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184CIVIL WAR history The diary's strengths lie in the length of time covered, the fact that the Orphan Brigade saw action in so many major battles, and his forthright picture of the everyday life of both common soldiers and officers. The descriptions of the role played by incompetent leaders—confusion and miscalculations in battle, and frequent accidents during seemingly endless marches—come to life in Jackman's diary: soldiers grow used to the monotony of camp, learn to take false reports of enemy activities in stride, and to accept rumors of future troop movements without concern. Jackman's sickly nature frequently kept him in the camp hospital or in private homes in the vicinity, also making his diary an excellent account of conditions on the Southern home front during the Civil War. Indeed, constantly moving from front to front and typically falling behind his regiment, Jackman describes how civilians provided much of the medical care of the Army of Tennessee and most of the food consumed by the troops. Marion B. Lucas Western Kentucky University General John H. Winder, C.S.A. By Arch Fredric Blakey. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990. Pp. xvi, 275. $29.95.) A martinet who always went by the book, Brigadier General John H. Winder was motivated by a desire to redeem his family's military reputation "by his own exemplary military conduct" (xiv) after his father's signal failure as American commander at the "Bladensburg races" in 1814. In this book, Arch Fredric Blakey contends that Brigadier General John H. Winder has gotten bad press from most contemporaries and historians. He intends to set the record straight and generally succeeds. Appointed Provost Marshal of Richmond in 1861, Winder was responsible for the passport system, the administration of martial law around Richmond, a temporary program of price controls, and the infamous prisons around Richmond and in the deep South. In the latter role Winder faced an impossible task, with the result that Andersonville became the symbol of his career. Blakey successfully establishes that Winder did all that he could to avoid the tragedy, but the Confederacy placed a low priority on his needs. He could not get sufficient labor to build prison camps, food was never adequate, and his guards were unreliable . Winder predicted the inevitable death rate. Who was to blame? Blakey implies that Lincoln and Grant bore heavy responsibility because they stopped the regular prisoner exchange, but Confederate Adjutant and Inspector General Samuel Cooper and Confederate Secretary of War James A. Seddon failed to provide the required resources and neglected to appoint a commissary general of prisons until the end. Under the BOOK REVIEWS185 circumstances, Winder should not have accepted the command of the prisons, says Blakey, but Winder felt it was his duty. "Only an extraordinary man, a decent, extremely efficient senior officer, could rectify the situation. He was arrogant enough to believe that he was that man, and," Blakey claims, "he may have been correct" (211). In despair Winder suggested that Union prisoners be sent North on parole without exchange, a recommendation that his superiors finally accepted. Blakey concludes that Winder "was not a benevolent man, but neither was he cruel or vindictive" (207). There is frequent conjecture and some needless detail in this book. Blakey tells us that Winder "most probably," "could not have," or "must have been" altogether too often, and we do not need to know that a government auditor refused to accept $32.65 of Winder's expenses in 1838, or that he paid the Seminole Indians to find a lost drummer boy in 1852. Some readers may also find the chronology confusing. The book starts with Winder's death, February 6, 1865, jumps to 1861, moves back to 1775 to tell the story of his father, and moves forward again to May and June of 1861. After a discussion of his career to early 1862, the reader is shuttled back to Winder's admission to West Point in 1814. The remaining chapters proceed logically, spanning the 1830s to the 1860s, then covering Winder as "Dictator of Richmond," "Warden of Richmond," and commander of Confederate prisons east of the Mississippi in 1864 and 1865. Who is...

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