The Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates after West Point (review)

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 to grow as a commander." No matter. Stephen Engle has filled a void in the literature of the American Civil War, not only with the life and career of Buell, which has been largely ignored, but with his willingness to deal critically, even severely, with his subject , to explore how and why the war changed, and to explain why figures such as Buell early on were rendered obsolete. Engle's scholarship is enviable, revealing prodigious research and close analysis. The bibUography itself could stand alone as a valuable addition to one's library. The result is an important work that has a place of honor on my bookshelf. Nat C. Hughes Jr. Chattanooga, Tennessee 77ie· Class of 1861: Custer, Ames, and Their Classmates after West Point. By Ralph Kirshner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Pp. xix, 224. $34-95·) Union general Gouverneur K. Warren saw one of the young graduates of the West Point class of 1861 in a "desperate scene" at Gettysburg and said, "There stood the impersonation of valor and heroic beauty." The same could be said of many of the graduates of that remarkable class. And Ralph Kirshner does indeed say it—and says it very well. Or rather, he lets them say it, for this, he tells us, is not so much a group biography as a group autobiography. Kirshner has mined a mother lode of original sources—memoirs, journals, letters, reminiscences —most of them by the men themselves, to chronicle what happened to the most notable of them after West Point. This was the class of the "boy generals" of the Civil War. They graduated from the Academy in two waves, forty-five of them in May 1861, thirty-four more in June, as the war was just beginning. A handful left early to join the I58CIVIL WAR HISTORY Confederate army. It was a rush order—to fill an acute shortage of Ueutenants early in the war. Although most of them began as lieutenants in one army or the other, several of them were generals before they were twenty-four. There has never been such a spectacular rocketing of youth to high command before or since in American military history. From this class came George Armstrong Custer, Thomas L. Rosser, Judson Kilpatrick, Emory Upton, Adelbert Ames, John Herbert Kelly—and Edmund Kirby, promoted from Ueutenant to general on his deathbed by Abraham Lincoln . From the class came other heroes who also might have become generals had they not died so young in the crucible ofwar—John Pelham, Alonzo Cushing, Patrick O'Rorke, Charles Edward Hazlett, Justin Dimick. There were few in this class who weren't cut from heroic cloth. Kirshner explains that this in part was because they were so young when they were, as OUver Wendell Holmes put it, "touched with fire." Their very youth gave them courage. It was said of one of them, O'Rorke, who died at Gettysburg, that he "fell a victim to his courage." The first halfofthe book is a...