometimes derisively called "bombproofs" and accused of taking an easy, or even profitable, [End Page 1296] position in contrast to the men who actually did the fighting. Adjutants and aides assigned to generals were the most numerous and best-known staff officers, but commissaries, engineers, judges, ordnance officers, quartermasters, and signal officers were just as vital to the success or failure of units at every level.

Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, by any standard the best-known Confederate army, included almost 2,300 staff officers of all grades from lieutenant to colonel, many of whom also served as company or field officers either before or after holding staff positions. This reference work is based on many years of painstaking research, the vast majority of it in unpublished manuscripts, official documents, local records, and other obscure sources. Many readers familiar with the army will recognize the names and careers of Campbell Brown, John Esten Cooke, Henry Kyd Douglas, Jedediah Hotchkiss, McHenry Howard, Henry B. McClellan, Charles Marshall, Moxley Sorrel, and Walter H. Taylor, but this book also chronicles the careers and lives of hundreds of officers little known even to the most seasoned expert on the army.

Robert E. L. Krick's superb introduction opens with a brief discussion of the ways in which staff functions evolved in the Confederate army, then analyzes the major categories of staff officers in the Army of Northern Virginia and the experiences of men in each category. The main body of the work is devoted to brief entries providing details of each man's Confederate career and in most cases his birth and death dates, prewar and postwar careers, and place of burial. Numerous sketches also include references to any known personal papers or publications, and several contain pithy quotations from contemporaries describing an individual as "the finest looking man I ever saw," "deservedly liked by all," "useless but highly ornamental," or "lively and ridiculous." Two useful appendixes list more than 3,000 staff officers in other Confederate armies and list staff officers in the Army of Northern Virginia arranged by the general on whose staff they served.

Staff Officers in Gray is an essential reference and a worthy companion to such standards as Ezra J. Warner's Generals in Gray, William C. Davis and Julie Hoffman's six-volume The Confederate General, Bruce S. Allardice's More Generals in Gray, and Robert K. Krick's Lee's Colonels. All those who read about, research, and write about the Army of Northern Virginia should welcome this impressive achievement.



J. Tracy Power
South Carolina Department of Archives and History
Columbia, South Carolina

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