Burnside (review)

BOOK REVIEWS353 he the means and opportunity, would have been capable of wreaking far greater havoc than Sherman. War was his natural element; he liked to fight and did so whenever he could and sometimes when he should not have. Since he believed God to be for the Confederacy and himself the instrument of God, he had little compunction about the employment of violence. Sherman's temperament and attitude were fundamentally different. He had no natural genius for war, failed miserably as an independent commander in 1861, and needed a long apprenticeship under Grant to learn to be a competent top general. Far from delighting in battle, he feared its "fickle fortunes" and as a rule fought only when forced by circumstances or the enemy. Indeed, even his famous (or infamous) use of terror, as embodied in the march to the sea and through the Carolinas, was motivated as much by a personal preference for raiding as it was by considerations of grand strategy. Owing to this march, and because of his knack for pithy phraseology, he became and remains the prime symbol of the Civil War's destructiveness, although in many ways it is a symbol without substance. Had Jackson lived to face Sherman in Georgia in 1864, it is more than possible that the former would have emerged from the ensuing duel as the destroyer. The back of the dust jacket offers an impressive number of eminent historians quoted in enthusiastic praise of The Destructive War. I can join in the praise but not in the enthusiasm. For reasons that I have tried to indicate, I find what is most valid in the book to be the least original and what little is truly new to be not all that valuable. What the book does is provide, in a highly readable and very sensible fashion, some excellent information and insights regarding some of the key events and aspects of the Civil War, thereby promoting a better understanding of that war as a whole. This, I submit, is accomplishment enough for any historian traversing a field of study that has been marched over so often and by so many as that of the Civil War. Would that all Civil War historians did as much and as well. Albert Castel Hillsdale, Michigan Burnside. By William Marvel. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xii, 504. $29.95.) Ambrose Everett Burnside was a figure of importance in the Civil War, and the need for a modern biography to replace Ben: Perley Poore's Victorian hagiography—published within a year of the general's death— was clear, if not pressing. Unfortunately, William Marvel's life of Burnside is much like Burnside the man: pleasant enough to be around, satisfactory in ordinary circumstances, but inadequate at critical junctures. 354CIVIL WAR HISTORY There are many complimentary observations to render on the book, although some require qualification. It is durably and attractively bound and laid out in a handsome format; still, in this computer age, there is no excuse for footnotes not being at the foot of the text, and their numbering should begin anew with each chapter, not with sections of chapters. The maps are unpretentious but clear and appear at appropriate locations. The index is admirably broken down into helpful subheadings. There is an interesting selection of twenty-nine, mostly unfamiliar, photographs , but regrettably about half are ruined by being much too dark. The chapter titles, if vague, are specific enough to allow a researcher to recognize the general location of Fredericksburg, for example, without annoying page flipping. The author's style is generally simple, clear and straightforward; although he occasionally lapses into a jarring folksiness (" . . . McClellan's first division was mighty slow about coming" [103]. And "...Meade . . . bulled directly through Stuart's videttes. ..." [186]). He also sometimes indulges in drawing cartoon characters in lieu of characterization ("à la McClellan," "McClellanlike," and "Hallecklike" [188, 206, and 211]). Marvel's bibliography lists an amplitude of sources, which indicates he plowed through a mountain of manuscripts, newspapers, books, and articles. Strangely, however, he found nothing worth citing in either the Lincoln or Fitz John Porter Papers at the Library of Congress or anything...