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Williams among the Rebels: Southern Generalship in the Civil War Roger Spiller T. Harry Williams was a Union man, through and through. Although he spent the greater part of his career in the deepest South and had great understanding and sympathy for his adopted home, he never went native. In his sensibilities and in his values he remained the resolute Midwesterner. That was the vantage point from which he taught and wrote about the Civil War, and he did a great deal of both.1 The sport of sitting in judgment on generals is one of the oldest in literature , and Williams was temperamentally and intellectually well suited to play the game. The inherent drama of war as well as its far-reaching consequences ensure that those who direct war will stand before the court of history. Writers protect or attack the defendants’ reputation, assess their successes and failures, and assign them a place on a cosmic scale from incompetence to greatness—at least until the jury meets again. Then the general’s record will be argued over once more, his ranking reassessed, and, depending on the fashions of time and place, perhaps even be rehabilitated and advanced in rank. Keeping track of the ups and downs of generals’ reputations is a lesser sort of sport, diverting at least, enlightening at best. Far less often are the judges themselves called to account. They hand down their rulings with near impunity. Critics may question their arguments on the facts of the case or the logic and skill with which they advance them, but seldom are the judges’ own understanding of the subject examined. Yet if an injustice to the defendant is to be avoided, it seems only fair to ask what are the sources of verdicts so confidently delivered? What standards guide their deliberations? Are their judgments applied evenhandedly or tendentiously? What are the origins of their standards, and how do they evolve, if indeed they evolve at all? Roger Spiller 274 For the longest time, generals were judged only by the victories they won. How and why they won their victories were rarely addressed until the eighteenth century. During the Enlightenment, generalship was thought of as an art, one that like any art revealed techniques and skills that, properly studied, might guide future practitioners. At the same time, the persistence with which certain patterns of technique could be gleaned from historical accounts of wars suggested to some military writers that war, far from being an art, was in reality a science, one that could be conducted according to fixed, timeless principles. These two views clashed at the end of the eighteenth century and persisted throughout the nineteenth and, some say, even the twentieth century, and were best represented in the classic studies of Henri Jomini and Carl von Clausewitz. Many of those who produced these works on military science were professional soldiers who knew war firsthand; few of them were classically trained and drew on the historical record to justify their prejudices. Not until the last half of the nineteenth century did professional historians, inspired by the works of Leopold von Ranke, address the complexities of war with the intellectual rigor the subject demanded. Of these historians, the Prussian Hans Delbrück led the way in applying the “scientific method” to the study of the military past, the object of which was “clearing away the underbrush of legend which obscured historical truth.”2 American scholars did not take up the formal study of military history as the Europeans had until after World War I, leaving the field instead to talented writers, memoirists, and soldiers. From Appomattox until World War II, the most vigorous—and widely read—works of military history took the Civil War as their subject. Few of these books addressed the nation’s military past with the rigor that would have satisfied Delbrück, however. When Williams was doing his graduate work in the 1930s, the few academics interested in the critical, systematic analysis of war came from the emerging social sciences. The political scientists Quincy Wright of the University of Chicago, Alfred Vagts of Harvard, and Edward Mead Earle of Princeton were the most prominent of a small band who aimed to advance knowledge about the nature and conduct of war in general. For them, however, history served only as a starting point, a resource from which they hoped to deduce theoretical propositions and general principles that might be applied to future conflicts. Should novice scholars wish...

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