Confederate Engineer: Training and Campaigning with John Morris Wampler (review)

Confederate Engineer: Training and Campaigning with John Morris Wampler. By George G. Kundahl. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. Pp. xxii+336. $34.

George G. Kundahl tells us that John Morris Wampler was "a variety of everyman" (p. 274) whose experiences as a Confederate topographical engineer shed new light on the generals above him in rank and the foot soldiers below. Kundahl's biography of his great-great-grandfather is a sterling example of diligent history. He has meticulously stitched together an obscure life from diaries, letters, and government records. His careful documentation of Wampler's wartime duties is sure to interest those who study Civil War reconnaissance, ordnance, fortification, and the battles in which Wampler engaged. The text is lean, intelligent, and for the most part well documented.

On the critical point of explaining his subject's significance, however, Kundahl falls short. His narrative view is so tightly constrained that we rarely see the broader implications of Wampler's career. For example, we learn more about his creaky survey vessel, the Nymph, than about the pioneering maps he produced of Galveston Bay for the U.S. Coast Survey in the 1850s. Kundahl notes that the scarcity of men with technical training in the antebellum South opened many opportunities for Wampler. He led the Galveston Coast Survey team at age nineteen and later found ready employment with railroad ventures and urban projects in the South, despite a history of poor performance that landed him in court on two occasions. Yet Kundahl does not press through to the conclusion his evidence suggests: that Wampler represents the success of a mediocre talent in a region starved for skill.

I most regret the lack of critical perspective on Wampler's work as a Confederate engineer. Kundahl's exhaustive research fleshes out Wampler's movements and activities during the war without explaining their meaning. If Confederate cartographer Jedediah Hotchkiss's maps of the Shenandoah Valley gave Stonewall Jackson superior knowledge of the terrain and thus an important tactical advantage over Union commanders--as Civil War historians maintain--might Wampler's less able reconnaissance have contributed to Braxton Bragg's difficulties in Tennessee and Kentucky? The story of Wampler stopping to refresh his horse and write in his journal while Federal troops moved into position to surprise the Confederates at Perryville suggests that he lacked initiative, to say the least. Was Wampler any more or less prone than other Confederate engineers to build bridges that proved "less durable than intended" (p. 158)? Did that collapsed bridge impede Confederate progress or thwart the enemy's pursuit? I wish Kundahl had said less about Wampler's pleasant evenings in Rebel homesteads and more about why military maps and reconnaissance mattered in the conduct of the war.

Wampler did possess an undisputed gift as a cartographer. "His ability to draw maps first brought him to General Beauregard's attention," Kundahl writes, "and then continued as his hallmark with field commanders wherever he served" (p. 272). Regrettably, the book reproduces only three of Wampler's finished maps from his Coast Survey career, all too small to allow the reader to appreciate the quality of his work. Kundahl mentions a number of maps that Wampler submitted with field reports during the war, but does not make it clear whether they survive. Maps made for the book that plot the places through which Wampler passed on various campaigns give no sense of the topography that was his chief concern. The ironic result is that the biography of a man who spent his career rendering the landscape is curiously hooded.

These criticisms are beside the point for George Kundahl, whose main purpose in this labor of love was to resuscitate the life of his ancestor. While accomplishing that goal he has compiled material that will help other historians analyze topographical engineers' significance in antebellum history and the Civil War. This study also raises the question of...