Armies in Gray: The Organizational History of the Confederate States Army in the Civil War by Dan C. Fullerton (review)

Reference works on Civil War armies are not generally light reading. From Ezra J. Warner's classics, Generals in Blue: Lives of the Union Commanders (Baton Rouge, 1964) and Generals in Gray: Lives of the Confederate Commanders (Baton Rouge, 1959), to more recent works like John H. Eicher and David J. Eicher's Civil War High Commands (Redwood City, Calif., 2001), data-driven studies of Civil War armies sometimes lack broad public appeal. Nevertheless, these studies provide valuable contributions for specialists and scholars seeking hard statistics on the military forces of that conflict. Military historian Dan C. Fullerton's ambitious Armies in Gray: The Organizational History of the Confederate States Army in the Civil War falls squarely within that tradition.

Armies in Gray is an enormous book, and even devoted students of the Civil War's military history may find it daunting to purchase and digest. Weighing in at over 1,300 pages, Fullerton's book presents the Confederate armies' structure and configuration and his best estimates of troop strength in detail. Fullerton organizes this material into three-month quarters spanning the entire course of the Civil War. His snapshot approach permits readers to chart the Confederate military's creation, development, deployment, and composition.

Fullerton's study contains very little actual narrative, instead relying on data for its structural integrity and overall utility. The insights readers may glean from it are potentially quite valuable. For instance, Fullerton disentangles the complex and bewildering institutional history of Confederate departments, theaters, areas of operation, and organization with admirable precision. This alone is a great service to historians, given the byzantine nature of the Confederate military bureaucracy.

Armies in Gray also provides important insights into the Confederate army's command structure and unit composition. Fullerton provides orders of battle by quarter, down to the regimental, battery, and, occasionally, battalion level, by army and department. Students of specific units or commands will no doubt rely on his work to track their subjects' location and deployment throughout the war.

Fullerton's troop strength estimates, the product of his immersion in Confederate army records, promise to be very useful for students of specific campaigns and battles. These estimates, while drawn from an exhaustive analysis of army records, should still be tempered by a measure of skepticism given the confusion within Confederate forces late in the war. Still, Fullerton presents scholars with the statistics necessary to chart the rise, fall, and evolution of Confederate forces across time and space, reducing or eliminating one of historians' more tedious chores in studying these organizations.

The book's only real drawbacks are its specialized nature and its high price point, both understandable given its focus and length. Fullerton's purpose in Armies in Gray is not to analyze or interpret the figures but to present them in an organized and accessible manner that will be useful for scholars and students in their own work. He succeeds admirably in that aim, and Armies in Gray should prove to be an essential reference for serious historians of the Confederate armies.