General Leonidas Polk, C.S.A.: The Fighting Bishop (review)

106C I VIL WA R HI S TO R Y who makes thorough use of several hitherto untapped manuscript sources for military accounts, especially the diary of Sergeant Oscar J. Downs, relies too heavily upon weak secondary materiak for his early chapters and faik to exploit John P. Dyer's Galhnt Hood, still one of the finest studies of the gaunt Texan. And unfortunately there are several spelling errors and index omissions which detract from Simpson's spirited narrative. On the whole, however, The Stonewall Brigade and Gaines' Mill to Appomattox are sound works and may open the door to further investigation of important units that served in the Civil War. Ralph A. Wooster Lamar State College of Technology General Leónidas Polk, C.S.A.: The Fighting Bishop. By Joseph H. Parks. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962. Pp. x, 408. $7.50.) Judged by antebellum standards, Leónidas Polk was a remarkably versatile man—planter, bkhop, and general. He practiced all of the most honored Southern professions except law and politics. Almost immediately after graduation from West Point in 1827 he resigned his commksion to prepare for the Epkcopal ministry. From 1833 until the Civil War he was both a preacher and a planter, first in Tennessee and then in Louisiana. In 1841 he became the first Episcopal bishop of Louisiana. Appointed major general in the Confederate army in 1861 and lieutenant general a year later, Polk commanded a corps in most of the Western campaigns of the Civil War. He was killed in action at Pine Mountain, Georgia, in 1864. Professor Parks's new addition to the "Southern Biography Series" is less impressive than most of the recent one-volume studies of Confederate commanders . General Leónidas Polk includes both too much and too little about Polk. The author, more an apologist than a biographer, seems overwhelmed and captured by Polk's own correspondence. Long and colorless quotations, frequently more than half a page in length, indicate his unwillingness to distinguish between the trivial and the significant. Thus blinded, he sees Polk as a "competent" corps commander and "a powerful influence in the development of Chrktianity and education," who compensated for hk ignorance of military science, theology, and canon law by charm and kindness. The most unsatkfactory chapters are those on Polk's military career. They are inadequate as biography because Parks neglects his subject to write detailed descriptions of army operations, leaving some of the most important questions about Polk himself unanswered. Why was he appointed major general? He knew almost nothing about strategy or tactics; his only military experience prior to 1861 had been four years at West Point some two decades before. Was Polk given his high rank because he and Jefferson Davis were friends? Did Davis actually believe Polk had latent military talent? Parks never says; in fact, he never even mentions that Davis and Polk attended West Point at the same time. As history, the military chapters are inadequate BOOK REVIEWS107 because they present nothing new on the Army of Tennessee or the Western campaigns. Parks ignores the latest research, and repeats many of the mistakes and faulty interpretations he made in his biography of E. Kirby Smith. If he had relied less on the words of Polk and his supporters, Professor Parks, might have written a better biography. He could have found evidence that his high opinion of Polk's military ability was not shared by many of the bishop-general's contemporaries. St. John R. Liddell, for example, considered Polk pompous, theatrical, and incompetent. Bragg, who thought Polk had been a bishop too long to be a subordinate, wrote Jefferson Davk that "General Polk . . . k unfitted for executing the orders of others. He will convince himself his own views are better, and will follow them without reflecting on the consequences." And one of Hardee's staff, D. W. Yandell, wrote of Polk: He is great at talk, but is monstrous uncertain. I saw enough of . . . [him] at Shiloh & Perryville to cause me to place no great confidence in him. He will prevaricate. He did say he was going to do this and going to do that, but the old...