The South Besieged: Volume Five of the Image of War, 1861-1865 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS183 eralism will soon swallow up state rights and wholly change the nature of our government" (4:218-19). We take leave of Davis, as he is revealed in these two volumes, with him in a pessimistic mood. "The events of 1850 & 51," he wrote to an unnamed correspondent, "have crushed my hopes of such action by the South as will hold the Northern majority in check. The barrier which has long restrained them is broken down" (4:295). These two distinguished volumes continue to confirm that this edition of papers is a superb addition to the tools of our trade. Interested scholars eagerly await the rest. Herman Hattaway University of Missouri—Kansas City The South Besieged: Volume Five of the Image of War, 1861-1865. Edited by William C. Davis. Senior Consulting Editor, Bell I. Wiley. (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1983. Pp. 461. $39.95) The South Besieged is the fifth of six proposed volumes of a photographic history of the Civil War. This book contains over 650 photographs and several articles on the events and campaigns depicted in them. Once again, I recommend that purchases of the previous volumes keep their sets up to date by buying this one, too. This volume betrays some small signs that this ambitious project is fraying a little toward the end. The essay in this volume on the South Atlantic Blockading Squadron seems unexciting, in part because an essay in Volume Three on the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron told much of a general nature about the blockade. Davis was forced to put a portfolio of photographs documenting the 1863 Siege of Charleston into this volume, although the written article on the subject appeared in one previous volume. Some of the editing is careless. Captions for two photographs on page 200 are reversed. According to the text of this volume, the youngest VMI cadet at New Market was 15, but a picture caption puts the youngest at 14. The essay with the most original content in Volume Five is Richard M. McMurry's "The Atlanta Campaign," in which he makes a brief but persuasive defense of Jefferson Davis's decision to replace Gen. Joseph E. Johnston. Ludwell Johnson's short article on the Red River Campaign stands out among the others because it sets the campaign in grand political, economic, and diplomatic context and does not focus narrowly on military affairs. Once again, Davis provides a thoughtful introduction to the photographs . When the secretary of the New York Peace Society looked at a collection of similar Civil War photographs in 1911, he said, "They are 184CIVIL WAR history the greatest arguments for peace that the world has ever seen." Photographic historian Francis Trevelyan Miller, whose ten-volume Photographic History of the Civil War was the inspiration for this modern series, also said of the pictures that they were "the most convincing evidence of the tragedy of war." We have recently experienced a war which, according to some pundits , was ended because of the revulsion of the American public at seeing war on television screens in their homes. I have never put much stock in that view of the Viet Nam War, and these Civil War photographs show why. For their day, they must have been as startling and grim as the flaming bonzes of Viet Nam. Yet Civil War photographs did not end war or the glorification of generals who, during and after it, ran for and often won high political offices. I doubt that a study of postwar art in nineteenth-century America would show any dramatic alteration in the conventions of battle painting or popular military prints. No simple explanation suffices to tell why we look at these old photographs or what we learn from them. But, as Davis's fine series of books shows, they are somehow irresistible. Mark E. Neely, Jr. Louis A. Warren Lincoln Library and Museum Southern Bfock Leaders of the Reconstruction Period. Edited by Howard N. Rabinowitz. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Pp. xxiv, 422. $27.50) For many years the ideas of William A. Dunning and his students dominated the textbooks and the historiography of American Reconstruction . The so-called "Dunning School...