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Book Reviews235 The Civil War At Sea. Volume II, The River War, March, 1862-July, 1863. By Virgil Carrington Jones. Foreword by Admiral E. M. Eller, Director of Naval History. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1961. Pp. xx, 490. $6.50.) for the general reader who has some knowledge of Farragut but has never heard of Duncan, Stevenson, and Mitchell (the Confederate commanders below New Orleans); who knows the name of Raphael Semmes, but not that of James D. Bullock, who outmaneuvered United States diplomats abroad in order to build and get possession ol the Alabama, the Confederate States' greatest commerce raider; for the reader who is generally acquainted with the Monitor and the Merrimack, but who has not hitherto encountered anything about the hospital ships that plied the rivers of tidewater Virginia or about the contractors with wires and little battery boxes whose business it was to blow up and remove the obstructions that blocked certain Confederate rivers; for such readers an opportunity is now offered once again to traverse main highways somewhat rapidly in order to take a number of interesting excursions into secondary creeks, rivers, and harbors of Civil War naval history. The River War, the second in a three-volume work entided The Civil War At Sea, covers the crucial middle period of the Civil War from March, 1862, to August, 1863. Virgil Carrington Jones has chosen to work on a mural-size canvas in which the chief centers of activity are the MonitorMerrimack battie and the New Orleans and Vicksburg campaigns. Although The River War covers the opening of the Mississippi and sundry occurrences on East coast rivers, it frequendy digresses into such non-fluvial arenas as Charleston Harbor for the duel between Admiral Du Font's ironclad batdeships and Fort Sumter, and out upon the high seas for certain experiences of the commerce raiders, John N. Maffitt of the Florida and Semmes of the Alabama. Mr. Jones carefully ran through the file of the New York Herald for March, 1862-1863. He has examined a mass of letters, diaries, and journals. He has leafed through several volumes of the official Navy records. From these, as well as secondary sources, he has extracted all kinds of interesting narratives that show how the participants in the war felt at the time. In stringing this material together, his prime concern has been to produce a work that is generally sound as history, but above all, that is readable. Mr. Jones's emphasis on Island No. 10, rather than on Forts Henry and Donelson, might trouble historians. The author might have shown how Farragut's actual formation below New Orleans differed from his preliminary plan. At another point he might have clarified his story by explaining that the U.S.S. Montauk was a later-edition Ericsson ironclad monitor. But on the whole, the professional historian as well as the general reader will find this book rewarding. Richard S. West, Jr. U.S. Naval Academy ...

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