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348CIVIL WAR HISTORY its structure. Although there are many internal cross-references, none give specific page numbers. The running heads are too general to be helpful, and there is no index. One is absolutely dependent upon the table of contents, and it is so widely spaced as to require the use of a ruler. In his introduction, Welcher admits that most of his information came from the Official Records, where he says it has been "deeply buried." Unfortunately, Welcher has exhumed this great body of information only to reinter it in a grave which cannot be aptly called shallow. Joseph L. Harsh George Mason University The Confederate States Marine Corps: The Rebel Leathernecks. By Ralph W Donnelly. (Shippensburg, Pa.: White Mane Publishing Co., 1989. Pp. vii, 340. $24.95.) The late Ralph W. Donnelly had a job (research historian for the Marine Corps) and a passion, the history of the Confederate States Marine Corps, upon which he lavished more than thirty years of off-hours research. The Confederate States Marine Corps is an expansion and elaboration of Donnelly's privately-published 1976 book on the same subject, and it brings together all the information Donnelly collected from archives, newspapers, and less obvious sources. If there is some additional treasure trove of papers about the CSMC somewhere, it will surprise all of us who observed Donnelly's uncanny knack for turning up obscure materials. On the other hand, for all its exhaustive research, The Confederate States Marine Corps is not a success as literature and analysis. Donnelly gives us "nothing but the facts, ma'am" with no stylistic grace and precious little interpretation. Donnelly's conclusions are really a list of assertions with little connection to his information. His major finding is that the CSMC had a more impressive Civil War record than its northern couterpart; though probably true, Donnelly does not make the case on a comparative basis except to insist that the CSMC camp of instruction at Drewry's Bluff, Virginia, served as a quality control measure for officer and enlisted training. Donnelly also insists that the officer corps of the CSMC, whose leadership came largely from the prewar United States Marine Corps, represented the cream of the USMC officer corps in 1861. Judged by their performance in the Mexican war and the expeditions of the 1850s, these officers were probably better than their Union counterparts, but Donnelly does not explain that longtime Colonel Commandant Archibald Henderson (1820-1859), a Virginian, recruited Southern officers of strong martial instincts to offset the patronage appointment of urban Northern officers, some of whom were Irish. The BOOK REVIEWS349 creation of the Confederate Marine Corps allowed the Henderson clan to create the model military organization denied them in the 1840s and 1850s by Washington politics. The theme Donnelly might have developed was how the CSMC officers attempted to remake their new corps in the model of the British Royal Marines. The Confederate Marines, for example, performed the traditional ship-board security and combatant duties of the U.S. Marines, and they guarded Confederate naval bases in the same manner that their Yankee counterparts patrolled Northern naval installations. The CSMC, however, also found a role in coast defense, a Royal Marine but not a U.S. Marine Corps mission. Whatever the Confederate Marines did, they didn't do much because they were so few in number. Donnelly doubts that more than six hundred were on duty at any one time and that no more than fifty officers and twelve hundred men served in the CSMC during the course of the war. Whatever its shortcomings as a scholarly monograph, The Confederate States Marine Corps brings together an exhaustive collection of information about the Confederate Marines that makes it the primary source on the subject. It will remain Ralph Donnelly's legacy to Civil War history, and as a definitive reference work it will endure. Allan R. Millett The Ohio State University Prison Life among the Rebels: Recollections ofa Union Chaplain. Edited by Edward D. Jervey. (Kent, Ohio, and London: Kent State University Press, 1990. Pp. xiii, 94. $26.00 cloth; $12.50 paper.) In this slim volume, we read the edited letters of Henry S...

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