Struggle for the Heartland: The Campaigns from Fort Henry to Corinth, and: Banners to the Breeze: The Kentucky Campaign, Corinth, and Stones River (review)

Struggle for the Heartland and Banners to the Breeze are two new titles in the University of Nebraska Press's Great Campaigns of the Civil War series. In book length and general subject matter, the series recalls the Scribner's Campaigns of the Civil War volumes of the 1880s. The similarities end there, however. The Scribner's series focused almost solely on the battlefield and boasted authors who had played prominent command roles in the campaigns they wrote about (an approach that worked with varying degrees of success, depending on the author's skill and veracity). On the other hand, the University of Nebraska series features professional historians who eschew the traditional narrow tactical study, and instead examine the military operations within a wider political and social context. The books are synthetic works that use the most recent scholarship in providing a comprehensive overview of the campaigns."The most pressing challenge facing Civil War scholarship today," argue series co-editors Anne J. Bailey and Brooks D. Simpson, "is the integration of various perspectives and emphases into a new narrative that explains not only what happened, why, and how, but also why it mattered." The authors of Struggle and Banners, Stephen D. Engle and Earl J. Hess, meet this formidable challenge. Their two studies form a continuous narrative delineating the crucial military operations of 1862 in the war's Western theater—roughly the area between the Appalachian Mountains to the east, the Mississippi River to the west, the Ohio River to the north, and the Gulf of Mexico to the south. The first half of 1862 saw an almost unbroken string of Federal successes in the west. As its subtitle indicates, Struggle traces the Union invasion of the Confederate heartland, beginning with the captures of Forts Henry and Donelson, continuing with the Battle of Shiloh, and concluding with the siege of Corinth, Mississippi. By mid-1862, the momentum appeared to shift, as the Federals consolidated their gains and the Confederates attempted to seize much of the territory they had lost. Banners traces the Confederate counteroffensive that culminated in the Battle of Perryville, Kentucky, followed by the Southerners' retreat into central Tennessee and the Battle of Stones River. The book also recounts the unsuccessful Confederate effort to recapture Corinth.

Engle and Hess provide enough tactical detail to make the battles comprehensible, but neither loses sight of the campaigns' larger significance. In Struggle Engle notes that, in early 1862, the war "began to assume a fundamentally new character politically." Military commanders and civilian leaders on both sides realized that they were in for a long and costly war. Just two weeks after the bloodbath at Shiloh, "the Confederate Congress enacted the first conscription law in American history" in order to fill the Confederate army's ranks. Meanwhile, the open hostility of Rebels in the Union-occupied Southern heartland convinced many Federals "that conciliation would have to end before the Union army could effectively be used as an instrument of civil policy, both in terms of confiscation and emancipation." In Banners Hess argues that the failure of the Confederates to seize the strategic initiative "and control the course of the war in the West doomed the entire Confederacy," for never again would the Secessionists enjoy such an opportunity "to do this as they had in the summer of 1862."

Both books are handsomely produced, though Struggle suffers from an inordinate number of typos. The maps are well placed and easy to read. Neither book supplants the more tactically oriented studies of Benjamin F. Cooling, Larry J. Daniel, Peter Cozzens, and Kenneth W. Noe, but because of...