The Military Memoirs of General John Pope (review)

book reviews167 rial from contemporary newspapers and postwarreminiscences.They stick closer to their main character than does Leslie, although a paucity ofinformation about Anderson's earlier life leads Castel and Goodrich to restrict this biography almost entirely to the waryears. They might have extended theirconceptual framework by making use of Michael Fellman's perceptive analysis of the Missouri war, yet the authors' meticulous tracing of Bloody Bill's brief career (he was two years younger than Quantrill and died eight months sooner) offers as convincing and insightful a portrait as we are likely to get. The centerpiece of the Castel-Goodrich narrative (covering thirty-five pages) is the incredibly brutal slaughter and mutilation ofover a hundred unarmed Union soldiers at Centralia, Missouri, in September 1 864. The Centralia massacre is to the legend ofAnderson what Lawrence is to our image of Quantrill, and Castel and Goodrich's painstaking recreation ofthe event—based largely on the memoir ofa Union survivor—leaves no doubtthat Bloody Bill deserves his terrible sobriquet . Quantrill and other guerrilla chiefs may have been merciless killers, but "death and hell," quivered one Missourian, followed in the path ofAnderson (39). As satisfying as both books tend to be, and as valuable as they are in fashioning a more complete understanding of the guerrilla war, both leave a tantalizing issue unresolved. Guerrillas like Quantrill andAnderson have usually been portrayed as bandits, pure and simple,just as likely to rob a Confederate as a unionist, and with little genuine attachment to the Rebel cause. Yet these two biographies show that Quantrill, Anderson, Todd, Archie Clements, the James brothers, and the rest ofthe Missouri mob fought exclusively against Union soldiers and unionist civilians. We even have the touching scene of Bloody Bill, spurred on by an unquenchable hatred of Yankees, riding to his death with a small Confederate flag tucked into his pocket. Were these guys better Confederates than we have thought? Daniel E. Sutherland University of Arkansas The Military Memoirs ofGeneralJohn Pope. Edited by Peter Cozzens and Robert I. Girardi. Forward by John Y. Simon. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Pp. xxviii, 287, $34.95.) In the Civil War in the East, certainly one of the more controversial figures, at least before 1863, was John Pope. Appointed to the command of the Army of Virginia, he was essentially groomed as the successor to George B. McClellan after the failure of the Peninsula campaign. In his rather abbreviated tenure as commander of the Army ofVirginia, Pope was involved in a number of controversies . His famous (or infamous) "headquarters in the saddle" order ofthe day, issued upon his assumption of command, has been the gist for jokes and ribald comments from his critics, both contemporaneous and subsequent. His orders regarding the treatment of the civilian population of Virginia, while mild in l68CIVIL war history comparison to what would happen in 1 864, so enraged Robert E. Lee at the time that he demanded that Pope be "suppressed." After his defeat at Second Bull Run, Pope, although engaging in further controversies with McClellan and Fitz John Porter (whom Pope was able to have court-martialed and dismissed for failing to obey orders at Second Bull Run), also exercised command over the largest department in the country. After the war, like so many other generals, Pope wrote his memoirs, but unlike so many other generals, he wrote them in serial form, mostly for the Union veterans' magazine National Tribune. Now after many years, Peter Cozzens and Robert I. Girardi have collected the various pieces Pope wrote for National Tribune and published them in book form. Although best known for his defeat at Second Bull Run, Pope's Civil War service was quite varied, and he had compiled a very respectable record in the West. His recollections about the early days in the West are really the strength of the book, and his comments and observations about Missouri in particular are very insightful and worth noting. Also noteworthy are his observations about the abilities of a number of generals on both sides, as well as his comments on the deficiencies ofWest Point as an educational institution. His portraits of various personalities in the...