The Galvanized Yankees (review)

BOOK REVIEWS329 produced will suffice." Harris' diatribe emerged again in 1960, specially reprinted as an anti-Kennedy campaign document; but, according to Matheny, die general "probably would have objected to it being printed." One can only hope so. The remainder of this study is littie more than a chronicle of the major events in Harris' life—especially his military career which, in the opinion of this reviewer, was not important enough to justify such extended treatment. Richard O. Curry University of Connecticut The Galvanized Yankees. By D. Alexander Brown. (Urbana: University of IUinois Press, 1963. Pp. 243. $5.50.) The term "Galvanized Yankee" was first applied to Union soldiers who joined the Confederacy to escape the horrors of Southern prison camps. Mistrusted by Soutiiern commanders, and with reason, they were used only to a limited extent and with littie success. Usually one tiiinks of Galvanized Yankees as those six thousand Southerners who changed sides during the Civil War and were sent to protect the frontier settlements and the trails crossing the Plains from Indian depredations. In this volume for the first time is told the story of those forgotten Americans who, to escape the confines of Northern prison camps or because of a change of loyalty or for other reasons, enlisted in six United States Volunteer Regiments. Many of these "white-washed Yankees" were of foreign birth or from the hill country, but there was a scattering from all over the South. They were seasoned campaigners and in 1865 during the "bloody year on the plains" they gave a good account of themselves and had a surprisingly low desertion rate. Eventually, they were replaced by regulars but while they were available tiiey were in demand as Plains troops. From as far south as the Santa Fe Trail and as far north as Montana, the Galvanized Yankees ranged as far west as Fort Douglas, just outside Salt Lake City, where they had the agreeable task of watching the Mormon community. Generally, however, their horizon encompassed an empty landscape that might erupt at any moment with raiding Indians. Most of their existence was just plain hard work, guarding supply trains and survey parties on the trails, rebuilding telegraph lines destroyed by the Indians, erecting miserable frontier forts scarcely worthy of the name, or burying the mutilated bodies of those unfortunates who had met a war party. In some areas skirmishes with the Indians were almost daily affairs and in the summer of 1865 the post at Platte Bridge Station withstood a siege of several days at a cost of twentyfive dead. Probably the most trying experience was that suffered by elements of die 1st U.S. Volunteers in the severe winter of 1865-1866. Companies F and G were stationed at Fort Fletcher, 225 miles west of Fort Leavenworth, Kansas ; Company A was placed at Monument Station, a hundred miles farther west; and Company I was moved to Pond's Creek Station, fifty miles still 330CIVIL WAR HISTORY farther west. Inedible rations and deep snows that prevented supply trains from getting through to the posts brought a crisis by the middle of January, and the Pond's Creek post was abandoned. But when the soldiers got to Monument Station they found it near the end of its supplies, and both groups were forced to march through a howling blizzard to Fort Fletcher, a hundred miles away, only to find the garrison there existing on parched com. Salina, the nearest post, was eighty miles away, and the situation was grim. Fortunately , at this critical juncture supply wagons arrived. The audior found little in published accounts about the exploits of the Galvanized Yankees, but when he dug into the official records of the regiments and of the campaigns, into personal letters and into soldiers' newspapers , he discovered the tale of these expendables who endured blizzards and frigid weather, heat and drought, grueling marches and scanty rations, encounters witii pitiless enemies, die monotony of lonely, bleak army posts and even starvation, who guarded the nation's frontiers with heroism and devotion, and who then disappeared unhonored into the dustbin of history. Professor Brown has fashioned a well-told story about a peripheral activity diat has...