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BOOK REVIEWS317 not know, for instance, that the home of General Stephen D. Lee could be found in Columbus, Mississippi, should we desire that information without having to peruse the entire volume. Mrs. Cromie's tendency to include unrelated facts sometimes to the exclusion of more pertinent information is the only other major fault of the book. Why, for instance, is the Fetterman Massacre Monument which commemorates an 1866 Indian fight near Sheridan, Wyoming, included? Why the Gothenburg, Nebraska, Pony Express station and many others equally without Civil War connection? While errors of omission and fact are noticeable one should not be picayunish with a work of this sort. Forgiveness should be allowed those errors in direct proportion to the number of facts involved, for it would be well nigh impossible to have a factually correct book of this nature. Mrs. Cromie is the first to admit this and makes no alibis in advance. Some of the entries are delightful. Mrs. Cromie has made an effort to include, here and there, bits of information from contemporary letters and diaries. For instance, New York's Ehnira prison is brought vividly to life by quoting an escaped South Carolinian who later wrote: I ran until exhausted, then stopped and looked back. There lay the prison under its bright lights, white with tents . . . [the] pickets, calmly walking their beat. Is it to be wondered at that I should give vent to my joy in unseemly ways, jumping up and cracking my heels together, throwing my hat in the air? ... It was all I could do to keep from shouting "The Bonnie Blue Flag" at the top of my voice. The Tour Guide should be a welcome addition to any Civil War library. As for myself, it will repose in the glove compartment of our family automobile the next time vacation days roll around. State by state and town by town we can quickly tell what should be seen before driving on through. Joseph W. Snell Kansas State Historical Society Hayes of the Twenty-Third: The Civil War Volunteer Officer. By T. Harry Williams. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965. Pp. xü, 324 + vi, $5.95.) By ordinary standards Rutherford B. Hayes had a quiet uninteresting Civil War, one hardly worthy of a fun-scale study. For brief periods Hayes led brigades and once a division in action, but he spent most of the war with the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, a regiment that only participated in two engagements of any significance. He did become President of the United States after the conflict but so did Abraham Lincoln after the Black Hawk War—yet no one has attempted a book of over three hundred pages on Lincoln as a company commander. T. Harry Williams is one of the few historians who could take Hayes's Civil War career and make it exciting and significant. His study of the 23rd Ohio as a typical regiment is marked by intelligence and imagination . Williams evokes a mood better than anyone writing history today, and 318CIVIL WAR HISTORY his descriptions of the West Virginia countryside in which the 23rd spent most of the war are superb. His analysis of guerrilla warfare in the mountains is extremely good. Further, Williams handles capably that pitfall of so many historians, the might-have-been. Not much happened in West Virginia, but it could have been an important even crucial, theater if there had been more intelligent leadership in the War Department. Williams spells this out carefully, then drops the subject His treatment is an object lesson in dealing with the "ifs" of history. Not so his discussion of the officer corps of the Civil War armies. In a chapter entitled "The Good Colonels," Williams analyzes the selection of company, regimental, and brigade officers, and their abilities. He contends that the methods used—political appointment or election by the troops—were the only ones available, the only ones that could get the necessary officers in a hurry. That most officers were amateurs, and many incompetent, he admits, but there were not enough West Pointers available to do the job and it was thus fatuous to argue that regular army officers should have...

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