Combined Operations in the Civil War (review)

BOOK REVIEWSS3 Alabama. Each time a move was made, there were months or even years of separation until new living arrangements could be made. WhenJosiah died in 1883, Amelia stayed on at the university as librarian and hospital matron, and eventually postmistress. She watched her children grow to maturity and complete dieir educations. The eldest child, William Crawford, distinguished himself at the turn of the century, by leading die search for the causes of yellow fever and eliminating it as a serious problem. Amelia retired in 1907 at the age of80, but continued to live on the campus of the university until her death at age 87. This story of the life of a Southern woman from childhood through old age is well done. It focuses on the family matters, entertaining, household concerns, and friendships which occupied the attention of nineteenth-century upper-class women. Mary Tabb Johnston, a friend of the Gorgas family, and her daughter, Elizabeth Johnston Lipscomb (assistant professor of English at Randolph-Macon Woman's College) have used substantial primary sources as well as extensive secondary literature. Amelia Gayle Gorgas emerges as a competent and confident woman, comfortable in the role society has assigned to her. Judidi F. Gentry University of Southwestern Louisiana Combined Operations in the Civil War. By Rowena Reed. (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1978. Pp. xxiii, 468. $16.95.) Here is a provocative, sporadically scholarly, and, I think, bad book. Despite a ponderous and difficult prose style it gives promise of being one of the more widely read new Civil War military studies, havingbeen featured by the History Book Club. It merits high marks for the importance of its topic and the audior's obvious familiarity with broad contextural military history, but weak support for speculative improbabilities renders it a "near miss." Reed believes that combined operations could have ended the war in 1862 and diat George B. McClellan had the necessary insight and die appropriate strategy, but most of the North's other generals, especially Henry W. Halleck, failed to understand McClellan's combined operations strategy. So the North blundered into a long and costly war. Unrestrainedly pro-McClellan, many of Reed's most important and substantive statements either are not footnoted or the footnotes given do not apply. Ultimately her interpretation degenerates into naivete. Time after time Reed entices and impresses, but her use of obviously pertinent bibliography appears entirely superfical. She advises the reader seeking a good account of Jackson's Valley Campaign to consult Fred Harvey Harrington's biography of N. P. Banks (p. 410,n24). Her "insights into Halleck" ignore Steve Ambrose's standard study. "For 84CIVIL WAR HISTORY Confederate preparations to meet the assault" at Chickasaw Bayou, she advises reading John C. Pemberton's biography of his ancestor. Her series of statements concerning the South's effort to blockade die Potomac River ignores Mary Alice Wills, The Confederate Blockade of Washington, D.C., 1861-1862 (1975). Her statements concerning "the senseless burning of Columbia" (p. 382) imply ignorance of Marion Lucas's recent and important book on the subject. One could go on. Assuredly there are some pluses, none keener than her note (p. 403,n49) that civilian leaders and "absent-minded historians and amateur critics ever since" espoused a culpable view of good generalship as primarily being aggressiveness, willingness to take risks and to spend lives. She takes R. E. Lee's Seven Days' Campaign down a few pegs, when she observes that "a few more battles like Malvern Hill would make an attack on Richmond unnecessary" (p. 180) . And "no Civil War campaign better demonstrates the superior advantages of water communications than the Peninsular operations" (p. 187), but the failure to exploit Burnside's expedition on the coast obscured the "true offensive power of combined operations," which "remained unrecognized" (p. 43). Then the limited success at Port Royal duped the Federals from learning "how to plan combined operations," which probably would have decisively facilitated McClellan's major invasion (p. 57). And she shows real penetrating power with some of her observations about the Tennessee campaigns, particularly regarding the communication gap that existed between civilian and military leaders concerning logistical realities. She also grasps a key...