Destruction and Reconstruction (review)

454 CIVIL WAR HISTORY We are moving away from the war at a great pace. Convalescence is not quite ended, even now, but it does progress, and this tragic era in our history is recedingsteadily into the past. As Mr. Stern says, in words which any devout reader of the great Civil War epic will cherish: Soon all living memory of the American Civil War will be gone, and we shall have only the documents, the printed records, and the pictures. These too must perish, and at some remote time the truth about the stirring events of the 1860's will pass into myth. Then the very real heroes will be transformed into vague legendary figures, gigantic and impressive, but very different from the hard-bitten troopers who behaved very much as any soldiers do in any war. Then the Civil War battles will seem as far away as those in which half-naked men in armor clashed and clanked on a dusty plain in the red dawn-light of a world that was still young. Finally Richmond will be one with Troy, and Appomattox and Waterloo will come equally to mean an end to long-continued conflict. If civilization has then advanced accordingly, the people of that more intelligently run world will shudder at the wanton waste and welter of all wars. But that will be another world and another time. And that, perhaps, is the haunting and incomprehensibly moving thing about our Civil War. It has not yet stopped working; it was our Troy, our immense epic struggle, and what it will finally mean—the way it will finally impress people who are not yet born—depends, in a strange but inevitable way, at least in part on what we ourselves may do. There will be another world and another time, we are helping to shape them, and the final backward glance will be taken through glasses to whose fabrication we in the 1950's are making our own unintended contribution. History is a living process, and its story is never entirely finished. Considering ourselves remote spectators of this tremendous achievement, we are actually a part of it. A very fine book, this, well worth the reading. Bruce Catton New York, New York. Destruction and Reconstruction. By Richard Taylor. Edited by Richard Harwell. (New York: Longmans, Green and Company. 1955. Pp. xxxii, 380. $7.50.) richard Harwell is due a vote of thanks for his excellent job of editing General Dick Taylor's interesting narrative. Taylor's work has long been a valuable source of material for writers on the War Between the States. His story, however, is not confined to his battle recollections. He makes many excursions into die realm of government and politics, and his illustrations are replete with classical and mythological allusions. Book Reviews455 Though he was without professional military training, Taylor was an able tactician and a real fighting general. He was a disciplinarian of the Stonewall Jackson school who did not believe in fortified positions or cities. He did not hesitate to take the long chance and, once committed, he struck with all he had without regard to losses. Among the interesting "ifs" of the Civil War is the contemplation of what might have happened if Taylor had remained with the Army of Northern Virginia and had reached command of a corps. He was never plagued by the doubts that beset Ewell or the vacillations that slowed Longstreet at Gettysburg. After sickness interrupted his service in Virginia, he was transferred to the Trans-Mississippi Department to revive the flagging hopes of his home people. His account of the Red River campaign is probably the most detailed study of these actions from the Confederate side. He was constantly at odds with General Kirby Smith, the commander of that department, and one might reasonably suspect it was to settle this controversy that he was assigned in the last days of the war to the command of the Department of Alabama, Mississippi, and Eastern Louisiana. The end of the war found him with high rank but little command, and his last military duty was the surrender to General Canby on honorable terms of the remnants of...