Hood's Texas Brigade: A Compendium (review)

176CIVIL WAR HISTORY What Bartlett has done is to encourage others who write about the frontier to take a fresh look at their subject matter, and to try within limits of their knowledge to make a fresh departure in dealing with it. In the final analysis, this is the great contribution of his book. Malcolm J. Rohrbouch University of Iowa Hood's Texas Brigade: A Compendium. By Harold B. Simpson. (Hill Junior College Press: Hillsboro, Texas, 1977. Pp. xii, 614. $12.50). Hood's Texas Brigade: A Compendium is the fourth and presumably final volume of Simpson's extensive and exhausting study of this important Confederate unit. Volume One, Hood's Texas Brigade in Poetry and Song, was published in 1968; Hood's Texas Brigade, Lee's Grenadier Guard followed in 1970; and Hood's Texas Brigade in Reunion and Memory appeared in 1972. And after five years, the Compendium completes the study. Together these volumes undoubtedly comprise the most complete record of any Civil War unit, North or South. Although conceived as a four-volume study, each really serves a separate function in the presentation of the unit's history. Thus, the second volume, subtitled Lee's Grenadier Guard, is the book most historians and Civil War buffs will want in their library and will consult most frequently because it is a narrative of the unit's actual participation in the war. Poetry and Song and Reunion and Memory are for the aficionadoes, and the final volume is for True Believers. Few would question the justification of intensive studies on individual units, but some might wonder if four volumes on a single unit are really needed. Perhaps Texan birth ought to disqualify one from addressing that issue here, but it begs at least an opinion. The audience for such studies is narrow and grows more so by the fourth volume; but there obviously is an audience. So long as it and Simpson hold out, the subject supports the endeavor. Simpson brings to his work an enthusiasm and a vigor often lacking in historical studies. The rosters in his Compendium may read like Heitman and Cullum to others, but to Simpson every mother's son of them is a vital element in the Confederacy's fightingest unit. And Hood's Texas Brigade was an outstanding fighting organization . Comprised of the First, Fourth, and Fifth Texas Volunteer Infantry Regiments, the Third Arkansas and Eighteenth Georgia Infantry Regiments, and the Infantry Battalion (8 companies) of Hampton's South Carolina Legion, it fought mostly in the eastern theatre and suffered some of the heaviest casualties of any unit in the war. The heart was always the Texas units, although able support BOOK REVIEWS177 came from the manhood of other states. Some 7,286 men served in the Brigade, of whom approximately 4,300 were Texans. By April, 1856, only 496 men of the three Texas regiments still bore arms by time of the surrender, or less than 12 per cent of those who served throughout the war. The Compendium divides into four parts. Part One contains the rosters and service records of all 7,268 men who constituted the Brigade . Brigade, Regimental Headquarters, and company rosters are included. Part Two contains nearly 150 photographs of officers, noncommissioned officers, and the rank-and-file. Part Three, which is entitled "Statistical Charts and Summaries," illustrates casualty and loss rates from both disease and combat. Part Four, "Brigade Trivia," is aptly named. A lengthy index makes it all available. There is a place for this kind of book. Not easy reading, unglamorous , pedestrian, it is still all it claims to be—a compendium of Hood's Texas Brigade. Archie P. McDonald Stephen F. Austin State University Joseph Smith: The First Mormon. By Donna Hill, (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1977. Pp. vii, 527. $12.50.) This is the first major biography of Joseph Smith since Fawn Brodie's No Man Knows My History, published in 1945. Hill has produced an excellent biography. If this book is not the definitive work on this subject, it is as close to it as we are likely to get. She has been able to produce such a complete...