General Alexander P. Stewart and the Civil War in the West (review)

362CIVIL WAR HISTORY subordinates in battle. Perhaps his most original point is that we should not think backwards, letting Johnston's dubious 1864 performance color our view of earlier operations. Instead, he sees the general's wounds at Seven Pines as producing a later timidity. At the same time, Newton overstates the neglect of Johnston. In 1956, Gilbert E. Goven and James W. Livingood produced the still-valuable A Different Valor: The Story of General Joseph E. Johnston, C.S.A., and in 1992 Craig L. Symonds published his excellent Joseph E. Johnston: A Civil War Biography. Newton tends to sight earlier defenders of Johnston while belaboring older critics of the general, such as Douglas Southall Freeman and Clifford Dowdey, many of whose judgments are now passé. Newton justifies another Johnston book by saying that the general is still underrated. But perhaps Johnston's poor standing remains partially justified. The impressions lingers that he dithered and that, had he faced a more determined general than McClelland, Richmond could well have fallen before Lee got a chance to try his hand at field command. Michael C. C. Adams Northern Kentucky University General Alexander P Stewart and the Civil War in the West. By Sam Davis Elliott. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. Pp. xviii, 339. $34-95·) Alexander Peter Stewart was Tennessee's highest-ranking Confederate military officer. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, Stewart left the army in 1845 and spent sixteen years teaching mathematics. In May 1861 he returned to military duty, serving first with the Tennessee Military Board and then as a major of artillery in the state's army. That August he transferred to Confederate service, and three months later he received a promotion to brigadier general. In June 1863 Stewart became a major general, and in July 1864 he was promoted to lieutenant general and corps commander in the Army of Tennessee. He held this post during the last part of the Atlanta campaign and throughout the ill-fated march into Tennessee that fall. In the war's closing months he commanded the remnants of the Army of Tennessee in the Carolinas. In all these parts he performed capably. Stewart pursued postwar careers in insurance and education. He served on the commission that established the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National Military Park, and he managed to avoid the controversies that engulfed many of his fellow former Confederates. Sam Davis Elliott has produced in Soldier of Tennessee a book that tells us just about all that can be known of Stewart's life, career, and role in the Civil War. So far as Elliott's book goes, it is about as well done as possible. The work's major problem stems from the fact that there are very few sources on which to base a study of Stewart the man or Stewart the general. Only the Duke BOOK REVIEWS363 University Library has a collection of "A. P. Stewart Papers," "and it consists of four brief documents, two of which are so fragmentary as to be practically useless " (xii). Elliott devotes but one chapter (sixteen pages) to Stewart's family, education, and antebellum career, and but two plus a short conclusion (total: thirty-five pages) to his postwar life. More than four-fifths of the text deals with Stewart's years in Rebel military service. Even here, however, scarcity of source material compels Elliott to fill most of his pages with general descriptions of campaigns and battles. We learn almost nothing about Stewart's participation in these engagements . Steward often all but disappears for pages. He did not direct any independent operations and played no significant role in the formulation of strategy. He even managed to avoid becoming seriously entangled in the sordid internal politics of the Army of Tennessee. These problems raise serious questions about the raison d'etre for this book. While Elliott's accounts ofthe battles are competently done, they, in fact, tell us nothing that is not readily available in studies of the individual engagements. We are better off for having had Elliott make the effort to ferret out information on Stewart, but I wonder if a long article in the Tennessee Historical...