West Virginia in the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWS101 But Patrick's own record of that interview, set down very soon after the event not thirty-five years later, and now available in this excellent form, is significantly different: I went to the War Office—After a half hour saw Mr. Stanton in the outer room and demanded an interview—In half an hour we were in his private room and the door locked—I never talked more plainly to any man in my life—I will do him the justice to say, that he behaved weü—He heard me patiently, said what he had to say and gave me the key to much of the mischief that has been going on— ... he appeared as much interested as I was and expressed his great satisfaction at the interview, saying that he wished me to come to the City never without seeing him. Of course the published Patrick record will receive comparison to the great but tricky Welles diary, to the more recently available one of General Wainwright, and to others of this invaluable breed. Patrick's will stand on its considerable merits as a welcome, fresh, and important asset to research and interest in America's continuing war. A provost cannot be loved, as King Charles noted. If he leaves a diary of this caliber for historians to feed from, a provost can win a respectful audience. Harold M. Hyman University of Illinois West Virginia in the Civil War. By Boyd B. Stutler. (Charleston: Education Foundation, Inc., 1963. Pp. vü, 304. $4.00 cloth; $1.25 paper. ) Of the many worthy books to emerge during the Civil War Centennial some of the most useful and durable are the studies of state participation in that struggle. We have such volumes as The Civil War in Louisiana by John D. Winters, Michigan Civil War History edited by George S. May, Wisconsin and the Civil War by Frank L. Klement, and New Jersey and the Civil War edited by Earl Schenck Miers—to name but a few. The latest and certainly one of the most readable of these excellent works is Boyd Stutler's able and significant contribution. Mr. Stutler, a war correspondent and former managing editor of the American Legion Magazine, has been a lifelong student of the Civil War. Along with his ability to tell a story well he has the historian's patience and reverence for facts, and a genius all his own for clarity. All this has combined in him to produce a book filled with human interest, the stirring events of those uncertain years, and history at its most dramatic moments. Stutler's book chronicles the struggle within the borders of the only state bom in the heat of the war, and does this from the very outbreak of conflict to the final hour at Appomattox. There are fifty-eight stories in this book, each linked to the other by the heat and din of battle. As Stutler points out, West Virginia was an "armed camp" during all the years of war. Out of a population of 376,688 this "state" furnished the Union 102CIVIL WAR HISTORY with 32,000 troops in spite of divided loyalties and the ruthless border warfare it was to experience. Contrary to some impressions held by students of the war that the troops West Virginia furnished were home guards. Stutler proves that they were rather "soldiers of the Republic who bore their weight in battles and campaigns from Gettysburg to Vicksburg and Jackson, Mississippi, and from McClellan's Peninsular campaign in tidewater Virginia to the far western plains of Nebraska and the two Dakotas." In a very real sense the men of West Virginia who served in the Federal armies earned statehood for their area with the patience, the endurance, and the blood they shed in many a skirmish as well as in many a full-scale battle. Since every county of West Virginia had many stories it could contribute to the history of the state, Stutler had a great range of material from which to select. Those he chose to tell in his refreshing and pleasing style follow the war's course in a chronological order. Since each is...