Stand in the Day of Battle: Volume 2 of The Imperiled Union, 1861-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS269 comes through in these letters. Yet, Child frequently displayed her sense of humor and keen wit. The editors selected the letters for this volume well, and they did an exemplary job in the editing process. Many portions of the letters were wisely excluded to avoid repetition. Child's spelling, abbreviations, italicizations , and punctuation have been retained, to give the reader a text as close to the original as possible. They have also provided editorial notes, a chronology, and a preface briefly summarizing Child's career and ideas. The letters are arranged in chronological order and placed in chapters covering several years at a time. Each chapter begins with biographical information on Child corresponding to the time and letters under consideration. Preceding a letter or group of letters, the editors offer brief explanations relating to the correspondence. Footnotes appear throughout the volume, providing additional information on the letters. Although no letters to Child were included (many are no longer extant), judicious use of relevant portions of the remaining ones is made in the commentary. The editors noted where the original text of each document is located. Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817-1880 is an excellent example of how such document collections should be edited. This is a beautifully executed book, giving many scholars access to the correspondence of an influential American woman. It can be recommended to students of nineteenth-century reform movements, women's history, and socialintellectual history. Donna M. DeBlasio Youngstown State University Stand in the Day of Battle: Volume 2 of The Imperiled Union, 1861-1865. By William C. Davis. (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1983. Pp. xix, 359. $19.95.) In the second volume of his Civil War trilogy, taking its title from a passage in The Book of Common Prayer, William C. Davis covers the comparatively brief but crowded period from the latter part of 1862 to the end of 1863. Again, as in the first volume, he leads into certain phases of the subject from the roles and viewpoints of selected participants. Thus he uses John C. Breckinridge to introduce the Confederate campaign culminating at Stones River; Owen Lovejoy for emancipation and the 1862 election; Ambrose E. Burnside for Fredericksburg; Joseph Hooker for Chancellorsville and Gettysburg; Ulysses S. Grant for Vicksburg; Charles Francis Adams for Union diplomacy; and Edmund Kirby-Smith (Davis hyphenates the name, though Smith himself and his contemporaries did not) for the fighting in the trans-Mississippi West. Between accounts of campaigns and battles the author intersperses chapters on politics, economic developments, and social change and conflict in both North and South. 270civil war history On the whole the presentation is fresh and vivid, though at times sloppy. For most of the sloppiness the copyeditor rather than the author should doubtless be blamed—as, for example, in allowing the nonword fastly to get by. The book can be expected to appeal to many Civil War buffs, especially those who are relatively new to the field. They probably will not mind the stylistic lapses, the superficiality of some of the economic and social analysis, or the occasional errors or oversights. Clement L. Vallandigham and most of his fellow Copperheads did not say "let the South go," as Davis relates. Instead, they advocated peace with union. The "widely repeated story" was not that prostitutes came to be called "hookers" because of General Hooker's "frequent liaisons with them." It was, rather, that they got the name because of his toleration of brothels for his soldiers. Either way, the story is fictitious. In fact, the slang term hooker for prostitute was in circulation before the war, and it derived from the Hook, a notorious whorehouse district of New York City. Richard N. Current University of North Carolina at Greensboro Soldiering: The CivilWarDiary of Rice C. Bull, 123rd New York VolunteerInfantry . Edited by K. Jack Bauer. (San Rafael, California: Presidio Press, 1977. Pp. x, 259. $12.95.) Ten Years in the Saddle: The Memoirof William Woods Averell. Edited by Edward K. Eckert and Nicholas J. Amato. (San Rafael, California: Presidio Press, 1978. Pp. xiv, 443. $16.95.) Beginning even before the end of the Civil War, countless soldiers' diaries , letters, and recollections...