The Coming Fury (review)

Book Reviews99 tarn. After McCleUan's fall from grace, Strother joined Banks's Louisiana expedition . Returning North in the spring of 1863, this "Virginia Yankee" missed the Gettysburg Campaign, but the next year found him with Siegel and Hunter in the Valley of Virginia. When Philip Sheridan replaced Hunter in the summer of 1864, Strother resigned from the army and went to Baltimore . Here he remained until Appomattox. To this reviewer, the author's description of the Battle of New Market (May 15, 1864) was of special interest. Viewing the engagement from the Northern side, Strother made no mention of the gallant charge of the Virginia Military Institute cadet corps at New Market. He wrote: The Rebel infantry continued to move in advance; in spite of our furious artillery fire their lines were steady and clean. . . . When within three hundred yards they began to yeU as usual, and the musketry from both lines opened with great fury. Our men began to break immediately, running to the rear by ones, twos, and finally by streams." Later in his diary, however, Strother had much to say about V.M.I. As General Hunter's chief of staff, he witnessed the burning of the Institute— an act he heartily endorsed. The June 12, 1864, entry in the Strother diary reads in part: "The General asked my opinion in regard to the destruction of the Institute. I told him I looked upon it as a most dangerous establishment where treason was systematically taught. . . . Throughout the pamphlet literature of the school, addresses, speeches, and circulars, we saw one prominent idea—that the Cadet, in receiving his education from the sovereign state, owed allgiance and military service to the state alone. . . . The catalogue of the Institute itself showed what a list of capable military officers had been raised up against the government of the country. This was the great paramount reason for its destruction by fire. . . . The burning of the Institute made a grand picture, a vast volume of black smoke roUed above the flames and covered half the horizon." IronicaUy, Strother, while adjutant general of Virginia in 1865, pressed vigorously for the restoration of V.M.I. In preparing the Strother manuscript for publication, Professor Eby did a fine piece of editorial work. The introduction is exceUent and the notes sufficient. An adequate index and a number of iUustrations add to the value of the book. John G. Barrett The Virginia Military Institute The Coming Fury. By Bruce Catton. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., 1961. Pp. 565. $7.50.) rr is getting t? be uncommonly difficult to find new ways in which to describe the merits of Bruce Carton's books. This reviewer, therefore, hopes he will be pardoned if he deems it altogether fitting and proper to try it in Mr. Carton's very own style. "Offhand, 1961 didn't appear to be a year in which people would spare 100CIVIL WA R HISTORY much time or attention to the Civil War, what with the troubled world seeming to teeter in its own orbit, on the edge of a dreadful plunge ino the blackness of oblivion. Yet somehow, most Americans couldn't help remembering that it was just a century since the last time the heavens had been rent and the impossible had happened. A good many of them, moved by some odd stirring of folk-memories just a bit below the level of reasoned thinking, kept buying books about America's tragedy. And about the best of such books in the Great FaUout Year came from a sagacious Michigan gentleman named Bruce Carton, who had a curious kind of genius for writing about that long-ago war in a deceptively understated way that managed, for aU its apparent simplicity, to make you feel that you had been there amid the smoke and the pandemonium—that this was how it really had been. "The Coming Fury was, like aU of Carton's books, very much of a reader's treat. In it the author went, more or less, off the battlefield for the second time in his career. His story picked up in April of 1860, when the Democratic Party disemboweled itself at Charleston...