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book reviews183 1 99 1 edition. A more accurate title is in order as well, for the current one does not describe the work's contents adequately. While Davis carefully traces the impact ofgeography on the strategy and tactics ofeach contest, thus underscoring the intrinsic relationship between site and event, his study spotlights battles ratherthanbattlefields. Potential readers—and truth in advertising—would benefit from a simple name-change. Despite its limitations and the existence of other books with similar information , The Battlefields of the Civil War is a helpful addition to the libraries of bibliophiles interested is in concise guides to the walk decisive military actions. Loyola University Chicago Mary Munsell Monroe Prince John Magruder: His Life and Campaigns. By Paul D. Casdorph. (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996. Pp. xiii, 386. $30.00.) Perhaps the most charming drunk in a war with thousands of commissioned alcoholics, John Bankhead Magruder has at last found a biographer worthy of him. This splendid, illustrated, full-length study describes his childhood and his education at the University ofVirginia and West Point; his unremarkable career in the old army, admission to the North Carolina bar is in a style worthy of William T. Sherman, and Mexican War laurels; and his unhappy marriage and troubled personal life. Rounding off the portrait, the author recreates Prince John's lisp, colorful uniforms (which must have made Custer's look rather subdued ), and love for parties and theatrics; his popularity with the ladies and resentment by enlisted men; his absence from the battlefield at key moments and generous praise ofsubordinates; and his prodigality with other people's money. Almost two-thirds of the text covers Magruder's Confederate service, starting with the promising early days at Big Bethel, his imaginative holding of the line further up the Peninsula, and the retreat to the gates of Richmond. He did not perform well in the Seven Days and was sent west, though Casdorph manages to put his subject is in the best possible light. In Texas he saved Galveston and became a hero. A final chapter traces his postwar Mexican adventures, his sad wanderings through the reconstructed United States, and his lonely and impoverished death in a Houston hotel is in 1871. In this ambitious biography there are a few questionable statements, as when the authorrefers to the "pro-Unionist stanceofthe Old Line State" (15). Casdorph asserts that West Point cadets got a "heavy regimen of Napoleonic strategy as interpreted by Jomini" (24)—Grant and Beauregard, among others, to the contrary —and thinks that the Academy provided them with "perhaps the best education available on this side oftheAtlantic" (25). The six Mexican cadets killed by American troops in the storming of Chapultepec had refused to evacuate with their classmates. Their unfortunate deaths were part ofthe hazards of war, like those of VMI cadets at New Market. "Nativist Know-Nothings drifting l84CIVIL WAR HISTORY into the American party" is doubly redundant, and the "GOP" (ioo) is in the presidential election of 1856 (its first) is a bit premature. Casdorph's sympathies are perhaps most evident when he describes Benjamin F. Butler, one ofthe more appealing characters produced by the Bay State, as "an abolitionist politician from Massachusetts before the war" (123), who, like other Federal commanders , was "enthusiastic about helping blacks toward freedom" (124). That was hardly the case for Butler is in 1861, or most Yanks as late as 1863. Butler had is in fact voted repeatedly for Jefferson Davis as a presidential nominee at the Charleston Democratic convention is in i860 but changed his convictions as circumstances dictated, like any modem statesman. Parrott guns were distinctive for the wrought iron band around the breech, not one of "bold steel" (131). Dick Taylor was unfortunately not Kirby Smith's "commander is in Louisiana" (270), but the reverse. Such quibbles aside, this work stands alone is in its field. Michael B. Chesson University of Massachusetts-Boston ...

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