Tennessee's Forgotten Warriors: Frank Cheatham and His Confederate Division (review)

BOOK REVIEWS67 militia. This frightened the largely pro-Union state legislature into passing a military bill which allowed pro-secessionist Governor Claiborne F. Jackson to raise State Guard forces en masse. Lyon responded by declaring war on the State Guard. In a swift, brilliant campaign, he captured the state capital, Jefferson City, and soon gained control of the river and rail systems of central Missouri. But although no military objectives made it worth the risk, Lyon then moved into southwestern Missouri to confront not only the State Guard, but Confederate troops from Arkansas. His decision to attack rested more on his desire to punish traitors than on any rational military evaluation of the situation. Phillips argues that the actions that sprang from Lyon's obsessive behavior polarized a populace that had little desire to participate actively in the Civil War on either side. Lyon "provided guerrilla bands with a cause célèbre for which they subjected large areas of Missouri to three years of rampant bushwacking. . . . more than any other single individual, Nathaniel Lyon bore responsibility for this fratricidal tragedy" (263). Although convincing in his evaluation of Lyon's motivations, Phillips blames the general too heavily for Missouri's war-within-a-war, the complex nature of which is best explored in Michael Fellman's Inside War: The Guerilla War in Missouri During the American Civil War (1989). His account of the battle of Wilson's Creek covers a scant five and one-half pages, providing little analysis of Lyon's performance as a field commander during the greatest (and last) professional challenge of his career. The failure to include maps of either the battle or Missouri is baffling and a severe handicap to the reader. It is refreshing, however, to see reference notes placed uncompromisingly at the foot of each page, and the book is well-illustrated. Damned Yankee constitutes a thought-provoking, and largely convincing , challenge to the standard interpretation of Lyon and his role in history. Essential to understanding the war west of the Mississippi, Phillips's work will prove popular among general readers, and belongs on every Civil War scholar's bookshelf. William Garrett Piston Southwest Missouri State University Tennessee's Forgotten Warriors: Frank Cheatham and His Confederate Division. By Christopher Losson. (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1990. Pp. xvi, 352. $24.95.) Major General Benjamin Franklin Cheatham and the Confederate Army of Tennessee were—and are—inseparable. Cheatham helped organize that army in the spring of 1861 and was with it when it surrendered in North Carolina in April 1865. In between he played a consequential and sometimes controversial role in virtually all of its major battles and in 68CIVIL WAR HISTORY the intramural squabbles of its generals. In addition, although Nathan Bedford Forrest achieved greater fame with his spectacular cavalry exploits , and although other Tennesseans such as Leónidas Polk and Alexander P. Stewart possessed higher rank, Cheatham and his division incarnated the Confederate cause in Tennessee both during and after the war. Thus the title and the contents of Tennessee's Forgotten Warriors: Frank Cheatham and His Confederate Division. It is more than a biography of Cheatham; it is the story of Cheatham's division and of the men who served in it. It also is, because it could not be otherwise, a history of the South's struggle in the West. Such being the case, it is appropriate to evaluate its merits in each of these categories. First, as a biography of Cheatham: Here the author had to cope with the most difficult obstacle of all, a dearth of personal papers pertaining to his subject. Cheatham either wrote few letters or few have been preserved, most of those he received were not retained or were later destroyed, and he kept no diary, left no memoir, and unlike some other Civil War generals he neither hired nor attracted a biographer while alive. Consequently, much cannot be known about his inner life or even about his career, especially before and after the war. Furthermore, several large gaps exist in the materials relating to his military operations, notably and most frustratingly for the Atlanta campaign and the Tennessee campaign of 1864. The author...