In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

?ooSouthwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly Longstreet's reluctance to commit Pickett's division to its doomed assault against Meade's Union army center is oft told. Ted Turner's 1992 movie Gettysburg dramatized the gallantry of Union Col. Josh Chamberlain. Jenny Wade's tragic death during the fight earned her poignant notoriety among Gettysburg aficionados. The reality of Gettysburg gets in the way of the heroic lines of Immortah . It is not to say that Amongst Immortals Raging lacks a place in Gettysburg collections. As an introductory text, it has features sufficiently compelling to excite younger readers. In this work, however, it is not to be amongst immortals as much as it is to pass among mere mortals, skeptically. Austin Community CollegeBob Cavendish Schooner Sail to Starboard: The US Navy vs. Blockade Runners in the Western Gulf of Mexico. By W. T. Block. New introduction by J. Barto Arnold III. (College Station: Institute of Nautical Archaeology, 2007. Illustrations, maps, appendices , notes, index. ISBN 9780979587405. $40.00, paper.) During the American Civil War, with an economy dependent on agriculture and a manufacturing base less than that of the state of Massachusetts, the Confederacy had to rely on materiel from the outside to survive. The northern blockade of the long Southern coast that Abraham Lincoln ordered soon after the war began made that difficult. It remained for Confederate blockade runners to deliver supplies and equipment to the South and return payment, often in bales of cotton, to Southern benefactors. In Schooner Sail to Starboard, W. T. Block has written a fascinating study of the ships that ran the blockade of the Gulf coasts of Texas and Louisiana. He also ably writes about the Union navy that attempted to seal off the coastline. Originally published in 1997, this edition coincides with the Denbigh Shipwreck Project, an archaeological and conservation project headed by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology at Texas A&M University. The Denbigh, a sleek runner built in Liverpool, England, ran aground near Galveston, Texas, in May 1865. The Union blockading fleet then destroyed it. Block's work provided the Denbigh project with excellent descriptions of the ship. Indeed, he provides excellent descriptions of seemingly every major event that occurred in the western Gulf Coast blockade theater. To diat end, Block's work is more narrative- than thesis-driven. He has no great academic argument to support, but rather wants to make sure this story gets told. As he writes, speaking of himself in the third person, "Over a long period of years, the author had accumulated a large bibliography of interesting blockade-running accounts in the western Gulf of Mexico. In them were many instances of bravery and special devotion to duty [among both blockaders and blockade runners]. . . . The blockade runners . . . supplied enough arms and munitions to keep the Armies of Northern Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia intact . . . [and] provided sufficient goods and munitions to field armies totaling 25,000 men in the Trans-Mississippi Department" (p. 167). 2??8Book Reviews101 Block's bibliography is exhaustive. He relies equally on A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Navies in the War of the Rebellion (a primary -source bible for Civil War naval historians) and contemporary newspapers. He has also trolled through a variety ofjournal articles, master's dieses, and other unpublished sources. The result is amazing. No detail of die ships that Block discusses (and there must be hundreds) escapes his notice. For instance, "The Dan [a steamboat] was a V-bottom, deep sea steamer, built of white oak, with a five foot (1.5 m) depth of hold and capacity for 600 bales of cotton. The Dan was a 1 1 2-ton side wheeler , 99 ft. long and 23 ft. (30 ? ? m)" (p. 87). The book is a good read. Block's work is full of tales of running gun-battles at sea, of blockade-running seamen hiding along the Gulf Coast until time and tide were right to make a run, and of loneliness and tedium aboard the Union blockading ships. While this book is perhaps not for readers with only a passing interest in Civil War naval operations, it is, however, a fine, thorough, well-organized study of...

pdf

Share