The Union Army: Organization and Operations. Volume 2: The Western Theater (review)

BOOK REVIEWS The Union Army: Organization and Operations. Volume 2: The Western Theater . By Frank J. Welcher. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Pp. viii, 989. $75.00.) Frank J. Welcher's The Union Army is a labor of love by an Indiana University professor emeritus of chemistry. Welcher, a "passionate student of the Civil War since the age of seven" (dust jacket blurb), has obviously spent many happy hours combing through the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. His Union Army is a large, two-volume reference work intended to provide students of the war with a handy means of ascertaining selected basic information on the Federal forces. The second volume catalogs the Yankee units that operated between the Appalachian Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. (Volume 1 , on the forces serving in the East, was harshly reviewed in CWH, December 1990.) Welcher's method is to discuss the upper hierarchy of the Western military organizations from the top down through the level of the army corps with some information on divisions, brigades, and regiments. He begins with a section devoted to the "Military Divisions of the Army"—huge commands that came into existence to administer, coordinate, and control forces in the vast areas of the West. In the second section Welcher covers the departments that were subordinate to the military divisions and the geographical subdivisions of each department. A third section describes the field armies that were assigned to each department, and a fourth deals with the corps that made up the armies. For example, the Military Division of the Mississippi consisted of four departments (Welcher mentions only three, and in truth the fourth—the Department of Arkansas—was soon transferred to the Military Division of West Mississippi). One of the constituent parts of the military division was the Department of the Cumberland. This department was divided into four posts and eight districts (some of which had their own subdistricts). It also supervised, among other units, the Army of the Cumberland. That army included at one time or another the Fourth, Eleventh, Twelfth, Fourteenth, Twentieth, and Twenty-first corps as well as assorted other troops. AU of these commands are cataloged by Welcher, and he gives the dates of their organization, their commanders, the major engagements in which they participated , and so on. 8oCIVIL WAR HISTORY The section on the corps is followed by a part covering "Miscellaneous Organizations" such as the "California Column," "Sibley's Sioux Expedition ," and the "Left Wing Forces in East Tennessee (Willcox)." In this part of the work Welcher sometimes gets down to the regimental level. He lists the black regiments (most of which eventually were designated as United States Colored Troops) including such units as the 54th Massachusetts and the ist South Carolina (which became the 33d USCT). Why such units are included in a reference work covering Western armies is not explained. The final section of the book contains discussions of individual battles and campaigns. Entries in each section are alphabetical or, in the case of the corps, numerical . The five-hundred-page battles and campaigns section reverses some of the information presented earlier. It lists the major units in each campaign and includes a narrative of the operations. One cannot help wondering why this book was published. Most of the basic information is accessible in more convenient and easier-to-use forms, such as Mark Mayo Boatner's Civil War Dictionary. The battle/campaign narratives are too long for a quick read (ninety-nine pages on the Atlanta campaign, fifty-four on Vicksburg), but they are not detailed enough for those who want a full account. The lack of completeness is made worse by the fact that the narratives naturally focus almost exclusively on the Federal forces. Some of the narratives border on becoming simply lists of what Yankee units marched to which points. None of the narratives contains a map, and readers unfamiliar with the areas of operations will sometimes have difficulty following the maneuvers. The Union Army, as Joseph Harsh noted in the review of the first volume cited above, is of very limited value. The second volume, however, does include an index to the complete work, thus...