The Papers of Andrew Johnson. Vol. 13: September 1867-March 1868 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS8l drive into Union territory of the war and mounted the most distant campaign from home soil. The high-water mark of the South's attempt to make the Confederacy a two-ocean republic and tap California's gold came at Picacho Peak, beloved of Southwesterners as the westernmost "battle" of the Civil War and "the Gettysburg ofArizona."There, onApril 1 6, 1 862, the vanguard of Hunter's forces, probing westward from Tucson, encountered and were repulsed by the leading elements of Col. James Henry Carlton's "California Column." The tiny affair at Picacho "ended any real possibility of Arizona Territory becoming a state stretching from Texas to California" (145), and soon thereafter Hunter's column abandoned Tucson, which Carlton occupied on May 20, ending forever the Rebel dream of a Pacific empire. After the Confederate failure to reach California, Hunter and his veterans took part in Maj. Gen. RichardTaylor's Louisiana campaign in 1 863, playing a major role at the Battle ofBrashear City, a locally important Confederate victory, overshadowed by events one week later at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. He then returned to the southwest, spending the remainder of the war in a hopeless attempt to recover the losses of 1 862. Hunter was one of the estimated ten thousand former Confederates to go into a self-imposed exile at the end of the war, settling, at least for a time, in the Southern colony ofCarlotta, Mexico. There, the biographer's trail ran cold, and the man who commanded the westernmost thrust of the Confederate army disappeared from history at age thirty three. Like the subject of his biography and the forces that Hunter lead, L. Boyd Finch's narrative is cursed by a lack of resources. Although the author has done an exhaustive job of research, the limited records of this western rim of the Confederacy are insufficient for either a full-scale biography of Hunter or a totally coherent narrative of the war in the FarWest. Important questions necessarily remain unanswered, and the author has patched events that the records are too thin to cover with a host ofsupporting characters and peripheral events— patches that sometimes confuse the narrative and divert the reader from the main thrust of the story of Sherod Hunter and his campaigns. Nevertheless, this book is a major contribution to the study of the war in the trans-Mississippi and is perhaps the best book that can be written on the campaign on the western slope of the Continental Divide. Thomas W. Cutrer Arizona State University West The Papers ofAndrew Johnson. Vol. 13: September 1867-March 1868. Edited by Paul H. Bergeron. (Knoxville: University ofTennessee Press, 1996. Pp. xxix, 734· $49·5?.) On February 21, 1868, Congressman John Covode introduced the resolution formally impeaching Andrew Johnson of high crimes and misdemeanors. That 82CIVIL WAR HISTORY same day, from peaceful little Post-Oak Springs in far-off Roane County, Tennessee , a former slave named Jack Eskridge asked if the president remembered "a black boy called 'Johnny Jack' who used to wait in yourroom, attend to your horse &c, during your stops at his house." And now, "can you not out of your great abundance lend a helping hand to a poor negro" who would be eternally grateful? (570-71 ). A semi-literate, driveling letter from Jennie Perry, clearly in pursuit of blackmail and hinting darkly at her knowledge of "the illegitimet Son," arrived in the same mail with letters praising Johnson's Reconstruction policies (197). These juxtapositions, frequent in the collected papers of nineteenth-century public men, remind us more starkly than do many biographies how the momentous and the minimal are interwoven in the texture of life. The Johnson Papers, a clear case in point, also illustrate the attendant editorial problems. Available material has increased greatly since the early volumes, making selection particularly critical. And Johnson, never a voluminous correspondent, has become even more reticent. Except for messages and other official documents, there are only four letters from Johnson: one to Charles G. Halpine inviting him to visit and "confer freely upon the pending difficulties" (363); one to Gordon Granger on the results of Memphis elections; one to Henry Cist declining to...