Frémont: Pathmarker of the West (review)

Book Reviews439 become ahve to the reader, and it is easy to imagine oneself widi Joseph Johnston and Beauregard at Manassas, or widi Albert Sidney Johnston and Beauregard on the Tennessee and in Corinth. Shiloh and Beauregard's assumption of command upon the death of Albert Sidney Johnston unfold in a wonderful narrative. The reader returns to Charleston with Beauregard and there shares the anxious days awaiting die Federal naval attack, which finaUy arrives in die form of the iron-clad monitors. Later, Virginia is again the scene, and Drewry's Bluff, City Point, and Petersburg become common terms in the reader's vocabulary. Beauregard's best battle of the war unfolds as Mr. WiIbams recreates die defense of Petersburg, which foils Grant's plan to force an immediate decision. FinaUy, die reader travels through North Carolina and watches the rapid advance of Sherman's army. Then, in Greensboro, North Carolina, one becomes a silent listener as Davis and his cabinet meet with Beauregard and Johnston, and the decision is reached that the war can be pursued no further. It is finished. As outlined above, Beauregard figured in many of die South's great engagements , and because of this fact the author has had a wealth of material to work with. The romance of die war, its pathos, its moments of joy are masterfuUy worked into die volume, widi P. G. T. Beauregard standing in the center. No doubt the colorful character of the general has helped this task. His fine engineering sense and his sound strategic ability are fully accounted for, as weU as his various tactical errors and his Napoleonic mania for die concentration of large troop numbers. Nor is the post-war period neglected. Beauregard's adjustment to Reconstruction is as colorful as his war record. He took an active part in the revitalizing of the New South, with apparently few regrets — on the surface, at least — for the lost cause. This is a volume that does entire justice to the Southern Napoleon. It is not a work of bias as was his own and Roman's work. Mr. Williams' text, footnotes, and bibliography prove the wide scope and accuracy of his research, and the book admirably fills a gap in the scholarly, weU-balanced presentation of the Soudiern Civü War story. The author must be comph'mented for bringing to life once more the Creole general from New Orleans. He has been gone historicaUy too long. Weldon E. Petz Birmingham, Michigan Fremont: Pathmarker of the West. By Allan Nevins. (New York: Longmans , Green, and Company. 1955. Pp. xiv, 689. $7.50.) from the union of a southern lady of quality and beauty and her French émigré paramour was born John Charles Fremont in 1813; seventy-seven years later he died, financiaUy broken, "almost alone in a cheerless Manhattan boarding-house." Between the unconventional beginning of his life and its unfortunate ending, Fremont married Senator Benton's daughter, gained a great reputation as a geographer and western explorer, was given credit for securing California to die United States, was court martialed, won a fortune 440civil war history in California gold, sat briefly in die Senate of die United States, received 114 electoral votes as the first presidential candidate of die Republican Party, served as a Civil War general, and dabbled disastrously in railroad promotion. Almost every step in this progression was marked by controversy — by adulation on die one hand and by bitter criticism on the odier. Historians understandably have had some difficulty in assigning Fremont to his proper niche in American history. In 1928 AUan Nevins pubhshed Fremont: The West's Greatest Adventurer which he described as "an attempt at an honest and impartial biography of a man who has been the subject of excessive laudation and excessive detraction ." Based in part on hitherto-unused papers of the Fremont fanuly, the book was commended by some reviewers but was criticized sharply by others — in one instance it was described as "die last word of counsel for the defense." Shordy thereafter, Cardinal Goodwin concluded Li John Charles Fremont: An Explanation of his Career diat the gentìeman was a mere drifter who easily adjusted his morals to...