The Ewing Family Civil War Letters (review)

book reviews167 cruel war is over, set type as well as ever" (1 10). In sprite of Robert T. Cole's caveat " I have come to the conclusion that history is nothing more than a 'Blue Book' of lies anyhow," he is determined to correct a number of published conclusions he knows to be wrong because he realized that "there will soon be none of us left to contradict the many errors committed." Cole himself discounts the full quota of "exaggeration" by Gen. Joseph Hooker about the Confederate losses at the battle of Wauhatchie in the Chattanooga campaign. Hooker claimed enemy losses of 1,500, whereas Cole states that the losses of all categories in the four Confederate brigades involved was 418. Cole's book is extremely readable and is very useful in evoking the daily life of the soldier in the Army of Northern Virginia. This work should be included in college and university libraries. The most disappointing part of the book is its maps. Not only are the two maps inadequate for this type of book, but they are placed inconveniently at the beginning. More maps should have been included and near the appropriate text. Detailed maps of the Second Manassas/Sharpsburg, Chancellorsville/ Gettysburg, and theWildemess/Petersburg/Appomattox campaigns would have been helpful to the reader. Patrick B. Harris, Jr. Troy State University The Ewing Family Civil War Letters. Edited by John T. Greene. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1994. Pp. xxxiii, 239. $24.95.) John T. Greene obtained these letters from his elderly neighbors, Gladys Milner and James Harvey Sackett, descendants of two Civil War soldiers, George H. Ewing and his cousin James Ewing, of Stockbridge, Michigan. These men, who served in different Michigan regiments, mainly in the West, met up once, during the siege of Vicksburg, when their two regiments temporarily joined U. S. Grant's enlarged army. A few months later, on November 29, 1 863, George, the author of the bulk of these letters, was killed when a Confederate shell fell directly on his rifle pit; James survived, making it to second lieutenant during a year-long postwar encampment at Camden, Arkansas. On the whole the letters are unremarkable. George Ewing hated Copperheads and hoped they would get drafted and perhaps killed, and he rather relished shooting at "the Graybacks," often counting the number of shots he had gotten off during a skirmish, divided into blind shots and those made at a specific target. As was true of most of his comrades, he was always hungry and therefore enjoyed foraging for enemy livestock. He was devoid ofboth religion and much in the way of political ideology. George Ewing's civil war remained local in conception. He relayed information about other Stockbridge boys in his units, and he was quite interested in hearing gossip from home, although he was something of a prude concerning l68CIVIL WAR HISTORY the girls. He also shared the time-honored foot soldier's resentment for the brass, in fact noting in one letter, "I saw Gen Grant to day he loocks no smarter then eny other man" (82). Although James considered the possibility of advancing his career by serving as an officer in a black regiment when such units were created in 1863, George remained a committed aversive racist. Referring to an abolitionist back in Stockbridge, George insisted, "i wish Baker was down her. he wood get sick ofthe Niger. ... I hate them wors that I do a rebel a good deal. I all moste want to shoot them when I see them darn them, they are the free men now and we are the slaves" (55). Negrophobia was George's only ideological obsession— mainly he wanted to survive and to go back to farming in Michigan, where he had his parents invest his army pay in acreage. Generally speaking, the content ofthese letters is quite thin, comprising enough, perhaps, for part of a scholarly article. The phonetic spelling, as always, is intriguing for what it reveals about the sounds of spoken language in rural midwestem America 130 years ago. Retaining the original spellings was a useful editorial decision, particularly as they are accompanied by an extensive glossary. John...