All for the Regiment: The Army of the Ohio, 1861-1862 (review)

The Army of the Ohio was formed in the early months of the Civil War. It participated in a number of skirmishes and in Logan's Cross Roads (Mill Springs), Shiloh, Corinth, and the Kentucky campaign culminating at Perryville. It was Don Carlos Buell's army and should not be confused with John M. Schofield's Army of the Ohio, which fought under Sherman during the Atlanta campaign. It had a brief existence, becoming the Army of the Cumberland under William S. Rosecrans and George H. Thomas in the fall of 1862. Its short life in the early years of the war provides an opportunity for intense scrutiny, but this life span also limits the possibility of broad generalization about the Union army as a whole.

Gerald J. Prokopowicz, historian at the well-known Lincoln Museum of Fort Wayne Indiana, first discussed this topic in his well received doctoral dissertation at Harvard University under the mentorship of David Herbert Donald. Its publication now makes it more widely available to professional and amateur historians alike.

Prokopowicz notes that there was no decisive battle in the Civil War like that at Waterloo, and historians have given many reasons to explain why. They have blamed or credited a commanding general or a heroic military unit. They have analyzed tactics and strategy in the context of new technology, especially the rifled musket, arguing that the weapon made decisive outcomes a thing of the past.

Prokopowicz disagrees. There were conclusive battles, but he argues that rifled muskets did not predominate in the western theater until late 1862. Even where they existed, the author believes that their effectiveness was nullified by the wooded, hilly terrain. Finally, he points to the Prussian army winning decisive victories in the 1860s and 1870s despite the use of excellent rifles. There was something else, he concludes, to explain the absence of a Waterloo in the American Civil War.

That something, he argues in the case of the Army of the Ohio, was "the way in which it was recruited, trained, and organized" (4). Its companies and regiments were recruited from the same immediate regions, officered by men soldiers elected to leadership posts. The company was, therefore, a family consisting of individuals familiar with one another and thus fiercely more loyal to the company (family), than they were to the larger army. The regiment then became the soldier's "hometown" (28), the unit that gained his primary loyalty. The training the soldiers received only enforced this loyalty. The highest unit that trained soldiers in drill was the regiment. Rarely did any larger unit ever practice maneuvers together. Rarely did a soldier move from one regiment to another; rarely were several regiments brought together to form a new one; rarely were officers promoted into leadership positions from outside the regiment.

Prokopowicz discusses the existence of myriad drill schemes in the various regiments from a lack of a centralized army training system. This resulted in poor coordination among regiments in an Army of the Ohio brigade or division. In short, he argues, regiments fought well as regiments and achieved impressive results at that level. However, these regiments could not work efficiently with other units, and thus kept the Army of the Ohio from achieving the kind of decisive victories it might have. For example, he says, "The Army of the Ohio fought the Battle of Shiloh as a large collection of individual regiments rather than a single well-coordinated centrally directed military organization; as such it proved to be a blunt instrument that could maim but could not kill" (112).

Prokopowicz has written a clear, well-argued book that makes its points without excessive detail. He believes that his conclusions about the Army of the Ohio for the years 1861-62 "can be applied to other Civil War armies"; but...