Shiloh: Bloody April (review)

BOOK REVIEWS275 of his family. They presage his eventual resurgence of interest in the family's history that made this volume of correspondence and the restoration of Redcliffe realities. I am a little uneasy about the developing interpretations of the inadequacies of postbellum southern white men, in particular their supposed inability to deal with the postbellum order. David Donald has argued that the limited horizons of southerners is evidenced by the nearly "non-literate" (contrasted with the beautiful antebellum) collected letters of a Georgia family. Supporting this view Bleser's letters suggest that while the Hammond women were particularly heroic, the postbellum men were less than successful. Actually, the Hammond men continued to play prominent roles in their communities, and southern men of the postbellum era built the framework for southern society, part of which we still contend with today. If this volume of letters contains a flaw, it has nothing to do with the fine work that Carol Bleserhas done. Rather, ithas to do with the historical significance of the correspondence in general. The first section of the letters is rich in family detail as well as information about events of far wider significance. After this first section, the details of family life are only occasionally compelling, and events beyond the family circle are disappointingly few. After the Civil War the letters do little more than recount the trials and tribulations of a mildly interesting southern family, but I have no doubts of the significance of these letters through the Civil War. Orville Vernon Burton University of Illinois Shiloh: BloodyApril. By Wiley Sword. (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1974. Pp. xxiv, 519. $15.00.) A book review: late, but timely in the wake of new interest and exciting new Civil War publications just two decades after the beginnings of the Civil War Centennial, including William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York, 1981); and James Lee McDonough, Stones River— Bloody Winterin Tennessee (Knoxville, 1981), words of a reviewer begging indulgence for delaying the review of a fine book. Battle is the "extreme in chaos and disorder," writes Wiley Sword, "messy, inorganic and little coordinated." Only later, he says, "after the clerks have tidied up the records" and the participants have filed their "retrospect" reports, does the historian find the "sensible pattern" in what happened. This book by Sword, Shiloh: Bloody April, is not as much the "sensible pattern" as it is an exciting, well-written account of the details of the "desperate groping in the dark" that marks the course of battle at the bend of the Tennessee River in southern Tennessee in 276CIVIL WAR HISTORY April 1862. At a time when Civil War writing has probably already peaked and covered nearly every phase of that tragic conflict, Sword has written an unusual work somewhat narrowly focused upon a single battle of the Civil War. This book is a detailed account of the two days of bloodletting between the forces of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman against the Confederate army of Tennessee under Generals Albert S. Johnston and P. G. T. Beauregard, a story of meticulous detail, garnered diligently from the official sources and the personal memoirs of those engaged. Sword has succeeded magnificently in presenting much beyond the tactics and strategy of war but includes as well the sounds, the smells, the smoke, and the blood of the battlefield. Characterized by colorful descriptions of land ("On the Tennessee . . . Forests of tall, gray-barked oaks stood on the high banks in leaning groves") and water ("Each spring . . . the muddy, rain-swollen Tennessee River becomes a vast water highway . . . Racing through a picturesque land."), scenes of nature before and after the destructive forces of humankind changed the face of the world; descriptions of marching men, boring encampments, the cumbersome lumberings of wagons, caissons and mounted cannon; the plottings of roads and of railroads; the unpredictability of weather and terrain, the intimacies of wind and rain, Sword races with creative abandon but perceptive understanding toward the battlefield. His personalities of battle appear in sensitive cameos of the heroic and the craven, the foolhardy and the brave, the tragic and the pathetic sons of Adam thrust into conflict...