Don't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned (review)

BOOK REVIEWS237 mere encomium, for his words present a much stronger sense of the complex connections between the people of Mexico and the United States than the editors do. If a young officer's thoughts and dreams impart an unexpected sense of innocence in the midst of an aggressive war, the work of his memorialists should be to explore the roots and meaning of this apparent paradox. Samuel J. Watson University of St. Thomas Don 't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned. By Kenneth C. Davis. (New York: William Morrow, 1996. Pp. 480. $25.00.) When any author purports to relate in a single volume "everything you need to know" about a topic as large and complex as the American Civil War, serious students of the war are immediately on their guard. So it is with considerable skepticism that one approaches Don 't Know Much About the Civil War: Everything You Need to KnowAboutAmerica's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned. Author Kenneth Davis expresses his intention to "give the Civil War a human face," to address the "grievous oversights and misguided teachings ofthe past— especially as they relate to blacks, women, and Native Americans," and to alleviate the boredom brought on by school textbooks that "emphasize facts over understanding" and have thus "drained the lifeblood from history" (xvii). Some readers will enjoy the question-and-answer format Davis employs, and he does manage to deal succinctly with many of the war's major issues and personaUties. The numerous quotations presented as "Civil War Voices" are particularly valuable additions. Unfortunately, there are also some problems with the book, not the least of which is that its scope is overly ambitious. Davis attempts not only to deal with the events that took place between 1861 and 1865, but to trace the growth and development of slavery from its introduction in the colonial period to emancipation . Perhaps as a result of this, there is a troubling tendency to oversimplify complex issues, such as the nature of colonial commerce or the reaction of Southern states to Lincoln's election. The author also is on shaky ground when dealing with the comparative history of slavery. He suggests that historians disagree with the notion that Southern slavery was more humane than slavery elsewhere in theAmericas.Actually, as historian Peter Parish points out in Slavery: History and Historians, one of the areas where there is something approaching a consensus is that Southern slavery was more humane than its Central and South American counterparts. Even more troubling is what Davis does not say. He almost completely ignores the war in the trans-Mississippi. Kirby Smith and Furl Van Dorn are mentioned in passing, but nowhere do we find a discussion of the battles of Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge, or Honey Springs, nor do we see mentioned such 238CIVIL WAR HISTORY significant figures as Nathaniel Lyon, Sterling Price, Samuel Curtis, or Thomas Hindman. This a serious oversight for a book that purports to tell us "everything we need to know." There are also some factual errors. Within the space of two paragraphs, we are told that "the war ended before any blacks everjoined a Confederate army," and that Arkansas was "a slaveholding state that remained in the union" (364). In sum, Mr. Davis's book falls far short of the claim made by its title. The author has simply bitten off a lot more than he can chew. Readers seeking a well-written and thoroughly-researched one-volume account of the Civil War era will find James McPherson's Battle Cry ofFreedom to be a superior choice. Thomas A. DeBlack Arkansas Tech University Portraits ofConflict: A Photographic History of Georgia in the Civil War. By Anne J. Bailey and Walter J. Fraser Jr. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1996. Pp. xiii, 410. $70.) When the soldiers and civilians of Georgia sat before the camera's eye during the Civil War, they left behind a vast photographic legacy almost entirely untapped by historians. Indeed, until recently little attempt has been made to tell the story of the state during that turbulent period through photographs. Typically , photographs...