Lawley Covers the Confederacy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS95 Grant and Sherman were decidedly second rate generals alongside the less noticed but more skillful Thomas. Conceding that Grant has been overextolled and that Thomas has not been fully appreciated by many, nevertheless a devoted Thomas school has long recognized Old Pap's high talents and has understood the inappropriateness of the Grant-Sherman charge of slowness. The author records without comment that Thomas was known as "Slow Trot" at West Point. He was also dubbed "George Washington" by perceptive classmate Rosecrans, a comparison drawn from a portrait but which might imply celerity. Author Thomas' battle descriptions are in general accurate and some are entertaining, though the Chickamauga research does not appear to have been conducted in depth and some of the sources apparently followed closely—such as Boynton, John B. Gordon, and D. H. Hill—might be questioned. Chickamauga was one of Thomas' great battles, yet the author is so rapt in his subject's career he feels cheated because the name won there, "Rock of Chickamauga," does not do "full justice to that unexcelled general." The preliminaries of the battle of Nashville, with Grant's "heartless" harassment of Thomas and Schofield's efforts to undercut him, called "villainy," are convincingly presented. There is a tendency toward excesses , such as ". . . Chickamauga ranks second to no other battle of the war in any respect whatever. . . ." and the assertion that Thomas' ability equaled the combined abilities of Grant and Sherman who "outmatched him only in their capacity for injuring their fellow soldiers." Refuge is found at times in clichés. "Silence reigned" and "the curtain of night slowly descended." Nevertheless the book has an element of freshness and simple directness in the handling of the material. Mr. Thomas (no kin to the general), a graduate accountant and veteran of World War I, is a newcomer in Civil War literature. His underlying theme seems to be that the GrantSherman -Sheridan-Schofield hierarchy colored Civil War literature to their own advantage, to the extent that later generations are still engaged in correcting the impressions left by their "distorted, often false" accounts. This is a big book and the reader will enjoy much of it. There is no reason why, after so many laudations of Grant, the seamy side of his personality and generalship might not be examined and set against the less costly generalship of Thomas—the lovable, reticent Old Pap. Glenn Tucker Flat Rock, North Carolina Lawley Covers the Confederacy. By William Stanley Hoole. (Tuscaloosa : Confederate Publishing Company, Inc., 1964. Pp. 132. $4.00.) When William H. Russell reported the first battles of the Civil War in America to the readers of the London Times, his criticism of Union military leadership made him so unpopular in Federal circles that, in the 96CIVIL WARHISTORY spring of 1862, the paper replaced him. Francis C. Lawley, former private secretary to W. E. Gladstone, assumed Russell's pro-southern mantle. Though Lawley's views could hardly have made him more popular in Federal circles than was Russell, he soon abandoned the North and, in the fall of 1862, joined the Army of Northern Virginia as one of a colorful band of foreign observers. The story of Lawley's coverage of the war is chronicled in Professor Hoole's limited-edition volume. The author could well have satisfied himself with merely reprinting those stories from the Times which could be identified as Lawley's; but instead, he has chosen to excerpt the more interesting dispatches and weave them into a narrative account. In doing so, he draws on the published memoirs of other participants as well as the works of a number of historians of the period. The result is pleasant reading and a much better-balanced account than Lawley alone would have been able to provide. For Francis Lawley was no school-of-journalism product; he felt little obligation to present an objective version of the events he witnessed, and he seldom did. As devoted to the Confederacy as any of the soldiers in grey with whom he marched, ate, and slept, Lawley conscientiously gave only one side of the story almost to the bitter end. With the exception of a brief holiday in...