The Twenty-first Missouri: From Home Guard to Union Regiment (review)

180CIVIL WAR HISTORY "aprii" (p. 62); "periously" (p. 65)—and the mistaken assumption that the United States Consul General to Havana 1861-1863 was "initially dubious" about capturing the Confederate Commissioners, Mason and Slidell, in November, 1861 (which he was enthusiastic about from the beginning), and that he was relieved as a result of a dispute with Spain over the Blanche seizure (by a Northern warship), when, in fact, he resigned in order to rejoin the Union Navy in 1863. Frederick C. Drake Brock University The Twenty-first Missouri: From Home Guard to Union Regiment. By Leslie Anders. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975. Pp. x, 209.) "Flush out the Johnnies," "Buel Stevens, onetime top kick of Company I," and "the Johnnies skedaddled," are typical examples of the quaint, colorful prose sprinkled throughout this chronicle of a Union Civil War regiment from Missouri. Sound in research on the personnel of the unit itself, and somewhat weaker on the events in which the regiment participated, the volume should appeal mightily to buffs and be of some value as a reference tool for genealogists. The work follows the entire history of the regiment's existence from a gleam in its founder's eye through the member's post-war lives. The unit became the first whole Union regiment engaged at Shiloh, and then went on to experience a wide sampling of the war in the West. Its campaigns included skirmishes and scouting in Kentucky and Tennessee, Sherman's Meridian expedition, Tupelo, the Price raid into Missouri, Nashville, and the assault upon Fort Blakely, near Mobile. Anders makes an interesting and fresh contribution to Reconstruction literature with his passages dealing with occupation duty and abrasive confrontations between black and white troopers. The last chapter inadequately considers Grand Army of the Republic activities which, although mentioned, are skimmed lightly—and not noted in the index. Greenwood Press should be commended for its "Contributions in Military History" series. It is nevertheless disappointing that it feels constrained by financial parsimony to use somewhat difficult-to-read type with unequalized margins, and allows little errors like "United Stated Senate" (p. 258) to go unedited. The book's scholarly value also would have been further enhanced by the inclusion of footnotes. Herman Hattaway University of Missouri-Kansas City ...