Chancellorsville: Lee's Greatest Battle (review)

338civil war history papers. In aU eras, crimes are front-page stories and die police-blotter is duly recorded; yet, a community's life cannot be evoked or adequately formulated by a re-enactment of its night court. Most people live and die widiout serious involvement with the law, and wartime Richmond was no exception. Eight crimes in one night do not represent a city of 80,000 inhabitants who spent some fifteen hundred nights under wartime exigencies, with predominandy peaceful procedures in their daüy lives. The many distortions of emphasis in this work add up to a faUacious report, and Mr. Kimmel cannot be commended for the total product. In aU fairness, it must be said that some of the inaccuracies cannot be excused by any scholarly method. The autiior's emphasis on runaway slaves— again revealing a lack of proportion and perspective—should have been corrected by even a partial acquaintance with historical methodology. He should know, as any respectable historian knows, that a newspaper füe of Richmond, Chicago, Detroit, New York, or Berlin, in or out of times of war, is not in itself a conclusively reliable historical document. The resulting inaccuracies represent only sloppy work. If nothing else, and diere is notiiing else, Mr. Kimmel's book is a salutary example, in the current stampede toward publications on the Civü War, of the faüure—for publisher as weU as writer—attendant upon superficial work done for today's market. The Civü War book public is not easüy befooled or befuddled; it has a knowledge of its subject exceeding diat of any book-buying market in the world's history. Although this knowledge forms an automatic brake on the profits sought by opportunists, obviously the need is for some method of separating the volunteers from the bounty-hunters. Cltfford Dowdey Richmond, Virginia. ChancellorsviUe: Lee's Greatest Battle. By Edward J. Stackpole. (Harrisburg , Pennsylvania: The Stackpole Company. 1958. Pp. 384. $5.75.) this is the THTRD ?? a series of Civü War campaign and battle studies by Lieutenant General Edward J. Stackpole, retired veteran of the two world wars. In 1956 he published They Met at Gettysburg; in 1957 Drama on the Rappahannock: The Fredericksburg Campaign; and in 1958 die work now under review. Stackpole is a leading proponent of the recent trend toward die booklength rehearsing of individual Civü War campaigns and batties. But this pattern is not new, for it is actuaUy a revival of a fashion prevalent at the close of the last century and the beginning of this, when müitary men, often veterans of the 1861-65 conflict, produced simüar volumes. An example was the publication in 1910 of The Campaign of ChanceUorsville by Major John Bigelow, Jr., a huge, ponderous book that involved a staggering amount of research in printed memoirs, regimental histories, and contemporary accounts of the war years. Public disregard for battle studies soon set in and reached its nadir during Book Reviews339 the twenties and tiiirties, an attitude much a part of the pessimistic reaction toward die results and idealism of die first world war. Historians Charles and Mary Beard went so far during the twenties as to caU fighting relatively unimportant and to suggest diat nature, in quickly covering the fields of combat with grass, must have regarded it likewise. Once again die impact ofour day— a period of continuing cold war, with the müitary influence necessarily strong —is upon us, and so battle history is again stylish. Perhaps HoUywood and television have likewise contributed to the popularity of combat studies, not to mention increased amounts of leisure time and money to visit the innumerablenational and state park battlefields that dot die nation. Like most of die Civü War müitary studies now appearing, Stackpole's Chancellorsville contributes little that is new in fact or interpretation. This is not the author's purpose. As in his two previous volumes, he sets out to produce an uncluttered panorama of the strategy, tactics, events, and major participants of the campaign and battle. He does not attempt a basic research book. He assembles what he considers the primary facts, puts them to some degree of analysis...