Fire Within: A Civil War Narrative from Wisconsin (review)

272CIVIL WAR HISTORY organizing a mass of information and focusing attention on a neglected but very important aspect of the Civil War. Steven E. Woodworth Toccoa Falls College Fire Within: A Civil War Narrativefrom Wisconsin. By Kerry A. Trask. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 279. $30.00.) Fire Within is the story ofa young immigrantfrom Scotland, James S. Anderson, who volunteered for the Union army in the early months of the Civil War. It is also the story of a small town in Wisconsin, Manitowoc, located on the shore of Lake Michigan about one hundred miles north of Milwaukee. Author Kerry A. Trask weaves together (not always in a seamless web) an account of the man and the town in the waryears, going back and forth from battlefield to homefront, showing how the war changed the man and the town. To follow town life, Trask uses the life of Rosa Kellner, a young woman who worked in the Williams House Hotel, which was a focal point of the town and a fine observation post for Kellner to record the first company of volunteers marching cheerfully off to war, the dead returning for burial, the panic of the townsfolk at the threat of Indian attack, the ravages of forest fire and drought, and the return in 1864 of the tattered remnants of that first company of volunteers. Kellner kept a journal into which she poured her thoughts and perceptions for her own satisfaction, and for which history owes her thanks. Politics in Manitowoc mirrored those on the national scene. James Anderson's volunteer company became Company A of the 5th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry, and so Fire Within is also the wartime history of that regiment. After training at Camp Randall in Madison in the summer of 1861, Anderson and his comrades went off to the eastern theater of operations and an incredible three years of hardship, battle, and numbing boredom. The 5th Wisconsin fought in an extraordinary number of major and bloody battles and minor skirmishes. Astonishingly, Anderson appears to have spent his entire enlistment without a single home leave. To maintain the connection with Manitowoc, Trask also provides glimpses of other local soldiers serving in other regiments on other battlefields. After his discharge, Anderson worked briefly as a federal agent to root out nests of draft dodgers and deserters in the Wisconsin woods. An epilogue completes the life stories of Anderson and Kellner. The author's language is to some extent captive to his nineteenth-century sources. The Wisconsin soldiers are invariably "boys," soldiers are "promoted up" and "artillery" is regularly used as an adjective instead of a noun. There are maps and illustrations, but the index omits some battles found in the text. These are minor complaints, however, in a book certain to make its readers care deeply about Anderson and Kellner and marvel at how events transformed a book reviews273 somewhat isolated lumber village into a community caught up in all the currents of a nation at war with itself. William L. Burton Western Illinois University The Capture of New Orleans, 1862. By Chester G. Hearn. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. Pp. 292. $26.95.) The Capture ofNew Orleans, 1862, by Chester G. Hearn, is a concise account of the naval and military actions leading to the surrender of the South's most populous city. Asserting that the "decisions of Jefferson Davis, Stephen R. Mallory, and three different Confederate secretaries of war were as much to blame for the fall of New Orleans as Davy Farragut's warships" (1), Hearn deservedly criticizes the Richmond authorities for underestimating the danger threatening the city from the sea, not sending able commanders with clear instructions to the Gulf, and taking away badly needed troops from Gen. Mansfield Lovell, the city's commander. In view of the fact that the federal government , on the contrary, earns the author's approbation, particularly Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles for selecting outstanding commanders, giving them precise and distinct orders, and unstinted, unwavering support, the emphasis on the Davis administration's errors rather than on Farragut's skill may be somewhat exaggerated, but the indictment is warranted. Hearn is...