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BOOK REVIEWS Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage. By Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson. (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1982. Pp. xvii, 209. $17.95.) In battle after battle of the Civil War, Confederate soldiers continually attacked because of their Celtic inheritance. Because they continually attacked, they suffered appallingly high casualties that undid their own cause. These are the two principal propositions argued by Attack and Die. The first of them is highly controversial, not to say dubious. The second is unsurprising, but it is presented with so much specificity of detail that the book will come to seem indispensable to any serious student of the military history of the Civil War. Fortunately, thevalue of the discussion of tactics and casualties is not dependent on accepting the speculations about the cultural inheritance of the South. Nevertheless, these speculations take up the final chapter and are patently intended to linger longest in the reader's memory. They will be familiar to readers of the numerous recent articles by Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald on the Celtic nature of southern culture. Whatever the general merits of the thesis of the Celtic South, this book's application of it to the military conduct of the Civil War is not among its more cogent aspects. We are supposed to believe not only that the Civil War was yet another round in the ancient feuds of Celts againstEnglish—the Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and Cornish South versus the English North—but that the Confederate propensity to attack stemmed from an ethnic inheritance reaching back at least to the Celtic attack on the Romans at the battle of Telamón in 225 b.c. Logically, this proposition is no more convincing than would be an analogous one that, for example, Chinese or black people fight defensivelyandnot aggressively, if they fightatall, as part of the ethnic inheritance of China's and Africa's long histories of passivity in the face of aggressive white men. Such a proposition would nowadays be hooted down even if many Americans did not possess firsthand experience of Chinese attacks in the Korean War. A still more obvious flaw of the book's argument about the Celtic inheritance is its circularity. We are told that it was because they were Celts that Confederate soldiers were continually on the attack. Yet how in the first place do we know that they were Celts? It is because they attacked that we know it. "The way that Southerners fought was one of the strongest indicators that their cultural inheritance was Celtic" (p. 173). BOOK REVIEWS275 Another, rather more persuasive explanation for the propensity to attack is drawn from the Confederate leaders' MexicanWar experience. During the Mexican War, rifles with their long-range accuracy had not yet replaced the much less accurate smoothbore musket as thestandard shoulder arm. Not usually having to confront rifles, attacks in the Mexican War often succeeded. In the 1860s, men who had been successful practitioners of the attack in the 1840s were slow to realize how badly the rifle had outmoded their accustomed tactics. Moreover, many of the Confederate leaders evidently modeled their generalship on that of the victorious Mexican War generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott. Not the least commendable feature of such an argument is that it shuns the almost certainly excessive emphasis that has often been placed on Antoine Henri Jomini and other textbook writers in shaping the generalship of soldiers who were never bookish enough to have been particularly susceptible to literary influences. On the other hand, the notion of Winfield Scott as a source of Confederate aggressiveness on the battlefield overlooks Scott's disinclination to attack in battle if he found any opportunity to ourmaneuver the enemy instead. It is unfortunate that some of McWhiney's and Jamieson's arguments are so doubtful that raising the necessary questions about them requires most of the space allotted to areview. Their discussions of casualties and tactics will surely have the lasting value already alluded to. Never before have historians demonstrated with so much statistical detail the conclusion that "casualty lists reveal that the Confederates destroyed themselves by making bold and repeated attacks" (p...

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