Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising of All (review)

156CIVIL WAR HISTORY such as Dennis Hanks, William Herndon, John G. Nicolay, and John M. Hay. He also includes Stephen Douglas, William Tecumseh Sherman, Elizabeth Keckley, Sojourner Truth, and Frederick Douglass. There are also pieces from foreign observers such as Ernest Duverger de Hauranne and Edward Dicey. One of the most intriguing quaUties of the portrait emerges as the story of Lincoln's sense of humor. Journalists and humorists together in one section present detail of Lincoln's wittiness and his reliance on humor in many social situations. Hölzer has had his own experiences as a journalist and is adept at assembling selections that demonstrate how humorous storytelling became Lincoln's key to survival as a public figure and a leader, especially during the grim years of war. While such a work can scarcely separate the myth of Lincoln from a more truthful picture of the human being he was, Lincoln As I Knew Him has less lofty goals, setting out to catch pubUc interest in the life and times of Lincoln. The book does this well. While much of the evidence is in a sense impressionistic , the editor has crafted a book accessible to the lay reader. Here the reader finds the contrasts of a man who lost touch with his father, who was awkward in physical presence and in courtship, who loved to be with his children, and who often read aloud from Macbeth to whomever would listen, yet whom writers lionize for the strength of his personality, for his wisdom and depth of his feelings and, especially, for his profound contributions to American history. Deborah Kuhn McGregor University of Illinois at Springfield Don Carlos Buell: Most Promising ofAll. By Stephen D. Engle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 476. $45.00.) Americans in 1 860 considered Don Carlos Buell one of the finest officers in the Old Army. His wide and successful experience had brought him prominence— as a combat officer in Mexico, as an organizer, as an administrator and as a disciplinarian. Highly professional, Buell brought an intensity of purpose to any assignment. The early months of the warjustified this reputation: he developed a splendid division in the Army of the Potomac, then moving west in November 1 861, he created and trained the impressive Army of the Ohio. His successes in 1 862 included the capture ofNashville and a timely arrival at Shiloh, not to speak ofhis defeat of Bragg's army at Perryville. Buell should have been one of the great military leaders of the Civil War, but as 1862 closed, so did Buell's military career. He failed, this man of promise. Why? This question prompted Stephen Engle to write Buell's biography. In the process he found himself drawn into an examination of larger and more compelling issues: civil-military tug-of-wars, command relationships, changing Union war aims and the shifting nature of the war in the West. Buell's career cannot be disengaged from these complex wider concerns. BOOK REVIEWS157 Thus a tension develops within the study. Engle tries to focus on the individual and does so splendidly in the early chapters. He takes unusual care in presenting Buell's boyhood and West Point days, and this attention is carried forward through the Old Army chapters. Once Buell takes command in Kentucky in November, 1861, however, the biographical narrative is submerged beneath the discussion of national war-making problems in light of Buell's perceived reluctance to make war, to use the machine he had created. Three chapters , for instance, are given overto the strategic considerations and debates during the winter of 1 86 1-62. The man, Don Carlos Buell, is lost. Perhaps this is inevitable in a careful biography of a figure so placid, but it seems that Engle grows weary of his self-absorbed, cast-iron figure, weighed down with an out-dated allegiance to limited war, an emphasis of preparation over movement, an insistence on a policy of conciliation toward the South, an inability to reconcile conduct of military operations with political necessity. Eventually Engle dismisses him as a glorified "adjutant general who enforced the rules of war" and who "failed...