The Civil War in the Northwest (review)

212CIVIL WA R HISTORY The Civil War in the Northwest. By Robert Huhn Jones. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. Pp. xvi, 216. $4.00. ) The locale of this study was a backwater during the Civil War. The Department of the Northwest, which included Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the territories to theirwest, sawno engagements between Northern and Southern forces but was an important source of manpower and foodstuffs for the Union armies. However, in the summer of 1862 Minnesota was the scene of a violent Indian outbreak that would have been a gruesome landmark in die the westward movement had it not been overshadowed by the greater tragedies of the Civil War. The Sioux Indian uprising is a familiar story and the author, who accepts conservative figures of those massacred, adds little to the tale, although he does recount the Indian campaigns of 1863 and 1864, which are generally overlooked because of the more dramatic events of 1862. However, his purpose was not to warm over the story of an Indian war, but rather to present a study of military administration in a Northern frontier department where the stresses of the Civil War were complicated by a serious Indian outbreak. As added interest, General John Pope is the central figure in the story from the autumn of 1862, when he took command of the Department of the Northwest , until early in 1865, when he was shifted to command of the Military Division of the Missouri. John Pope is usually dismissed as "vainglorious," and his capture of Island No. Ten has been effaced by the humiliation of Second Bull Run. In these pages Pope appears as a capable, intelligent administrator and his conduct of civü-military relationships may well have been a model. Although political factionalism in the Northwest was not as bitter as in Missouri or Kentucky, Pope had to be constanüy alert lest the military power under his control be drawn into factional politics. During the Civil War there was a rather natural tendency for the civil authorities to lean upon the military because of opposition to the draft and other war measures, understandable doubts about the loyalty of the political opposition in a time of widespread disloyalty, widely held beliefs about real or imaginary conspiracies, and a willingness to use the situation for personal and political advantages by sliding into a military dictatorship. That the country emerged from the war with so little harm to individual liberties was in part due to generals like Pope. As the author says: "Pope may not have been the best remembered field general, Lee and Jackson perhaps made him look very foolish at Second Bull Run, but Pope had at least one quality that set him above some of his fellow officers: respect for civil law. He quite sincerely believed that civil law, authorities, and procedures should be either exhausted or incapable of action before the military could justly act, and to this principle he rigidly adhered." Isn't it about time for a new look at the whole career of John Pope? This book is a transitional study. Most of our previous studies of the Civil War have been made from the viewpoint of the tactical commander and have dealt with the problems of field command and with the surge of armies across Book Reviews213 battlefields. What has been overlooked has been the fact that Civil War armies operated in military departments and that combat was only one—although probably the most important—of the activities of a departmental commander who might or might not also be the field commander. As Jones points out: "Few seem to comprehend the magnitude and scope (and thus the tremendous responsibility) of directing an army in all its activities, such as strategy, supply, and organization, and in all its relations, such as civil, political , and legal, and also in the organization's entirety, in the South, on the frontier, in reserve." The viewpoint of the present study seems to be part way between field and departmental headquarters. What we need are departmental studies, made from the viewpoint of departmental headquarters, if we are to understand the movements of armies and seemingly inexplicable hesitations and...